The Best of Electric Velocipede (41 page)

The girl danced alone. At first she only swayed, tilting between her feet. Then she lifted them and smacked them on the floor, so the noise beat the turned backs and decorous shoulders that hunched against her. The girl didn’t care. She flew away from us and flailed her arms. She got sweaty and her hair stuck out in dull and frizzing brown. Her face blotched; it lost its cold smoothness and revealed a split across one puffy cheek that had just begun to turn red.

She had become someone I wouldn’t notice if I passed her on the street, except that she was dancing like a crazy person, and we were the only people who bothered to watch.

She slid between the silver trees, into a gap hidden somewhere in the wall, and was gone.

“Oh,” Rhodes said.

I asked him what happened.

Rhodes said he couldn’t explain.

The short man was telling a story about someone who found an enchanted kingdom inside a hill of bone—
or was it a forest?
—and challenged its queen to a game of wits—
as if that would help
—with the prize being a stay lasting exactly as long as the winner desired—
something you can’t know until you get there, can you?

There was never enough time, Rhodes said, and he wanted to hear the end.

“Don’t you?” he said.

*

Once, Rhodes told me he was afraid of the dark. We were young and hiding in a closet for a game. It was a birthday party, and we were both still small enough to fit in the closet together.

Rhodes took a little flashlight out of his pocket and turned it on so the fine beam bounced off the shelves of board games and picture albums, and drowned itself in the folds of a spare blanket. I asked him why he had a flashlight in his pocket. It’s not something that people usually carry. Because his mom had given it to him, he told me. Nobody gives flashlights, I said. You buy them in stores and keep them in cupboards in case of emergencies, or when the lights go out and you can’t find what you’re looking for.

Rhodes asked me if I had ever looked at the dark. Not in the dark, but at it.

I lied and said I hadn’t.

The flashlight was shockingly bright for being so small. I was sure that it showed, white and glimmering, at the crack beneath the door, and I got so mad that I would have left, if I hadn’t been afraid of giving myself away.

*

When the skin begins to fit too tight, and the mask starts to stick, then it’s time to dance. You shouldn’t do anything else.

“Stop fidgeting,” Rhodes said.

I couldn’t. The cold had attached itself to my bones. I wanted to take deep breaths. I wanted to swing my arms and stomp my feet until the top of my skull shook and I could be sure that I was still alive. Everyone’s faces were pale and flat. They seemed to have put on layers of makeup while I wasn’t looking and now their faces couldn’t move. I twisted my hands and scrubbed them down my front because I was sure that my clothes had grown into my skin, but nobody noticed except for Rhodes.

“Oh well,” he said. “It’s probably better this way.” He didn’t say goodbye to our new friends. He took my hand and walked with me to the center of the room. Our feet moved together. They touched the ground at the same time, through his fine leather shoes, through my terrible, hungry, feet-eating slippers of velveteen. We put them down and I remembered they were only summer sandals made out of rubber and flat plastic string that slapped the back of our heels.

Have you ever tried to walk with someone, really tried to walk with them? You might as well be dancing. You don’t need to whirl them or leap them; you don’t need to wrap your arms around, or fold their hand on the inside of yours; you don’t need to rest your cheek against their cheek and measure the space between your mouth and their ear. You don’t need to do any of these things, although you could, and they might be nice.

All you have to do is keep their bones next to yours, your hearts in close proximity. And then you need to listen.

There was an accordion, a pipe, a calliope, and someone far away, an old lady in a striped silk gown, clapping her hands.

“Do you know the way?” Rhodes asked. “It’s not that hard.”

The silver trees flickered around us. Curls of silver paper drifted through a long dark space where there wasn’t enough light to see. We danced between them and my side began to pinch. The bottoms of my lungs were scraped raw from too much breathing and sweat soaked my clothes. It slid down my arms to make our hands slippery.

Rhodes was next to me. I could hear him breathing.

Then we weren’t dancing anymore. The music tipped us over and made us step on different sides of it. I tried to catch up, and then to slow down, but it was too hard in the dark. Our fingers bumped each other, fumbled, let go.

“I’ll only be a little while,” Rhodes might have said.

It was too dark, he might have said. He just needed to go back for something. He would be fast, he might have said, he would be late. He would run there and run back, and I would barely even notice.

I think that’s what he said.

I walked by myself in the dark, wishing for a flashlight, cramped between two fences in a space that smelled like jasmine. The streetlamps were still on when I got to the end, but their light was obscured by the start of morning.

I waited. Other people came out from between the fences, ordinary people with sweat on their faces and wilted clothes. They went slowly, as if their feet hurt and they could only keep moving if they sent themselves straight to their beds.

I waited a long time.

*

“What happens,” I asked, “if you come back late?”

Rhodes’s mother opened a cupboard and took things out. She put them on the counter one at a time: a can of soup, a box of crackers, a crackling cellophane package half-filled with pistachios.

“You might lose the way,” she said. She didn’t turn around, just kept reaching up into the cupboard and back down again. “You might forget where the doors are, and then you might forget how to open them, and then you might forget that things like doors even exist.”

“Are they hard to find again?” I asked.

She took down a bundle of dried leaves, blackened and frail; a neatly folded square of something covered with tiny, glittering scales; and a jar of brown powder that hummed.

“It depends,” Rhodes’s mother said. “But that’s the wrong thing to ask.” She dug her fingers between the wood panels that made up the cupboard’s inner wall. She slid one to the side and reached into the space while I waited for her to explain what she meant.

“What matters is how much finding them is worth.” She took one dusty bottle from the hidden shelf and put it on the table in front of me. Her fingers left clean oblongs behind and I could see the yellow wine inside.

Then she gave me instructions on how to get there. She didn’t seem to expect me to follow them, and even though that made her look sad, I could tell she wouldn’t follow them herself. Maybe she couldn’t, and all she could do was wait.

Rhodes’s father slept through the whole thing. He was waiting for her to whisper something in his ear to wake him up, and I wondered if she would.

*

The first time that Rhodes and I kissed, I thought he was funny looking, even though he was waiting with me for my mom, who hadn’t shown up when she said she would. It was the day that she was unavoidably late. We were sitting on the curb and I made sure we arranged ourselves so I could watch both Rhodes and the street at the same time.

When we kissed, our noses pressed against each other, sideways, and I felt them rub together like cats walking around a stranger’s legs. It made me sleepy and it made me want to curl up on the sidewalk and close my eyes, but I left them open so I was sure to see the way Rhodes’s ears stuck out against the sky, and the empty street behind them.

*

I’m almost certain I didn’t know then how to find him if he ever went away. I’ve been trying to remember while I stand here in front of a space between two fences. The bottle I’ve been holding feels like I just pulled it out of a bucket of ice, and I can still smell the jasmine, though it’s fainter now in the daylight.

I can almost hear Rhodes’s footsteps, even though the passageway is empty and I can see it’s very short and that it ends in a plain fence grown over with vines and tiny white flowers that gleam in the sun.

We’ll walk back together of course. We’ll go carefully this time and we won’t lose the steps.

I’m not sure why I’m saying all this. There’s too much wine in here for one, but you won’t want it now when everyone else has gone home. Maybe I just thought I should, in case something happens and we don’t make it back until late.