The Freak Observer (9 page)

Sometimes, I read while he killed virtual zombies. It gets to be white noise, after a little bit, the endless explosions. I just kept my eyes on the page in front of me so I didn't get CGI images of the creepy undead stamped on my retina.

Anyhow, we pissed away hours most nights.

. . .

Once, I went upstairs because Corey wanted an apple, but he didn't want to get it himself. He asked. I went.

When his mom said, “You must be Loa,” she would have scared the pants off me, if I'd had any on. She was sitting all curled up and quiet as a cat on a big chair in a puddle of light. The rest of the house was dark.

“Yes,” I said, and I pulled the T-shirt I was wearing down as far as I could over my butt.

“I'm glad Corey has a friend,” she said. She didn't sound sarcastic. She didn't sound enthusiastic either. She took a sip out of a glass she held cradled in her fingers. The glass sparkled. “He's OK, isn't he? He's OK.”

I just nodded, he seemed OK to me.

“I worry, you know?”

“He's OK,” I said. “I'm just going to get him an apple.”

“An apple?”

“He's OK. He just wants an apple.”

She swirled her drink around in the glass and said, “Goodnight, honey.” Then she switched off the lamp beside her and left us both in the dark.

I followed the light of the digital clock on the microwave into the kitchen, got Corey his damn apple, and took tiny, little baby steps to find my way downstairs in the night.

It was the only conversation I ever had with his mom. And during the times I was there, Corey never spoke to her at all.

. . .

“Rumor has it,” Corey says, “that I'm gay.”

I have nothing to say to that.

“Rumor has it,” Corey says, “that you are planning to plant bombs in the girls' bathrooms and kill us all—at least those of us in the girls' bathrooms. And then you are going to sweep down the halls in a yellow slicker slaughtering innocents.”

“A yellow slicker? The rodeo kind that makes the guys look like rubber ducks. Oooo! Fierce. Really fierce!”

“Well, you're crazy. That's the sort of thing that crazy people do.”

“And what kinds of gay things are you doing?”

“Less than I'd like.”

“So. You're gay.”

“Gay as a tangerine. Gay as the Pillsbury Doughboy.”

“Gay as a rodeo cowboy.”

“Gay as Curious George.”

“Was the Man in the Yellow Hat a pederast?”

“He was a monkey molester—and gay as lemon ricotta ravioli.”

“I better start learning how to make pipe bombs.”

“You'll be good at it.”

“You know I will.”

Corey introduces me to the university library. It is vast and full of stuff. Some of it is interesting, and some of it is not. Theoretically, we are here to do research to make us better debaters, but to be honest, most of the stuff that ought to be helpful to us in debates falls into the “not that interesting” category.

I feel like I'm trespassing. Corey tells me I'm an idiot. It's a public place. It's a
library
for crap's sake. He asks if I feel guilty when I use toilet paper at the mall—do I feel like I'm stealing it? Do I leave pennies lined up on the back of the toilet to pay for every square? He doesn't know why he puts up with me, really he doesn't.

Then he winks and says we should go on the grand tour.

There is the Dewey decimal section. It is a ghetto for old books that couldn't just be put in the dumpster but weren't worth the trouble of assigning new numbers and moving to new shelves. There are the shelves of oversize books, exiled from their natural clans by their gigantism. Atlases, anatomy books, fashion portfolios, they are all tossed together and expected to get along. There are even books that defy being books. They are boxes of loose pages. There are others that have a single page folded inside.Unfolded, that page is a map as big as a bedsheet.

Corey showed me where they kept the little books of pornography—no, no, Corey said they were erotica, not porn—written by famous authors. They were much more interesting than a soap-opera romance or a TV ad selling cars or hamburgers or sex. Erotica, it turns out, is more about imagination than biological plumbing.

My favorites are the big glossy books of photography. I like the photo of a gray dog with a gray sock hanging from its nose. It's an elephant. On another page, the same dog is sitting quietly after someone poured a bag of flour or something all over it. There isn't a single trace of movement, not one paw print, in that flour. There is a woman who disguises herself again and again and makes portraits of each person she seems to be. There is a whole book of portraits of dead Wisconsinites: babies in long white gowns, criminals with bullet holes.

They are so different from the photographs I know. I know about
National Geographic
and family snapshots, that's all. Here I am with my second birthday cake. There I am with my dog, Ket, standing in a snowbank. My dad is in the picture too, but only as a pale blue shadow on the snow. You can tell he is the one taking the picture because of the way his shadow elbows are sticking out of his shadow head. Now I am holding a baby Asta wrapped up in her blanket. Where did I ever get a purple sombrero? And whatever happened to it?

And
National Geographic
is cool, but it's not the same as these books. I loved looking at the pictures of the woman who rode across Australia on a camel and the X-rays of Egyptian mummies, but this was different. The subject of these pictures was seeing. That's what they were about, seeing. They were not about dead babies or dogs dressed in golf sweaters. They were about looking and seeing.

I turn page after big glossy page. This is a whole new world. There are people who make a living just by showing other people what they see.

When Corey says it's time to go, I don't want to. He is pleased. I just want to keep looking at pictures, swallowing up other people's visions.

It is better than vodka.

. . .

I wanted to go the library again the next day, but Corey had different plans.

He said I needed a killer-bitch costume for debate. This worried me some, because the other girls in debate did not seem to be wearing black leather or spiked collars. Sometimes Corey's language was imprecise.

The next thing I knew, we were standing in his mother's closet and he was throwing clothes at me. There were no spiked collars involved, but that didn't make the experience better. Corey pulled a skirt off a hanger and flapped it at me.

“Maybe you could wear one on each leg?”

He pulled a sweater from the bottom of a neat, rainbow organized pile, “This could stretch,” he said, while he stepped on one sleeve and pulled on the other, “Or not. You know, I think we are going to have to go to the mall.”

I bent down to pick up the skirt he had tossed on the floor so I could hang it back up. Corey snatched it out of my hands and tossed it high onto a shelf. Then he flipped the whole pile of sweaters onto the floor.

“Leave it,” he said.

And I did.

. . .

We went shopping.

The mall makes me miserable. I know it isn't supposed to, but it hurts my eyes and ears and gives me a headache. Too many reflections, too many places where music is coming at me from two directions at once. It just freaks me out.

Even though Corey seemed to know exactly what he was looking for, finding the debate costume of his dreams was difficult.

As for me, I lived through similar hell when I played Barbies with Reba in second grade. Endlessly shoving uncooperative arms into impossibly skinny sleeves: not fun. Chopping firewood builds biceps, and I chop a lot of firewood. Nothing fits right. My hair looked as frustrated as I felt. It floated around my head full of static electricity and all fratzed out from pulling things on and off.

Finally, though, Corey was satisfied. It was a charcoal gray suit. The skinny skirt wasn't short, but it fit tight. It had a slit up the back so I could walk a bit. The jacket, Corey announced, would create the illusion of an ass. And there were tall black boots with heels too.

When I came out of the fitting room I was surprised at Corey's face. When I looked in the three angled mirrors, I was even more surprised. I saw myself. Anyway I hoped it was myself. The only time I look in the mirror on purpose is when I brush my teeth. My self-image, as they say on
Oprah
, is a little warped. I'm used to seeing my hands doing what I tell my hands to do. I'm used to seeing my feet when I pull on my socks. But I am not used to seeing myself like this, a whole person.

The person in the mirror looked spooky good. Even with her wispy dark hair a mess, that person in the mirror looked like she could flick trouble out of her way like a bug. Her eyes looked level into mine. When I saw that person in the mirror, I stood different and I walked different. I felt different. And I liked it.

It may have been a coincidence, but my debate scores went up the first time I wore those clothes to a meet.

. . .

I liked not being home.

But I assumed that home was going to be there when I got back. One day, it wasn't.

It's not like the house burned down or an earthquake split the rock and swallowed everything whole. It was worse. More personal. My dog, Ket, died.

He was getting a little old. It took him a little longer to get up, especially on cold mornings. He never jumped off the porch to terrorize squirrels anymore. Still, he might have lived years and years, but he fell through the thin ice on the creek.

He probably just went down to get a drink, and when the ice broke, he wasn't quick enough to make it out. He didn't drown, but his back legs were swept under the ice by the water. He just hung on and struggled.

Little Harold found him there when he didn't come to get his dinner. Poor Little Harold. He tried, but he's just a little kid and he didn't have the strength. He just kept trying and crying until Dad went looking for him. Dad says we were just lucky that Little Harold didn't get trapped under the ice too.

All of this is secondhand knowledge. I didn't see it. I was having fun. I was at a speech and debate meet, racking up points. I was riding a bus through the snowy dark with a bunch of other speech and drama nerds. Ket never crossed my mind. Little Harold never crossed my mind. I never had a fleeting psychic moment where I looked at the icy world outside and shivered. I was perfectly, selfishly happy.

My dad was strong enough to fight the water and the ice, but he couldn't fight The Bony Guy.

. . .

Poor Little Harold slept all night on the floor by the woodstove with his arms around Ket's neck. When morning came, it was pretty clear that things weren't right. Ket didn't even try to get up.

By that afternoon, my dad had decided the only kind thing to do was put him down. Little Harold cried. Dad probably wanted to, but he just got the rifle and the dog into the truck and went to do what he had to do.

Sometimes I see shows on TV about paralyzed dogs that zip around in little wheeled carts or dogs that chase balls hopping along on their last two paws. Those stories don't make me smile. They always seem like a cruel joke. Ket's story ended so differently.

My dad stopped the truck on a logging road. Then he laid Ket out on the snow under a pine tree and shot him. That was the end of Ket. He was never going to gather us all up and keep us safe again.

Like I said, when I got home, home wasn't there anymore. Little Harold was sitting on his bed holding Ket's dish on his lap and crying. When I asked Dad where Ket was buried, he looked at me like I was stupid.

“The ground is frozen.”

Sometimes when I ride my bike on the logging roads, I see bones. But they aren't Ket's bones. They are almost always from Bambi's stupid brothers. I may never find Ket. Bones don't last forever in the woods. Coyotes scatter them around. Mice and other little animals gnaw on them. They get chalky and start to break apart. Bones don't last forever.

But The Bony Guy does.

. . .

The Bony Guy likes disguises.

I am watching a late-night show. There is a guest who tried to pay for a cruise with a glossy photograph of the host. The host declares that it ought to be as good as money. It is a picture of him. People like him better than any of the guys on the money, don't they? The audience applauds wildly. Then he has a quiz for all of us. Question 1: Would you watch a bunny rabbit eat some lettuce? Question 2: Would you watch a bird peck something dead by the side of the road? Question 3: Would you watch dogs eat a live donkey? The audience applauds wildly.

When I wake up. I am surprised I'm in bed. It certainly seemed like a real TV show.

. . .

“My mom is sending me to Europe.”

Corey said it as if moms do that sort of thing, like they do laundry or nagging. Was it a summer vacation or something? I didn't know.