You Are Here (5 page)

“Above average,” he said. “Nothing wrong with that, don’t you think?” This last part he directed over his shoulder, and Peter glanced up to see a girl sitting poised on the staircase, looking at him through the banister like a monkey at the zoo. She had long brown hair and the palest eyes he’d ever seen, a nearly colorless gray that settled on him lightly, and there was something in her manner—a casual lack of interest, a complete failure to be impressed by his knowledge—that made him wish he hadn’t spoken in the first place.

Sometimes Peter felt like he’d spent the past eight years trying to dig himself out of that first moment they’d met, when he’d announced himself as someone intelligent to a girl who seemed to look upon this particular trait with great ambivalence.

But Emma wasn’t like most kids who hated school or found homework boring; she wasn’t indifferent and she wasn’t stupid. It was as if somewhere along the way, she’d simply decided to take a different route than the rest of her family, a conscious decision that seemed to inform everything else in her life. Still, whatever it was that drove her to act this way—brilliant parents and intelligent siblings and a home that sometimes felt more like an old-fashioned literary salon than anything else—Peter couldn’t help being jealous of the simple fact that these things
drove her
nonetheless.

Just the other day, on the Fourth of July, Peter had run into her as she made her annual escape from her family’s cookout, this almost as much of a tradition as the party itself. He hadn’t exactly been looking for her, but they had an uncanny habit of stumbling across each other nonetheless. Not that this was unwelcome. It was, in fact, the highlight of his days, when all the planning and mapping and waiting and hoping had been cast aside, and all he was left with was a town no bigger than a postage stamp, a father who barely noticed he was around, and a school he considered both too slow academically and too fast socially for someone of his nature. Emma’s tolerance of him—he didn’t fool himself into believing it was something it clearly wasn’t—was the one bright spot in an otherwise dreadfully monotonous existence.

He’d fallen into step beside her as she headed up toward the campus, the collection of pale stone buildings and dorms set high above town. The sun had slipped to the other side of the valley, the day was cooling off already and Peter pushed at his glasses as he tried to think of something to say.

“How long’s your brother in town?” he asked finally, and Emma looked over like she hadn’t quite realized he was there until just that moment.

“Not long,” she said. “I’m going back to New York with him tomorrow.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Emma said, then grinned. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”

Peter ducked his head and kicked at the tall grasses as they crossed the lawn. “Can I come too?”

She laughed, though he hadn’t really been joking. “You don’t even know how long I’ll be away.”

“I don’t mind staying awhile.”

Emma frowned and shook her head. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back. I’m probably going somewhere else after New York.”

“Where?” Peter asked, quickening his pace to keep up with her, but she didn’t seem to have an answer to this, or at least not one worth mentioning to him. “If there’s no room, I could always take a car from the lot,” he said, thinking of the small patch of asphalt behind their house that served as a makeshift lot for impounded or abandoned cars. “We could caravan.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“I might,” he said. “I know how to jump-start them.”

Emma rolled her eyes, but Peter thought he could detect the faintest trace of interest even so. “Maybe another time,” she said absently, already striding out ahead of him, her shadow long across the grass, leaving him there to watch her go.

The next morning, though he suspected she was already gone, he found himself standing in front of her house, wondering if it was okay to bother her parents so early on a Saturday. Much to his relief, the barbershop where he occupied himself five to six mornings a week for minimum wage was closed for the holiday weekend. It was a job he found nearly unbearable, pushing the broom in figure eights around the old-fashioned chairs, holding his breath against the fruity smell of the shampoo, and worst of all, disposing of the hair clippings, the flakes of dandruff still clinging to them determinedly.

Other summers, his jobs had been somewhat better. In fact, in his sixteen years in this town, Peter figured he’d done odd bits of work for at least three-quarters of the shops, everything from bussing tables and washing dishes to serving slices of pizza and bagging groceries. He’d once even worked as a janitorial assistant up at the college, which was just another reason he felt he could never go to school there: How could you attend classes at a place where you’d picked sludgy cigarette butts out of the fake plants in nearly every building on campus?

The lights appeared to be on in the Healys’ kitchen, and so after a moment, he found himself following the flower-lined path up to their blue front door.

“This is a nice surprise,” Professor Healy said, and his wife appeared in the doorway beside him, the two of them both dressed in khaki pants and navy sweaters, unwittingly matching in the way of long-married couples. “We’re just about to have breakfast. You brave enough to try Katherine’s eggs?”

Peter grinned. “That would be great.”

He followed them into the dining room, and took a seat at the large oak table, which was seemingly engaged in a mighty struggle to stay upright beneath so many piles of papers and books. The surface was littered with reading glasses and pens, random pieces of day-old fruit and two mugs of coffee that had left permanent ring stains in the dark wood. He spotted a ruler and a calculator, sheaves of typed pages and others decorated liberally with red pen, and not for the first time, Peter wished that he lived in a place like this, a dust-filled room that smelled of books.

Mrs. Healy poured him a cup of tea, and Peter added some milk, watching the white liquid cloud his mug. Part of what he loved about coming here was this: the way they treated him like a colleague, a grown-up, a fellow intel lectual. There were never any silly questions about school unless he brought up a certain paper he’d written or a subject he happened to be enjoying. He liked how they never assumed he was there to see Emma either; in their minds, it was just as likely he’d arrived for a discussion of the peculiar rituals of ancient Mayan funerals or the newest collection of poetry by Seamus Heaney.

There was something about them, too—an undercurrent of sadness, distant and lingering—that Peter found oddly comforting. He’d never had the chance to know his mother, and this absence often made him feel painfully alone. But every now and then—when Mr. Healy was scanning a bookshelf or Mrs. Healy’s eyes drifted to the sun-bleached windowsill—he could very nearly see it etched in their faces, a mystery that seemed both sad and sweet at the same time, like sleeping with a blanket even after you’d long outgrown it.

Now Mr. Healy passed Peter a section of the newspaper, and the two of them sat reading about the affairs of the world, weather that threatened to tip the globe off its delicate axis and wars that could shake the planet to dust.

“Well, it’s nice to have
someone
around to appreciate my cooking,” Mrs. Healy called out from the kitchen. “Since my own kids always seem so eager to escape.”

Peter glanced at the doorway, where he could see her poking at the eggs on the stove. He was surprised by how easily she joked about this kind of thing, when just yesterday his own dad had accused him of more or less the same thing—trying to escape—only he’d done it with a look so dark and injured you would have thought Peter had suggested making a permanent move to New Guinea.

“I don’t know about kids these days, Pete,” Mr. Healy joked from behind his newspaper, his gray eyebrows bobbing up and down. “I mean, what kind of sixteen-year-old wants to spend a weekend in New York City? Must be terribly boring.”

Peter looked up from his tea. “She’s just gone for the weekend?”

He noticed the Healys exchange a brief glance, and once again, Peter felt his face flush, worried they might find another meaning in his question. This was not a subject Peter took lightly. He’d had time to give it plenty of thought over the years, and the conclusion he’d come to—one that he was determined not to think of as wishful thinking—was that he didn’t like Emma. At least not in that way.

She was pretty, of course, with those unsettling gray eyes and that way she had of smiling with only one side of her mouth, and there was something careless about her that made the other guys at school glance at her sideways in the halls. But although Peter couldn’t help being drawn to her, he chalked it up to more of a quiet affinity than a lovesick hopefulness. They were both loners in their own way—for Peter, out of necessity; for Emma, more of a choice—but he was fairly certain the bond they shared didn’t amount to anything more than that.

He willed his face to return to its usual shade, a color pale enough to make his freckles stand out. “It’s just that I thought she might be gone longer.”

“Nope,” Mrs. Healy said as she deposited two plates full of runny eggs onto the table, then snatched the newspaper from her husband’s hands. “Back on Monday.”

Peter realized that Emma must not have told her parents about the full extent of her plan either. It was his experience that people who lied were either hiding something or looking for something, and he wondered which was the case with her. He frowned at the eggs on his plate, then stabbed at one with his fork. There was far less confusion in things like math and history, with their straightforward numbers and dates. It seemed that people were a great deal more difficult to figure out.

chapter five

Emma was halfway to taking a bite of her burger—mouth open and breathing in the sharp smell of onions—when she caught a glimpse of something white streaking past the rest stop. She lowered her hands and looked off toward the straggly woods to her back, where a thin layer of trees separated the expressway from an office complex that lay just beyond. Seeing nothing, she turned her attention back to her burger, and she was just about to bite down again when a few of the kids from a nearby table began to scream and laugh and jump up and down.

It took a moment for Emma to realize it wasn’t a wolf. Standing a few yards away in the grass and eyeing her burger with an unblinking gaze, a huge white dog was balancing on three legs. What had once been his fourth—the front right one—was now no more than a stump, cut short just above where the knee would have been. But there was something about the way he carried himself, like he didn’t even know it was missing. He looked like a husky that had had a run-in with a bottle of bleach, pure white and enormous, but with a crust of mud along his belly and a collection of thorny brambles caught in his fur, which—along with the lack of a collar—gave him away as a stray.

He took a few hobbled steps forward, waving the stump of his leg up and down as if to say hello. Emma could see that one eye was brown and the other a startling shade of blue, as he sat down a few feet away from her and wagged his tail. Behind her a few people hastily shuffled their kids away or grabbed their trays and headed for another table. But Emma watched, fascinated, as he approached her.

She’d always loved dogs, but her parents had never allowed her to have one, and this, to Emma, seemed completely illogical: Wouldn’t the best way to remedy irresponsibility be to have something to be responsible
for
? She’d spent years campaigning against the decision, dragging her parents down the street whenever she spotted a puppy, twice bringing home stray dogs (both of which were reclaimed within a few hours) and even once kidnapping the neighbor’s puppy (also reclaimed within a few hours, though not quite as joyously).

And so now, as the white dog stood trembling a few feet away, his coat muddy and smelling of mulch, she held out one of her French fries. And when he took a tentative step forward, she tossed it in his direction, watching as he tipped his head back and caught it handily, snagging it in midair with a clean snap of his jaw. Each time she looked up from her burger, he had inched a bit closer, scooting along the pavement until he was settled near the end of the picnic table. And when he was near enough to rest his chin on her sandaled foot, Emma reached down and offered him another fry, which he took from her fingers with a well-mannered wag of his tail, his whole body wriggling with gratitude.