Mosquitoland(28)

All inquiries related to the lost lipstick have been stonewalled with questions like this. Do I like the color yellow? Do I like sausage? Do I like dinosaurs? It’s a preference marathon, and I’m slowly wearing down.

“I don’t know, Walt. Sure.”

Sports is a thing, and I recognize that—but it is not my thing. Football, basketball, soccer, and yes, hockey, all seem beyond pointless. Baseball, however, I get. Or at least, I don’t not get. Back before the BREAKING NEWS, it was one of the few things Mom and Dad and I all enjoyed. Something about the narrative of the sport, I think, is what we found appealing: the unique personality of each player and team; the intricate strategies based on who’s at bat, who’s on base, and who’s pitching; the minutiae, the inches, the history. Plus, it’s relaxing. Three hours a day on a well-manicured field—I guess my family idealized that kind of idle recreation, as we rarely encountered anything like it within our own home. I never had a favorite team, but I know enough about baseball to know that the Cubs have pretty much the worst luck of any team in all of professional sports. Like, in the history of History, no team has ever been as unlucky as the Chicago Cubs.

“You wanna go to a game?” asks Walt, a look of pure excitement on his face. “We should eat first, but then we could go to a game. If we can get tickets.” He raises his index finger in the air like he’s had a profound idea. “We have to have tickets, though. Tickets.”

As the hour passes, traffic thins to an occasional car or semi careening into the sinking sun. We follow in kind, on the margins of the highway, the oddest of couples.

“So, Walt—I wouldn’t be mad or anything, you know? If you took the lipstick. I just need it back. It’s really important.”

“The shiny lipstick?” he says.

I glance sideways at him, wondering if he knows he just gave himself away. “Yeah, Walt. It’s got some shiny on it.”

He nods. “No, I don’t have it.”

Just as I wonder what it would take to physically search the kid, he hops over the nearby guardrail and disappears into the adjacent woods. “This way, Mim!”

Back under the bridge, for just a moment, the option to continue my trip sans war paint had been just that—an option. But no longer. The thought of moving on without it, when I know exactly where it is . . .

Ahead, the pink sun becomes a dingy crimson, and soon, it will fade entirely. I sigh and turn back toward the shadowy woods. “Curiouser and curiouser,” I whisper. And with the daring temperament of Alice herself, I climb the guardrail and follow my white rabbit into the trees.





17


Firework Thoughts

A DIALOGUE OF dead leaves underfoot; our social cues, like twiggy trees kaput. This conversation of a wood at night; so different from a highway during light.

Stop thinking in f*cking iambic pentameter, Malone.

I follow Walt, the peculiar wayfarer, uphill. After twenty minutes or so, the ground begins to level a bit. Five minutes later, the trees diminish, and I suddenly understand a lot more about the kid’s situation.

In the middle of a circular clearing, a ragged blue tent stands like an emphysema patient; its withering canvas is bent, torn, faded, and ripped. Beside a dead campfire, a cornucopia of pots and pans pours out of an overturned milk crate. Wet T-shirts dangle from bony branches around the edges of the clearing advertising roofing companies, church soccer leagues, and obscure rock bands.

A shallow pit full of feces permeates the clearing from ten yards away. I don’t know whether I’m relieved or terrified by the box of toilet paper next to it.

Never, I think, raising my shirt collar up over my nose. Not in a million years. Literally, one million. I would hold it for a million years.

“It’s my land, New Chicago,” says Walt, disappearing inside his tent.

Putting some distance between the shit pit and myself, I climb atop a boulder the size of a Smart Car. What with my depth perception, it takes a few tries, but I manage eventually. Far below, the occasional flickering headlight is the only sign of human life. It certainly feels isolated up here, like some post-apocalyptic zombie movie. Through the thinning fall trees, I squint my good eye until the headlights blur into luminous stars, cosmic proof of the outside world; it spins and spins, ignorant of more than just this kid’s mountaintop campsite—it’s ignorant of the kid himself. I know this is true, because the Subaru lady didn’t stop for Walt. She stopped for me.

“Ready to swim?”

Walt looks up at me with wide-eyed enthusiasm. He’s shirtless now, holding a flashlight and sporting a pair of cutoff daisy dukes. The Cubs hat and the green Chucks he’s still wearing, as well as that infectious smile that sets my heart aflame. It’s the same smile my dad and I used when we made waffles, only Walt’s is magnified somehow, like I-don’t-know-what . . . the Belgian waffle version or something.

“Here,” he says, offering a wad of denim. “My backup pair.”

Hopping down from the boulder, I take the shorts and hold them out in front of me. They’re a little wide in the waist, and far shorter than any shorts I’ve ever worn.

Walt throws his finger in the air, spins on his heels. “This way to my pool!”

He stomps through the woods, bare-chested, peach-fuzzed, and pale-thighed, laughing his ass off, throwing that index finger in the air, and I have to give it to him—this kid has absolutely nothing in the world to call his own, and look how happy he is. No family? No friends? No home? No sweat. Hey, hey, he’s Walt, and he’s alive, and that’s enough. In light of his situation, my problems suddenly seem brazenly adolescent. Like a spoiled child crossing her arms and demanding some expensive new toy.