Before We Go Extinct (18 page)

“Ha ha,” she says. “Funny.” But she does crack a small smile.

“I'm available for bar mitzvahs, weddings, funerals,” I say.

“Gallows humor?” she says.

“Yeah.” I nod. “Anyway, I'm sorry.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Well, people die. You know that, of all people. So the living keep on living and the dead keep on being dead. Right? I guess that's all there is to it.”

“I guess,” I say.

The tide has risen while we've been talking and my feet are submerged. Under the surface of the water, my feet look distorted and unreal. My heel catches a barnacle and a puff of red clouds out. It doesn't hurt. I'm going to have so many scars from this summer. It's leaving marks all over me. The water is cold. Later, I'll feel it, but for now, it just feels the same as always.

“I guess I wonder if you saw him,” she says.

“Who?” I say.

“The King,” she says.

“Oh,” I say. I swallow. I'm not thinking about kissing anymore. I'm thinking about not throwing up. “No,” I say.

She shifts over so her leg is next to mine, our feet are dangling next to each other. Her leg is brown and smooth, mine is whiter and bonier. The place where they are touching is an inferno of heat. Not from the sun.

“Sorry,” she says.

“Me too,” I manage. “I am, too.”

I just want to stop feeling everything. I want it all to stop. I get up, grab my stuff, and head back up to the cabin. I don't look and see if she's still there, but I think she'll probably sit there till it gets dark, waiting to see her dad again up in the stars, and for a minute I'm just so jealous that she has that, she has a place to look. I don't have anything at all.

 

31

The dogs come rushing from their usual spot behind the logs to greet me and I grab my T-shirt and my pack, which I've filled with the kind of food that Dad and I still have, which is those stupid onion chips that he loves, a bag of cornflakes, and a few of those fruit cocktail cups that you eat when you're a kid. The kind with extra cherries.

I want to get far away from Kelby and the beach and my feelings about Kelby and about everything. How far do you have to go to get away from yourself? I want to go deep into the woods before I eat. We start out pretty fast, me and the dogs. I'm so used to them now, I hardly notice their huffing breath and the way they crisscross the trail, disappearing and reappearing from the salal. We go up and west and up and west until I figure that we might be near the highest peak of the island. My legs are wet from brushing through the still-rain-soaked undergrowth. There is no lookout provided by a handy parks department, or signs, or markers, or really anything at all except a few old trail flags with obscure writing on them, left here by loggers a decade ago. The trees are thinner up here and there are different kinds than lower down. They are smaller-leaved and spindly. The ground is covered with waist-high yellow grass and thistles and weeds and countless wasps buzzing around on the hard-packed earth. It's hot and somehow the dampness in the air makes it feel like a sauna. I'm soaked in sweat and I miss the bay and the water and I wonder if Kelby is still sitting there and I know that she is.

There are acres of blackberry bushes all around me now. I stuff myself with berries because let's face it, fresh fruit beats tinned sugary stuff anytime. I eat and eat. Thorns scratch patterns in my arms and my hands get sticky with juice. Bees fly around me, brushing against my fingers and legs. I lose track of time. I feel like I'm someone else. Since when am I a kid who picks blackberries on islands? Who am I here?

No one.

By the time I start going down, I've lost my sense of which way I came. But down will eventually lead to a beach and from there, I'll be able to figure out where I am. I pass the face of a cliff off to the side of what must be an old logging road that I'm walking down. I stop. I know that animals live in caves. I know that from movies and books and documentaries.

I know I shouldn't go into the cave.

But knowing a thing and what you do with that knowing are not the same.

I go over to the cave and shout into the entrance. Up close, it's a small space. The entrance is only maybe two feet around. I can't hear anything. I can't smell anything. I remember my dad telling me that all wild animals have an unmistakable stink. A smell you don't have to be an animal to smell. I sniff. I can't smell anything but cool rock and dirt.

I don't know what I'm thinking, but I crawl in. The cave is pretty deep. I crawl about ten feet before I start to feel anxious, but it is so cool that it's a relief from being outside. I lie down on my back.

I don't know why I do that. But I do.

Lying on my back makes me feel buried alive, the roof of the cave only inches above my nose. It's impossible
not
to think about coffins and suddenly I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, but I also can't get out. I mean, to get out, I have to flip back on my belly. I have to wiggle slowly. I have to not panic, but I am panicking, and The King is in the ground in the ground in the ground in the ground.

The King is

The King can't get out

The King is decomposing and

I wiggle out and the dogs sniff me and lick my legs as if to say,
Seriously, dude, don't go into caves.

“I know,” I say to them, scratching each of them behind the ears. “Seriously. What?” I take in huge lungsful of breath.

I try to slow my breathing.

I try to slow my pulse.

It's getting dark.

“Remember the Alamo,” I whisper, which is what we always said to each other when we started this game we used to play, this hide-and-seek treasure-hunt game we played in Central Park, but we didn't call it that. We made up a cooler name: SCAT CATS. It's an anagram. Maybe that's only cool if you're a huge nerd, which we are, I guess.
Were
. Whatever.

The point was that you had to find this list of random things, but you couldn't be seen by anyone else. If someone spotted you, you were out. There was a lot of crawling. There was a lot of hiding behind things. A cave like this would have been an awesome find. But nothing is scary when you're with your friends. Everything is scary when you're alone.

Anyway, this one time, one of the things on my list was “wheel,” and I thought I'd remembered seeing an old tire down by the edge of this one place on the creek. I don't know why that made sense to me, like I'd be able to carry an old tire back to our meeting place, along with the stuff I already had, which was a balloon on a string, a flamingo, an empty beer bottle, a half-eaten hot dog, and two filthy coins I begged off a street musician, but that's where I was going.

I made my way down the rocky slope that led to this creek. The balloon was basically like a giant red bubble pointing at where I was, so I figured I'd get spotted but there wasn't anything I could do. If I let it go, it would be gone. There was garbage stuck between the rocks and it smelled terrible. I half expected to find a dead body in the water. At least the corpse of a rat. Or worse.

I got down there and the tire I thought I remembered was gone. There was an old shopping cart though and I was trying to figure out how to pull off one of the wheels when I looked up and I saw them.

I saw The King.

He didn't see me. He was talking to someone. A man. He was with the man. The man and he were together. The man was a middle-aged white guy. Balding. But big, like a biker. He looked somehow tough, even though he was in a suit. I think he was in a suit. Between the man, The King, and me, a woman dressed entirely in long purple robes was doing some kind of tai chi and the purple fabric kept blocking my view.

I don't know why I'm remembering this. I don't know if I'm remembering this right. Probably not.

Or maybe I am.

Suddenly, I'm dizzy. I can't faint in the woods. No one would ever find me and probably a cougar would eat me, so I stop walking and flop down by the trail on a soft patch of moss, in the shade of a huge cedar. I must be getting lower now because the trees are evergreens and ancient. I break off some moss and press the damp roots against my forehead. I don't know why, but ever since I was a kid, when I used to faint, Mom would put a cool cloth on my head and it was like magic, it fixed me. The ground is still damp and a bit muddy from the rain we had last week and the wind is coming up, but I don't really notice that, because I feel like the memory is pushing on me. Crowding me out of myself. I'm remembering something I don't want to remember, I really, really don't want to remember it, I can't
not
remember it, and the dogs are sniffing around my ears and my face like they can figure out what I'm thinking and fix it, that's how it feels, like the dogs always want to fix things and Zeus sits back on his haunches and howls, a full-on howl, which makes me think of sirens, the way the sirens filled the air and drowned out all the other sounds that day while I stared down from the forty-second floor.

So screw me.

I don't know what happened. The King disappeared into the bushes with the man and then came out again, pocketing something.

Money.

He was pocketing money.

He came out of the bushes, pocketing money, and then he ran.

He ran in the opposite direction from where we were meant to meet. He ran like an athlete, not like how he usually ran, he ran so fast and like a freaking Olympic athlete, that I thought maybe it wasn't him after all, knees high, stride long, like there was something he could never run fast enough to get away from.

The man came out right after that. Coughed a few times, in that way people do when they're self-conscious.

I mean, I'm not a total idiot. I know what happened. I know what they did.

I knew it then, too.

I just pretended I didn't.

If I had my phone right now, I'd text Daff. I'd say,
Did you know?
And then she'd say,
Know what?
And I'd say,
About the men in the park.
And she'd say,
Yeah, I knew
. And I'd say,
Why didn't you tell me?
And she'd say,
Because you knew, too.
And then I'd say,
Je suis désolé
. And she'd say,
It sounds better in French
, and then I'd run, I'd puke, I'd run, I'd flip backward off buildings, it would be the ultimate parkour, which maybe, after all, is what he meant for the forty-second floor to be.

And then I'm crying and the dumb dogs are slurping up my tears maybe because they are thirsty or maybe because they aren't so dumb and they are fixing that, too, or maybe I am making them, the way I'm holding on to them too tight and they squirm away from me and sit back on their haunches, staring, like,
What? Dude, enough, let's walk.

It takes me a long time to start walking again, and the trees are dipping their tops into the darkness like paintbrushes and then swooping the dark low and long in shadows across the trail. I finally come out at a beach but I'm facing the wrong way. I mean, it takes me a while to figure it out, but what I'm looking at isn't Vancouver. I'm on the wrong side. I'm literally miles away from where I am meant to be.

“Crap,” I say out loud, and my voice sounds like it's interrupting a conversation the trees were having. I sit down in a little clearing and try to think, how or what or when or where and then I see that what I'm sitting on is a thing, a structure.

It's a grave.

Well, yeah. Of course. I mean, of course. Why not?

People die, you know. People die everywhere. Even on abandoned islands where no one lives, the dead are everywhere.

That's
normal
.

That's just how it is.

 

32

The graves have mostly crumbled open and the markers are crooked and some are missing. I look inside one of the collapsed graves. I see bones. I don't want to touch the bones because that seems wrong, but it's like my hand won't stop itself from reaching out, from touching the smooth but dirty round dome of the skull, from resting on the crumbled ribs.

It's a pretty small skeleton. A kid. Or a really small guy, the size of The King. A pile of bones that used to be someone.

I sit back on my haunches and watch the sunset making lazy oranges and yellows spill low across the sky. The water on this side is different, even the beach is different: crushed white shells instead of pebbles. The ground by the beach is a low grassy field instead of stone. It's like being in a different place, at a different time.

I'm cold, from the graveyard or my own cooling sweat. I wish I could light a fire on the beach. The dogs are confused, nervous. “It's okay,” I tell them. “It's going to be fine.”

The night sky is now full of stars. Because of Kelby, I can identify the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and Cassiopeia. Kelby's on her side of the island, and I'm on mine. I guess she's gone back to her cabin, off the rock. I guess she's safe and warm and probably laughing with Charlie or talking to her mom or playing Monopoly or maybe she's at my cabin, maybe she's wondering where I am. For some reason, I think she's in my room. On my bed. I think she's reading my e-mails. I think she knows about Daff, or she's finding out, and her eyes are widening as she realizes that I'm in love with someone who isn't her, and she knows why I haven't kissed her yet. She must wonder why I haven't kissed her yet. She wants me to kiss her.

Doesn't she?

I wonder if they're worried. I wonder if Dad is freaking out. I wonder if he's thinking about cougars and death.

Eventually, I take my wet towel out of my bag and use it as a blanket. I go to sleep on the white, crunchy shell-sand, above the high-tide line, the dogs pressed against my sides, keeping me warm.