In Her Skin(18)

“Cool,” I whisper, because this seems like a place where you whisper. But really, I don’t want to wake up those puppets. “It’s like they’re not even on strings.”

“It’s an illusion. If you did cut their strings, they’d collapse,” you say.

You have a soft spot for these puppets, and I’m a sucker for soft. I cannot imagine having affection for anything so creepy, and it puts me in mind of Keloid Kurt, a scarred dude in Tent City who kept a mangy pet rat that he would stroke and coo at. Because I am smart, I see you are trying to tell me you feel like a puppet with that pressure to be perfect, with your parents controlling the strings, and I am moved.

“They’re really cool, Temple. Thanks for showing them to me.”

“Do you want to see how they’re made?”

You also like to teach, and I am guessing Vivi liked to be taught. Living in someone else’s skin is a lot easier when I’m being led.

“Yeah, totally.”

We leave the room of the wooden undead, and there are official-looking visitors who probably know the room is off-limits, so we have to hang and pretend we had special permission to be in there. You drop to the floor, crisscross applesauce, and ask me to dictate notes to you about the puppets, and I’m left making things up like, “The floating ghost-skeleton is approximately twelve inches in height and represents man’s inhumanity to man,” as the visitors look on, impressed. I am pulling this out of my butt, something I read in a book once, and they nod and smile. You hang your face over your keyboard and try not to laugh. The visitors lose interest and leave.

“Impressive. You don’t sound like someone who missed years of school stuck in a shed,” you say, throwing your laptop into its bag and zipping it fast, but before I can stress about my carelessness you grab my elbow and drag me into the next dark room, laughing, fumbling for the switch. When the lights go up, we are in Frankenstein’s laboratory. Headless wooden bodies lie in lines on a worktable. One has holes at the tops of its thighs, and we peek inside. There are sharp tools, crude mechanical tools, and something that looks like a vise. This is where the magic happens. Men should not play with dolls, and although you’re supposed to think tinker, I am thinking torture, and I have no need to be in this room longer than necessary.

“They’re harder to control than they look,” you say. I wonder how much time you have spent playing with puppets, but it makes sense, since you’ve got the kind of rich family that would be big on expensive, “classic” toys.

“I bet.” It sounds stupid and way overboard and you look at me and burst out laughing.

“Not that I’ve spent much time playing with puppets,” you say.

“Not that I’ve spent that much time playing,” I add, and it’s okay to say that, because even if it’s because I’ve been working cons my whole life, it could also be because I spent half my life in a shed.

You just think I’m being funny.

“Not that I would play with freaky wooden puppets if I could,” you say.

“Not that those freaky wooden puppets wouldn’t spring to life and attack you if you did,” I say.

“Not that that’s not exactly what happened to this Dwiggins dude,” you say.

“Not that that’s not exactly the way the Dwiggins dude wanted it to go down,” I say.

“We’re not being respectful.”

“You’re right. Rest in peace, puppet master. May you always feel a cool wooden hand on your back…”

“And the tug of a string at your shoulder.”

“Nice! Amen.”

“Amen.” Your eyes go flat. “When did you get so funny, Vivi Weir?”

My throat catches. “I’ve had some time to work on my material.”

You hold your stomach and wag your finger at me. “Very nice!” You check your watch. “We better go. After you.”

We are becoming easy in each other’s spaces, and this is special. You shut off the light and the door slams behind us. We laugh as we make our way back through the near-empty halls and it gets louder as we get closer to the bigger rooms where the unspecial people flock to so they can check stuff off their unspecial, touristy lists.

We huddle together as we head for the Copley Square train stop, and it is early for friendly huddling, but what the heck, I go for it. Though you are tall and Y-shaped where I am small and on the scrappy side, we fit nicely together, and you smell less like clean and more like candy. You pass me a stick of black licorice. Black licorice reminds me of the NyQuil one of Momma’s boyfriends sipped when he had the shakes, but I’ve never tried it, and if there was ever a time to try new things, it’s now. I chew, thinking how the library was my old safe place, a habit. I don’t need it as my safe place anymore, and it’s time for new habits, like eating black licorice. You duck down the subway stairs. I turn to look at the library, the stick of licorice flopping from my mouth, when I hear it.

“Jo!”

I freeze. My mouth falls open. The licorice drops.

Wolf rises. He was sitting on the library steps as I walked down. I must have strolled right past him. And now I know that I did; he was the boy my eyes saw but my mind didn’t, with his face hidden in his knees and his sneaker tapping. Now I see his eyes are shaded gray and he is in a bad way, on or off something.