I looked behind me, to my right. “Oh. I guess I did.”
“Do you have germs?” she said. She took a step back. She moved comically slow in a white snowsuit decorated with little coiled demons awash in fire that I realized, upon blinking, were only goldfish.
Orange
goldfish
were
decorating her snowsuit, not demons.
“Do you?” she said again. “Have germs?”
“I might,” I admitted.
“Gross,” the girl said, wrinkling her nose. But she didn’t move. She didn’t seem to care if she caught my sickness.
I noticed that my van beside the curb was still idling; I’d left the engine on.
The back doors were also open, showing the dark cavern inside. It seemed much larger than it should be, like a tunnel that didn’t want you to see its end.
“Could you do me a favor?” I asked the girl. “Could you look inside there?”
“What?”
“My van. Could you look inside the van and tell me what you see?”
She started shrinking away from me.
She must have had that special assembly in school about bad strangers wanting to snatch kids in their dirty, scary vans.
I had the terrifying feeling then that she’d be smart to play it safe and run, but she only hopped over to the van and peeked into the back. “Cool! A bike,”
she said.
“Anything else? Nothing else in there besides the bike?”
“No,” she said. She looked back at me like I was a wacko. Still, she didn’t run.
I began to worry for her. Where were her parents?
If she stayed with me for much longer, she really would catch it. She’d catch it off me and carry it around with her through elementary school and middle school and into high school. She’d carry it down the field during soccer matches, up to the top of the Empire State Building when she visited on a class trip, down hallways and in the pockets of her tightest jeans, and then her birthday would come, and she’d celebrate with friends, they’d have a party, and she’d fling herself around the room dancing, not having any idea of what’s to come. She’d be 17, and by then she wouldn’t remember any of this.
She won’t know what meeting me will have done to her.
I stood up all of a sudden and grabbed the handles of the back doors, closing up the van. “Go back inside,” I told the girl.
Didn’t she hear me?
“Go,” I snapped, louder this time.
“Get away from me. I mean it. Get out of here. Now. Go.”
She leaped back as if I’d smacked her. Her face twisted like she was about to cry, but before she let me see, she whipped around and started running.
She was racing away, away from the gray, salted sidewalk, and away from me, into the warm and cheerful interior of the local Friendly’s. Her mom was probably in there, her dad and siblings, too, and maybe a trademark Happy Ending Sundae would help her forget about this, and me.
I watched to be sure. When she was safely inside, I realized it was snowing.
Snow falling on the roof of my van and on the pavement and in my hair and on my eyelashes and on my outstretched limbs. Fluffy white flakes of snow covering me just like they’d cover a dead body.
— 18 — FIONA Bur ke did run away—there was never any question.
After she’d finished packing and making up her face, her bags strewn around the foyer and her lashes protruding from her eyelids in gnarled spikes, Fiona Burke made a phone call.
Her voice softened as she spoke, turning simpler, slower, like she’d regressed to my age, or was mocking me by pretending so.
She kept assuring the man on the phone that everything was cool. She said yes a lot, like she wanted to agree with every single thing he said. She got very silent at one point and it sounded like the person on the other end was yelling at her. She stuttered, and said she was sorry, and after a while the yelling stopped and they were just talking and making plans for the night.