The Chaos (17 page)

That did it. “So Rich always wanted to fall into a hole and disappear? Or maybe I wanted him gone? Is that you trying to tell me?”

“Uh, I didn’t mean—”

“All these people here always wanted to lose everything they own? That guy on that cot over there always wanted to turn into a giant cockroach in his sleep? Never mind, maybe he did. But you really telling me that your cousin’s family always wanted what happened to them?”

His face fell. “I don’t know! I’m just saying, people are crazy. We make the world a crazy place. Maybe some of it is that our crazy isn’t invisible anymore.”

We were not going to talk about my crazy again. “Let’s just go eat,” I said coldly. “We only have half an hour.”

In the volunteers’ room, people moved over at one of the tables so that we could all sit together. Tafari came over and joined us. I blew a kiss down the table at him. There were a couple of cardboard flats on the table, already half-emptied of sandwiches.

“Two kinds,” said the woman beside me. She was kinda old, white, with short pink hair and piercings. I think her name was
Helen. “Ham on whole wheat, and cheese on white. That’s as vegetarian as it gets. And be careful; some of them bite.”

She was right; the first sandwich I took the plastic wrap off opened like a mouth at me and tried to nip at my fingers. The group around the table laughed when they saw my face. Helen said, “They aren’t all like that. If you don’t want that one, just keep opening them till you find one that’s just a sandwich.”

“Is it cheese?” asked Lenny from across the table.

I nodded.

Lenny held a hand out. “Give it here.” Lenny was short and muscular with olive skin, an amazing nose, and short, straight black hair with a streak of silver in it, even though Lenny didn’t look old enough to be going gray. I hadn’t decided whether Lenny was a girl or a boy. I was waiting to hear someone use either a “he” or a “she” to talk about Lenny.

I handed the mouth sandwich over. Lenny made a kissy face at it. Its sandwich-crust lips made a growling motion back. Lenny bit into it. I eeped in alarm. Through a mouthful of sandwich, Lenny said, “What? It’s not like they really bite. They’re soft and they don’t have teeth. I already ate one. Two, in fact. And I’m fine. Except for, you know, eating dairy.”

“You should be careful, Lenny.” That was Sita, a tall, plump dark woman with a long ponytail of straight black hair. “You don’t know what’s in them, what effect they might have on you later.”

“Please. Have you looked around you? As of today, I don’t know what effect my next breath will have on me. None of us does. You can’t count on anything being the way it used to be.”

“Whatever,” said Glory. “I’m hungry.” She grabbed a sandwich and unwrapped it without looking at it. She took vicious little bites out of it as she ate.

Those sandwiches were the closest thing
I’d had to a meal since the doughnut and juice Punum had bought me this morning. I ate the one I had unwrapped. Then another. Then I started on a third one. I was ignoring Ben. I was still feeling hurt by the stuff he’d said. Glory and Helen were talking about the best kind of bread for open-face toasted cheese sandwiches. Hidden by the table, I slipped my fingers under the bottom of my blouse and touched my stomach. I could feel the blemish, raised and ever so slightly sticky. It had filled in my belly button. I didn’t even have a freaking belly button anymore. I kept breathing. In. Out. Kept on doing it, at normal speed. Things would be all right. Maybe tomorrow the hospitals wouldn’t be as busy, and someone would be able to see me. They probably had some killer app you couldn’t just go and buy in a store, right? Some kind of major blemish dissolver/exfoliant ray, or something. T’aint no big thing, I kept telling myself, like Mom would say. T’aint no big thing.

“Scotch, what’re you doing?” Gloria’s voice cut through the chatter at the table. Everyone turned to look at me. Guiltily, I pulled my hand out of my blouse. But Glory was looking at the table in front of me.

I’d eaten most of the plastic wrap that had been around my sandwiches. It’d tasted good, too. Kinda like fruit leather, only stretchier. “Uh . . .” I said, trying to think up an explanation.

Bo Yih ran in through the doorway. “Somebody come quick! Some guy’s cot just turned into a giant feather duster and attacked him!”

While everyone was rushing to take care of that, I snuck quietly out of the lunchroom and found a quiet alcove. I called Rich’s line. The metallic lady voice said, “There is no one here to answer your call at this moment. Please leave a message after the tone.” Then there was a beep.

“Rich? I guess you’re not around. I really hope
you’re okay.” I took a deep breath. “So here’s the thing, Bro; I was the one who tattled on you to Mom and Dad. I told them you had weed in your room. Mom and Dad had been making me crazy, hounding me because my grades had slipped. But anybody’s grades would slip, if their lives were like mine! I was slowly being covered in sticky black blemishes, and you were pissed at me because you’d had to move to our new school too, even though you hadn’t been the one in trouble. Though maybe if you had stood up for me at LeBrun, we wouldn’t have had to move, you know? You ever think about that? Then to make it worse, a guy I used to know from LeBrun High had just been transferred to our school, and I just knew that Tafari, who was always mad at me anyway because I didn’t dare tell our folks we were dating, was going to hear from the new guy that everyone used to call me a skank at LeBrun High, and then Tafari would get that sneery look and he’d stop hanging out with me and he’d start spreading lies about me around this school, too, and pretty soon people would be sneaking rotten sandwiches into my knapsack again. Because, Rich, once people decide you’re the school slut, it sticks. It gets tangled up in you like the chewed-up gum in your hair. It’s like you’re wearing a big
S
on your forehead, and no matter how much foundation you put on over it, eventually it shows through. Eventually somebody’ll look at you a certain way, or a bunch of girls will laugh as they walk past you, and even if that look doesn’t mean anything and those girls aren’t laughing at you, in your mind you’ll be the school slut all over again, with girls calling you skank and saying that you stole their boyfriends. In your mind you’ll be sure that it’s going to happen again. You’ll be sure that a bunch of girls will corner you in the parking lot after school one day and hold you down and scream names at you and spit on you and take the gum they’ve been chewing all day just so they could have it for this out of their
mouths and smoosh so much of it into your hair that your mom will have to cut all your hair off with a pair of scissors and your dad will be mad and say that you must have done something to deserve this, that girls are gentle and wouldn’t do something this awful unless you’d done something to make them mad.

So Mom and Dad were on my case, and I was jumpy at school all the time and snapping at Tafari even though I wasn’t mad at him, I just wanted him to break up with me and get it over with. And I wanted to take some of the pressure off at home. I wanted to show Mom and Dad that I was still their good little girl. So I told them about you, and they freaked out and called the cops. And then I kinda went nuts, but all inside, where no one else could see it. I told Tafari I wanted to stop seeing him. I got tired of always being scared that he was going to break up with me, so I did it first. And you were in jail and everything had gone to shit and it was all my fault. And Rich, I’m so, so sorry. I really suck. But please be okay. Please come back, even if you never talk to me again. You shouldn’t ever talk to me again. I wouldn’t.”

I hung up.

“SWEEPING THE CLOUDS AWAY . . .” bellowed the clock towers. Clearing the air seemed like a good idea. There was more weird going on than I could deal with all at once. Best not to think about how plastic wrap suddenly was tasting good. There were boxes of donations at the loading dock; blankets and clothing waiting to be carried upstairs, sorted, and distributed to people who needed them. I could keep busy. I grabbed a box and started climbing the stairs to the level above. It was safer than taking the escalator, which had developed a habit of asking people who rode on it riddles about quantum physics, and if they gave the wrong answer, it would loop them round and round like in an Escher drawing, never reaching the top or the bottom,
until they got dizzy and fell off. Made you dizzy to look at, too. The laws of physics just weren’t supposed to work like that.

Tafari came up the stairs beside me. He was carrying two cardboard boxes of donations. “I could have carried that for you, you know.”

“What, and carry yours at the same time?”

He nodded. “I could do it.”

“You know I like to do things like this myself if I can. If something’s too heavy for me, I’ll ask you, okay?”

He nodded agreeably. Well, that was a change. Tafari was the arguingest guy I knew. He’d fought with me for days over the breakup, trying to convince me of all the reasons it made more sense to stay with him. Now it looked like he’d finally accepted it. I had something to accept, too.

The room where we were doing the sorting was full of people chattering away and separating the stuff into clean and dirty, usable and unusable. “Come with me,” I told Taf. “Bring the boxes.”
This is a test
, I thought.

“Okay.” He followed me, no argument.

I walked around the upper level. It was empty of refugees for now, but more people kept pouring into the Convention Centre. There’d probably be cots up here soon. Taf and I wandered until I found a quiet alcove where no one could see us. I turned to Taf. “Okay, you can put them down for a second.”

He did.

“No,” I said. “Upside down is better.”

He didn’t bat an eyelid. He just stacked the boxes one atop the other, turning each one upside down as he went.

I held both his hands. They were warm and solid in my grip. Big hands. I couldn’t have carried three boxes up those stairs, but he could. I sighed. I looked down at his hands in mine. They were perfect. The real Tafari had this thing called
syndactyly. His two middle fingers on one hand were fused together, and all the other fingers were crooked. He’d been born that way. And he sure as hell had never been the type to just do anything I said without questioning it. “You’re not really Tafari, are you?”

He smiled. It was Tafari’s smile, every detail, and it made my heart ache. “I dunno. Aren’t I?”

I’d realized that he didn’t mention anybody by name unless I did so first. He showed up out of nowhere, and went away again with no warning. He didn’t argue. “Do other people see you, too?” I asked him. “Or is it just me?”

“What other people?”

Oh, crap. “Okay, now you’re creeping me out.”

Tafari’s smile wavered a little. “Scotch, what’s wrong? We should get back to work.”

“Are you a ghost?” I couldn’t make myself ask, “Are you Tafari’s ghost?”

He frowned. “Maybe? Do you think I could be?”

I took a deep breath. Ben had his solution to his ha’nt, and I had mine. “You need to stop coming to me.” I prayed that it would do as I said, whatever it was. “You made things easier for a little while, and I thank you for that. But you have to stop coming to me now.”

He nodded. He took my hand with his five straight, unfused fingers, and kissed my palm. “Okay, then.” He picked my box up, turned it upside down, and put it on top of his two. I followed him as he carried them all the way back to the sorting area. I waited outside the door while he took them inside for me. When he came back out, he gave me that Taf grin and went over to the stairs. He stopped at the top and said, “Oh; and you’re welcome.”

The noise from the convention hall below was a constant roar, so I couldn’t hear his footsteps as he went down the stairs,
or even whether they made any sound at all. When I looked down the stairway a second later, there was no one there. I couldn’t have carried all three boxes. I didn’t know who or what had. All I knew was that it felt like I’d just broken up with Tafari for the second time. And even worse; now I knew that the real Tafari was missing, too.

I put my fingertips under my blouse, touched my skin. Still there. Apparently, I hadn’t gotten rid of all my crazinesses.

“FRIENDLY NEIGHBORS THERE/ THAT’S WHERE WE MEET . . . ,” sang the clock towers.

I was downstairs, by the rows of lockers for the volunteers, when I saw the black shape again. It had just slipped out from under one of the cots. It was heading my way. It didn’t look exactly like a dog. I couldn’t tell how many legs it had, for one thing. Sometimes it seemed to be loping along on two, and sometimes galloping on . . . five? Eleven? Looked like it had more of a face than a snout. Not that I could be sure of that. It was maddeningly twitchy. Wouldn’t hold still for a second.

Who did it belong to? It shouldn’t be loose like that. This was a scary situation for an animal to be in. It might get startled and bite someone.

It ducked between two rows of lockers. I followed. Maybe it would lead me to its owner.

It was shaded in the alley between the lockers. I couldn’t see the dog, but I did see Glory and Punum. They were hugging. I stopped right there. They hadn’t seen me yet. Glory was sitting in Punum’s chair, on her lap with her arms around Punum’s neck. They were hugging; no big deal, right? My friends and I hugged each other all the time. But as I watched, they kissed. Full-on tongue and everything. Holy. I went flushed all over from the surprise of it, from stumbling into their secret moment.
I waited for Glory to pull away, to say that that wasn’t what she’d meant, something. Nope. When Punum moved her head away for a sec, Glory pulled her back into the kiss again. “Yo,” I said, “get a room.” They both started and turned to look at me. Gloria jerked out of Punum’s arms, but Punum kept her arms around her neck.

Gloria gave me a hesitant smile. I pasted on a grin. I could do this. I could play this cool. I moved closer to them. Glory licked her lips, looked sideways at Punum, and burst into a breathless giggle. She turned to Punum. “I kissed a girl!”

Punum preened. “Yeah, you did.”