Through the doorway I watched brown autumn light fill the clearing, orange and red leaves glowing like falling stars as they drifted down to the forest floor. The wind was bitter this late in November, but I only noticed when I thought about why I didn’t feel it as much as I should have. Even though my jeans had rips and tears in them, even though my running shoes were still soggy inside from falling in Sugar Creek, even though I only had on a jean jacket and a hooded sweatshirt underneath for warmth, if I’d taken all that off I still wouldn’t have shivered as long or as often as I probably should have.
There was an old steel cot in one corner of the shack that didn’t have a mattress anymore, just a long rectangle of rusty springs basically, but I thought I might be able to make it into a bed with a little effort. So I went outside, got some wood planks and took them inside to put on top of the springs. Then I opened my backpack and took out my extra clothes and spread them over the planks for a little layer of softness. When I tried to sit down, though, the bed squealed like someone being murdered, so I braced myself and slowly let more of my weight rest on the bed until I was sure it wasn’t going to fall apart beneath me. Then I pulled my legs up on the cot too.
Looking up at the ceiling, I saw a maze of webs in a shaft of sunlight, glittering from corner to corner, and in the center was this huge black spider that looked like it could have kicked the shit out of Charlotte, the spider that helped Wilbur the pig in that book Charlotte’s Web, which I read when I was around ten years old maybe and had thought was pretty cool except I always felt bad because Charlotte was so nice and tried to bring Wilbur special attention by spinning webs above him to spell out things like Some Pig! and everyone would read the messages in her web and go crazy over Wilbur because of what they said. But I always thought the truly amazing thing was that a spider could read and write. No one seemed to get that, though. Then she had babies and died, yet another sacrifice it seemed we were supposed to feel okay about, but it was a huge disappointment to me and somehow reminded me of my mother except my mom had babies and didn’t die. She had Andy and me and got paralyzed instead.
So I wasn’t alone after all. I was living with Charlotte. No big deal. I could share a shack with a spider.
Rummaging through my bag, I found I still had the five hundred dollars I’d taken from Mr. Highsmith’s underwear drawer along with a knife, a flashlight, a bag of cereal and an apple. I wasn’t very hungry so I left the cereal in the bag and took the apple, crunching my way through half of it before it started to taste sour and I put it down. The other half sat heavy in my stomach and if I made the slightest move on my makeshift bed it sloshed around inside me like a huge load of gravel, making me double up on the cot, so sleeping that afternoon as I’d planned for didn’t happen.
Since I couldn’t sleep, I decided to think about other things I wanted. Hopes. Wishes. I didn’t have many hopes or wishes for my life at that moment and those I did have were mostly things like how I hoped I could run fast and far enough away to get out of the range of God’s finger as well as out of the range of my crappy family. Other than that I also hoped Gracie was at home writing her report on The Diary of Anne Frank right then, because if she was it meant she’d been able to convince her parents and the cops that she’d gone on a joy ride alone and they would still have no clue where to look for me. For all they knew, I was far away, not even near town anymore. Kids can get pretty far in a few days when they’re on the run. Cops know that. If they were smart cops (which is rare I think, and so I added that to my list of hopes and wishes) they’d assume I wasn’t anywhere nearby and Gracie could go back to studying at home alone and her parents would begin to trust her again and in a couple of days we’d be able to see each other, maybe.
It’d been about a week since I’d left home, give or take a day, but I’d already started to lose track of time. Now I found myself looking toward the quality of light to judge if it was morning, noon or evening. Night was easy. You can’t mistake a moon and the stars spread out over the trees like a banner for anything other than night. So as the light faded from afternoon to evening and the dark came out and night birds began to rustle in the branches above, I put my list of hopes away and slept a little more easily. At least until I started to dream.
A place unfolded inside me that looked exactly like the place my body was hiding in the shack in the woods surrounded by trees as they lost their leaves and the air was full of their drifting colors. I woke up inside that shack, only this time the shack was inside me, and I walked out into the woods and down to Sugar Creek, where I kneeled and took a long drink of cold water, lapping at it like a dog.
There were other dogs too. Wolves were howling. I heard their voices all around in the woods and it was late and evening was coming on fast. Soon it would be night and the men with no skin that had been around the first time Jamie took me into dead space would come out and they’d find me where I wasn’t ready to be, like Jamie had said. And then there they were, clambering through the brush, pushing aside branches until they were on both sides of Sugar Creek, stretching their arms out toward me. One said in a voice like someone who’s just woken from a nightmare, “Say something. Say anything,” and held his trembling hands out as if he was waiting for me to give him something to eat. I turned from him, but ran only a few steps before I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get away. They were surrounding me, begging me to speak, their hands clenching and unclenching as they reached out.
“They’re mine!” I shouted. “Mine!” And then they were on me and I couldn’t breathe or shout because they were holding me down while the one who asked me to say something stitched my mouth shut with a needle and string.
“If you won’t share,” he said, “then you can’t have them either.”
I woke up for real then, shivering and cold for real too, though it wasn’t from the cold air or the lack of a blanket or any real way to keep myself warm out in the woods. It was the men with no skin who had touched me and made me shiver. Like Jamie had made me shiver that first night he came to me.
I sat up and the cot screeched. It was deep in the night, but as I looked around I thought I could see vague shadows moving under the moonlight that filtered through the trees. I didn’t speak to them. I wasn’t ready to be where they were, so it was better to pretend like I didn’t exist and to say nothing at all. I kept all the things I wanted to say inside. Instead of saying them, I thought them in my head, where no one but I could ever hear them.
Is that you? I thought hard, looking out at the shadows. Are you out there?
The next morning I woke to sunlight falling through the window. The woods were full of chirping already and when I sat up and went to the doorway, I saw the white tail of a deer lifted high as she jumped into a thicket of thorny brush and trees and sped away. She must have heard the cot as I got out of bed. “Sorry,” I said. I couldn’t hear her rustling in the brush anymore, so she was either out of hearing range or playing it safe, hiding.
I felt a bit hungry so I got the bag of cereal out of my backpack and had a couple handfuls before it was completely gone. Luckily I was already starting to feel full again. Two handfuls of sugary cereal shouldn’t have made me feel full but the other option was eating the other half of the apple I’d tried to eat the day before, which I found at the bottom of my bag and took out to throw into the thicket where the doe had jumped away. Maybe she’d eat it and I wouldn’t feel so bad for scaring her. One thing I didn’t have much patience for anymore was people scaring other people. Like how Frances loved weirding me out with her story about why she killed her parents every morning and to tell the truth, that is just not cool. That’s crazy.
I was a little worried though because without the cereal and apple I had nothing to eat and I started to wonder if I’d have to eat crayfish from Sugar Creek or figure out what roots and plants were okay to chew on. Maybe I wouldn’t do so good on that survival show after all. I only had a few things I knew how to do to survive in this world. The one I was be
st at was running, and that wasn’t proving to get me very far. Maybe if Jamie was still with me, we could have put our heads together and come up with something. Or Gracie. She always seemed to know what to do. I was always the one without a clue. But they weren’t with me, and I knew I’d better think of something fast because at some point I would eventually need to eat again.
I didn’t want to stay in the shack anymore so I grabbed my backpack and started heading for Sugar Creek. The woods were peaceful that morning. Only a slight breeze blew, but you could tell that it was carrying winter on it, that somewhere down the line snow followed its trail. It was only a matter of how long it would take to reach here. A few weeks, I figured. And by then I’d hopefully have found somewhere to stay other than the old Amish logging camp. Even if I was still here when snow came, though, it was still better than home, where there was basically nothing but trouble waiting.
As I walked through the covered bridge, my shoes knocking against the wooden planks, then along Sugar Creek where the banks were soft beneath my footsteps, I thought about home. I didn’t know how to feel about that word. I mean, I had the shack in the logging camp, which was sort of like home but not really because it was just a place to keep me out of the wind and rain for the most part. It didn’t have anything comfortable about it and wasn’t the safest place either. And that’s when I realized the two most important things about home are comfort and safety. And knowing that those two things were a big part of the word home helped me understand that the home I’d left hadn’t been my home either because it wasn’t comfortable or safe and hadn’t been for a while. If there’d been a chance before that moment that I’d have added the word home to my collection of words, it was gone now. There are too many things you can’t trust about that word, so from there on out I’d settle for words that didn’t hold false promises. Shelter, I thought. That was what I had now. That was the word I’d add to the others.
I was starting to understand what my grandma had been on to with her warnings before she went and died. She’d known this was coming, but not even I, who usually understood everything she said, even her strangest visions, could see what she saw in the time before she died. How could we? We weren’t on the road she was on right then. But now I was, now I saw the path she’d been able to see when life was abandoning her.
But even if I’d been able to see what she saw, it didn’t matter. No one but my grandma ever listened to me, and if I talked about visions and stuff like my grandma used to do, it would have been even worse. My dad always said if I listened to her my head would rot. Probably he was saying that right now even. That boy’s head is rotted from all of your mother’s crazy talk! He probably thought that’s why I got into Jamie’s hole too. But getting into that place wasn’t because of my grandma. That had nothing to do with her. Nothing at all.
As I sat down on a stump beside Sugar Creek, I thought about sitting down beside him in computer lab, how we sat at the last two computers in the back corner of the room where no one could bother us, and even if we talked our teacher Mr. Gardner couldn’t hear us. Or if he did hear, he didn’t say anything. Probably he could see from my tests that I didn’t understand computers as easily as Jamie, so maybe Mr. Gardner thought I was at least smart enough to get help. And if that’s the case, then it’s Mr. Gardner who gave us that period of being able to talk without everyone being in our business.
There was this one day I finished our assignment pretty fast and, since Mr. Gardner let us do what we liked after we finished our work, I logged on to a chat program I belonged to so I could play a puzzle game it had. I’d barely begun to play when suddenly a box popped up with a message from someone called Lonewolf who wrote, “move the green tile to the last row on the bottom right of screen.”
I could feel my brows knitting together above my eyes and thought, Who the hell is this? No one ever messages me. But I moved the tile anyway and totally won practically before the game even started.
So I typed back, “how did u know I ws playing a game?”
And Lonewolf replied, “b/c I was watching you.”
I looked slowly over to my right and Jamie turned his face in my direction, already smiling. “Jerk,” I snorted and punched his arm when he chuckled at me, but he only shook his head and kept smiling.
“You don’t think too quick, do you, McCormick?”
“I guess not. I mean, no. Not about everything.”
“Good thing you have me around to watch your back.”
He went back to doing whatever he’d been doing before and I thought about him watching me without me knowing it and somehow that made me feel safe, thinking maybe someone was looking out for me.
But he’d been the one who needed watching. Not me.
By the time late afternoon came around, I got up from my seat by Sugar Creek and started walking toward the tracks. The light was fading into the gloaming hour. That’s what my grandpa always called the part of the day when there was no sun and no moon, but somehow light from both still filled the air, a gold purplish brownish light, a light like a bruise, he called it. I thought there was something true in that, how light can be like a bruise, painful like a bruise too, to look in the direction of light, to see it without squinting or shielding your eyes. My mother used to tell us not to look into the sun or we’d go blind, but sometimes I looked right at it, even though she said it was dangerous. Thinking of that made me feel like crap, though, because it just reminded me of all the other things I did that I wasn’t supposed to do and made it seem like I had this criminal history or something. I always did the wrong thing if given the chance. I got into graves. I listened to shadows. I fought my own brother. I burned down houses. I ran away from home. I don’t know why I reached for edges, but I’d reach every time. And the desperate thing was that I didn’t plan most of these things. They just happened. Which was even more frustrating because it all seemed hopeless. Out of my hands.
I made myself stop thinking about it. I was on the railroad tracks, hands in my pockets, trudging toward Gracie’s house. When I reached the road where the old tracks ran across and curved behind the Highsmith house, I kept close to the tree line, even though it was dark, in case there were cops still waiting for me.
But there weren’t. In fact no one was waiting outside the woods for me. Mrs. Highsmith’s car sat in the circular drive outside the house and the lights were on inside, making the windows look like squares of butter. I saw Mr. Highsmith wander across the front window on his way to the kitchen and thought about how everything in his kitchen gleamed, how everything was so new and fiercely clean. I imagined him making a sandwich, even though he’d already had a fine supper made by his fine wife, the town librarian, who also homeschooled their fine daughter and kept his fine house in such fine order. Who could ask for more than his blessed peaceful little family? He was so happy, spreading mayonnaise across the bread, smiling like a fool. How had he got so lucky?
I looked down at my feet and shook my head. What was Gracie thinking, getting caught up with someone like me? She was in way over her head, I thought, and I realized then that this was one thing I knew that she didn’t.
I started walking toward town, still staying inside the trees, where I could hide and no one could see me.
A half hour later I was behind the fence in back of the high school looking at the track on the other side where I used to run. The school was dark and empty. Everyone had gone home and all the sports practices were over. I climbed over, wedging the toes of my shoes into the little diamond-shaped spaces one at a time until I was at the top, where I pulled myself over and landed on my feet in a crouch like Spider-Man, looking around to see if anyone had spotted me. When it seemed safe, I took off running around the track until I was out of breath.
I walked the baseball diamond and soccer field, I walked the perimeter of the octagon-shaped gym, I hung out in the empty faculty parking lot in back and looked through the windows of the woodshop where all the machines you could cut yourself on sat
in silence, their blades gleaming, hungry for the next kid to put his fingers too close as he slid a piece of wood through their teeth. Andy was good at woodshop, but I only took one semester because it was mandatory and after that I switched to typing. When I told the woodshop teacher I was transferring, he wanted to know why. I told him I was planning on going to college and needed to know how to type. He was nice about me leaving and said in that case typing would be a skill I’d need for sure. I didn’t tell him I had no real intention of going, but he’d probably thought I was lying or deluded anyway. No one in my family had gone to college and I’m pretty sure that was obvious to everyone. I was even more sure after hearing how Mr. Highsmith talked about us when he didn’t know I was living in his daughter’s closet.
I was getting a little hungry so I went back to the garbage Dumpsters behind the cafeteria loading dock and flipped open a lid to look inside. There were pizza slices and burgers still in their wrappers and French fries in cups from today’s lunch in there, so I climbed up on the closed side of the Dumpster and let my torso and arms and head drop down into that dark space to fish for food.
It smelled like any Dumpster, but not as bad as I remembered. I figured if I only took things still in wrappers like burgers, it wouldn’t be so bad. So I grabbed three burgers and a salad in a plastic container with an Italian dressing pack and a plastic spork taped to the top and brought my haul back up to the night to sit on top of the Dumpster and eat.
I started with a burger, which was cold and goopy in my mouth but it filled my stomach faster than I thought it would. I packed the other two and the salad in my backpack and climbed down again to head back to the woods so I could reach the town square under the cover of tree shadows.