“Are you like, some supercharged bolt of electricity or something?”
Nick gave me a small smile, part mysterious, part sad. “Something like that.”
“State secrets?”
He shook his head. “You know a lot of those. But there’s no word or name in your language, or any human language, that can explain it. I’ve been using words associated with energy, electricity, and computing because I thought it would help you understand better. What I really am is a form of matter humans haven’t encountered.”
“Hmmmmm…” I was trying not to feel dumb, but he must have misunderstood because his face got stormy. I hastened to add, “It doesn’t matter, though, promise.”
“You keep saying that,” he said. “It makes me think it must matter.”
“I only keep saying that because you keep acting all Alien Edward.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine, whatever. Consider this: since you know everything about earth—hey, that means you must get my Edward joke!” He shrugged, and I rolled my eyes. “Well, your encyclopedic knowledge also means you must know about the PSAs they run during children’s shows. You know, Dun Dun dun Dun dun, 'The more you KNOOOOOW!'” I think he knew, but was puzzled by my tunelessness. For a girl who can almost play by ear, I can’t sing for crap. “What I’m trying to say is, you must know all people are just the same, no matter how they look or whether they're old or young, or gay or a different color or a difference species. You know, that kind of thing. Love and acceptance. We’re all people.”
Nick's voice was grave. “I'm not a person, Milo.”
“Neither am I. I mean, I'm not just a person. I'm energy, like you. That’s really what I believe. I’m just stuck in this body. But we’re the same.”
“Are we?”
“It's what I think.” I squeezed his hand.
“I don't know what we are.” And when he noticed me noticing his heavy moment, he stroked my cheek again. “I’m glad you’re who you are. And that I’m here with you.” He smiled slightly. “Vera hates your experience of time, but I like it. It makes me more aware of every moment.”
“You’ve got a better attitude than almost every human I know.”
He shrugged, and I sat up, disentangling from him but still holding his hand. I stroked the top of it, feeling content and full and ready to face anything. “So what's the plan now?”
“I was hoping to send Vera into Gardiner. We don’t have much food.”
“Why Vera?”
“She can manipulate her appearance.”
My heart raced. “Is the DoD nearby?”
He shook his head, opened his mouth, then shut it quickly, and I pounced. “What? Tell me, what is it?”
He sighed. “Three hours ago the state of Colorado issued an Amber Alert. For you,” he said. “Someone manipulated surveillance footage to make it seem like Vera and I kidnapped you.”
“They didn’t!”
He nodded solemnly.
“Wait—how do you know this?”
He pointed his finger up. “I can access all the data that travels by radio or satellite—and that’s a lot.”
“Wait, so you can get on the Internet right now?”
“It’s more—”
“—Complicated than that,” I said.
He smiled. “But close enough.” His face went serious. “I’m not just keeping up with the news. I’m erasing all traces for you from all government databases. I might even be able to erase memories, if Vera agrees to help.”
“You could do that?” I gaped at him.
“I think so.”
It's not like I'd forgotten the men in black were after us, but it had slipped a little on the priorities list, what with the impending alien invasion. I admit I was a little relieved that I was being portrayed as the victim in all this—until I realized that they could just kill me and call it an accident, and there would be no one to dispute their story later.
It occurred to me suddenly that if Mom thought I was kidnapped, she was probably freaking out. I had to pinch my arm to keep from crying. “So…will Vera go? Does she care if I starve?”
“I haven't asked. If you want a more filling breakfast,” he said, handing me a water bottle and a granola bar, “I'll find out.”
“When you get back, I want to hear about your plan for swaying her to the human side of things.”
About that time, we heard a loud curse, and Nick smiled. “I think she's becoming more human already.”
Nick ducked into the tent a few minutes later, shaking his head. “No go.”
I wasn’t surprised.
“She’s still being difficult,” he grumbled, and I felt not at all reassured. He pulled a Rockies cap out of his back pocket and fitted it onto his head, like he'd been wearing a baseball cap his whole life.
“Looks good.” I grinned.
“I think I like it. I’ll be back soon.”
I stood. “Let's go together.”
Nick shook his head, but I gave him a gentle shove toward the mouth of the tent. “Stay there for a second, okay? Don't leave. Promise me?”
“I promise,” he said.
I ripped through the duffel bags for props. I used four pairs of socks to stuff a giant bra, tucked my hair into a suede fedora, and attached a blond weave, letting it hang down my back like a ponytail.
When I came out, Nick's eyebrows jutted up comically. “I guess you'll be going inside.”
I smiled, giddy despite everything because, like him, I was trying to experience every moment. And every moment near him made me giddy. “Guess so.” I turned toward Vera's tent, beside the springs. “Is she in there?” He nodded. “So she's saying here?”
“Yeah.”
Can we trust her not to get up to shenanigans?
“She’ll be fine,” he assured me.
Mind reader!
I took a moment to appreciate our campsite in the early morning light. The springs, which completely surrounded us, were swathed in steam that rose up to the beautiful, pearly gray sky. For as far as I could see, there were firs and pines and rocks and patches of yellow grass. And beyond them, the mountains.
I was surprised to find myself following Nick not toward the big, white truck, but toward a beige SUV.
“Holy crap.”
He grinned. “Surprised?”
“Just a little bit.”
“It’s the same truck, I just made it look different.”
“That’s amazing.”
Nick smiled at me. “Your disguise is better.”
I laughed and flipped the extensions as he opened the door, and yes, on the inside it was the same truck.
Considering who we were and what we were doing and what we had done the day before, it felt shockingly normal being together in the car. I glanced at him as he turned us back toward the entrance to the park, guiding the wheel with deft hands. Hands that had touched me. They were nice hands: strong and capable.
I realized suddenly that I didn’t have any pictures of Nick. Nothing to help my mind hold his face once he was gone. No videos to help me remember the way he moved, or the subtle expressiveness of his eyes. I had a cellphone, but I suddenly realized it was gone.
“I don’t have my cell phone,” I said. I didn’t necessarily think about it before I said it, and I definitely didn’t mean to sound so miserable. Nick’s eyebrows jumped to the top of his forehead, and I said, “It’s just…I don’t have any pictures…of us.”
“Ah.” His face instantly matched my mood, but he tried to keep his tone easy. “Maybe I can get some surveillance stills from our former captors,” he said. “So you can remember the good times.”
“I don’t want to not have anything to remember you by.” I was dangerously close to crying.
Don’t think about that!
“We’ll get something,” he promised. “In fact, isn’t a camera something our destination might have?”
“Good point.”
> “We can take selfies.”
I smiled. “That would be funny.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I can’t even imagine what you’d look like.”
“I think like this.” And then he made his lips into the duck face that Halah loves to make, and I laughed.
“How do you even know about that?”
He tapped his head. “It’s all up here.”
“Yet you claimed to not understand my Edward reference.”
“Twi-what now?” He failed to keep from grinning, and I thought, This would be the perfect picture.
I felt desperate then. Almost overwrought. I wanted to tell him that he couldn’t go. To beg him not to. To declare that I would spend the rest of my life waiting for him to come back. Instead, I said, “Fool me twice, shame on me.”
He smiled slightly, but he could tell. He could always tell.
“Vera will come around,” he offered.
Okay, so maybe he can’t read my actual thoughts.
I nodded, pretending that was all that haunted me.
I BIT MY lip as we drove through the grassy foothills, past fields where snow was melting in soft, white sunlight.
“What do we need at the store?” I asked.
“Enough food for two more nights at least, and at least eight gallons of water.”
“That’s a lot of water.”
“Little more for Vera, because her body is a different. Little more for me, because I'm bigger. Be sure to get at least 9,000 calories for Vera and me, for a three-day period, plus a minimum 4,638 for yourself.”
I blinked, surprised that he knew exactly how many calories I needed. More than I would ever eat, I thought, feeling kind of strange about it. I wondered what Nick would think if he knew about my craziness. When I looked up from the cuticle I'd been playing with, he was looking right at me. I felt the blood rush from my cheeks.
“What's wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
One of his eyebrows arched up toward the bill of his hat. “I don’t believe you.”
“I was just thinking about something.”
“Something sad?”
“After dad died, I had…issues,” I said, shocking myself that I was actually going there. I searched Nick’s face for signs of discomfort, the kind I came to expect on my friend’s faces the few times I opened up. He raised both eyebrows, a casual invitation. I glanced out the window. “I didn’t eat enough,” I said quickly. When his face remained neutral, I went on. “I think I just...didn't know what to do about it.” I looked back over at Nick. “What I mean is, I wanted to do something about it, but there was nothing I could do. I couldn't be mad about it, because who would I be mad at? I couldn't talk to my mom too much, because she would get upset, even though she said she wouldn't; she always did. I wanted to...I don't know...make a statement. A statement to the universe that I didn't approve.” I bit my lower lip, imagining I must sound ridiculous.
It took me a second to wrangle up the nerve to look at Nick's face, even after his thumb started stroking my knuckles. When I did, his face was solemn. “I wish I had been there.”
“It was probably one of those things that was just bound to happen.” I'd always been a little funny about food. In a session with Dr. Sam, Mom mentioned I had avoided mayonnaise and candy even as a little girl.
“Do you believe that?” Nick asked seriously. “That things are bound to happen?”
I shook my head. I didn't—did I? “No. I guess not really. I don't want to, anyway. What do you think? You probably know.”
He sighed. “Not any more than you.”
“Really?”
“You’re surprised.”
“No, I—” had always kind of assumed that consciousness was headed to a better understanding of those things. “I don’t know. I guess I thought you guys would know everything.” I shrugged, feeling trite.
“There’s knowing and there’s knowing,” he said as we passed under the arch and out the park. “We know a lot about the way the universe works. But We know only what We observe, and We only observe what We need to survive. There’s plenty We don’t know. We never ask why, either.”
“Really?”
“We're good at math.” He offered. “We comprehend the equations that create existence. But nothing in our knowledge leads to understanding. It doesn’t provide…I don’t know, anything existential. That’s not what we’re after.”
My stomach rolled as we curved around the road to Gardiner. “Let's go to the little general store up here, past the bridge, on the right,” I told him. “As for the other thing...what do you mean by the equations that create existence?”
“Well…remember what I originally asked you? Whether or not things are determined to happen?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I can tell you the probability of any conceivable event occurring.”
“That’s cool.”
He shrugged. “I’m a cool guy.”
We held hands as Nick drove us past the shops of downtown Gardiner. When my anxious mind dredged up thoughts of my mom, worried beyond endurance, or of the minutes ticking by like sand in Vera's hourglass, or of the devastation I knew I’d feel the moment Nick left, I tried to focus on the scenery: jack-o-lanterns by doorsteps, shoe-polish messages on store windows, potted firs in medians, the curve of the mountains behind the town, and the egg-white sky that spread out in every direction over us, almost translucent with the cold.
“Was Annabelle really dead?” I asked, to distract from the Hitchcock birds flapping in my stomach as we rolled through traffic.
Nick shook his head. “She wasn't dead, but she had some serious arrhythmia.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “I dropped her on the bed and went into the bathroom. I saw the statue—” a statue made entirely of gold “—and had what I could only describe at the time as an out of body experience. When I came to, you were there, and she was almost dead.”
“So you, like, brought her back to life.”
“I corrected her heart’s rhythm using electricity.”
“So you’re, like, a human defibrillator.”
He shook his head, and I realized my mistake. “Well, a defibrillator masquerading as a human. A hot human,” I said, winking.
“Masquerading,” he agreed with a wary smile.
We passed a book shop and a hardware store before parking in front of the little general store. Firewood lined the sidewalk, sharing space with potted pines, snow plows, cedar rocking chairs, and license plate birdhouses.
I pushed my hair back under the fedora, neatened the wig into a perfect blond ponytail, and glanced warily at the glass door, already feeling trapped.
Nick gave my hand a little squeeze and surprised me when he pulled me close for a quick hug. “Everything is fine,” he said, passing me a credit card he’d rigged to leave no trace. “Take your time and don't be afraid to make eye contact. But don’t go out of your way to.”
“Thanks Jason,” I teased as I reached for my door's handle.
“Bourne?” he asked, and I nodded.
Nick tapped his temple with a wink, and I held an image of his silly face in my head as I slid out of the truck and stepped up the curb. I passed a man in jeans and a down jacket sweeping a few feet from the door, and I flashed him a polite smile. A cheerful bell announced my arrival, and before I got all the way inside, the delicious smell of cinnamon roasted almonds hit my nose. My stomach cramped, and I let the hunger distract me from my nerves.
When the gray-haired woman behind the counter gave me a cheery smile, I was able to smile back.
“Hello,” she chirped.
“Hi,” I said with a little wave.
“Can I help you find something?”
I almost said, 'no', but I figured asking for help wouldn’t hurt. “Just some snacks and maybe a few flashlights.”
“Right this way, dear.” Her voice was sharp, and as she smiled, lipstick rubbe
d off on her teeth. For some irrational reason, this made me think she was an undercover agent. It’s okay, I reminded myself.
The woman led me down an aisle lined with baking supplies and fix-it stuff, like nails and wrenches. Along the back wall, beside some snow blowers, was a row of flashlights.
“Here they are. For food and drink, it's the other side of the counter,” she said, pointing to the far end of the check-out counter, which had been hidden from the doorway by a giant, painted totem pole.
My stomach clenched when I noticed a TV back there, along with another, younger woman watching it.
As I reached for a hot pink flashlight with rhinestones—for Vera—the woman put her hand on my shoulder, and I nearly had a seizure.
“Are you the Bertrards' cousin? Sally, I think, from Seattle?”
I swallowed, trying to find my breath. “Um, no. I'm not.” Sketch-yyyy!
She laughed, sounding embarrassed. “Oh, well, I heard the Bertrards were having company. A pretty, tall, blonde girl. My daughter—” she said, pointing to the '40s-aged brunette sitting near the TV— “has a son about your age. We were doing a bit of match-making.”
I smiled, and tried to sound laid back and friendly. “My name is Ruthie.”
“Well nice to meet you, Ruthie. I'll leave you to your business,” she said, chuckling as she headed back to her spot behind the counter.
“Thanks for the help.” I grabbed two flashlights, then, in a panic, two more; no news reports would mention four fugitives—although, I realized, it wouldn’t mention three, either, since I was officially an abductee.
I snorted at that and walked back down the aisle. I found several disposable cameras at the end and grabbed the most expensive. Then I followed my nose to the source of the almond smell: a hooded buffet counter, near where the first woman’s supposed daughter was flipping through a Redbook.
“Oh, wow. I need some of the cinnamon stuff,” I said with my brightest smile.
Yeah, it would cost me a few minutes, but Nick had said to act natural, and I hearted sugared almonds hard.
The brunette’s smile looked like her mother’s. “Anything else?”