Bugs and spiders, up and down my spine.
Something beyond weird was happening. I couldn’t even seem to find any words to talk about it, and I guess neither could Jack, because he just sat there, gaping at my sketch.
The silence stretched out, and then Jack looked at me kind of wild-eyed and blurted out, “How did she get here?”
Like I would know. But as I thought about it, I answered slowly, “You know, I’m not sure she was here—not the way you mean. She was sort of floating over the river, and she didn’t seem to see anything around her.” I paused, wondering whether to add the part about her saying his name, and decided that would just freak him out. More, I mean. “Maybe I just somehow saw her,” I finished lamely.
“But who is she? Why am I going there? Why are you seeing her?” Jack’s elbows were on his knees, and he dropped his head into his hands. “None of this makes any fucking sense.”
Resourceful Take-Charge Lucy didn’t have a clue what to do. So I said the first thing that came into my head. “Let’s just go through the whole thing from the start, everything you can remember, and maybe…” I trailed off because I couldn’t actually come up with anything this might accomplish.
But it seemed to make Jack feel better. “I was in math class,” he began.
I hadn’t got very far into telling Lucy about my first Weird Encounter when she stopped me.
“She was selling matches?”
“Yeah. I asked her name, and she looked at me like I was a moron and said, I’m the match girl.”
“Oh my god, it’s the Little Match Girl!”
“Is that supposed to mean something?”
“You know, ‘The Little Match Girl’! The story?” She looked at me, all expectation, and got nothing but a blank. Reconsidered. “No. I guess when I think about it, it’s probably not common kids’ knowledge.”
“So what’s it about?”
“It’s old—kind of a fairy tale, I guess. It gave me nightmares when I was a kid.”
Of course it did. Too much to hope that it would be a nice story. “You better tell me about it.”
Lucy hesitated, glanced at her watch and said, “It’s just five. If we leave right now, we can catch the bus back to my place. I’m pretty sure I still have the book. I think we should read it.”
I was on my feet before she’d finished talking. I wanted to see the book, yes, but I also wanted to get out of the house. I wasn’t sure where everyone was, but I knew at least some of them would be back for dinner—and I was so not ready to talk to anyone but Lucy.
I scrawled a note, and we hustled out the door. Buses don’t run too often in this town, and the routes are often pretty roundabout. Luckily, Lucy and I lived at opposite ends of the same route. We jogged the two blocks to Riverside and then stood around for ten minutes, wondering if the bus was late or if we’d missed it. “They’re always late this time of day,” said Lucy, and, sure enough, it came lumbering into view. We didn’t talk at all for the entire ride north along the river. It’s like we were just holding the interrupted conversation in our heads, waiting to pick it up again.
Lucy lived on a street full of tiny one-story brick houses, strung together in pairs or foursomes. They weren’t really old, like my house, but the trees were pretty big, and the houses had grown distinguishing features like front porches and back additions.
Lucy’s house had a bright-blue front door and a small concrete stoop. Inside, it was tidy but sort of bare. Of course, I was used to the debris of four people—including two slobby boys—so probably it was just normal. Lucy led me straight to her room.
It was way different there. The walls were covered in her artwork—lots of sketches and a few finished paintings that I’d have loved to spend time really looking at. Clothes and books were scattered around. A hand-lettered sign on her dresser mirror said BE WHO YOU ARE. I bent to take a look at the photos on the dresser while Lucy rummaged in a bookshelf. There was one of Lucy at about five, between her mom and dad, holding their hands while they swung her in the air. She looked like a little elf child with her big eyes and heart-shaped face and swirl of dark hair. They all looked happy.
“Here it is.” Lucy sat on the bed with an old hardcover book and flipped pages. I squeezed in beside her. She still smelled like fresh air and leaves, and all I really wanted was to kiss her neck and hold her against me and feel her shoulder bones, like little wings, under my hands. I felt a sudden flare of anger that the memory of our first kiss would always be eclipsed by the weirdness that happened next.
“Okay, ‘The Little Match Girl,’ by Hans Christian Andersen.” Lucy laid the book in my lap, open at an illustration of a young girl in ragged clothing, standing on a dark, snowy street. It didn’t look exactly like my Match Girl, but I recognized the scene, all right, and it spooked me enough that I forgot about Lucy’s neck.
“Andersen…that’s my mom’s last name.”
“Really?” Lucy shot me a quick glance. “He wrote tons of famous fairy tales. This one though—it’s pretty dark.”
We read through it together, and when we were done I just shook my head. “He wrote that for kids? No wonder you had nightmares.”
Lucy snorted. “I guess we’re supposed to be all happy she got her reward in heaven. But really, it’s a story about a poor abused girl who freezes to death while rich people ignore her.”
Then we went quiet, each of us, I guess, trying to put the story together with the Match Girl I’d met and find some kind of answer there. It was impossible.
And then I went low. I didn’t notice at first—I was feeling too weird already to notice I was feeling weird—but I clued in when my fingers started trembling. Then that starving-but-pukey wave rolled through me. I groped in my pocket for my glucose, stuffed three sugar tablets into my mouth and pulled out my meter. I could feel the sweat standing out on my forehead now—never a good sign. I tested at 2.7, low enough to make me a bit loopy. With everything that had gone on, I realized, I hadn’t tested or eaten anything since lunch. I popped another sugar tab.
“Jack? You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m just low.” I tried to smile reassuringly though I felt like crap. “I’ll be okay, but I should eat something more than sugar. You got anything like crackers and peanut butter?”
By the time she ran back with a sleeve of Premium Plus and a jar of PB, I was already perking up. “Sorry if I scared you. It doesn’t usually take me by surprise like that.” I felt like I could inhale the entire contents of a fridge, but I’d probably given Lucy enough excitement for one day. I made four cracker-and-peanut-butter sandwiches and resisted the urge to cram them all into my mouth at the same time.
At least Jack going low broke the spell, or we might have sat there, baffled, on the bed forever.
“Let’s make dinner,” I suggested. “At least, if I can find anything to make.” It was Thursday. My mom usually shops on Friday, her day off, so the cupboards were pretty bare.
We found decent salad fixings, odds and ends of vegetables, a frozen ham (when did my mother think we would ever eat such a big ham?) and two frozen blocks of tofu. I looked at them glumly. “I bought three of these because I thought I should eat more vegetarian,” I confessed, “but I don’t really know what to do with it.”
I’d choked my way through a stir-fry dotted with tasteless white blobs and given up. I looked in the cupboard where we keep the canned stuff. “There might be some tomato sauce in here—there’s always spaghetti.” I was embarrassed—here was Jack at my house for the first time, and I couldn’t even make him a decent dinner. His kitchen was always full of food.
But he pulled the tofu out of the freezer. “This is good,” he said. “We’ve got onions, peppers, some other stuff—I’m thinking tofu scramble. You got potatoes? Maybe with hash browns and salad?” He caught my look. “My mother was vegetarian for years—haven’t you noticed what a total ex-hippie she is? Not even ex. We eat vegetarian a lot.” He was rummaging in the fridge, pulling out ingredients. “How about I do the tofu, and you do the rest?”
We set to work. He asked for maple syrup and limes (which we didn’t have), garlic and soy sauce and brown sugar (which we did). He nuked the tofu, squeezed it till it bled a bunch of clear liquid into the sink and sliced it up. Then he whipped up this brown concoction, set the tofu to soak in it and started chopping onions. I just watched him, sort of entranced. I’d never realized how sexy a man wielding a kitchen knife could be. Jack paused and glanced up, as if he could feel my eyes on him, and my face flushed. You’d think I’d been caught peeping at him in the shower. Ridiculous.
“Um, right, potatoes,” I muttered and busied myself washing and peeling. “How do you do hash browns—cut them up really small and fry them?”
“Sure. Unless there’s something else you want to do?”
So polite, not wanting to take over. I smiled and dropped a little curtsy. “Nope. I’m happy to take orders here.”
I chopped up the potatoes and set them frying with a sprinkle of the onions. Then I asked Jack to walk me through the tofu, and he told me about marinating it so it takes on some flavor.
We had so much fun cooking together. Studiously ignoring what had happened before, we just concentrated on playing house. I ripped up lettuce, and Jack fried the vegetables and tofu together, then poured some of the leftover marinade over the pan.
It was so yummy—the tofu salty and sweet and a bit crispy on the outside, all mixed in with the onions and peppers.
“To the chef.” I held up my water glass and we clinked.
“Merci, Mademoiselle. Tu es charmante.” He laid it on with a thick accent, then grinned. “Actually, I can only cook about three other things. It’s lucky you didn’t ask me to make the ham.”