Towering (6 page)
Authors: Alex Flinn
“Good to know.” Trying to sound casual, I said, “Hey, have you ever heard of a place called the Red Fox Inn in Gatskill?”
Josh thought. He even said, “Hmm.” Finally, he shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Gatskill’s the next town over, and it’s pretty small. I’d think I’d have heard of everything in Gatskill.”
“It’s okay.” I tried to hide my disappointment. “My mom and her friends used to go there when they were teenagers. It’s probably closed now. She used to date a guy who played guitar there, a guy named Zach.”
“He’s not your long-lost father, is he?”
“No, nothing like that.” Though that would be a good cover story. “She just wanted to find out if anyone had heard from him.”
“Zach Gray.” The old man with the TV suddenly came up behind us. “That’s Rebecca Gray’s grandson. He came to town eighteen years ago, then left.”
“Eighteen?” It seemed pretty exact.
“Yup. I remember because that was the year of the big snowstorm.” And then, he started in on a long, irrelevant story about the storm itself, the height of the snow, the number of days it fell, and how long it took for the flowers to come back afterward. But I was thinking eighteen years was right before Danielle had disappeared. Maybe he’d run away with her. Or maybe he’d killed her and gone on the lam.
The old man finally concluded his story, saying to Josh, “Will you take twenty for this TV?”
I thought he’d be lucky to get five, but Josh said, “I’ll have to ask my dad. He only authorized me to sell for thirty. And he’s not here today, so if you want it for the bowl games . . .”
“You drive a hard bargain, son.” The old man took out a faded wallet and extracted some folded, soft-looking bills.
After he left, Josh said, “I don’t know if you have plans for New Year’s.”
“Oh, yeah.” I nodded. “I’m going to Times Square to celebrate with Ryan Seacrest.”
“Whatever, man. If you don’t have plans, a bunch of us are getting together. My family has a place on Grouse Lake. It’s a three-season house, so it’s almost inaccessible right now. Good for partying. I could pick you up if you’re interested.”
I nodded, realizing at that moment how much I really did miss hanging out with people. “That’d be great.”
We made plans for the next day at ten, and Josh said he’d call when the hinges came in.
When I got home, Mrs. Greenwood was asleep on the sofa in front of the TV. An old rerun of
Star Trek
was on, the creepy theme song that sounded more like a theremin, this weird instrument, than a human voice. I wondered if that was what I’d heard earlier, the voice I’d heard on the wind. But it seemed unlikely that the old lady was a Trekkie. I figured her experience with science fiction was more along the lines of H. G. Wells. I tried to tiptoe past her, but she woke up.
“Oh, there you are. I can’t believe I fell asleep during
Star Trek
.” She picked up the remote and started rewinding. At least she had a real television. “I got cable just so I could still see William Shatner. That is one handsome man.”
I grinned. “He’s about your age now too.”
“Well, I know. He was my age back then. Are you a Trekkie?”
“I can’t tell a Vulcan from a Romulan.”
“I could teach you.”
I smiled. “Maybe later. I want to check out the connection.”
Of course, I didn’t do virtual school. The week between Christmas and New Year’s was sacred, even for the virtually bored. Instead, I went on Facebook. They’d made Tyler’s page into a memorial one with hundreds of messages, all talking about how they’d loved him, from people who wouldn’t have loaned him a pencil when he was alive. I checked my own. No one was posting on it, only a few invitations to play CastleVille and Texas HoldEm, from people I didn’t really know. Bored, I looked through my duffel bag and found the notebook from last night.
I saw him again today! It has been three days since I first saw him. I haven’t been able to get out, but today I was, and I went, pretending to walk Ginger, limping to the road. And by some miracle, he was there! He smiled. I noticed his eyes again, a shade of blue I’d never seen before.
“I couldn’t come before. I’m sorry.”
“I know. I came anyway, in case you made it today.”
He walked around to open the car door. So polite, so different from the rude boys at school, who joked about how their “women” had better be ready at the door when they honked. I almost wished I could tell Mom about him. She was old-fashioned and liked stuff like that.
“I brought a picnic,” he said.
“Every day?”
“So I’ve eaten a few picnic lunches. It was worth it. I thought we could go to the lake.”
That was old-fashioned too, charming like the picnic basket—not a cooler—he’d brought, with its red-checkered lining. He held out his hand to help me into the car. Again, that shock. I shivered.
“Are you okay? Need a sweater?”
I shook my head. “It’s a nice day.”
It was a lovely day, and as we drove to the lake, a drive I’d made a hundred times before, I began to notice things I never had, the beauty of the black-eyed Susans, how the brown inside was like a dog’s nose, and each petal formed a ruffle around. How it and the Queen Anne’s lace grew against the craggy, gray rocks, sometimes clinging, sometimes avoiding, like a flirtatious girl. Even the rocks themselves glowed and sparkled. I mentioned that to Zach.
“Do you know why?” he asked.
“Of course. Everyone knows. There are bits of garnets in there, just little flecks It’s my birthstone.”
He nodded. “A red stone, fiery like you. There’s a garnet mine about an hour from here. But they don’t use the garnets for rings and necklaces. They make scouring pads out of them, or use them for stone washing jeans.”
“That’s not very romantic,” I said.
“You’re right.” He touched my arm, maybe unintentionally. “In the right light, they glow just like diamonds. Just like you.”
We went silent again after that. I realized I should speak. He wouldn’t like me if I didn’t talk. He’d think I was a weirdo.
But he spoke first. “I wasn’t telling the whole truth the other day.”
My heart clenched, wondering what he was going to tell me—that he’d been in jail or was thirty years old? But he said, “I have lived a lot of places, but I’ve been here before. My grandmother lived here, and my uncles still do. I used to visit them when I was younger, and now, I live with them. Actually, they own the bar where I perform.”
I stared at him, mesmerized by his eyes.
“I thought you’d think it was geeky, living with my uncles, or that I was a loser. You were so beautiful, I wanted to impress you.”
“I’m impressed,” I said.
“It’s kind of loserish. I left home, thinking I’d make it as a big rock star in New York, only to come back here with my tail between my legs.”
“Are you still going to try to be a rock star?”
“Absolutely. I just ran out of money, so I’m working here for a while. They let me live for free. As soon as I’ve saved enough, I’m going back.”
“That sounds like a good plan.” He was so hot I thought he could make it even if he couldn’t sing. “It was brave to leave home in the first place. I complain about my mother, but going to the big city all by myself sounds kind of daunting.”
He pulled off the road then to a beautiful spot by the river. We waded in the water for a while. He took out the sandwiches. Over lunch, he asked me about my life.
“It’s boring. I’d rather hear about you.”
“It’s not boring. You’re not boring.”
“There were only thirty kids in my graduating class, and I’ve known all of them since kindergarten. They’ll all stay here and marry each other and have kids who’ll stay here and marry each other and have kids who’ll stay here and marry each other. A hundred years from now, the people in this town will look exactly the same.”
“But that’s great. That’s what’s cool about this place. It’s like everything here, the rocks and the trees and the people too. They never change. That’s what I loved about visiting here when I was a kid. We had all these traditions—like we’d always eat ice cream at the same places every year, the one near the waterfall and the old-fashioned one on Main Street. And we’d always go to the drive-in movie theater. Do you know how few towns have a drive-in movie anymore, but they do here because it always has to be the same.”
“But I’ve never eaten a snail before.”
“A snail?”
“On TV, you hear about people going to fancy restaurants and eating things like caviar or snails. But we don’t have any restaurants like that here, and if we did, people would think it was gross anyway. Here, people just eat things like pot roast. Pot roast!”
He smiled. “That, I can help you with.”
From the picnic basket, he removed a small container of what looked like salad. I’d noticed it before, but I hadn’t gotten too excited about it. Salad wasn’t my thing. “Try this?”
“Lettuce? Not very exciting.” He didn’t even have any dressing from what I could see.
But he opened the container and reached inside to take out one single leaf. He held it between two long, slender fingers. Beyond it, I could see his strange blue eyes, and then, the green itself seemed to glow almost blue too. It was shaped like a heart with little tendrils of smaller hearts hanging from the stem. I opened my mouth.
The second the leaf touched my tongue, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of incredible peace. As I chewed, the world grew sharper, brighter. I could pick out the songs of individual birds and smell the pine trees and each flower. In fact, I could even see the flowers blooming.
Zach leaned toward me. His eyes were psychedelic blue. “You know what else is exciting?” he said. “You.”
And he kissed me. I kissed him back, and I don’t know what was real after that and what was a dream. I could see the reflections of trees on the lake, and I felt like I could jump in and climb them, entering another world, a tree world. Then, Zach was carrying me across a field of flowers toward a ruined tower I’d never seen before. All I knew for sure was that I was in love, so in love, and from this day forward, everything in time will be divided between the days before I met Zach and the days after.
I’m in love.
As I finished the page, Mrs. Greenwood called me, for dinner. Then, we watched
Star Trek
, which apparently is on all the time somewhere, if you have five thousand cable channels. It wasn’t as dumb as I thought it was.
I told Mrs. Greenwood that.
She nodded. “Gene Roddenberry, the creator, wanted to show what mankind might develop into, if only they learned from their mistakes.”
“Fascinating,” I said, imitating Mr. Spock.
“He wanted to end violence. For example, the Vulcans had a very violent past but learned to control it by controlling their emotions.”
“Should people control their emotions?” I asked.
“Sometimes, you have to, I suppose. You have to avoid thinking of what upsets you. If not, it will take over your life. I know. . . .”
She meant Danielle, her thinking about Danielle. I wanted to find out more about what had happened to her. Had Zach drugged her? Why? But by the time I went upstairs, I was tired, so tired. I thought it was the altitude, ’cause I just fell into bed and slept with no trouble, the first time since Tyler died.
But a few hours later, I woke once again to an eerie voice, singing on the wind.
It wasn’t the
Star Trek
theme. It came from outside my window.
I bolted up and walked across the room, thinking maybe it was Danielle. But there was no one there, only the voice.
Sometimes, I like to crouch on the floor and look upward, out the window. Then, I can tell if it’s a blue sky, which I know from books means a clear day, the kind of day on which Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters might walk into town in
Pride and Prejudice
, or a gray sky, which might mean a stormy day, the sort of day on which Jo March in
Little Women
might huddle under an umbrella with Professor Bhaer.
Not that it matters, for I never go out. But still, I like to know. It makes me feel like a part of the world.
