100 Sideways Miles (23 page)

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

I wanted to say something, but I was afraid my voice would crack like a little kid who just had his milk money swiped by some asshole like Blake Grunwald.

Twenty miles.

And I asked her, “What do
you
want to do?”

And it wasn't me, it was Julia Bishop, who began to cry. She
leaned her forehead against the side window. She squeezed my hand in her lap.

“I don't know, Finn. I miss my mom and dad. My home.”

I said, “Oh.”

There's no balancing shit like that. Part of me knew what was right for Julia. Part of me allowed myself to feel cheated, like I was being robbed again—and look out, kid, here comes another fucking falling horse.

Julia Bishop said, “I have to leave Tuesday.”

And Cade Hernandez told us, “What a pair of fucking downers you two are.”

The planet of humans and dogs spins and sails, spins and sails. There is nothing I can do about it. Things keep moving. The knackery never shuts down.

Julia Bishop left Burnt Mill Creek.

• • •

Laika and I crossed the dry creekbed of San Francisquito Canyon to say good-bye to her on the morning her aunt and uncle drove Julia to the airport in Los Angeles.

“You look nice,” I said when she appeared, dreamy and floating like she always seemed, framed within the front door.

“Thank you,” Julia said. “I don't think you've ever told me that before.”

“I'm sorry for not saying it sooner than now.”

My voice cracked. I felt terrible.

Then I said, “Julia Bishop, you are without a doubt the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in the eleven billion miles of my life, and will ever see, no matter how many billions of miles I have to go before the knackery takes me back too.”

Julia smiled and looked down at my feet. I was wearing the socks with the sharks on them.

“I have to leave in twenty minutes,” she said.

I calculated the distance.

“Want to take a walk for, like, twenty-four-thousand miles or so?”

Julia sighed. “What am I going to do without you, Finn?”

“How can I answer that? I won't be able to ever know what you are going to do without me, Julia, because we are going in different directions.”

She held my hand. We walked through the rock garden where we sat together on the night of the perigee moon, and out into the canyon bed as the sun peeked over the rim.

Laika, no doubt sensing something was about to die, stayed at my feet.

On summer mornings at sunup, San Francisquito Canyon is one of the most perfect places on the planet of humans and dogs.

Look: In my father's novel,
The Lazarus Door
, incomers named Earth the planet of humans and dogs because they liked keeping dogs as pets, but they liked human beings as entrees.

“I wish we could go twenty-four thousand miles away,” I said.

“Where would that be?”

“One-tenth the distance to the slowpoke moon.”

“Probably not a good idea if we plan on breathing and stuff.”

“Probably not.”

Julia sighed. “Finn, we'll still be—”

She didn't know what to say.

“We will still
be
, Julia.”

Across the creek from Julia's house, where the old washed-out
road lay in crumbled chunks, stood a concrete abutment that once served as an overpass to the floodwaters of winter and spring.

“This canyon is nothing but a knackery, and now it is pulling us apart too. It never shuts down, does it?”

“What can I say, Finn? It's time for me to go home.”

We kissed. I held Julia's face in my hands and wiped the wet at the corners of her eyes with my thumbs.

I said, “In books—sometimes the corny ones—it's always love conquers all, and waiting faithfully forever, but that kind of stuff is stupid when you know you're just going to have to go on and do what you're going to do. Because we will still
be
, won't we? But it would be a good book to be stuck in, I think.”

“Everyone likes those kinds of endings, don't they? We'll see each other again. I know we will,” Julia said. “We will always remember this. How could you forget me?”

“You need to tell me how it ends—if I can ever get out of the book.”

“I don't know the ending. It's something you have to write for yourself. Don't you get it? You have to open the doors. There's nobody else who's going to do it for you.”

“Sure thing.”

I couldn't say anything else.

We walked back to her house.

I thought I would cry; I was afraid I'd act like a baby in front of Julia and her family, but in the end I held it in perfectly and walked back home and shut myself inside my room.

I was alone again.

• • •

Look: The incomers—the
real
aliens, not me—in my father's book had the ability to produce vibrational waves that targeted a specific region inside the brains of their human victims. This part of the brain, called Wernicke's area, is the part that “hears” and decodes language. When it gets stimulated, there is no difference between actually hearing language and only
imagining
you're hearing it, which is why so many starry-eyed religious human beings believed the fallen angel–cannibal aliens were actually messengers from God, as opposed to hungry freeloaders.

Imagine that.

It's a very long book. It also made some people insane with anger.

I mean, what if messengers from God actually
did
want to eat you? Most people would be okay with that; I mean, those famished angels being sent from God and all.

So when the incomers stimulated all those Wernicke's areas, people heard all sorts of nutty things and assumed it was the actual Voice of God delivering absurd orders that eventually got recorded as unarguable law in holy books like the Bible—things like:
Don't wear clothes made from more than one kind of fabric
, and
If a man has sex with a woman during her period, they must be quarantined from the people until you burn a turtledove or a pigeon
, and
If you are wounded in the testicles, your penis should be cut off
.

That last one was terrifying to me.

I also wondered how—or why—you would set a poor bird on fire.

But my favorite message from God in Dad's science fiction novel was this:
Lie down and let me eat you
.

Amen.

• • •

Everyone knew something was wrong with me. When Julia went home to Chicago, I stopped trying to fool people with my pretense of being okay.

I was filled with a winter storm of sorrow and rage, and I needed someone to blame.

After she left, I stayed in my room for about four million miles—two days—with the shades drawn and my phone turned off. I didn't want to see anything; didn't want to talk to anybody. I'd even listen at the door to make sure I could sneak out of my room to take a piss and drink some faucet water once in a while and not have to look at anyone else in my family. I'd pretend to be asleep whenever Mom called up the stairs, telling me to come to dinner.

I was pathetic.

But my misery wasn't a secret to anyone; there was no mystery to be solved at all. The epileptic boy had a broken heart, and it was no big deal to anyone else on the planet of humans and dogs.

At least, not until Dad got tired of my behavior.

On Thursday morning at eleven o'clock, he came into my room.

Hello, gasoline!
said Mr. Lit Match.

I was still in bed, a mess. I hadn't showered or put on clean
clothes in the millions of miles since I said good-bye to Julia Bishop.

Dad went straight to my window, pulled the blinds back, and opened it.

It was like I'd been unearthed from a coal mine after being trapped for days and days.

“It stinks in here.”

There was a definite edge to my father's voice.

“Sorry.”

Dad put his hand on my shoulder and shook me.

“You need to get up, Finn. I'm not going to let you stay in here like this any longer. Cade's waiting downstairs, and I exhausted all possible topics of conversation with him back when he was about twelve years old.”

Cade Hernandez and I were supposed to leave for our college trip on Friday, the next day. That was the plan.

Not feeling any particular need to be nice to anyone, I said, “Why do you hate him?”

Dad said, “Because he is exactly everything I do not want you to be.”

Then he pulled the covers off me. The only thing I had on was a pair of briefs—the free ones we got from Governor Altvatter after Cade Hernandez fixed Burnt Mill Creek High School's BEST Test scores.

We were the smartest junior class in the galaxy!

Cade Hernandez was a god, and I owed him my underwear.

I sat up and hung my feet over the edge of the upper bunk.

“Oh. What
do
you want me to be, Dad? Why don't you just map it out for everyone to see in your next book, and that will be me?”

I caught my dad's eyes. He looked like I'd punched him. It was the meanest thing I'd ever said to my father in my life, but I wasn't about to stop myself from going a step farther. I told him this: “Why don't you leave me the fuck alone?”

It felt like I'd been holding in twelve billion gallons behind the sutures of my Lazarus Door scar. It was time to set them free.

I hadn't noticed Tracy—Mom—was standing in the doorway, listening to us. She carried a tray with breakfast for me.

She said, “You should be ashamed of yourself, Finn.”

I was.

Dad had a sickened expression, as though he'd finally lost what he couldn't stand to lose. He went to my door and told Mom to go, that he wanted to talk to me alone. Then he shut my door.

I already knew I'd gone too far; I'd caused a flood and I was caught in it, drowning. Finn Easton's self-taught disaster.

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

“Sorry I said that.”

“You made your mother cry.”

I caught myself before my fourteen-billion-year-old teenage atoms let my mouth say something horrible—that Tracy wasn't my
real
mom, even though she was the only mom I remembered.

“She shouldn't have been standing there. I just want to be left alone.”

“Well, that's not going to happen.”

I planted my elbows on my knees and propped my chin in my hands as I stared down at my feet dangling above the floor.

My dad took a cautious step toward me. I wasn't looking at him; I could sense him moving closer.

He said, “Come on, son, I know exactly how it feels—”

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

Dad turned toward the door.

“Okay, Finn. I'll leave you alone. I'll let Cade know the Dunston trip is off.”