The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Three (24 page)

"Just looking," I said. "What are you reading?" I had just run half the way to the library and could feel the sweat on my scalp. I knew I looked really awful. He looked dry, even cold. His skin was pale, as if he had never spent a day in the park.

He lifted up the book spread open across his lap:
Faerie Folktales of Europe
.

I was used to people who wouldn't shut up. I wasn't used to making conversation.

"You're Zachary, right?" I asked like an ass.

He looked up again. "Mmhmm. You're Jen, Tanya's friend."

"I didn't think you'd remember," I said, then felt stupid. He just smiled at me.

"What are you reading?" I stumbled over the words, realizing halfway through the sentence I'd already asked that. "I mean, what
part
are you reading?"

"I'm reading about unicorns," he said, "but there's not much here."

"They like virgins," I volunteered.

He sighed. "Yeah. They'd send out girls into the woods in front of the hunts to lure out the unicorn, get it to lie down, to sleep. Then they'd ride up and shoot it or stab it or slice off its horn. Can you imagine how that girl must have felt? The sharp horn pressing against her stomach, her ears straining to listen for the hounds."

I shifted uncomfortably. I didn't know anyone who talked like that. "You looking for something else about them?"

"I don't even know." He tucked some curls behind one ear. Then he grinned at me again.

All that summer was a fever dream, restless and achy. He was a part of it, meeting me in the park or at the library. I told him about my last foster home and about the one before that, the one that had been really awful. I told him about the boys I met and where we went to drink—up on rooftops. We talked about where pigeons spent their winters and where we were going to spend ours. When it was his turn to talk, he told stories. He told me ones I knew and old-sounding ones I had never heard. It didn't matter that I spent the rest of the time begging for cigarettes and hanging with hoodlums. When I was with Zachary, everything seemed different.

Then one day, when it was kind of rainy and cold and we were scrounging in our pockets for money for hot tea, I asked him where he slept.

"Outside the city, near the zoo."

"It must stink." I found another sticky dime in the folds of my backpack and put it on the concrete ledge with our other change.

"Not so much. When the wind's right."

"So how come you live all the way out there? Do you live with someone?" It felt strange that I didn't know.

He put some lint-encrusted pennies down and looked at me hard. His mouth parted a little and he looked so intent that for a moment, I thought he was going to kiss me.

Instead he said, "Can I tell you something crazy? I mean totally insane."

"Sure. I've told you weird stuff before."

"Not like this. Really not like this."

"OK," I said.

And that's when he told me about her—a unicorn. His unicorn, whom he lived with in a forest between two highways just outside the city, who waited for him at night, and who ran free, hanging out with the forest animals or doing whatever it is unicorns do all day long, while Zachary told me stories and scrounged for tea money.

"My mother . . . she was pretty screwed up. She sold drugs for some guys and then she sold information on those guys to the cops. So one day when this car pulled up and told us to get in, I guess I wasn't all that surprised. Her friend, Gina, was already sitting in the back and she looked like she'd been crying. The car smelled bad, like old frying oil.

"Mom kept begging them to drop me off and they kept silent, just driving. I don't think I was really scared until we got on the highway.

"They made us get out of the car near some woods and then walk for a really long time. The forest was huge. We were lost. I was tired. My mother dragged me along by my hand. I kept falling over branches. Thorns wiped along my face.

"Then there was a loud pop and I started screaming from the sound even before my mother fell. Gina puked."

I didn't know what to do, so I put my hand on his shoulder. His body was warm underneath his thin T-shirt. He didn't even look at me as he talked.

"There isn't much more. They left me alone there with my dead mom in the dark. Her eyes glistened in the moonlight. I wailed. You can imagine. It was awful. I guess I remember a lot, really. I mean, it's vivid but trivial.

"After a long time, I saw this light coming through the trees. At first I thought it was the men coming back. Then I saw the horn—like bleached bone. Amazing, Jen. So amazing. I lifted up my hand to pet her side and blood spread across her flank. I forgot everything but that moment, everything but the white pelt, for a long, long while. It was like the whole world went white."

His face was flushed. We bought one big cup of tea with tons of honey and walked in the rain, passing the cup between us. He moved more restlessly than usual, but was quieter too.

"Tell me some more, Zachary," I said.

"I shouldn't have said what I did."

We walked silently for a while 'til the rain got too hard and we had to duck into the foyer of a church to wait it out.

"I believe you," I said.

He frowned. "What's wrong with you? What kind of idiot believes a story like that?"

I hadn't really considered whether I believed him or not. Sometimes people just tell you things and you have to accept that
they
believe them. It doesn't always matter if the stories are true.

I turned away and lit a cigarette. "So you lied?"

"No, of course not. Can we just talk about something else for a while?" he asked.

"Sure," I said, searching for something good. "I've been thinking about going home."

"To your jerk of a foster father and your slutty foster sisters?"

"The very ones. Where am I going to stay come winter otherwise?"

He mulled that over for a few minutes, watching the rain pound some illegally parked cars.

"How 'bout you squat libraries?" he said, grinning.

I grinned back. "I could find an elderly, distinguished, gentlemanly professor and totally throw myself at him. Offer to be his Lolita."

We stood awhile more before I said, "Maybe you should hang with people, even if they're assholes. You could stay with me tonight."

He shook his head, looking at the concrete.

And that was that.

I told Tanya about Zachary and the unicorn that night while we waited for Bobby Diablo to come over. Telling it, the story became a lot funnier than it had been with Zachary's somber black eyes on mine. Tanya and I laughed so hard that I started to choke.

"Look," she said. "Zach's entertainingly crazy. Everybody loves him. But he's craz-
az
-azy. Like last summer, he said that he could tell if it was going to rain by how many times he dropped stuff." She grinned. "Besides, he looks like a girl."

"And he's into unicorns." I thought about how I'd felt when I thought he was about to kiss me. "Maybe I like girly."

She pointed to a paperback of
The Hobbit
with a dragon on the torn remains of the cover. "Maybe you like crazy."

I rolled my eyes.

"Seriously," she said. "Reading that stuff would depress me. People like us, we're not in those kinds of books. They're not
for
us."

I stared at her. It might have been the worst thing anybody had ever said to me, because no matter how much I thought about it, I couldn't make it feel any less true.

But when I was around Zachary, it had seemed possible that those stories were for me, as if it didn't matter where I came from, as if there were something heroic and special and magical about living on the street. Right then, I hated him for being crazy—hated him more than I hated Tanya, who was just pointing out the obvious.

"What do you think really happened?" I asked finally, because I had to say something eventually. "With his mom? Why would he tell me a story about a
unicorn?"

She shrugged. She wasn't big on introspection. "He just needs to get laid."

Later on, while Bobby Diablo tried to put his hands up Tanya's halter top before her boyfriend came back from the store and I tried to pretend I didn't hear her giggling yelps, while the whiskey burned my throat raw and smooth, I had a black epiphany. There were rules to things, even to delusions. And if you broke those rules, there were consequences. I lay down on the stinking rug and breathed in cigarette smoke and incense, measuring out my miracle.

The next afternoon, I left Tanya and her boyfriend tangled around one another. The cold gray sky hung over me. Zachary was going to hate me, I thought, but that only made me walk faster through the gates to the park. When I finally found him, he was throwing bits of bread to some wet rats. The rodents scattered when I got close.

"I thought those things were bold as hustlers," I said.

"No, they're shy." He tossed the remaining pieces in the air, juggling them. Each throw was higher than the last.

"You're a virgin, aren't you?"

He looked at me like I'd hit him. The bits of bread kept moving though, as if his hands were separate from the rest of him.

That night I followed Zachary home through the winding urine-stained tunnels of the subway and the crowded trains themselves. I was always one car behind, watching him through the milky, scratched glass between the cars. I followed him as he changed trains, hiding behind a newspaper like a cheesy TV cop. I followed him all the way from the park through the edge of a huge cemetery where the stink of the zoo carried in the breeze. By then, I couldn't understand how he didn't hear me rustling behind him, what with the newspaper long gone and me hiking up my backpack every ten minutes. But Zachary doesn't exactly live in the here and now, and for once I had to be glad for that.

Then we came to a patch of woods and I hesitated. It reminded me of where my foster family lived, where the trees always seemed a menacing border to every strip mall. There were weird sounds all around and it was impossible to walk quietly. I forced myself to crunch along behind him in the very dark dark.

Finally, we stopped. A canopy of thick branches hung in front of him, their leaves dragging on the forest floor. I couldn't see anything much there, but it did seem like there was a slight light. He turned, either reflexively or because he had heard me after all, but his face stayed blank. He parted the branches with his hands and ducked under them. My heart was beating madly in my chest, that too-much-caffeine drumming. I crept up and tried not to think too hard, because right then I wished I were in Tanya's apartment watching her snort whatever, the way you're supposed to wish for Mom's apple pie.

I wasn't cold; I had brought Tanya's boyfriend's thick jacket. I fumbled around in the pocket and found a big, dirty knife, which I opened and closed to make myself feel safer. I thought about walking back, but if I got lost I would absolutely freak out. I thought about going under the branches into Zachary's house, but I didn't know what to expect, and for some reason that scared me more than the darkness.

He came out then, looked around, and whispered, "Jen."

I stood up. I was so relieved that I didn't even hesitate. His eyes were red-rimmed, as if he had been crying. He extended one hand to me.

"God, it's scary out here," I said.

He put one finger to his lips.

He didn't ask me why I'd followed him; he just took my hand and led me farther into the forest. When we stopped, he just looked at me. He swallowed as if his throat were sore. This was my idea, I reminded myself.

"Sit down," I said, and smiled.

"You want me to sit?" He sounded reassuringly like himself.

"Well, take off your pants first."

He looked at me incredulously, but he started to do it.

"Underwear too," I said. I was nervous. Oh boy, was I nervous. Mostly I had been drunk all the times before, or I had done what was expected of me. Never, never had I seduced a boy. I started to unlace my work boots.

"I can't," he said, looking toward the faint light.

"You don't want to?" I took one of his hands and set it on my hip.

His fingers dug into my skin, pulling me closer.

"Why are you doing this?" His voice sounded husky.

I didn't answer. I couldn't. It didn't seem to matter anyway. His hands—those juggling hands that didn't seem to care what he was thinking—fumbled with the buttons of my jeans. We didn't kiss. He didn't close his eyes.

Leaves rustled and I could smell that rich, wet storm smell in the air. The wind picked up around us.

Zachary looked up at me and then past my face. His features stiffened. I turned and saw a white horse with muddy hooves. For a moment, it seemed funny. It was just a horse. Then she bolted. She cut through the forest so fast that all I could see was a shape—a cutout of white paper—still running.

I could feel his breath on my mouth. It was the closest our faces had ever been. His eyes stared at nothing, watching for another flash of white.

"Do you want to get your stuff?" I asked, stepping back from him.

He shook his head.

"What about your clothes?"

"It doesn't matter."

"I'll get them," I said, starting for the tree.

"No, don't," he said, so I didn't.

"Let's go back." I said.

He nodded, but he was still looking after where she had run.

We walked back, through the forest, and then the graveyard, back, back to the comforting stink of urine and cigarettes. Back to the sulfur of buses that run all night. Back to people who hassle you because you forgot your work boots in the enchanted forest where you cursed your best friend to live a life as small as your own.

I brought Zachary back to Tanya's. She was used to extra people crashed out there, so she didn't pay us any mind. Besides, Bobby was over. That night Zachary couldn't eat much, and what he did eat wouldn't stay down. I watched him, bent over her toilet, puking his guts out. After, he sat by the window, watching the swirling patterns of traffic while I huddled in the corner, letting numbness overtake me. Bobby and Tanya were rolling on the floor, wrestling. Finally Bobby pulled off Tanya's shorts right in front of the both of us. Zachary watched them in horrified fascination. He just stared. Then he started to cry, just a little, in his fist.