The Impossible Knife of Memory

  “We should do something to make it look nicer.”

  “I guess.” He stood next to me and pointed to the empty grass to the left of the grave. “That’s where you need to put me when my time comes.”

  I swallowed hard. “You’re not going to die.” I leaned my head against his shoulder. “Not for a hundred years.”

  He put his arm around me. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath of pine and damp earth. Only a few birds were singing and, far away, an owl called. Leaning against my father, the sadness finally broke open inside me, hollowing out my heart and leaving me bleeding. My feet felt rooted in the dirt. There were more than two bodies buried here. Pieces of me that I didn’t even know were under the ground. Pieces of Dad, too.

  “Gloaming,” Dad said.

  “What?”

  “That word I couldn’t remember. Gloaming. That short, murky time between half-light and dark.” He hugged me quickly and let me go. “Night’s here, princess. Let’s head home.”

  40

  Finn texted me Tuesday morning to ask if I wanted a ride to school. I was kind of surprised, but I said yes and then I put on a cleaner shirt. By Thursday, we had fallen into a sort of pattern. Right around six thirty in the morning, he’d text:

  ?

  and I’d text:

  K

  and by the time I got to the corner a block south of my house (no way was I going to let him pick me up where Dad might see), Finn would be sitting there, his engine smoking because he hadn’t fixed the leaking oil valve yet. He also slid into the habit of eating breakfast burritos and drinking chocolate milk at first-period lunch with me and Gracie and Topher, in addition to meeting me in the library after school to try and convince me that precalc wasn’t some enormous joke that got out of hand.

  I was beginning to understand why people were horrified when they learned that instead of attending school from grades seven through eleven, I’d been riding shotgun in my dad’s semi. It wasn’t that my life was ruined because I never sang in a holiday choir or that I missed the thrill of reenacting the Battle of Gettysburg with water balloons and squirt guns. It was that I didn’t know The Rules.

  I hadn’t even known The Rules existed before that week.

  I was not a totally ignorant feral recluse. Watching Animal Planet had alerted me to the existence of mating behavior. Plus, having eaten a lot of bologna sandwiches in truck stops, I’d heard the kinds of things that grown men say to other grown men about these issues. But I was pretty sure that the blue-footed booby’s courting dance wasn’t going to get me anywhere with Finn, and if I approached him in the way that truck drivers recommended, it wouldn’t end well.

  Things were complicated even more by the fact that there was something weird about Finn. Not zombie weird. He was more of a cyborg with a vivid imagination. But he’d spent enough time around the zombies to adopt some of their ways. He knew The Rules. I didn’t.

  Finn would show up at my locker one day and then he wouldn’t the next. Was I supposed to return the gesture and go to his locker before he could take the next step, make the next move, whatever that might be? One minute we’d be riffing about conspiracy theories, the next we’d be arguing so loudly about mandatory military service (I was for it; he, being a privileged wuss, was not) that we got kicked out of the library. And then we didn’t say a word to each other the whole drive home.

  Which was another thing—I couldn’t talk about this to him. And/or he couldn’t/wouldn’t talk about it to me, assuming he wanted to, assuming the entire drama wasn’t a product of my estrogen poisoning or a symptom of a brain tumor caused by eating so many gallons of artificially colored, high-fructose corn syrup–enhanced plastic food products when I was younger. (Truck stops are not known for their selection of organic fruits and vegetables.)

  I watched all the couples and almost-couples around me, frantically trying to understand how this stuff worked, and was more confused than ever.

  Gracie was no help. The situation at her house went to DEFCON 4 when her dad moved out. The next day, her little brother refused to go to school. Mrs. Rappaport carried him out to the car and tried to shove him in, even though he was kicking and screaming. Gracie grabbed her mom’s arm to make her stop and Mrs. Rappaport turned around and slapped Gracie’s face. The neighbor who saw the whole thing called the police.

  The only relationship I’d ever seen my father in was with Trish, and for most of those years he was on the other side of the world from us. When he was finally discharged, the two of them turned our apartment into a battlefield. Even if their relationship had been less than awful, there was no way to talk to him. The gloaming that closed over us in the cemetery had crawled inside his skin. He didn’t want to talk or eat. He just sat in front of the TV.

  So I couldn’t talk to Finn about what I wanted to talk to him about, I couldn’t talk to Gracie about anything other than how awful her parents were, and my dad was a bigger mystery than ever.

  To make matters worse (was that possible?), I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted with Finn. Did I like him? My opinion about that changed several times a day. Did I want him to like me? Ditto. How could I like him, how could he like me, if we didn’t know each other? The little I was able to learn about his family (perfect, middle-class people, apparently) made me pretty sure that he’d run screaming if he ever met my father. That would be a logical reaction, of course, but did I really want to fall in love (fall in “like”?) with someone who didn’t give my dad a chance? We had to get to know each other. Gradually. Baby steps. In order to do that, we’d have to break down and talk about things that were more significant than font size in online newspapers and his fevered delusions about his time studying telekinesis with a group of monks in a Himalayan ice cave.

  I had no idea how to do that.

  I started to cyber-stalk him late on Wednesday night, but it made me so disgusted with myself that I played hours of Skulkrushr III instead and thus flunked the next day’s Chinese vocab quiz. I wrote an apology note to my teacher in Chinese. She told me that I had actually written something about pigs and umbrellas.

  At one level? None of this mattered. It was hard enough surviving day to day, both navigating the hordes at Zombie High and listening to the bomb that had started ticking inside my father’s head. A little flirting with Finn? That wouldn’t hurt. But I concluded that it couldn’t go any further. When we met after school for precalc tutoring, I made sure that there was always a table between us. And when I was in his car, I kept my backpack on my lap, my face turned to the window and my attitude set to the frost level of “Don’t Touch.”

  Despite this strategy, the hordes gossiped about us. Girls in my gym class asked me flat out what Finn was like. That’s how I found out that his family had moved to the district only a year earlier and that he had led the swim team to the state title but decided not to swim this year, and no one could figure out why. I also learned that those same girls were pissed off; they’d assumed he was gay, because why else wouldn’t he have tried to hook up with them before?

  I dialed up my serial killer glare and eventually they walked away.

  Even the teachers noticed. Mr. Diaz walked past my locker when Finn was there and said, “For the love of all that is holy, you two, please don’t breed.”

  Seriously?

  The sex thing, that was the undercurrent, the electrically charged wire that ran through all of this nonsense. I’d been eavesdropping on zombie sex conversations since school started. Most of them, I thought, were totally made up. But now I found myself doubting that conclusion. What did The Rules say about this? If everyone was really having sex, then why was it paradoxically a hush-hush-whisper thing and a scream-it-online-and-in-the-cafeteria thing? If everybody was really having sex, why weren’t more girls sporting baby bumps? I knew the statistics. I also knew the closest abortion clinic was more than a hundred miles away. Most of my classmates cou
ldn’t remember to tie their shoes in the morning. I had no faith in their ability to use birth control. Either nobody was getting laid and everybody was lying about it or the school was putting contraceptives in the oatmeal raisin cookies.

  No wonder the zombies were crazy. They thought they were supposed to practice breeding before they learned how to do their own laundry. They talked about it, thought about it, maybe did it, all while going through the motions of attending class and learning stuff so that they could go forth and become productive adults. Whatever that was supposed to mean. It was enough to make me want to flee into the mountains and live out my life as a hermit, as long as I could find a hideaway that had a decent public library within walking distance and toilets that flushed, because Porta-Potties were the worst.

  Then I’d see Finn in the hall, or I’d catch a glance of his profile out of the corner of my eye while we were driving to school, and he would turn to me and smile. And I didn’t want to be a hermit anymore.

  41

  He was waiting for me when I got out of detention on Friday.

  “Rogak?” he asked.

  “Diaz.”

  We fell into step next to each other and headed for my locker. “What did you do this time?”

  “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “I just pointed out that calling it the ‘Mexican–American War’ falsely gives the impression that the Mexicans started it, and that in fact, in Mexico they call it the ‘United States Invasion of Mexico,’ which is the truth, or the ‘War of 1847,’ which is at least neutral-ish.”

  “You got detention for that?” Finn asked.

  “Not exactly. Mr. Diaz, who really needs to work on his anger management issues, yelled at me for disrupting his class with what he called my ‘pedantic quibbles.’ Then this idiot named Kyle lost it because he thought ‘pedantic’ meant the same thing as ‘pedophile,’ and I sort of melted down a little.” I handed him my books and dialed the combination on my locker. “And I wasn’t being pedantic or quibbling. Diaz was being an imperialist first worlder.”

  “How do you know such a bizarre amount of history?” Finn asked.

  “Dad was a history major at West Point. I know more about the fall of the Roman Empire than the Romans did.” I lifted the latch. The locker didn’t open. I dialed it again. “But that’s the wrong question. Ask why everyone else is so pathetically stupid and why they’re always whining about how hard American history is. Instead of getting detention, I should get a medal for not slapping people in the face every day.”

  The latch still would not open. I kicked the locker, remembering too late that I was wearing sneakers and not boots.

  Finn nudged me to the side and spun the dial. “You whine about precalc.”

  “That’s different,” I said, trying to stand casually on the foot that wasn’t throbbing in pain. “The zombie overlords numb our brains with math so they can implant their devious consumer-culture agenda in us.”

  Finn pulled up the latch. My locker magically opened.

  “I hate you,” I said.

  “I’m not being obtuse,” he said as he crossed his arms over his chest, “but you’re acute girl.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s a math joke.”

  I shoved my books into the locker. “‘Math joke’ is an oxymoron, Fishhead, like ‘cafeteria food’ or ‘required volunteer community service.’”

  “I think we should take each other to the limit to see if we converge,” Finn said.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “I’m flirting with you, Miss Blue, flirting in the perfect language of calculus. It’s a sine I think you’re sweet as pi. Get it?”

  I paused. He’d said “flirt” twice. My detention rage contracted into a small, spinning ball. Finn raised his eyebrows, waiting, maybe, for me to say something. What was I supposed to say to an irritatingly good-looking guy using stupid math puns to flirt with me in an empty hallway on a Friday afternoon?

  “You are the biggest dork in the history of dorkdom,” I declared.

  “Even though you have a mean value,” he said with a grin, “one of these days I know you’ll want to integrate my natural log.”

  “Okay, that’s just awkward,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But you stopped scowling.”

  “The library is closing in five minutes so you don’t have to tutor me today.” I slammed the locker closed. “But can I get a ride home with you?”

  “Um . . .” He suddenly frowned and spun the dial on the locker next to mine. “Yeah . . . about that.”

  “What? Is your car dead?”

  “No.” He lifted the latch to check if he had broken in. He hadn’t. “I was thinking maybe we could do something. Together. Do something together.”

  “Now?”

  “Well, yeah. Now.”

  “Like what? Write another article?”

  “Um, no.” He jiggled the locker latch again. “I was thinking more like a movie. Or maybe we could go the mall.”

  “A movie or the mall? Are you asking me on a date?”

  “Not quite.” He brushed his hair out of his eyes. “What was that word you used at the game? ‘Anti-date’?”

  “Yeah, an antidote to the stupidity of dating. An anti-date by definition can’t be a brain-dead movie or a spirit-crushing trip to the mall.”

  “What could it be?”

  The conversation had suddenly veered into dangerous waters. “I don’t know. I guess we could go to the mall if we liberated all the animals in the pet store.”

  “We’d be arrested and put in jail,” Finn said.

  “That could be fun.”

  “No, that would screw up my chances of getting into a decent college, which would freak my parents all the way out.”

  “It would give you the best material ever for a college essay.”

  “Our mall doesn’t have a pet store.”

  “Okay, so that’s a real problem,” I said. “Liberating hot dogs at the food court doesn’t sound as interesting. What would you normally do on a Friday afternoon—stuff your face and game yourself into a coma?”

  He shook his head. “I’d probably head to the library. No one uses the computers there on Friday afternoons.”

  “That’s pretty lame for a guy whose middle name is Trouble,” I said. “What about the quarry?”

  He blinked. “You want me to take you to the quarry?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s not exactly the kind of place to go in the daylight.”

  “Well, duh, it is if you actually want to see it.”

  He looked very confused, which made two of us, and I decided that was better than being confused alone.

  42

  The quarry was closer to my house than I realized, hidden from Route 15 by a grove of old maple trees with flame-red and caramel-orange leaves. We drove past the trees onto a dirt road and started up a steep hill. The quarry was on my side of the car, beyond a tall chain-link fence and about twenty feet of dirt and rock. I felt the emptiness before I saw it.

  At the top of the hill was a large plateau; Finn swung the car so that it pointed toward the fence and parked. “The view is better at night.”

  “You keep mentioning that,” I said. “Will we get arrested?”

  “Doubt it.” He turned off the engine. “The cops only patrol at night when the view is better and conditions are ripe for all sorts of things.”

  I unbuckled my seat belt, and unlocked and opened the door.

  “Where are you going?” he called after me. “Hayley?”

  * * *

  The fence was fairly new: ten feet tall and built with steel mesh nearly as thick as my pinky finger. I stuck my foot in a hole, reached up, and started cli
mbing.

  “Wait,” Finn said.

  “You coming?” I asked.

  “You’re not supposed to do that.”

  “So?” I reached, pulled, and climbed.

  “In fact, that sign we passed back there?” he continued. “That definitely said no trespassing.”

  I lifted my left foot, found another opening. “We trespassed by driving up here.” My right hand was just below the top of the fence.

  “Yeah, but you’re taking it to another level.”

  I clutched the top bar and slowly worked my feet up until I could swing one leg over, then the other, and climb down the forbidden side.

  “Ta-da!” I threw my arms in the air, victorious. In front of me, uneven granite sloped up to the quarry’s edge. It made me think of an ancient map. Like if we went over the edge, we’d be lost forever in the “Great Unknown.” Here be dragons . . .

  “Now what?” Finn asked.

  “I’m going to walk over there and look down.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not.” He leapt at the fence and started climbing. “Don’t move, don’t you dare. The whole thing could crumble.”

  “I am standing on a block of granite, Finnegan. It’s not going to crumble for another billion years.”

  He swung his legs over and quickly climbed down the inside of the fence, sweating and breathing hard even though he was in way better shape than I was.

  “What if an earthquake hits?” He stood in front of me, right hand clenching the fence tightly, his knuckles bone-white.

  “The only natural disasters around here are blizzards. It’s fifty degrees out, so I think we’re safe for the next ten minutes or so.”

  “Fracking.” He licked his lips and swallowed. “Earthquakes can happen anywhere now because of fracking. You could be walking to your seat at the movies, your face in a box of popcorn, and boom, a massive earthquake rips open the ground and thousands die.”