Going Underground (2 page)

“You will tell her, won't you?” Dr. Mote's blinking again, which she only does when she's gearing up not to accept anything but a total, unconditional
yes
.

Barely controlling my shrug and sigh muscles, I manage, “If I ever even talk to her.”

Dr. Mote's eyes get small as she studies me some more. “You need to get a life, Del. Branson's right about that part. Some sort of normal, healthy, happy teenage life, even if it's hard, so maybe this isn't all bad. I'm thinking you'll talk to her. Is she pretty?”

“She's … she's …”

What?

Beautiful doesn't quite cut it.

I think she might be pretty in ways that don't have anything to do with outside looks.

I think she might be like me, and I've never met anyone like me since the bad stuff happened.

I think she might … understand.

Just trying to describe her makes me breathe funny all over again. The girl who visits that grave in Rock Hill still reminds me of a fairy, with her long legs and arms, and the way her black hair hangs straight around her face. It flutters in the wind like her loose skirts and shirts, making her seem wispy and flyaway, and I wouldn't be surprised if she did sprout wings and take off into the sky.

“She's special.” That's the best I can do.

Dr. Mote nods. After a long few seconds, maybe a whole minute, she says, “Talk to her. Then tell her about yourself and your situation. And don't wait too long.”

I lean back on the saggy sofa and blow out a breath. “Could I find out her name first? Seriously, she's never even noticed me.”

“She will.”

Psychic. Therapist. Sometimes it's hard to figure out exactly what Dr. Mote should call herself.

So you're waiting for it, right? I know you are.

Why am I seeing a therapist? What horrible problem do I have? What rank, lame, rotten thing did I do?

Shame on you.

What if I didn't do anything at all?

Maybe I witnessed a vicious crime. No, wait. “Brutal.” When newspeople talk about murder, it's always “brutal.”
Brutalmurder
should be a new word, since they always get said together, even though they're kind of redundant.

Wait, wait. Maybe I got hit by a drunk driver and have to live in a wheelchair now. That happens to people. It could have happened to me. But I guess that's a crummy thing to joke about, even though I'm not really joking about stuff like my life being wrecked and having no future.

Maybe I have a learning disability and I'm all frustrated by not being able to read, or sit still, or whatever.

Maybe I have real problems I didn't even cause.

See? Now don't you feel guilty?

Good.

Because God knows I do.

Three Years Ago: Dreams in Dreamland

“I like the way your lips taste.”

Crap. I wasn't expecting that. My cheeks go hot, but I keep still on the quilt in the park, eyes closed tight so I don't see the blue sky or the drifting clouds, or the way Cory's probably smiling at me because I'm turning red.

She laughs. “You're blushing.” She touches my lips with hers again, just a brush, like a whisper without any words. She's right beside me, stretched out, her arm draped across my chest, her head on my shoulder when she's not giving me fast little kisses.

I keep my eyes closed and wonder how exactly my lips do taste.

What did I eat for lunch?

Tacos? Brownies? I can't remember. It's been four hours and a baseball game. My stomach tightens, winding up to rumble, but I tense my muscles to keep it from making some obnoxious noise.

When I open my eyes, all I can think is,
it's summer
and
she's pretty
.

Our phones are turned down low, and we're ignoring them if they don't give our parents' rings. A warm breeze blows against the dirt and mown grass of the infield we're using. Cory's blond hair looks ready to make a break from her ponytail. Her nose has a few freckles on top of her dark softball tan. I'd count them, but she's looking at me with her blue eyes, the same color as the sky, and then she's moving to lie down again.

“You always taste like cinnamon,” I tell her as she settles her head on my shoulder.

She lets out a breath, almost a sigh, but more
I'm relaxing
than
I'm ticked about something
. “It's the gum.”

I like kissing her.

I mean, I've kissed three or four girls—but nobody like her. I can't believe I didn't notice how kick-ass she was until the end of eighth grade. Weird, how that happens, how you can know people for months or years and then suddenly see them different, like they just stepped off a bus and turned into someone else.

Watching Cory play softball did me in, I guess. She's one wicked-mean underhand pitcher, and she can run like a track star, and she just—I don't know. Shines in the sun or something.

We're lying in a lot of it. Sun, I mean. My team, Home Hardware, is safely in the finals, so we're getting a rest before tonight's games. Cory and I are three fields over from the tournament, and the grass is deserted except for Cory and me. Jason and Randall are playing right now on the Backwater Restaurant team, against Tom and Raulston's team, Perlman's Law. On the girls' field, Jenna and Lisa are playing for Sonic Drive-In Team I, and we left Dutch and Marvin running back and forth between the games, cheering everybody on.

Well, Marvin was eating a bunch of hot dogs, but he'll cheer between bites, when he's not burping.

“Are you scared about next month?” Cory murmurs, her lips close enough to my neck that I feel the puff of heat from her breath.

“No way.” I tighten my arm around her, because I know she's nervous about it, and really, so am I, but I'm not admitting that to anybody, even her. “I'm ready for high school. We're all ready. And we're tall, so that'll help.”

She gives my chest a little punch with the heel of her hand.

Everybody knows I'm superorganized, and everybody but Cory hates me for it. I've already got my schedule planned and the notebooks bought and labeled. Everything's in its place for school to start, because I'm gonna kick ass with my grades to keep myself on whatever team I pick, and so I'll have no trouble getting into premed or prelaw. I want all my options open. My parents might have invested their degrees in small-town life and small-town jobs to “be sure you get raised in a place where life is simple and real, Del,” but farming and settling for less—absolutely not my plan.

I have dozens of plans. If plan A doesn't work, I'll move to B. If B doesn't work, there's always C.

Who says teenagers don't know what they want? Who says we're not able to set goals and reach them?

Just watch.

“I think I'll take chorus instead of drama, at least for the first year,” Cory says.

I keep her as close to me as I can. “You've got a great voice.”

She doesn't say anything back. She just snuggles into me and lets me hold her and enjoy how it feels to have her next to me. She smells like cinnamon, too. Cinnamon and vanilla. I think the vanilla comes from her shampoo or lotion.

My eyes float closed, but she rattles me awake a little bit later, answering her phone, then getting up.

“My folks will be at the park in a few,” she says as she punches off her phone and slides it back in her pocket, then dusts the wrinkles out of her Coldair Refrigeration uniform. That's her team's sponsor, and their colors are white and red. “We should get back.”

I don't budge from the blanket. “What's the big deal? We're not doing anything.”

Her smile comes fast as she tucks her shirt back into her red pants. “Fine. I'll just let you explain that to my dad.”

Um, yeah. Rather not.

For a second or two, with the way she's looking at me, I'm nervous that Cory does want to do something more than kissing. But she doesn't say anything. She just waits for me to get up, then waits for me to follow her.

When I do, I watch her walk.

She has a great walk, too.

I think maybe she will be the one.

Why shouldn't she be? She's the best girlfriend I've had, and the longest so far, four months and counting. I've known her for lots longer, of course, so some of that time should count toward the “knowing each other really well” part, right?

We're both smart. We know what we want. We'll use protection.

She sees her team getting ready to go warm up on a practice field, so she gives me a wave and runs off to join them. Just about the same moment, the bleachers empty as the afternoon crowd heads for the bathrooms, food, or walking tracks to take a break between games. By the time I turn toward the main field gate, it's open, and Raulston's heading right at me with Tom behind him, grinning like an idiot. Jason and Randall are heading for the concession stand, looking pissed, so I figure Backwater Restaurant is out of the tournament.

Raulston's even taller than me, and his black hair and dark eyes make him think he's ten kinds of handsome. He waggles his big thick eyebrows at Cory as she heads onto the practice field, then gets close enough to me to smack my shoulder.

“You two been gettin' busy?” Raulston's laughing as he asks the question, and he's making obscene motions with his fingers. It's a perpetual thing with him, the sex obsession. All Raulston thinks about is sex. All he talks about is sex. I don't know how Dutch stands him, but then, she's kind of the same way.

“No.” I say it too fast, but he bugs me sometimes, about Cory anyway. “Just resting up to kick your ass next game.”

“The man knows how to dream,” Tom says. He's got red hair and tons of freckles, but Jenna likes him anyway. “Are the girls done?”

“I don't think so.” I glance toward the girls' field, but I can't see the scoreboard from my angle. “Last time we checked, Sonic Team I was winning by eight.”

“Ouch,” Tom says, looking like he feels sorry for the other team. “I'm too broke for concessions. Let's find Marvin.”

“Why?” I ask. “He won't have any food left.”

But we're moving in the direction of the girls' field so Raulston can see Dutch and Tom can see Jenna. Jason's with Lisa, and Randall and Marvin are still wishing. Randall used to be with Lisa, but he's over that now. He likes some girl in Allenby.

Marvin—well, Marvin likes hot dogs. He's into food—fast, slow, gourmet, or greasy—and it doesn't matter how much he eats, because he still looks like a toothpick with big feet. He likes music, too—psycho level with that since his dad took off—and animals, but not as much as my parents. Nobody likes animals as much as my parents do (way past psycho level).

As for me, music kind of gets on my nerves. I like the popular stuff, but I'm not into in-depth studies of singers and songs and types of music like Marvin. I'd rather read about baseball, and I can't read while I'm listening to music. I don't have any pets—of my own, at least—and I don't want any because I'm too busy with baseball and Cory and my friends and, soon, high school, too, even though this one bird my mom rescued from a hoarder is trying to make friends with me. It's a parrot named Fred. Fred doesn't talk like parrots are supposed to do. Mom says lots of parrots don't talk. As for Fred, Mom says Fred hasn't talked for us
yet
. Fred makes good smoke-detector-alert noises, though.

Not much fun when I'm trying to sleep late.

I see Cory's parents coming through the far archway to watch the afternoon game. Her mom, who looks a lot like her, only older, spots me and smiles and waves—again, lots like Cory would do. Her dad gives me a nod. He's got blond hair and blue eyes, too, but he's not like Cory at all. He and Cory's two older brothers look like stone-faced soldier guys, even though they've never been soldiers. Mr. Wentworth is a plumber.

I nod back to him as they move toward the practice field where Cory and her team are warming up, and I'm suddenly glad we came back to the main area when we did. We weren't doing anything, not really, but it might be bad luck to piss off a plumber.
That
plumber, anyway. He's already explained what he could do to me with a pipe wrench if I make him too unhappy. The creepy part was, he smiled while he was talking about it, and I've never seen Mr. Wentworth smile any other time. Ever.

Cory says he's just being a badass for my benefit.

I'm not too sure.

“Marvin!” Raulston yells, and when I look, I see Marvin in the girls' bleachers, wearing the same pair of faded jeans he always seems to wear, and a T-shirt from the refrigerator factory where his mom works. I try to get the boy to pay attention to how he looks, to go through my closet and at least try some of the sharp jeans I've collected, but he blows me off.

The game's still going on, and Dutch is with Marvin. She's got on a fridge factory T-shirt, too, but she looks way better in hers than Marvin does in his. For her, any T-shirt can be a fashion statement.

“I don't see any hot dogs,” Tom says, like he seriously had hoped Marvin—hello, this is
Marvin
we're talking about—would have leftovers.

We all jog toward Marvin and Dutch. When I run my tongue across my lower lip, a little bit of cinnamon tingles in my mouth, and I smile.

We'll be playing until late tonight, and I wonder how long I'll be able to taste Cory's kisses, and whether or not I can sneak a few more to keep me going. Without running into the pipe wrench problem, or my folks after they get here, or any coaches who want to have an attitude about “fraternizing with the opposite sex.”

I'm thinking a few, maybe, if Cory wins her game and stays in a good mood.

And I'm still smiling.

Nothing's Wrong with Me

(“The Only Living Boy in New York”—Simon and Garfunkel. I like old stuff, too. And new stuff, and hard stuff and soft stuff—if it's music, I like.)

She comes back to the graveyard twice more the next week.

No, really, I'm not hiding behind an oak tree and staring at her like some kind of psycho. I was working nearby. I'm just … on a break. And stuff.

Fairy Girl isn't the most gorgeous female on the planet, but she really is beautiful, and she seems thoughtful and smart, and she's sad, and every time I see her crying, I think about …

Galloping up on a white stallion and asking her what dragon I should slay.

Breaking into a Broadway number to make her laugh.

Stepping into the afternoon sunlight like a gunslinger and tipping my hat.

Offering her a handkerchief. A
clean
handkerchief.

Or …

Saying hello would be a start.

Sometimes she sits by the grave she visits and reads. Other times, she has a little notebook with her, and she writes. This afternoon, I think she's sketching.

She has long fingers.

And probably good-enough eyes to notice a dork lurking behind an oak tree.

When I get back to the grave I was working on, my brain is still buzzing. I'd walk it off, but I can't, because my boss, Harper, is sitting on the pile of dirt next to the opening, resting his elbow on the little travel cage where I keep Fred when I'm working. Harper's got stringy gray hair, three days of gray stubble on his chin, a beer, and half a peanut butter sandwich. Fred's crawling across the top of her cage, trying to get a bite of the sandwich or Harper's elbow. When Fred's on the attack, she's not picky.

Harper sees me coming, and he points a hunk of bread crust at me and says, without swallowing, “Something's definitely wrong with you.”

“You're just figuring that out?” I hop down into the grave and pick up my shovel.

“Fred,” Fred announces brightly, as a way of saying hello to me.

I say hello to Fred, and Harper grumbles, “You're spying on that girl over in Oak Section.”

“I'm not spying. I'm … studying.” I pitch a shovelful of dirt in Harper's general direction. Talking about the girl definitely won't help the brain buzz.

“Whatever you're doing, knock it the hell off. I don't want any trouble in my graveyard.” He chews up the rest of the sandwich, swallows it with a swig of beer, and squints in Fairy Girl's direction. “She's pretty, though. What's her name?”

“No idea.”

“You haven't talked to her?”

“No.”

Harper frowns at me, then shakes his head. “You and me, we should have a long talk about stuff like this, sometime when we ain't got digging to do.”

I throw more dirt, barely missing him.

Fred whistles at me.

“My dad and I had that talk,” I tell Harper.

“Well, he must have done a piss-poor job.” Harper gets up, leaves his beer can next to Fred's cage, and stalks off, muttering, “Ain't even found out the girl's name. Swear to God …”

The next day, I'm thinking about asking Fairy Girl her name, but I can't stop seeing Cory's face.

It's been three years.

That's a long time, but I remember Cory like no time ever passed, like nothing ever changed. I think about her a lot. Probably too much. Sometimes when I think about Cory, I feel things down deep inside—things like steam and tension and sweetness and aching. Things deeper than that, too. Stuff almost forgotten, like it's lost to me forever.

That makes me work to stop thinking about her, to stop thinking about everything. It turns me into flatness and thinness, into a paper-doll person.

If you want to make a paper doll of me, make it regular height with decent muscles, dark brown hair, and a smile. Mom and Dr. Mote say I smile a lot even when I should be really pissed off, that maybe my smiles actually
mean
I'm pissed off, but I don't think it was always that way. Sometimes I think I remember smiling because I was happy—the Cory days—but now, maybe Mom and Dr. Mote are right, so don't forget the smile. Don't forget the little gray parrot with the red tail, either, because Fred's always with me, on my shoulder, my arm, my chest, or my knee—or in her travel cage if I'm outside.

If you make Marvin, he's a little taller than me, more buff, with lighter brown hair, a few freckles, thick eyebrows, and he grins instead of smiles. He wears jeans and vintage T-shirts. Oh, and if he's at my place, he's usually holding Gertrude. Gertrude's a fat cat who drools a lot.

Make a medium-sized paper town for Duke's Ridge, with a complex for G. W. Morton High School (big, square, brown brick, lots of buildings) on the south side. Then make a paper box for Marvin's house near G. W., and my house about twenty miles out in the middle of nowhere with nothing nearby except Rock Hill Cemetery, a huge, rambling collection of gravestones, a little cottage in the back, and the funeral chapel near the stone front gate. If you want, make my parents and Marvin's mom, but I wouldn't put them at the houses. My folks are usually gone doing animal rescue stuff, and Ms. Brown works all the time at the refrigerator factory north of Duke's Ridge. (Did you add the factory? It looks space-age because it's all silver.) Make dozens or even hundreds of paper people for G. W. and kids downtown in Duke's Ridge in the park around the square, and people in Walmart, and people at the little hospital in the middle of town, and the four-screen movie theater, and at the gas stations and grocery stores and all along the fast-food strip.

You can move your Marvin doll anywhere you want because he goes lots of places. You can match him up with some of the other paper people at G. W. or all through Duke's Ridge. He's friendly. Most people like him, even though lots of them snicker about his name, and pinhead Jonas Blankenship, defensive end for the G. W. Eagles, calls him “the Great Marvolo” just before he slugs him in the arm.

You can move everybody everywhere, except me. I stay apart from everybody except Marvin. I'm at G. W., Rock Hill, home, Dr. Mote's office beside the little hospital (twice a month), and James Branson's office on the square once a month for my probation meeting and to drop off college letters and pay off another chunk of my fines. Technically, now that I'm off house arrest and just on probation these last months until I turn eighteen, I could go more places as long as I'm home by ten o'clock curfew, but I'm used to my routine, and I don't have a car and can't get a driver's license until after I'm off probation, so I stay in my regular spots. When Marvin gets an itch to drive somewhere else for a few, or go talk to people, I get nervous and stay quiet, so then my paper doll would look like invisible lines in the passenger seat. Nobody seems to see me, they don't talk to me, and that's fine.

So, I'm invisible, or separate, or removed, or whatever you want to call it. I'm at home, at school, at therapy, at probation, or digging graves, but always sort of … I don't know, lost in space, or secretly made out of paper, meant to get a little older, fade, then just blow away. Doesn't seem like much point to thinking about the future, because I can't really do anything I had planned, and I can't figure out anything I'd rather do, so here I am.

Lost in space, without the robots.

That's my life. Any questions?

Oh. Right.
That
question.

Which I'm not answering yet—but, like in Dr. Mote's office, I'm not trying to be a dick. I just don't have the words rehearsed, or know how to explain everything, or even if you'll let me finish. If I start in the wrong place, you'll walk away before you hear everything and you'll just think I'm a shit. Maybe I am a shit, but I try not to be.

It's late September now, and I'm in Duke's Ridge, in G. W., sitting with Marvin.

I watch Marvin pull out the books for his next class, drop half of them, grin, and pick them up before he shuts his locker.

“It's mind-blowing how you never get mad at anything,” I tell him. “I wish I was like that.”

“I get mad.” Marvin gets a better hold on the books he snatched off the green tile floor. His jeans are the same black color as the book on top, only not as shiny, and he's wearing a vintage KISS T-shirt that looks like it's really forty years old. The air in the hallway's five different kinds of hot and stinky, but I'm not really paying attention to anything else in the hall but Marvin. No point, really. Nothing in the hall pays attention to me, other than him.

I shift my grip on my backpack strap. “Name one time you've gotten mad. Just once.”

Marvin's big thick eyebrows bunch like his brain's cramping as he thinks. “This year, or since I've known you?”

“See, that kind of makes my point.” I push him away from the locker and into the blurry crowd of people clogging the halls between us and fifth period.

“You don't get mad at anything, even all the shit that should make you furious, so why're you busting
my
balls?” He elbows through people, but he smiles at them before he bumps them out of the way.

I don't bother with the smiling part. “I get mad all the time. Like, every day, two or three times a day. I just don't say anything.”

“That's your problem.” Marvin shuts up long enough to smile at five more people before we turn the last corner toward class. “That's why your PO stays up your ass and your therapist always asks you if you're about to turn serial killer. They know one day, the wrong thing's gonna hit you, and you're gonna blow like Vesuvius.”

My stomach does a nervous weird thing inside, and it's time to move on to new topics. “When was the last time Vesuvius erupted, anyway?”

Marvin snickers. “This year, or since I've known you?”

“Hey.”

The female voice makes me jump, and two seconds later, I process who it belongs to and have to work not to groan.

“Hi, Cherie,” Marvin says as she comes up from behind us before we can get to the classroom, because he's always polite. It's natural to him, like being a giant dork and not caring at all. Only the slight flush of red under his freckles gives away the fact he's not really happy about her sneaking up on us.

My eyes move like they're on autopilot, double-checking to be sure that King Kong Jonas is nowhere nearby to be pissed off that I'm jawing with his baby sister. Though, really, nothing about her looks like a baby. Cherie's dressed in her school best—black skirt, black shirt, black bag and shoes to match her black hair. She can't do weird nails and makeup at school, but she'd do it if she thought she could get away with it.

Cherie ignores Marvin and keeps her eyes on me. “Are you working today?”

“Uh—I—um, probably. But Harper doesn't want you—I mean, he doesn't want me to talk to people while I'm digging.” I stop at the door to class. Probably should go inside, but that feels too, I don't know. Abrupt or something.

Cherie stares at the ceiling for a second before staring at me again. “It's just graves. You can talk and shovel dirt.”

“Not a good idea.” Marvin edges through the door, but Cherie doesn't take the hint because she never does. In the hallway behind us, I notice a few faces turning in our direction, probably because it's weird to see me talking to anybody besides Marvin.

Cherie acts like Marvin didn't even speak. “I want to see you, Del. It's been like days. A week. Maybe almost two.”

Damn. I'm smiling. I wish I wouldn't do that, because people probably take it wrong, especially Cherie. “You don't need to spend time with me. You're not my girlfriend. I'm not your boyfriend. We don't have any reason to spend time together.”

You think that was rude, right? Right? I know you do.

That's because you're normal.

Cherie is not.

No matter what I say to her or how I say it, she never takes it bad—even when I want her to.

She gives me a soft punch in the belly. “Don't be like that. You know I just want to talk.”

“But he doesn't want to talk to you,” Marvin tells her.

She turns her back on him completely.

“How many different ways do we have to explain this to you?” Marvin asks. “Not wanted. Not welcome. Don't bug Del at work.”

Hmm. Marvin actually does sound a little irritated. I'd forgotten Cherie could get to him so totally. Maybe he
is
more regular than Vesuvius.

“I'll come by Rock Hill as soon as I can,” Cherie says, demonstrating whole new meanings for the word
oblivion
. Her smile is fast and bright, and it seems real enough, which always catches me off guard.

She punches me in the belly again, a little harder this time, and then she's gone, running off down the hall as first bell rings.

Marvin and I stand in the door, matching big dorks, watching her fly away like a skinny little bat.

“She doesn't get it,” he says.

“She doesn't want to get it.”

We have to move to let somebody in, so we go sit down.

Both of us are sure Cherie will show up at Rock Hill, if not tonight, then tomorrow night, or soon enough, and she really, really, really needs to stop that.