All-Season Edie (9 page)

“There,” Dexter says, stabbing a finger at the windscreen. Ahead of us, a van is backing out of a spot.

“Yes!” I say.

“No,” Mom says, because it's a wheelchair spot— we see the white and blue symbol of a wheelchair painted on the ground as we drive by. A couple of spaces later she brakes when she sees a couple loading up their station wagon. They smile and wave at us to show they're leaving as soon as they've packed all their shopping away.

Dexter jiggles up and down in her seat impatiently. Mom catches my eye in the rearview mirror and grins. Dexter is extremely weird about the mall. She loves it. It makes her happier than anything else in the world, and she wants to go there every day. She knows each store and what things she wants from each store. She knows what's a good deal and where you can get a better deal. She knows what food you can get at each of the fast-food counters in the food court and where the elevators are and where to get the best haircut and which stores have mirrors in the change rooms and which don't. She's a mall expert.

“Now,” Mom says, but just as the station wagon backs out, a sports car opposite us zips into the spot we've been waiting for. “Ooh,” Mom and Dexter say at the same time, with mean squinty looks on their faces that should have made the sports car shrivel up and disappear in a sour little puff of smoke. Instead, a man gets out of the driver's side and walks toward the mall without even glancing at us.

“Mommy,” I murmur, watching the man for as long as I can. He's pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and is dialling a number while he walks. I press my hot forehead against the cool window, watching him. Would Grandpa like a cell phone? One for him and one for me, and we could call each other, like spies?

“That man was so rude,” Mom says. “Dex, if I drop you and Edie by the doors, will you look after your sister until I meet you inside? You can go to the card shop and start choosing.”

“Yay!” Dexter says, ripping off her seat belt. I follow more slowly. We get out in front of the glass archway that leads into the mall. I watch Mom's car rejoin the circling throng. I feel sleepy again. “Hey, dope,” Dex says, “come inside. You're getting wet.” I look at her and start coughing and can't stop. I cover my mouth with my hand to keep the germs from flying everywhere. Germs, I imagine, are like pepper: tiny black dots in the air. My throat hurts all the way up into my ears.

“You're all red,” Dexter says when I finish. Then she does something extraordinary: she holds her hand gently to my forehead the way Mom did at breakfast. “You're, like, way hot,” she says. Again, though, I have the feeling she's less interested in me than in the invisible watcher. She's just trying to be grown up since Mom left her in charge. So I shrug away from her and say in my clogged, scratchy voice, “OH BY DOD. Doe dutch be.” After that, Dexter starts acting normal again, and we ignore each other all the way to the card store.

There's a lot to look at along the way. The mall is all decorated for the holidays, and carols are playing on the loudspeaker. In Center Court is the annual display, Christmas Castle. Dexter and I are both too old for Christmas Castle, where Santa sits on his throne and kids sit on his knee while the photographer takes pictures. We're too old for the toy railroad that goes in circles around Christmas Castle, where little kids scream to get on or get off while teenage girls in green felt mini-skirts and green felt hats chew gum and tell them to get back in line. These girls roll their eyes and pop bubbles and push their hair behind their fake pointy ears. They're elves. One day Dexter will get a job as an elf, I'm pretty sure. She's just as cute and blond and bored as these girls, plus she has good posture from years of ballet. But you have to be in grade ten. Dexter and Mean Megan asked. They're only in grade eight.

I wonder if I will go insane, like Dexter, once I'm thirteen. I wonder how much will have changed by then, two years from now. I start to wonder whether Grandpa will even—but then I have to shut that thought down quickly because it makes my chest hurt too much. Grandpa will always be Grandpa, and right now what I need is to find him the perfect present. That's all.

“Hurry up,” Dexter says now because I've slowed down to watch the train while I think. I still like the train a little, even though I'm too big to ride on it. It has a silver bell and wooden benches to sit on. I'm hoping one of the elf girls will see me standing there forlornly (I try to look forlorn) and offer me a free ride, but none does. A boy going past on the caboose makes a face at me and says, “Nah-nah,” and calls me a name, and then I hurry to catch up with Dexter. Christmas Castle has changed; it's not as good as it used to be.

An angel flops past over my head, beating big flashing wings, but when I look up, it's vanished. Now that's strange.

I find Dexter in the card shop, picking through a shelf of boxed Christmas cards with two other ladies. There are upside-down cards, spilled boxes and boxes on the floor. It looks like a hurricane hit the cards. The other ladies are talking loudly and moving in on Dexter's space as if she just isn't there. She looks grim.

“I saw an angel,” I tell her. I feel kind of hot and woozy.

Dexter gives me a box to hold. It shows a man angel with curly yellow hair and a trumpet and a tree branch and under his feet a big fancy letter G in a gold box, followed by a bunch of tiny letters.

“In the atrium,” I say, which is the name for the glass ceiling in the mall. “What does it say?”

“Gloria in Excelsis Deo.”

“Eggshells?” I say. Dexter snatches the box back. “Find one with cats,” I suggest.

“Oh, go away,” Dexter says, stamping her foot.

I wander through the card shop, looking at the posters and mugs and stuffed animals and stickers that fill all the spaces where there aren't cards. My head hurts. Everything seems very bright, even the stuffed animals, which normally I would enjoy petting. There's a little gray elephant that seems to be staring at me in a creepy way. The fluorescent lights buzz loud and dangerous as bees. I hurry out of the store.

There are too many people in the mall. That's the problem. A few less people and I'd be able to concentrate much better. A few less people and no more angels flopping by like big pterodactyls. I whip my head back, thinking I've seen another out of the corner of my eye, but it's only flashing lights from the giant metallic Christmas ornaments that hang from the glass panes in the ceiling. Still, I could swear I heard flapping— air beaten by huge wings. I decide to go back to the doors where we came in and wait for Mom there. I'll tell Mom about the angels, and Mom will be interested, and together we'll watch the miniature train go round and round for as long as we want, and she'll help me think of the perfect thing for Grandpa.

Because I'm not exactly sure where the main doors are, I waste some time following a man and a woman who are carrying handfuls of bags from all different stores. Surely they're leaving. But the woman keeps saying, “Bruce, honey, just in here, honey. Brucie? Bruce? I'm just nipping in here, honey.” She just nips in the candle store or the shampoo store or the joke underwear store while the man stands outside, his arms pulled straight by the weight of his bags. He stares at the floor until she comes out with one more bag. His preoccupied look reminds me of the Greek god Zeus staring down from Olympus at the little Greek people below, trying to decide who to zap with a bolt of lightning. Zeus has a wife named Hera.

“Zeussie?” Hera says, emerging from the joke underwear store waving a pair of Rudolph socks with a little red lightbulb on the big toe that lights up when she presses the heel. “Aren't these darling?” No wonder Zeus is so gloomy and destructive. Still, it might be wiser to get out of his way. I'm backing slowly toward Ralph's Shoe Repair U Nixem We Fixem when I'm knocked off my feet and sent flying toward the fountain.

“Are you okay?” a voice says.

At first all I can see of the voice is a pair of running shoes. No, that's not true. At first all I can see are little lit matches, winking and blinking in circles like fireflies, making dizzying patterns between my brain and normal vision. Once they've gone out, reluctantly it seems, one by one, all I can see is a pair of running shoes. I've never seen another pair like them. “Where did you get those cool running shoes?” is more a Dexter line than an Edie line, especially when addressed to a boy closer to Dexter's age than mine, but I try to say it anyway. That's how extraordinary these shoes are. But because I'm still recovering from my collision with the floor, and sitting up has started me coughing again, it comes out in a series of jerky, spluttering and totally incomprehensible syllables.

I use my coughing time to study the shoes more closely. They look like the fastest shoes ever made: they're sleek and sparkling, blue and gold, with a white wing design on each side. I'm not very good at brands (that's Dex's territory), but I could swear I've never seen a pair like them and neither has anyone else. They seem to glow slightly, especially the soles, as though a spotlight shines on them from beneath the floor. They seem to hum or buzz, faintly but distinctly, above the workaday buzz and hum of shoppers cruising around the crowded mall. They even seem (though I can't be quite sure about this) to radiate heat. I'm just reaching out to touch them with my fingertips when their owner grasps me by the armpits, awkwardly but not roughly, and hauls me to my feet.

“Are you okay?” the boy says again. “I'm really sorry about that. I was, ah, delivering this message and I just didn't see you.” He's even a little older than Dexter, and his concern for me, I can see, is rapidly cooling as he realizes I'm going to be fine and somebody his own age might see him talking to me. He's a cool kid. Well obviously, in those shoes. Those shoes!

“Delivering a message?” I say thickly. Messages, winged shoes—

“Uh, yeah.” The boy glances nervously over his shoulder. “Look. The thing is, if you're okay, I've gotta go. I've gotta catch up with this guy and—”

“Hey, Mark!” A boy standing at the top of the stairway to the mall's upper level is calling down to the boy with the shoes. “Did you make a new friend?”

“I'm gonna get you!” he calls back, shaking his fist. “I hope you're hungry! I'm gonna make you eat this!”

“You and what posse?” the upstairs boy calls down. He's even jumping up and down a little, doing a kind of victory dance, and waggling his fingers rudely.

“What's a posse?” I ask.

“His friends,” the boy says grimly, never taking his eyes off his enemy, as though the word “friends” means “extremely hideous, stinky and contemptible sewer rats.” “Look, I gotta go,” he says again, probably only hesitating because I'm still swaying a little.

“Hi, Mark,” another voice says from somewhere behind me.

The effect of this second voice is both astonishing and hilarious. The boy spins around as though someone has pulled him on a string. His face turns pink.

“Hi, Vee,” he says, and then he squirms and looks at his feet as though he's just done something mortifying, like pee his pants.

I turn too and see a girl about Dexter's age who is—is it possible? it evidently is, though I've never seen it before—prettier than Dexter. She has curly yellow hair to Dexter's straight, and her brown eyes are as big as—not a rabbit's, and not a doe's, though they have something of both, something soft and warm and appealing. She wears a red skirt and a white T-shirt with a big pink heart on it, which is pretty corny but suits her perfectly. There's something strange about her, something I can't quite put my finger on. It's not just her effect on the boy with the cool shoes, who has turned a few shades pinker and is evidently trying to engage in casual conversation. I've tuned this part of the scene out while I study the girl, and decide to tune back in, if only for the entertainment value. I've seen boys doing this with my sister, and the results are usually a cross between cringingly embarrassing and extremely hilarious.

“How's it going?” the boy says. He's trying to make his voice go deep but it still has a little squeak of nervousness in it. I repeat his words under my breath just to reassure myself that my flu-voice is deeper than his normal voice. It is.

“I'm shopping,” the girl says. Her voice has the same velvety satisfaction as Dexter's when she says phrases like this, anything to do with “mall” or “shopping” or “clothes.” “Is that Perry up there? Perry's cool.”

“You think everybody's cool,” the boy named Mark says. His face goes from pink to red, and he starts to look mad again.

“I have to go,” the girl says.

Stammering, the boy offers to buy her a drink at the food court, but she just laughs and flips her hair—a move I've seen Dexter practicing in the mirror—and bounces away. Her hair bounces perfectly and she seems to be walking on balloons. Just before I lose sight of her, I realize what the girl reminds me of and what makes her so strange. She's like a cartoon. Everything about her is perfect and slightly larger than life, but she's too smooth and clear, without any edges. Her skirt has no wrinkles and her hair looks like someone has drawn it with a yellow felt-tip so that no curl will ever be out of place and frizziness is out of the question. Her eyes are too big, like cute animals in Disney movies, and her colors—yellow hair, brown eyes, pink lips, white T-shirt, red skirt—are too even and flawless to be believable. I wonder, if you had a big enough eraser, whether you could just rub her out.

When I turn back to confirm my suspicions with the boy with the cool shoes, he's gone, and so is the boy upstairs. I imagine them zipping after each other so fast they'll leave lines in the air behind them; if one of them ever catches up with the other and bops him on the head, the air above him will explode with little stars and number signs and the word “BANG,” written all in capitals.