A Problematic Paradox Page 4

  A wide meadow now surrounded the trailer. Cool, fresh air greeted my face, and soft-looking patches of grass spotted the browning landscape. There wasn’t a building in sight. I was not alone, though. A handful of goats were trotting over to check out the new arrival.

  I left the door open and stepped outside. “Help yourselves, guys. Eat, poop, and be merry.”

  “NA-a-a-a-a-a-a-a!” said the goats, and they proceeded to do just that. Behind the trailer was a foreboding concrete tube with rails like train tracks. I would have thought it a drainage pipe or the entrance to an underground garage had I not just emerged from it with all my worldly possessions. The tracks extended past where the trailer had stopped, and I could see how they were so buried and overgrown with grass that someone might not notice them, unless they happened to step right on one. Squinting a bit, I could make out a huge paw print stenciled on the side of a distant water tower—the logo of the West Blankford High School Wild Boars. I must have been a couple of miles outside city limits.

  I could also see a pillar of black smoke rising from about where I reckoned our home was located, but decided not to think about that yet.

  Mobile Housing Unit B looked like it had been through a war or two. Deep scrapes and gashes adorned every surface, and at least one metal panel had been ripped off altogether. On the opposite side of the trailer was a rusty barbed-wire fence and a gravel road that appeared to lead directly from nowhere to nowhere. This was convenient because I had nowhere to go.

  I said goodbye to the goats, hopped the fence, and started walking.

  It was growing dark, and the thought occurred to me that a flashlight would help me see where I was going. But that would only help if I’d had some idea where I was going. I was just going. I would have called family, but apart from Dad, I didn’t have any. I would have stayed with friends, but you know the flaw in that plan.

  I tried pushing the button on my Happybear Bracelet again. Just as before, the eyes blinked a second, and the bracelet spoke to me in a tinny electronic voice.

  “Say! It seems like you’re experiencing a stressful situation! Is everything okay?”

  “Contact Melvin Kross.”

  “Out of range. Cannot contact. Sorry, Nikola. What seems to be the problem? Tell your friend, Mr. Happybear!” said the bracelet, just as before.

  “Can you call me a cab?” I asked.

  “Gosh, I’m sorry, Nikola! No taxi services are available in this location. Transportation has been requested,” Mr. Happybear said. “Would you like to hear a joke?”

  “No,” I said, wondering what kind of transportation came after rocket-propelled trailer.

  “Okay!” the bracelet said. “What’s the difference between A SLICE OF PIE . . . and A PUPPY?”

  I closed my eyes and sighed. Every instinct in my entire body told me to ignore the question and keep walking. I figured the odds of Mr. Happybear knowing a good joke was about one in a billion, especially since it had been programmed by my dad.

  I couldn’t stop myself. “I don’t know. What’s the difference between a slice of pie and a puppy?”

  Mr. Happybear’s eyes blinked once. “Perhaps you should find out before you eat your next slice of pie!”

  Let me tell you, if that bracelet hadn’t been my only link to Dad, it would not have survived the evening.

  I hadn’t walked five minutes when a pair of headlights appeared over the crest of the hill I was descending. A moment of panic turned to relief: the lights were not the high, square lights of the SUVs. The approaching vehicle rode low to the ground and with a distinct rattle.

  I needed a ride, but for a girl my age, hitchhiking is typically considered about as reckless as Russian roulette. At the same time, I was tired, and there were certainly people after me. People I couldn’t hope to escape on foot. As the car drew nearer, I decided to risk it and stuck out a thumb. Like magic, the car’s brake lights lit up, and it rolled to a stop alongside me, the brakes squealing. A purple-tinted passenger window cranked down haltingly, and a voice spoke from within: “Er, ah, Niko—hic!—Nikola?”

  My worst fears were confirmed as the window lowered enough to make out the face of Miss Hiccup. “No,” was all I said.

  “No? No what?—Hic!—”

  “No, today is bad enough already, and I refuse to believe that you’re here, miles from heaven knows where, offering me a ride. Please stop existing. You are making me doubt that the universe still makes sense.”

  Miss Hiccup’s trademark kindly smile was nowhere to be seen. Instead, she angled her head down to glare at me over the top of her spectacles. “Look, Nicky. When you first came to our school, your dad brought me a pager and gave me a pretty generous—hic!—er, payment. The deal was that if the pager ever went off, I was supposed to come here, pick you up, and drive you somewhere. So get in and we can get—hic!—get this over with.”

  I wanted to keep walking, but this Tabbabitha person had resources, transportation, and friends who didn’t mind breaking the law to get at me. I had my feet, a pair of boots, some clothes, and a ride, which was apparently a part of Mr. Happybear’s nefarious plan. I held my breath and opened Miss Hiccup’s car door.

  “The name is Nikola,” I said, climbing in. “I see you didn’t spend the money my dad paid you on a car.”

  Miss Hiccup’s eyes flared. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with my ca—hic!—car, young lady.”

  You know how something can be so ugly it becomes cute? Like those wrinkly dogs? That doesn’t work for cars. Miss Hiccup’s car was a brown, green, orange, and brown El Camino. If you’ve never seen one, it’s a car in the front, a truck in the back, and a crime against automotive design from bumper to bumper. Miss Hiccup’s El Camino appeared to be pieced together from the ugliest parts of all the ugliest El Caminos ever created.

  “Okay,” I said. “Spill it. What’s going on? Who were those people?”

  She shrugged and stared ahead. “No idea. I told you what I know. The pager beeped, I put down my ramen noodles and got in the car. Is your dad a fugitive or a spy or something? I bet he makes drugs, doesn’t he?”

  I didn’t think so. “He’s a scientist,” I said.

  “Yeah, because scientists occasionally skip town without their kids from time to time. Your pop sounds like a real stand-up guy.”

  “He didn’t skip town. He’s been . . . abducted,” I said, finding it strangely hard to admit the situation to another person. I know this will sound weird, but it felt a bit . . . embarrassing. Like it might feel if you fell down stairs in front of everyone.

  She turned to look at me. “My own pop was a real schmuck, too. We had a saying in my house growing up: Things were bad, but they were always going to get better next week. Of course, next week never happened, you know? You can’t keep waiting for a thing that isn’t coming. I hope you aren’t.”

  She was studying me in a quizzical way that made it clear she expected an answer.

  I shook my head. Part of me wanted to correct her, but something told me I shouldn’t. I was a little bit floored by the change in her demeanor. She was always so kind and sweet. How much of that had been an act? Grouchy, brutally honest Miss Hiccup was starting to grow on me.

  “So where are we going?” I asked instead.

  She sighed. “Iowa.”

  “We’re going to Iowa? On purpose?”

  She laughed heartily. “And that ain’t the half of it.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Miss Hiccup repressed a snicker and almost repressed a smile. She was enjoying herself.

  “I don’t know anyone in Iowa,” I said.

  She turned on the radio, filling the car with loud static. She turned it off again. “Sounds like that’s about to change.”

  I would have felt better if she didn’t look as happy as she did. She’d stopped hiccuping, too. “What’s so
funny?”

  She took on a contemplative look. “You know, Nicky, the rotten thing about being a guidance counselor is that you have to be so damn nice to everyone. You have to be nice to the crappy, sassy little kids, no matter how awful they are. You have to be nice to the other teachers, even the ones who make you call them doctor because they have a PhD in physical education or home economics or something. And when you’re done with all that, you have to be nice to the parents: ‘Oh, hey, I haven’t even glanced at my kid’s homework in three months, but would you mind kissing my butt while I yell at you because he has a C in English?’ It gets old. It isn’t natural—being that nice all the time.”

  “Okayyy,” I said, “but where are we—”

  “Last week,” Miss Hiccup went on, “a kid stole a cigar from that gas station down the street from the school and smoked it in the boys’ room. You know what happened? He got busted. They hauled him into my office and told me to deal with it. The moment he hit the chair, he puked. He puked in my purse. And he’d been eating corn! My keys were in there, Nicky. I have to touch those every day! But I had to be nice to the little vomit fountain. I had to say, ‘Oh, that’s okay, let’s get you cleaned up.’ I would have cleaned the little cigar-stealing barf bomb with a fire hose if I could have gotten away with it.”

  “You don’t own any guns, do you?”

  She pointed a shaking finger at me, a warning look in her eyes. “Can it, sister. I’m never going to see you again, so I’m going to give you a gift: I’m going to tell you what your problem is.”

  She brushed an errant lock of hair out of her eyes and continued. “I know you’re smarter than everyone at school. That’s great, but it’s been pretty inconvenient for me. Do you know how big a pain it is to find teachers who aren’t scared of teaching you? It sucks, trying to teach a classroom of kids about photosynthesis and having one kid point out that you’re mispronouncing some word none of them will ever remember anyway. Do you honestly expect a public school teacher to know what wavelengths of light produce the most nutritive output in switchgrass? We don’t pay them enough to even look up switchgrass online.”

  She turned on the radio and tried tuning it, but all she found was the voice of a man shouting about something in the Bible. She turned it off again and continued her monologue. “And you know what? Those other kids are wrong, and you are right. Those other kids are horrible people. They’re going to grow up and become horrible adults, and you’ll have to deal with them without anyone to take your side. There’s no changing that. All I can do is send letters home to all the parents, but the parents don’t read them. You know why?”

  I started to answer, but she was going strong and didn’t want to be interrupted by something as insignificant as me answering her question.

  “Because the parents are horrible people, too. So yeah, it’s more convenient to tell you to quit being weird and to blend in.”

  “Well, I just think that—”

  She turned on the radio a third time, tuned it, and smacked it with the flat of her hand. This time it produced a sound that was about 80 percent static and 20 percent music, which was apparently good enough, because she left it on. “Here’s the worst part: I kind of like you. I see myself in you.”

  I cringed involuntarily.

  “Teachers say that all the time, great way of bonding with a kid, and it’s usually a lot of bull, but I actually mean it. You’re a lot like a younger me. When I look at you, I see some of the stuff I like, a bunch of the stuff I hate, and some of the stuff I’d change if I could. So here’s what I’d change: You need to learn how to meet people halfway. Allow people to be imperfect. Get out there and make friends with jerks and idiots and terrible people, because when you stop looking for the worst in people, that’s when you see the good stuff.” At this point, she turned up the radio and made it clear we were done with our little heart-to-heart. “Why don’t you take a nap? The trip will go faster. You could sleep till we got there and not miss a thing.”

  The sun hung low on the horizon. For a moment I thought it was the sunset, but the chill in the air and the ache in my neck told me it was morning. I sat up and looked around. Miss Hiccup was still asleep, so it must have been pretty early. She looked so peaceful that it almost made me want to like her. The landscape was flat and empty in all directions, making it seem almost as if we were standing still. Fading clutches of early snow clung to the earth here and there, harbingers of the coming winter. The El Camino, which had not broken down or burst into flames during the night, was moving along at a good clip. I drew a deep breath and stretched. Off in the distance, a lone stag leaped a wire fence and continued on his way to wherever stags go. The hum of the road, faint static-music, the vibration of the engine, and the wind noise were so soothing that I found myself being lulled back to sleep.

  I bunched my backpack up against the window and started getting comfortable again when something occurred to me. I didn’t have a driver’s license, but from what I understood, it was very bad for a person driving a car seventy-five miles an hour down the interstate to be sound asleep, no matter how peaceful she looked.

  “WAKE UP, MISS HICCUP!” I screamed in a panic.

  Miss Hiccup was so startled that she jerked upright in her seat, wrenching the wheel hard to the left. The El Camino lurched obediently and started spinning out of control. For a few terrifying seconds, the shrieking of burning tires and the shrieking of Miss Hiccup and myself broke the formerly placid morning silence. The world spun wildly around us, and I lost track of which way was forward and which was back. In a move of desperation, Miss Hiccup slammed on the brake, spun the wheel in the opposite direction, and engaged the left-hand turn signal (for good measure, I suppose). Just as suddenly as the spin had begun, the car jerked to a halt, ending with us parked in the center of the road, pointing straight forward with a whirling tornado of tire smoke fading away around us.

  The world seemed utterly silent, save for the gentle grumble of the engine and the placid tic-tic-tic of the turn signal, which Miss Hiccup disengaged without comment. The stag had stopped and was viewing us with what looked like disdain.

  My traveling partner drew a deep, shuddering breath and spent about a minute staring straight out the front window. After pondering her mortality, Miss Hiccup put the car back into gear and started driving again.

  Not long after, she turned to me. “Miss Hiccup?”

  Did I say that out loud? “Pardon? Say, do you know where we are?”

  “You called me Miss Hiccup,” she said.

  Crap. “No. No, I didn’t. You probably dreamed that,” I said.

  She cocked her head to the side. “Do you know what my name is?”

  I sighed. There was no getting around it. “Not . . . exactly? It’s nothing personal. I just never managed to remember it.”

  “Nothing personal? There is nothing more personal than a person’s name. What made you settle on Miss Hic—hic!—Hiccup? Why not”—she straightened in her seat and took on a stoic expression—“Miss Pretty Blond Woman Who Should Have a Boyfriend but All the Men in Town Are Intimidated by a Woman Who Doesn’t Feel the Need to Constantly Re-Inflate Their Egos at Every Opportunity?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’s funny you should mention that, because that’s my other nickname for you, Miss Pretty Blond—er, you know, what you said just then.”

  “Hm,” she said, unconvinced by my masterwork of a fib.

  “People forget things. I’m sor—”

  She twitched. “For God’s sake—it’s printed on my door. There are certificates on each of my walls and a six-inch sign on my desk, and you have a photographic memory.”

  “You have to admit,” I said lamely, “it suits you, what with the—”

  “I think we’ve established that I have the ability to kill us both without much notice, have we not?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So let�
��s just drop it. ’Kay?”

  4

  CORNFIELDS AND ZOMBIES

  Miss Hiccup produced a set of directions scribbled hastily on a yellowed scrap of paper. I recognized my dad’s handwriting and overcame the urge to grab it and clutch it to me like a cherished teddy bear.

  As the hours wore on, the directions took us more and more off the beaten path. We went from the interstate to highways, then to county roads, and eventually to gravel roads with names like F-21. Before long, the directions resorted to descriptions: Take the first left turn after the rusted-out tractor with a scarecrow leaning on it and Turn right four miles after the speed limit sign with a bullet hole in the lower left corner. Other landmarks, like the large dead horse and the house that burned down had long since been cleared away or decomposed, so we were left looking for blackened earth or the sort of place a horse might choose to enter into rest. These led to occasional wrong turns, and before long, we were choosing roads based on whether we thought we’d tried them yet.

  While this was going on, I made a few attempts at conversation, all of which were rebuffed. Miss Hiccup was making a conscious effort to avoid getting to know me any more than she had to. I respected her decision, but it made for a rather dull trip. “So why did Dad say he was setting up this plan, anyway? You must have had questions,” I tried finally.

  Miss Hiccup had been focused on scanning the fields for what the directions referred to as an enormous beehive and didn’t answer at first.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “What? Oh, sorry,” she said. “I was pretending not to hear you. Your father did explain. But his explanation was bizarre, and I’m not sure if any of it was true.”

  There was a pause. After almost a minute, I couldn’t take the suspense anymore. “AND?”

  “What?” she said, as if she had drifted off into a daydream. “Oh, I’m not supposed to tell you. I just thought you’d like to know you’re missing something really fascinating and mysterious.”