Pulling up Stakes and Other Piercing Stories Page 9

  We chatted about small stuff for most of the walk, but there was one big thing I needed to know. With a couple minor exceptions, I'm a rational guy. I believe there's an order and a meaning to the universe. Stuff usually makes sense. The thing I needed to know was, Why me?

  I couldn't come right out and ask it that way. I had to sort of creep up on the subject. "You date much?" I asked.

  "Not really."

  "But you're so..." I searched for a word that would sum things up without sounding wrong. Hot? Awesome? Wonderful? Out of my league?

  Phoebe saved me by answering the question I was trying to ask. "A lot of guys are scared of smart girls," she said.

  "You're kidding."

  She shook her head. "Nope. No joke. I guess they feel threatened or something. But not you, Randy. You don't seem to be scared of anything. Not even smart girls."

  "That, I can handle," I said.

  "Besides, you're kind of cute. Especially when you smile."

  I grinned at her, but kept my mouth shut so I wouldn't say anything stupid.

  "Want to come in?" she asked when we reached her house.

  "Yeah."

  As I walked up the porch, I noticed a flap at the bottom of the front door. My stomach felt like I'd just yanked my belt a notch tighter than normal.

  "You have pets?" I asked, trying to keep my voice from quavering, which was already hard enough, since I was a bit nervous about going over to her house.

  "A cat," Phoebe said.

  I froze on the steps. Years ago, we'd had a cat. I was too young to remember what exactly I did, or what exactly he did, but I still have enough scars on the back of my hand to make it look like I went through some sort of tribal rite of passage.

  "Want to meet him? He's a total sweetypuss." Phoebe glanced around, then called, "Here, Johnny! Come here, boy."

  Don't panic. Okay, she has a cat. But it's not a problem. Cat's don't come when you call them.

  "Johnny!" she called again. "Johnny Depp!"

  "I'm sure he'll show up later," I said. Everything would be okay. Cute little Johnny was out somewhere in the neighborhood, chewing the head off of a sparrow or ripping the intestines from a chipmunk. My own stomach began to wriggle free of my esophagus and slide back down to where it belonged.

  "Oh, there he is," Phoebe said. "Come here, sweetie."

  Oh yeah. There he was. One of those scrawny gray beasts. Thin and mean looking. An outdoor cat. That meant he had claws. And teeth. I glanced at the row of small white dots on the side of my right hand near my thumb. Healed tooth marks. My intestines felt like they'd been overfilled with warm water.

  Phoebe knelt and held her hand out. But instead of going up to her, the creature padded toward me. As I stood there, trying to decide what to do, he put both his front paws on my leg, stretched, and extended his claws. He stared at me with the cold eyes of a serial killer.

  I wanted to scream and run. So did my last meal. I knew Phoebe expected me to say, "Nice kitty," and pet him. But there was no way I could touch that animal.

  "Isn't he just so adorable?" she asked.

  I nodded. Not to me.

  She bent down and snatched him up. His claws pulled at my pants leg like evil Velcro, but she finally yanked him free. My knee tingled from the feel of those tiny needles.

  "Come on. Let's go in." She jiggled the cat. "Johnny can keep us company."

  Johnny was still staring at me.

  "Oh god — I just remembered. I have to water my aunt."

  "What?"

  "Water my aunt's plants," I said. "She's away. I promised I'd water her plants. And I forgot. If they die, it will just kill her. She's like ninety-seven. Sorry, Gotta go."

  I turned and fled.

  Behind me, I heard Phoebe call, "Come back here."

  I almost stopped. But then she said, "You come back here, Johnny Depp."

  Oh crap. I didn't even look to see whether he was chasing after me. It was supposed to be dogs who did that. And bears. Not cats. But I wasn't taking any chances. I ran as hard as I could for three blocks. Which isn't easy when your lungs have turned to concrete.

  Stupid cats. I can't stand them. Not even on TV. They completely creep me out. Every time I see one, I can just imagine it leaping on my face and biting. Or shredding my eyes with its claws. I know that isn't rational, but I can't help it.

  ###

  "Are the plants okay?"

  "What?"

  "Your aunt's plants?"

  "Oh, yeah. I got there just in time."

  We'd met, as usual, outside the school. Phoebe didn't seem to be upset that I'd rushed away. I decided the best strategy to avoid another encounter with Johnny Depp was to invite Phoebe to my place. "Want to come over after school."

  "Sure. I'd love to."

  Wow. A month ago, I would have been terrified of asking a girl to my house. But, facing a much more tangible fear, I'd hardly thought about what I was doing before I spoke. Maybe terror wasn't so bad when it pushed you to do other things you were just slightly scared of.

  So Phoebe came to my house. We studied. We talked. We ate popcorn and watched documentaries about the ocean. We laughed. My folks adored her from the instant they met her. Life was pretty much perfect.

  We started hanging out at my house most days after school. I thought it would become a problem after a while. I figured eventually she'd invite me back to her place. For three weeks, she didn't. But Friday during lunch she leaned forward over her tray and beckoned me with her finger. I moved closer. She whispered in my ear. The sensation of her warm breath so near my flesh shut down my power of hearing for a moment. But then the words sunk in.

  "My parents are going away tonight."

  "Oh?" A half-dozen glands shot various overdoses of hormones into my blood stream.

  Phoebe nodded.

  "Away?"

  "Far away." She smiled. "They won't be home until real late."

  Are they taking the cat? "Great."

  "We'll have the whole place to ourselves."

  Not really. Maybe the cat would stay outside. Panic sent my mind to strange places. I imagined buying a bird and leaving the cage in her front yard. Or dousing myself with some kind of chemical that repelled cats. From there, my mind bombarded me with scenes of Johnny Depp leaping into my lap. I could almost feel his claws digging into my groin.

  "You don't seem very interested." Phoebe batted her eyes and made a sound somewhere between a meow and a purr, then said, "Don't tell me you're a scaredy cat."

  "Are you kidding? This is fabulous. It's just, my folks want me home for dinner. We're having company."

  "No problem. Come over after dinner. It's Friday. We can stay up late." She reached under the table and squeezed my knee, sending a tingle up my thigh that felt far nicer than the sting of imaginary cat's claws. "As late as we want."

  ###

  "It's just a cat. It's just a cat. It's just a cat." No matter how often I said those words, they had no power to change reality. The very word itself — cat — could raise my pulse. I could barely eat dinner. When we were done, I kept looking at the clock. It was almost seven. Phoebe was expecting me. And I wanted to go. Man, did I want to go. This was every guy's dream. A hot girl — a girl I really cared about — and an empty house.

  But the house wasn't empty. The thought of being a captive plaything of that hideous beast was enough to make me want to slink up to my room, crawl under my covers, and never come out again.

  I couldn't go through with it. I'd have to invent some sort of excuse. It was too late to tell her I was allergic to cats. I should have done that the instant he showed up. But I'd been too freaked out to think straight. Maybe I could tell her I'd been grounded. That would work. I wouldn't have to pretend to be disappointed. My disappointment would be real. Very real.

  As I reached for the phone, it rang.

  "Hello?"

  In answer, I heard my name, stretched through several octaves and far more syllables than usual.

  "
Phoebe?" I asked.

  "Uh huhhhh."

  "What's wrong?"

  "Johnny...."

  Johnny's dead? I felt a huge wave of guilt over the huge wave of glee that hit me at the thought of Johnny wrapped around the front right tire of a Ford Explorer. But no amount of guilt could drown out the glee.

  "... caught a mouse."

  Phoebe hit even higher octaves with the word mouse, as if a tiny rodent could be the source of all terror in the world.

  "A mouse?"

  "Yeah." Three syllables, two octaves.

  I waited for more information. Instead of explaining further, Phoebe let out a scream. That was followed by a thump and clatter that did temporary damage to my right ear. I had the feeling she'd dropped the phone.

  "Can you hear me?" I shouted.

  Distantly, I heard her voice. "Randy, help."

  A damsel in distress. The total geekazoid fantasy. If only the cause of the distress had been something I could handle, like a spider, or a dragon. Anything except a cat. I didn't want to go. But the fear in her voice lingered in my mind. I knew how she felt. Knew it all too well. She was a prisoner of irrational terror, and she'd reached out to me for help. "Hang on. I'm coming," I shouted into the phone. I headed over to her house.

  ###

  When I opened the front door, I expected Johnny Depp to leap at my face. There was no sign of him. I forced myself to take a deep breath. "Phoebe?"

  "In here."

  I followed her voice to the kitchen. She was on a chair. I wasn't super thrilled about the idea of dealing with a dead rodent, but I could handle it. I glanced around the floor, looking for the corpse of Mr. Mouse, hoping he'd died from internal injuries and not loss of blood. The only dead thing I spotted was the handset of the cordless phone. At least there was no sign of the cat. Maybe he'd gone outside to kill again.

  "So, where's the mouse?" I asked.

  "There." She pointed to an archway that led to the dining room.

  The cat walked through the opening and sat on his haunches. The mouse — or at least its lower half — dangled from his mouth, the tail hanging like a limp piece of dirty string.

  Before I could move, Johnny Depp opened his mouth and dropped the mouse. It didn't plop on its side or back like a respectable dead rodent. It landed on all fours.

  "I think it's still alive," I said.

  "Eeeeeeeeee," Phoebe said. Her arms waved like a badly manipulated marionette.

  The mouse ran across the kitchen, right toward us. Johnny Depp loped after it, gave it a casual swat, then snatched it up in his jaws again.

  "Do something," Phoebe said.

  I was already in danger of doing something that would require the services of a very skilled dry cleaner. Johnny sat two feet from us, the mouse dangling from his jaws again.

  Eat it. Swallow the damn thing.

  Johnny got up and put his front paws on the chair. I knew for sure that if he dropped the mouse near Phoebe's feet, it would lead to her death in some sort of tragic way, and I'd be doomed to spend the rest of my school days alone and then grow into a bitter old man who lived by himself in a small apartment stuffed with piles of yellowing newspapers, ate cold spaghetti right out of the can, and creeped out all the little kids on the block.

  He can't bite me if his mouth is full. I looked at Phoebe. I looked at the cat. Oh crap — it was like being faced with the lady or the tiger. Except I knew what was behind each door.

  Phoebe screamed again. Johnny started to open his jaws. Knowing that the next moment would become part of my permanent collection of nightmare memories, I bent down, grabbed the cat around the waist with both hands, and snatched him from the floor. He wriggled, but didn't let go of the mouse. I held him at arms' length and raced toward the front door, dropped to my knees, let go with one hand to push open the cat door, then chucked Johnny Depp and the mouse onto the porch.

  As the flap fell back in place, I collapsed against the door, blocking the entrance with my back.

  I tried to take an inventory of the damage. I hadn't been bitten or scratched, but I was trembling. I still couldn't catch my breath. My heart was hammering like an uzi set on full automatic. My guts felt like someone had been kneading them to make bread dough. This moment would definitely linger in my mind.

  Worse, something else lingered — the memory of a loud scream, all the way from the kitchen to the door. Not Phoebe's scream. Mine. I'd left a trail marked by my fear. I'd howled like a whipped child, and exposed the bare, naked terror that lived inside of me. I knew that wasn't something that drove the ladies wild. I hoped she'd at least let leave by the back door so I wouldn't run into the cat.

  "Poor Randy."

  Soft fingers touched my cheek. Phoebe sat on the floor next to me.

  "You were scared?" she asked.

  There was no way I could hide the truth. Not when I'd nearly shattered every window in the house with my scream. And no way I could speak, yet. My lungs hand shriveled to the size of pencil holders. I nodded.

  Phoebe reached down and took my hand. "I knew we had a lot in common." She leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. "It's okay to be scared. Mice are so creepy. They completely freak me out. But you got rid of the mouse even though you were afraid of it. That makes you my hero." She punctuated this with another kiss. On the lips.

  I still couldn't breathe, but fear didn't get all the blame for that. I returned the kiss. A while later, when I could trust myself to speak, I said, "Maybe we should keep Johnny outside for a bit. There's no such thing as one mouse. Who knows what else he might drag in."

  "Yeah. Who knows."

  "You don't mind?" I asked.

  Phoebe reached behind me and latched the cat door. "Johnny likes it outside."

  ###

  When I left Phoebe's house, late that night, I saw Johnny sitting on the porch, less than five feet from me. The fears came right away, but I thought about how I had carried him out of the kitchen. And survived. That eased the terror just a bit.

  I braced myself for him to leap at my face. Instead, he stayed where he was and looked at me with lazy eyes.

  "I like her," I said. "I like her a lot."

  He turned his head away and licked his flank.

  "We're just going to have to get used to each other."

  He dropped on his side, arched his back, and stretched out his paws, as if inviting me to scratch him.

  "Not quite yet." I walked down the porch and across the lawn. "Maybe never." The thought of petting him made me shiver. But not once, all the way to the street, did I need to look back over my shoulder.

  Words of Faith

  There's nothing that can ruin your day like the words I expect better from you scrawled in red across the first page of a paper. Except, maybe, the words I expect MUCH better from you. With MUCH underlined. Twice.

  "Merry Christmas," I muttered as I stared at my grade. To my left, Mr. Sterns shuffled along the aisle, handing out the last of the papers just before the bell rang.

  "Have a lovely holiday," he shouted over the noise of twenty seven students scrambling toward freedom.

  I kept looking at the grade, hoping I'd misread the number. No such luck. It was definitely a sixty five. And it was definitely my own fault. I'd dashed off the paper the night before it was due, figuring I was a good enough writer to get by with a first draft. Bad plan.

  This truly sucked. I needed to end the year with at least a ninety. That's what it took to get into the senior honors writing program. I'd managed an eighty seven the first marking period. I'd been hovering around ninety one this period. Until now. It was going to be hard as hell to climb out of the pit I'd dug. Maybe impossible.

  I had to get into that class. I'd been planning on it ever since I was a freshman. I loved writing. In my humble opinion, I was probably the best writer in the school. But that didn't mean anything without the right grade.

  I tried not to obsess about my problem during vacation, but it kept getting in my face. A&E ran a biogr
aphy of Steven King. I worshipped him. He had the bug so bad he lived in a rented trailer while he wrote his first book. AMC showed a special on novelists who'd become screen writers. The Science Fiction channel did a feature on Ray Bradbury. His short stories are awesome.

  Despite my misery, the holiday sped by. I read, I wrote, I watched too much television. Christmas Eve, Mom mentioned something about going to church.

  "You really want to?" I asked. The idea didn't thrill me, but I'd go if it would make her happy. Maybe I could pray for a better grade. Dear God, all I want for Christmas is a ninety.

  Mom pushed aside the curtain and looked out the window. "It'll probably be crowded."

  "There's always next year," I said.

  We rented a movie instead. I think Mom went to church when I was little, but I don't remember much except this room with a picture on the wall of happy pairs of animals boarding the ark. And cookies. They had great cookies.

  The next day, we unwrapped presents. I gave Mom a boxed set of Audrey Hepburn movies and a really nice scarf. She gave me a fountain pen and a blank journal bound in leather. On the cover, stamped in gold, it said The Early Works of Michael K. Ellison, Famous Author. Aunt Jill renewed my subscription to Writer's Digest Magazine, and Aunt Leona gave me a book-store gift certificate. Dad sent me a football.

  Weighing down the fun of Christmas was the knowledge that I'd blown the one thing that mattered the most. But the first day of school after vacation, I found hope. That was also the day I met Julia. My homeroom teacher had sent me to the office to drop off some papers. On the way back I noticed this girl wandering the hallway. She moved from door to door, staring at the numbers as if they might eventually change. I knew from my own experience with Mr. Sterns's grades that such miracles never happen.

  "Lost?" I asked her.

  "Once." She gave me an odd smile, as if we'd just shared a joke. "I can't find room 307."

  That explained it. Whoever numbered the doors had screwed up and skipped 307. Instead of doing it over, he'd just changed the last number on the floor from 329 to 307. "That's where I'm headed. You just move here?"