Double the trouble, double the fun, since I’m A) going out to dinner tomorrow night and won’t have time to write, and B) this felt better as one chunk. No real place to split it into two, I’m afraid.
95 percent of this was written on an iPhone keyboard. Thus is the peril of getting into a groove on the bus, and refusing to move to a sensible option like a keyboard when you arrive home.
Like all these drabbles, this has neither been re-read nor edited, so read at your peril.
I curled up in the back of the taxi, clutching my backpack, as if I could wish myself back by holding it tightly enough. I missed my bear. I missed Annie. I missed Hal. I missed snow. I missed home.
Couldn’t think about that. Caught my breath. Swallowed. Allowed my head enough movement to tilt upwards, listening to my dad give directions to the taxi driver, a Hispanic guy with a lisp and heavily graying hair. And, before I could stop myself, I was back East, hearing my fourth grade teacher lecturing us about the proper placement for apostrophes. He had always spoken with the same lilting accent trails this driver was using now.
You’d think it would have comforted me. You’d think I would’ve been happy to hear something so familiar.
Instead, I turned and shoved my nose against the window, opening my eyes as widely as possible, willing them to stay dry.
We pulled away from the curb as the terminal light above flickered, then extinguished. I heard the woosh of air as my mother cranked the window down, felt the sticky muggy air wrap around us. The driver’s temperature gauge, a mercury-filled thermometer held by a cheery two-dimensional girl in a grass skirt, looked to be somewhere in the high seventies.
“It is unusually hot,” he remarked to my father. “Even for us! You pick good week for vacation.”
I suppose, were I a taxi driver ferrying people around the week before Christmas, and I picked up a family clearly dressed for winter, I’d think the same. Nice folk, visiting relatives, going to Disneyland, seeing the sights, skipping down the avenue of the stars, then hopping back in a plane and going home. Home.
“Home,” I heard my mother say. “We’re moving, actually.”
I dropped out of the conversation, digging headphones out of my bag. Plugging in. I let the opening notes of the Imperial March drown out the accented taxi driver and my mother and the noise of the city streets.
It was only early evening, but no people walked the streets outside the airport. Their absence was supplanted by neon signs, billboards, and more cars than I’d ever seen—even more than the one time we’d driven into New York City for Thanksgiving.
Unlike the New York drivers, though, these ones didn’t honk, didn’t make themselves visible, just slid and merged along the four-lane road until it morphed into a highway.
Freeway. Whatever.
The next track came on. Cars whizzed by, arcs of light and smoke. The sun set, leaving a eggplant-purple sky in its wake. I couldn’t see a single star. I squinted out the window, hoping to catch something—Venus, the Big Dipper, anything that would tell me I hadn’t been transported into what already felt like a whole other universe. Nothing came. And yet, I continued to stare out the window, like a chump.
A white sportscar, which had been lurking behind the taxi, took this moment to bend around us on my side. The woman driving it blew us a kiss—the kind of mocking kiss you’d see a racecar driver sending his opponent—and sped on. No one saw but me.
We switched lanes, and then freeways, moving away from the city. The purple sky began to tinge ever-so-slightly more cerulean. And then, before I had really had time to take in the change: The ocean.
The pier that Annie and Hal had spoken of with such glee was sprawled out in front of me, a ferris wheel lathered in the red-and- green lights of Christmastime. At the edge of the pier, in the parking lots adjacent, cars were packed like sardines, slid so close together I was surprised no one had thought to start stacking them on top with a giant claw machine. It was utterly beautiful—and abhorrent—all at once.
The light turned green, and we left the monstrosity of the pier behind us, weaving through the surrounding beach town. Hazy as it was, the sky held the limping remains of the day near the water’s edge, creating a weird sort of glow: like looking toward a fiery pit, burning on embers in the distance.
I watched as the beach towns morphed into what seemed like endless stretches of beach—broken up only by the occasional parking lot. One of the lots was full of RVs, a bonfire starting on the beach below. Men with surfboards cluttered the circle, dressed in sandy wetsuits, holding what I could only assume were beers of some kind. And then we left them, too, turning from the beach toward the eastern hills, winding our way up through the canyon road.
My mother patted my arm, breaking my concentration, and the refrain of the current track. I pulled out my earbuds and glanced over. “We’re almost there,” she said, straining excitement in her voice. More for my benefit than hers, I thought.
“Yeah,” I mumbled, turning back toward the window. In response, she ruffled my hair—a gesture she knew I despised.
“C’mon. We’ve got the evening. What do you want to do first? Unpack? Explore?”
I traded her a weary look. We’d been stuck in an airport for thirty hours. On a plane for four. On another plane for three. And now in a taxi, in a foreign city, three hours jetlagged. “I kinda just want to sleep, I think.”
“Oh, honey.” She put out a hand and squeezed my forearm, then looked down at her phone, pulling up a calendar with a free hand. “I’ll see what we can do. The movers should have gotten here this morning, so with any luck they’ll have your bed set up already… If not, I’ll get you set up on one of the couches, okay?”
I nodded, suddenly feeling as exhausted as I had intimated. I moved away from the window and laid my head in her lap. “I miss home,” I whispered.
“I know, sweetie,” she said, in the way only mothers can, and brushed my hair back from my face. We rode in silence like this for a moment. If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine myself back in my bed at home, dozing off to the sounds of whispered fairy tales in my ears.
“We’ll call the airline tomorrow,” she murmured. “See if they haven’t found your bear.” And though it wasn’t a tale of castles or princesses, I felt almost at peace. I shut my eyes.
Annie and Hal and I are sitting around their dining room table, playing Monsters. Hal flips a card down onto the board: The Queen of Death.
“You little cheat!” Annie shrieks. “I knew you were going to bring her out, I just knew it.”
“Should’a specced to fight her, then, shouldn’t you?” Hal says with a smirk. “Andy, it’s all you. Do you engage the Queen?”
I skim through my hand and pull out a bonus card, laying it down. “It’s on my honor to defend the lady Anne from the evil Queen,” I say. “I pull out my silver lightsaber—”
“Sword of light,” Hal corrects.
“Same difference, and lightsabers are cooler” is my reply. I point to the card. “I step forward to attack the Queen, swigging a Quickening Potion from my flask.”
Hal has me roll. He does the same. Annie grins at the result. “You’re too fast for her to see!” she announces.
Her brother gives her a foul look. “You’ve become too fast for the Queen to keep track of, and you set her mind into a great state of Confusion. She attempts to swing out at you, but sends magical bolts of doom toward the lady Anne. They will most certainly kill her.”
“No!” screams Annie.
“I’ll parry!” I shout, and roll. The dice land. We all lean forward…
The taxi bumped, sending me out of the dream. I tried to clutch the wisps as they flew away from my waking mind, but they were gone, left behind as the car began to slow, taxiing to its final destination. I refused to open my eyes, willing my mother to think me still asleep, willing the dream to come back.
It didn’t. But my mother didn’t attempt to get me to rise when the car stopped; and in fact left me on the seat, slipping what felt like my backpack under my head. The taxi’s motor hummed. A latch popped open, luggage was jostled, the trunk slammed. Voices, leaking in through the open rear window. A soundscape I tried my hardest to ignore, but couldn’t. Everything was magnified.
I opened an eye, then the other, frustrated. Sat up. We had pulled into a dark, circular driveway, a house on each side of the taxi I could see. The ones to my front and left were brightly lit, Christmas decorations hanging from their eaves. And then, to my right, the dark house. The one we were supposed to live in.
The one that was supposed to be full of movers.
The realization came to me as I stepped out of the taxi. Backpack in hand, I walked up to my parents, who were conversing with each other in hushed tones. “Why’s it so dark? Where are the movers?” I asked.
My mother looked up in surprise at my voice, then alarm. “Oh, no, Wyst, I needed you to stay with the taxi—”
But the driver, whose signal had apparently been my leaving, had blinked his lights in farewell and began to drive off. She looked at my father in horror. “But we didn’t pay—”
“Taken care of at the airport,” he said, sounding like a stone had caught in his throat. “Damn, Andrew, we thought you were going to keep him here—”
“I was asleep,” I murmured, still drowsy and confused to suddenly be the target of anyone’s speech. “No one told me to stay, and why would I need to? What’s wrong?”
“The movers never came,” my dad replied, and his voice cracked into full-out frustration. “And now we’re stuck in an empty house with no furniture, no food, no electricity, and now, no damn transportation!”
“Thanks to me, you mean,” I shot back. “Because it’s all my fault the stupid taxi left. I was SLEEPING! I didn’t know!”
“Well, maybe you should have stayed asleep!” he thundered.
“Richard!” my mother growled, but it was too much. On the edge of tears all day, I let them come, and barreled past my parents, running toward the empty house. I just needed somewhere to sit, somewhere to calm down, somewhere to breathe…
But the door was locked, so I dropped my backpack and kept running, under the orange trees, through the backyard bushes, down a slope full of brambles and weeds. They stung as they swatted against my jeans, but I kept running, oblivious, focused on just one thought: Away.
And before I knew it, I was tumbling down into the bushes. As I fell, I felt my foot break free of the bramble that had most certainly caused me to trip; my legs snapped up into a ball and I rolled down the rest of the slope, dirt and branches mangling my clothes until I could roll no more.
I let out a strangled cry that was half-laughter, half-sob. Not ten hours out of Connecticut, and here I was: beaten up, scratched, and dirty on the edge of a canyon somewhere in southern California. It was kind of hilarious, when you looked at from the outside.
Of course, I wasn’t exactly an outside observer. I preemptively cringed as I opened my eyes to squint downward at my clothing which, while torn and dirty, did not seem to be covered in blood. So far, so good. I wiggled one foot, then the other, then my legs and arms. Nothing broken or severely bruised that I could tell. Nothing that hurt so bad that I’d have to lie here until my parents got so worried they sent out a rescue party.
I’d run off before, at home. The first time, my mother had freaked out so much that when I trudged back an hour later, sore from yelling at the woods, I found my entire house surrounded with police cars. I made a deal with my parents after that: I got an hour to go cool down; if I hadn’t reappeared by then, they could call in the national guard.
Granted, home was home, and this was a brand new state with all sorts of horrible god-knows what lurking in the bushes, but I shrugged off the thought. My dad needed the cooling off time as much as me, I hadn’t gone far, and you know what? It was their fault for breaking all the rules and dragging me out here in the first place. I let out a huff of air, bringing one of my scratched palms to my eyes for closer inspection. What a mess.
As I frowned at the torn skin, I noticed something twinkling out of the corner of my eye. I dropped my hand to focus on the light, and found myself involuntarily gasping out loud.
In the half-hour or so that I had spent sleeping and generally making a mess of myself, the sky had darkened. In place of hazy purple eggplant, thousands of stars littered the sky, swirling about in faint, nebula-inspired strokes. The constellations were all there, and everything else, the planets and clusters and everything I loved. Home.
“Wow,” I murmured, forgetting for a moment the sheer insanity of the day. “Wow.”
A giggle.
I shot up like a rocket despite the aches, any thought of stars forgotten. “Who’s there?” I demanded. My eyes went blurry trying to adjust to the surrounding brush. A glowing light flickered on about ten feet away, then pointed directly into my eyes. “OW!” I squinted, tried to shield my eyes from the luminance. It was a flashlight, my brain helpfully tried to supply. That, or a ray gun.
“You look awfully bad.” A girl voice. High-pitched. Not an adult, for sure.
“I fell,” I retorted, still trying to squint beyond the light. “And some idiot girl decided it would be funny to blind me with a torch.”
These were the magic words, apparently: The light disappeared from my eyes with an audible click. “I am not some idiot girl, thank-you-very-much.”
I blinked, trying to clear the echoes from my vision. A blurry shape, sitting on something grey, in what looked like the middle of the canyon. “What on earth…? What are you doing?” I tried. “Who are you?”
“That’s an awful lot of questions for a boy who decided to roll out of the sky, don’cha think?” Singsong. She was teasing me. After everything, I was getting spanked by a punk girl.
“You’re the one creeping around the bushes in the night like a creeper,” I shot back lamely, cursing the jetlag and the tumble for my sudden inability to craft retorts.
“Maybe I like creeping around! ‘Sides, they’re mine. I can do whatever I well please.” My vision cleared somewhat, and I began to get a picture of the girl sitting across the way. She was perched on what looked like a giant steel object, six or seven feet wide, that ran the width of the canyon. It almost looked like a dam, which sounded foolish as it popped into my head—the canyon was dry as a bone. And the girl… she was my age, I thought. Maybe a little younger, though that could have been her outfit. She had her hair in long, reddish braids, with blue-jean overalls and a striped sweater underneath. In one hand, I could barely make out the flashlight; in the other, some sort of metallic tube.
“Hey, you just going to stare at me, trespasser?” She jolted me out of my inspection with a wave of her flashlight. “What’s your name?”
“Uhm.” I stammered. “Wyst. I mean, Andrew. Callahan. Wait!” I got to my feet unsteadily and clambered toward the steel bridge. “I asked you that first.”
“Trespassers gotta identify themselves,” she said boldly. “I have to make sure you’re not anything nasty, after all.”
“What,” I said, “Like a demon?” The girl laughed.
“Sure. Or a werewolf.” She howled at the sky, and I felt my cheeks tugging into a smile, despite myself. “Or a child molester, but you look a bit young for that.”
“I hear that doesn’t kick in until your first prison sentence, ” I joked. She laughed again.
“You’re a little funny, Wyst Andrew Callahan.” She stuck the flashlight into her pocket, proffered a hand. “I’m Laynie. Laynie Brewster.”
I took the steps I needed to take onto the steel object, meeting her hand in mine. “It’s just Andrew. Andy. Wyst’s a, uh… it’s a middle name.”
“No way!” She shook her head as she shook my hand, then grinned. “That’s much too cool to be stuck in the middle, especially with a boring old name like Andy.”
“Hey, I like Andy,” I protested. But Laynie had already moved on.
“Nope! You’re totally Wyst to me forever now.” She used her grip on my hand to pull me down to the base, where she remained sitting. I collapsed with a grunt. And maybe a small ‘Owch.’
“What is this thing?” I mumbled, attempting to soothe my backside not-so-self-consciously. She pointed down over the ledge. I looked, was instantly sorry to have done so. The canyon plummeted downward at least fifteen feet, maybe more.
“Once upon a time, this was a dam for the folks who lived down the hill,” Laynie lectured. “To keep the rainwater from flooding their homes. But now we’ve got drains and stuff, and the city thought it was too much of a hassle to tear down, so now it’s just a cool place to sit and watch stars.” She pointed out toward the horizon. From here, I found myself realizing, you could see all the way out to the ocean, where it met the sky. And, reflected in the water—all those thousands of stars.
“Wow,” I found myself mumbling again. Laynie giggled like before, but this time I didn’t let her distract me.
“This is all my property,” she said, gesturing with her free hand. “Well, this half of the dam up the hill.” She pointed up the opposite side of the canyon, where I could faintly see the outline of a lit house.
“You live up there?” I asked.
“More or less. Me and my dad and Ernie and Marco and Shelley. But this,” she motioned once more to the dam, “This is all mine.”
“It’s awfully nice,” I admitted. She looked pointedly at me, then broke out into a smile.
“Well, if you’re going to be so cool about it… I s’pose you can trespass on occasion.” She glanced upward toward where I had come. “Where’re you trespassing from, anyway?”
“Hartford,” I said automatically, then paused. Doubled back. “I mean.” I frowned. “We moved. From Connecticut.”
“No way!” Laynie said, her eyes lighting up. “Shelley’s from New England! She’ll flip. You guys moved into the Lawson house?”
“I guess?” At my confusion, she sighed impatiently.
“C’mon. Like this? With the arches and the—” She tried to poorly mock up the shape of our house with her fingers. “The little garden? And the orange trees?” I nodded. “Oh, aces. I love that house! I was so sad when Mary moved out. She was my dad’s hairdresser, you know.” She flipped her hair. “She’d do mine sometimes, too, but. Mostly his.”
I marveled at the idea of a hairdresser living in a house like the one my parents had acquired, but didn’t press the subject. “What’ve you got over there?” I asked, gesturing at the tube now lying by her side.
“Oh!” Laynie grabbed it, seemingly eager to show it off. “You’ll like this.” She made a snapping movement with her wrist, and the tube extended outward. It was a bronze telescope—the kind I’d only seen in pirate serials and on Monster cards.
“Wicked,” I murmured, eyes caught in the spectacle of it. She held it out.
“You can try it, if you like.” I wasn’t going to pass that opportunity up. I grabbed it—gently, of course—and put it to my eye. The magnification was surprisingly good, crisp, and as I tilted upwards, I caught the moon. “It’s sure something, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I replied, grinning as I gazed through the scope. “Yeah, it really is.”
