By K.M. Smith
He let her build the campfire, which he had usually done every night that they had spent in some field, couched in the high grass and brambles, or in the darkness and constant rustling of some wooded area, always careful not to give the fire too much lighter fluid. The lighter fluid was running out, and besides, they wanted a campfire, not a bonfire. It was only the two of them, for God?s sake. But this time Amy had taken the small hatchet (one that almost looked like more of a toy than anything else, except for the gleam the edge of the blade had. She sharpened it often, most times out of boredom than the hatchet?s dullness) and began methodically stripping dead branches from the copse of trees around them. Jack watched as she dug a shallow hole in the ground and threw in a few sparse handfuls of dead grass and topped it with the twigs and branches.
The night was warm, almost hot, July was dragging into August now, they had been on the move for a month, going slowly because it was hot, because they were on foot, and because they strayed from the main roads. Amy had told him not long after she had sold the old continental she had been driving at a used car lot in Kingsford, Colorado, they?re first stop after driving through the Rockies, that they didn?t need the main roads. They didn?t want the main roads. Jack searched his mind for her exact words. She had begun leading them slightly northwest, straying from the highway that she?d been more or less keeping to since she left Missouri for some unknown reason for her unknown destination, and Jack had asked her why she was turning away from it. She had cast a brief glance in the direction of the highway, which had been particularly dead that day, and said, That?s not our road.
Jack mused over this as Amy bent and gave the meager campfire a squirt of lighter fluid and struck a match. She stared at the small flame, her eyes squinted into slits, and simply stayed that way until the flame had worked its way down the matchstick and reached her fingertips. She dropped it, her fine brow furrowing as the heat turned to a brief pain, and fire spread quickly from the kindling, lapping around the branches. She sat down, still staring into the fire, that small crease still drawing its black line in the flesh between her eyes. She had promised him that tonight she would tell him why she had left her home, why she had found it so necessary to pack up and begin an insane road trip west at the tender age of seventeen, and now he understood that she was trying to find a place to start.
2
?I?m not entirely sure how to begin this. The logical idea is, of course, to start at the beginning, but it?s hard when you?re not sure where that is. I suppose it begins when I was in sixth grade, because that was the first time I saw her.?
Jack frowned, thinking to himself, Saw who?
?I was in study hall,? Amy said. Her eyes never left the fire, but her hands began toying unconsciously with her long hair. Jack was suddenly and uncomfortably aware of the difference in age between them, he had turned thirty only a week and a half before meeting this girl in the parking lot of the Cosy Court in Arlene on the western border of Kansas. She continued: ?It wasn?t like high school study hall is supposed to be, where you could slack off or jerk around while the teacher, a middle aged man, balding, inevitably wearing tweed, nodded off in his chair. In junior high it was different. Study hall, it was the final class of the day, was reserved strictly for those who had earned one or more failing grades, and if you were there, you studied. You worked, in other words, which seems to be the antithesis of what the general idea of study hall is.
?The teacher there, Ms. Caton, was,? she paused, thinking, smiling slightly, ?well, there is a line from the book ?IT? that describes Ms. Caton fairly well: ?she hated all kids equally.??
Jack laughed a little, and Amy turned to him with her eyebrows raised. ?Hey, laugh if you like, but there were many of us who thought that she might have been Medusa in a past life.? This only made Jack laugh harder, and for a brief moment Amy joined him.
?I don?t remember exactly when it was,? she continued, ?whether it was December or maybe January, only that it was winter, late ?95 or early ?96. I didn?t snow hardly at all that year. Winters in Missouri suck big time, let me tell you, they don?t call it the state of Misery for nothing. No snow, but it was god-awful cold. There was a bad strain of the flu going around that year, I don?t know of anyone that didn?t spend time at home because of it, but at that point it had begun to wind down, and the kids were flooding back into school, whether they wanted to or not. The absences caused a lot of grades to drop and caused a lot of kids to be sent off to that fabled class that most of us called Seventh-Hour Purgatory.
?Now, normally I chose the seat nearest to the door, which assured me both a quick escape from Purgatory when the bell rang and a view of the room?s only window. At least that way I had something to look at other than Kevin Houdeshell, who was constantly involved in a search for gold or other precious objects in his nostrils.
?Call me crazy, but I never really had the desire to stare at him for forty-five minutes.? Amy smiled a little and leaned back against the bole of a tree, still gazing absently into the fire.
?Anyway, I wound up coming into class late, I had one of those fabled locker crisis: mine wouldn?t open. When I finally did get to class, another girl had taken my seat. Alisha McNeally was sitting there, just as gross as you please. She was about a year older than me, I think she?d repeated the fourth grade, and was one of the school?s token bad girls.
?I wasn?t afraid of her. You had to be pretty dumb to be afraid of Mrs. McNeally?s little girl. She was all mouth, no action. She promised me an ass-kicking to end all ass-kickings in seventh grade, and I?m still waiting for her to make good on that promise.? Jack snickered. He?d known at least forty guys like that in school. Had, for a brief time, at least, been one himself. ?She was a bitch, sure, a grand Emmy-winner of a bitch, but she was the kind who was content to talk another person into throwing the first punch so that she could play Miss Innocent (not that she did that very well) whenever a teacher or other adult arrived to break up the fight.
?She was sitting there in my seat, big as life and twice as ugly, her hair was hanging in her face in greasy clods and clumps, barely hiding the warzone of acne and pox scars on her forehead, talking quietly (as quietly as she could) to the three boys in her little cluster of desks and laughing.? Amy paused, her eyes drawn inward, drawing up the memory, an incredulous and slightly disgusted look came over her face. ?Her voice was already raspy from cigarettes. That female must have started smoking at age three,? she said.
Her face cleared. ?We should start supper,? she said. ?Stories always go better on a full stomach.?
The edges of Jack?s mouth curled up in the slightest smile. ?Yes, but you might talk with your mouth full.?
Amy giggled and began removing their meager cooking gear from her pack. ?What are we having tonight, mon ami??
Jack rummaged in his own pack and produced two large cans. ?Well, you have your choice, mon cherie, Dinty Moore beef stew, or Campbell?s Chunky Chicken. What my friend Thomas used to call Campbell?s Blown Chunks.?
Amy, her hands full of metal cookware, favored him with a look of mingled amusement and revulsion. ?How lovely. In that case, I vote for the Dinty Moore.?
?Excellent choice!?
Amy set the soup pot hanging over the fire as Jack went to work opening the can. He held the open can over the pot, but contents stayed put. He glared at the can. ?Resistance is futile.?
?You will be assimilated,? Amy added, trying not to let the giggles that were bubbling in her throat burst through.
The stew remained packed into the can, unmindful of the laws of gravity, and Jack sighed. ?Alright, you had your chance to come peaceably, now we must remove you by force. Extraction implement, please, Ms. Pierson.? Jack extended his free hand as solemn as a surgeon.
Amy slapped a large blue-painted metal spoon into his hand. ?Extraction implement,? she echoed.
He emptied the can into the pot and laid the can aside. They would bury it with the rest of their trash tomorrow before they moved on. ?Now, we wait.?
Amy leaned back against the tree again, her face grave. ?Yay. I love to wait.?
Jack felt the same, but he sat back and waited for her to pick up her story nonetheless.
She exhaled forcefully through her nose, and glanced up as the branches above her rustled with movement. A sharp song of a bird sounded out from the same place, and Amy lowered her eyes. ?As far as I can remember,? she said at last, ?for awhile, I just stood there in the doorway, staring at that female in my seat. I probably would have been there for awhile longer, but the Ms. Caton barked at me. She said, ?Take a seat, Ms. Pierson.?? Amy?s voice lapsed into a grating growl as she imitated her old Medusa-reincarnated teacher. ?She startled the hell outta me. I jumped, I really did, and started looking around wildly for someplace to sit. Just my luck, there were two seats left, and neither one was very inviting.
?One was situated next to Kevin Houdeshell, the great nose miner. It was rumored that the kid had a Lisa Frank pencilbox (now this in and of itself was disturbing enough) that he had filled with dead bugs. Flies, mostly, according to rumor, but some crickets, too. We were absolutely flooded with the noisy buggers that year. It was the worst on the ground floor of the school. They were everywhere, even in the light fixtures. Anyway, according to Connie Halston and Heather Ogle, he would, every now and then, remove one of these insect carcasses very gently, and drop it down a nearby girl?s shirt. This didn?t exactly add to the ?pros? side of the argument for that seat.
?The other desk was on the opposite side of the room from the door, over by the window, which overlooked a small marsh the science department had either made or just maintained for the purpose of observation. Not that we ever did a single experiment on it, that I remember, at least. I do remember there being a copse of trees near it, separating the marsh and the playground / parking lot area. I remember spending a lot of time there, especially on the last day of school in eighth grade, the sky had been steely because of smoke carried northwest from wild fires in Florida. I remember sitting under those trees, eating lunch and looking at the hazy, dappled sunlight that streamed through them and suddenly having the song ?Goodbye Blue Sky? run through my mind.?
??Did-did-did-did you see the frightened ones??? Jack sang in a soft, unremarkable voice.
Amy nodded. ?That?s the one. I mean, I really didn?t mind the view, but the desk didn?t face the window, it faced the door. It also faced Alisha, but, hell, it was better than sitting next to Kevin. So I suppose you can imagine which I chose.?
?The non-dead-cricket seat?? Jack asked.
Amy chuckled. ?Yup. One hundred percent cricket-free. I took the desk by the window and tried to do my homework without staring too much at the bitch-monster in my seat. It didn?t take me too long, really, I didn?t have that much to do. Pre-algebra, I think. And some worksheet from science class. Once I was done I stowed my books in my bag and just started scribbling in one of my notebooks waiting for class to be over.?
She paused, an expression Jack couldn?t quite identify coming over her face. And suddenly he was frightened. He didn?t want to know the rest of the story. Whatever it was, he didn?t want to fucking know. But he had to know. He had to hear it.
Jack saw that Amy was shaking.
?There was a girl outside the door of the classroom,? she said. ?Tall, pretty, long hair. She was wearing this gauzy peasent top and black high heeled boots. The kind with the square toes. My friends and I used to call them vixen boots. She was looking right at me. God, she looked so sad. She was still young, a teenager, but the look of sorrow on her face was just overwhelming. My first thought was that it was Tolkien?s Valar Nienor, the weeper, in the flesh. She looked like some broken goddess dying of grief.
?She was looking right at me,? Amy whispered. ?Right through me. She smiled at me. I have never seen so sad a smile in my entire life. And she just turned around and walked away.?
She stopped and Jack eyed her carefully. The meager firelight and twilight played on her face, orange-gold and blue, throwing shadows and making her look so much older. Ancient, even. God, she was beautiful. Teenager or not, she was breathtaking. Jack studied her face for a moment and then said softly, ?There?s more. I know there is. You can tell me, Amy.?
?You won?t believe me,? she said. She didn?t look at him.
Jack thought of the motel, the Cosy Court, and what had happened there the day before Amy Pierson had drove her beat-up car into the parking lot, looking like a gypsy in a drop-top, and how he?d nearly run up to her and thrown his arms around her crying You?re real! You?re really REAL! And he thought of Frank. Good ol? Frankie with his shit-smelling cigars and his beer belly and goddamn John Denver records lying on his lap, shaking and jabbering in French, his skull in absolute pieces after coming into contact with the rear tire of some bastard?s Plymouth. Jabbering. Saying something about doors. He was never sure what exactly Frank had said. He didn?t know French, either.
?Try me,? he said finally.
She looked up at him with flat, shining eyes. ?I watched her walk away. All the way down the hall to the ramp that led to the first floor. There, there was a door near the ramp. In all the time I?d been there I?d never seen that door before.?
Jack felt a sudden chill grip him.
?It was white, it looked more like the front door to a house than something that belonged in a school. She opened it, I couldn?t see anything behind it, it was too dark. She went inside, shut the door.?
Amy sighed shakily and passed a hand over her face. ?As soon as she shut the door it fell. It fell right over onto the floor. It was so fucking loud. There was nothing behind where it had been, just the wall, white-painted cinderblocks. Then the door itself disappeared. I even heard a pop as the air rushed back into the space where the door had been.
?I screamed. I couldn?t help it. I screamed and I couldn?t stop screaming.?
Forgive the question marks, this thing doesn't seem to agree with quotation marks and apostrophes when copy&pasting.
