Dark Water - Laura McNeal [32]
I had a light on my bicycle, but that was just because my mother, my father, and I had once, when we were a normal, von Trappish family, taken our bicycles on camping trips and ridden along safe, carless paths to the ice cream stand. At no time in my life had I ever been permitted to ride my bike on Mission Road, where most things that couldn’t go forty miles per hour—possums, squirrels, dogs, cats, coyotes, snakes, and rabbits—were promptly killed. It being Sunday night, there weren’t many cars, but the ones that were on the road were screaming. Twice, cars flew by so close a rush of air pushed me slightly sideways, and I swore I would never, never do this again.
I decided I would hide the bicycle by Robby’s tree house. If my mother was awake—and surely she would be—I would say I fell asleep in the tree house. Looking back, I see that I was beginning my practice with lies, preparing unconsciously for the day four months in the future when the fire would jump from tree to tree and roof to roof and I would head straight to the woods, to Amiel, to a house no fireman would think to defend but where all that I had come to love was in danger of burning alive.
Nineteen
I was too optimistic about my mother. She had checked the tree house. Repeatedly. She was waiting for me in a murderous mood.
“Where were you?”
“Greenie’s.”
“I called her.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, in a vain attempt to bluff her.
“Where was Greenie, then, when she answered the phone?”
It didn’t seem likely that I could guess this. “Okay. So I wasn’t with her.”
“The truth this time.”
“I went for a bike ride.”
“IN THE DARK?”
“I used the headlight.”
“I don’t understand what’s gotten into you.”
I expected her to say it was my father’s fault. She thought it, I suppose. What she said was that we were going to be spending a lot of time together. I was no longer grounded but Siamesed. For the remainder of my sentence, whenever I was not in school, I was going to be with her. All. The. Time.
“Fine,” I said indifferently. It’s harder for someone to punish you when you don’t react. I went into Lavar’s junky (but clean) bathroom, closed the door without slamming it, and started the bathwater. I stared at the plume of rust that went down the white enamel from the faucet to the drain, flipping at the still-cold water with my hand, and wondered what Amiel was doing now and if he had light of some kind in his house. I studied the stinging, shaved-off part of my shin. The aloe still glistened there, and I touched it carefully. I brought the trace of aloe to my nose to see if it had a smell, but it didn’t, so I held my finger under the running water with the hope that I could wash away my longing.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were sensationally long and boring, containing one conversation of note between Robby and me at school.
“I talked to Mary Beth last night,” he said in his excessively casual way.
I tried to keep doing my geometry homework. “In person or on the phone?”
“Phone. I asked if she wanted to come over and swim.”
Write out the formula for the perimeter of a triangle urged my book. “Is your dad gone or something?” I asked. Isolate variable x.
“No,” Robby said. “He’s not gone. But that’s why I asked her over. It was a test.”
“Oh,” I said. “Super-clever.”
“Thanks. She failed because she said she had to study for a biology test.”
“Well, she does go to college,” I told him. “She could study from time to time.”
“Yeah, I thought of that. So I asked her what was going to be on the test.” He lifted his chin in that weird way guys do when they’re chin-waving at each other. “It turns out she’s kind of smart.”
He began to describe the biological concept of the chimera, which is the freaky real-world version of the mythological chimera: a monster made of different animals. While my lunch period floated away, he talked about gametes and zygotes and how a mule wasn’t a true chimera and a hinny wasn’t a true chimera (a hinny being a cross between a stallion and a jenny, whatever a “jenny” is), but a geep was.
“A geep?”
“Yes. Apparently,