Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

Now Will turned from the fence and stood near the doors, where some toddlers trotted in figure eights, screaming at some pretend disaster. Because his house was his way of measuring time, a giant sundial they lived inside, without it Will felt like he’d been at school for weeks. He’d expected more people for him to befriend here, not less, and he wondered if this achy sensation at the back of his skull was what people called loneliness and how long it would last. Already he missed the crisp thwack of his mother turning pages in her reading chair, the jet-engine scream of her morning vacuum, how they tangoed expertly around each other through the hall of London.

With still no sign of Marcus or his gang, Will reached into his pocket and retrieved the amethyst. He had to resist the urge to smash it into his forehead in exactly the same spot, in the hope the wound would become a beacon that drew Marcus to him, and he’d invite Will into his pack and teach him how to survive the Outside.

Back in class, Mr. Miller’s speech was almost the same, but this time it was called history. To sum up: the French and the English and the Indians all fought bitter battles when Canada wasn’t even Canada, and the Indians didn’t win much, no matter whose side they took. Then came lunch. Will ate his slow-cooked vegetarian chili silently in the sunless lunchroom. Afterwards he was shooed out for yet another recess, depressingly identical to the first, except for when an excited girl sidled up beside him.

“Hey kid, I’m Angela Gallo,” she said.

When he told her his name, she asked him where he lived.

“Just down the hill,” he said. “How about you?”

“County Park.”

Already he could feel the schoolyard gaze turn upon them. His only other conversation with a girl was long ago, when two pretty Girl Guides came to his door bearing boxes of chalky cookies. After sampling them, Will suggested they try his mother’s recipe for the cookies she made in the breadmaker, but they left in a huff. This Angela looked nothing like those girls or his mother. She had overlarge eyes that didn’t properly close, flat black hair, and teeth that fanned out like a magician’s fingers casting a spell. But the ache in his skull was gone, and there was some faint slippery sound in her voice that he enjoyed, so he kept talking.

“County Park’s through the culvert,” said Will, proud of his growing Outside knowledge.

“No shit, Sherlock,” she said, then, pointing to his forehead, “How did you get that?”

“I fell in the creek,” he lied.

“Huh. Why are you so white?”

“White?”

“Your skin ? It looks like skim milk.”

“I don’t really know what—”

“Here’s the deal, Will. I know you didn’t move from San Francisco or whatever. My brother was your paperboy, and your mom paid him to play LEGO with you.”

Suddenly Will had a dead porcupine in his throat and a burning under his scalp. He turned to flee, but she grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around.

“Look, I don’t care about that,” she said. “But can you do me a favor?” Her eyelashes fluttered like the legs of an overturned beetle.

“Okay?” he said, recovering.

“Get me some stuff from the desk you’re in?”

“Like what stuff?”

“Oh, papers, but not books. I’m interested in artwork. Drawings .”

“Isn’t it another kid’s desk?”

“Duh.”

“Jonah?”

She rolled her eyes. “Ye ssss .” Will noticed that Angela ended all her sentences exhaustedly, as though she was about to faint.

“Uh …,” he said, stalling. “Why isn’t he in school?”

“There was a fire at his house.”

“How did—”

“People say he started it, but he didn’t!” she said with exasperation. “It’s because he’s Native. Even my dad says if you build Indians a house, they’ll have burned it for firewood by noon the next day. Jonah’s brothers are actually criminals, but they didn’t do it either. It was an accident !”

“Oh,” said Will, imagining his own house in flames, his mother sitting in a smoke-swirled chair, hair smoldering, content to burn. “Do you know a boy named Marcus who went missing?”

“Yeah, his foster home is on my street. Marcus and Jonah used to skateboard together. But nobody ever knows where Marcus is. He’s always playing tricks and stealing things and running away. He’s nothing like Jonah, who’s the swee—”

“—Marcus and Jonah are friends?” Will interrupted. “Would Jonah know where he is?”

“ No ,” she said peevishly. “They don’t hang out together anymore for some reason. Maybe because Marcus hasn’t been to school for, like, years, and Jonah pulls straight As even though he’d rather die than ask Mr. Miller a question. Look, can you do it?”

“Why don’t you just grab them yourself?” Will said.

“Because people will see and he’ll know .”

“Know what?”

“That I’m basically in love with him?”

“Isn’t that stealing? Like real stealing?” Will fought to differentiate this act from all the times Inside he’d hurriedly mashed brown sugar into butter and stuffed the blissful glob into his mouth before his mother checked up on him. “Why can’t you ask him?”

“Oh, my god, he doesn’t talk!”

“In class?”

“No, he doesn’t talk. Ever. Look, can you do it or not?” She cocked her hips, tossing her hair even though it was too short to generate much movement.

Will had the sudden notion that Angela was the only person other than his mother or Mr. Miller he was going to talk to all day. “I’ll see,” he said.

After recess the teacher gave more senseless speeches and squiggled tired diagrams on the board in bleary gray chalk. The first day wasn’t even over, and Will had already jammed his frequency completely, like a stealth bomber to enemy radar. To bury time, Will discreetly picked through the desk and removed some papers. A pencil-drawn masterpiece of a skull. The feathery shading, the deep-sea depth of perspective, all done with such acuity to reality he was robbed of breath. It was miles better than any masterpiece he’d ever done or could do. He unleafed another: a perfectly rendered boy on a skateboard flying over a filthy dumpster. Then a less impressive one, what looked like a crudely drawn grid with a number of X s on it. Will slipped them all into his backpack.

After the bell rang, Angela cornered him in the hallway.

“Did you get it?” she said.

“This is all I found,” Will replied, holding up the grid, his least favorite, the one he couldn’t imagine Jonah would miss.

“I love it ,” she said, fawning wickedly, snapping the paper from his fingers and pressing it to her flat chest. “You’re the sweetest .”

Studying the drawings later that night, Will knew each of Jonah Turtle’s masterpieces made his own resemble enormous unfunny jokes told with paint, all stacked in the basement, kept for posterior. He recalled how many his mother had sent off to galleries in real New York and Paris over the years and nearly imploded with embarrassment. He vowed to hide Jonah’s masterpieces from his mother. If she saw them, they’d shrivel, weaken, close over like his forehead, like all wounds when exposed to air. He made a promise to himself to return them to Jonah’s desk in a few days, but for now, their mystery, like all his adventures Outside, would remain his alone.

She always knew he would go to school, eventually, but she hoped he might be sufficiently gifted to skip all the schoolyard heartbreak, the punch-ups, the crushing report cards, the cruelties and disappointments and failures of life in a Thunder Bay public school — just leapfrog right into a good, safe university or fine arts program when he reached eighteen or so. Juilliard took homeschooled kids, didn’t they? As did Berkeley? It seemed like something they’d have to do, for ideology’s sake.