Two years of heading to the same seat at the same cafeteria table had her legs operating with the muscle memory that guided her to Amputator, Hangman’s Noose, and the other traps each Sunday. Though it wasn’t unusual for other students to greet her on her way to Monica’s table, it was jarring to have one cry out with such unbridled enthusiasm.
“Liv! Sit here!”
It was Bruno Mayorga. Her feet froze to her square of tile. No one, especially not a new kid, dared broadcast such a naked appeal—it could so easily be dashed. Liv glanced at her regular table. Only Darla and Phil had noticed the situation, and they both chuckled at her predicament. When she looked back at Bruno, he was already scooting over, making room. Others near him, a hodgepodge of kids who fit nowhere else, inchwormed down the bench. Feeling like every eye in school was on her, she walked over and cautiously lowered herself beside Bruno. She kept her spine rigid, a signal that she wasn’t getting comfortable.
“It’s me! Bruno!”
“I remember,” she said. “Three sisters, three dogs.”
He gestured at her tray. “What you got there?”
Liv stared down. Most of the cross-country team brought lunches from home, healthy menus advocated by Coach Carney. The majority, though, had parents preparing those lunches, or at least reliably buying the raw materials. On that front, Liv never knew what to expect; it was easier to roll the roulette wheel of cafeteria offerings.
“I believe they call this chef’s salad,” she said.
“Is that a side of fried cheese?”
“Probably.” She glanced at the brown paper bag spread before him, the scatterings of shredded cheese and salsa. “Taco?”
“Torta. Pork, avocado, peppers. Smells good, huh?”
Liv nodded. The morsels had a clean, sharp aroma that sliced through the cafeteria’s meaty stink. She checked her usual table. Darla and Phil had moved on to feeding each other French fries, but Krista made eye contact, giving Liv an inquisitive, amused look. Liv replied with the mildest of head shakes—I’ll explain later—before Bruno reclaimed her attention.
“Where’s Doug?”
Liv frowned at him. “Doug?”
“He doesn’t eat with you? Oh, I guess that makes sense.”
“He’s never here at lunch. I guess he goes outside.”
“Tell him he can sit with me. I’m not picky.”
“I don’t really talk to him that much. But okay.” She tried to imagine actually extending this offer to Doug next Sunday. He’d be embarrassed at his unpopularity being called out and ridicule the idea. Still, it was rare to hear so friendly an entreaty. Liv softened her voice. “I told you in Baldwin’s class you were nice.”
“Baldwin’s class.” Bruno whistled. “I’ve been to a lot of schools, Liv Fleming, and I have never, ever seen a student take it to a teacher like that. One hour you’re rescuing Doug Monk, the next you pull that? Eres una chica loca.”
“Don’t get too excited. It was probably my last stand. I have to meet with Principal Gamble after school.”
“What’s your beef with Oliver!?”
Liv stabbed her salad like she might a sworn enemy, stuffed a forkful into her mouth, and chewed it while giving Bruno a flat look. She knew what was happening here. Bruno raised both hands guiltily. His hands were large, with long, articulate fingers. He noticed salsa on one of them and nibbled it off.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll admit I’ve heard some things. Okay, lots of things. But there are parts of it that just can’t be true.”
“So you want the news straight from the source.” She grabbed her tray and started to stand. “At least you’re upfront about it.”
Bruno rested one of his large hands on the edge of her tray.
“That’s not why I asked you to sit here. We don’t have to talk about it. Look, let’s draw up a formal agreement never to talk about it. It can just be this big, mysterious thing sitting between us for all of eternity.”
Liv laughed at the preposterous but flattering notion that this guy she barely knew was already planning for eternity, and that she was part of the plan. She glanced at her usual table, and this time it was Monica who had fixed her eyes on her—not a good sign. Monica had on her most unbothered expression, which meant that she was plenty bothered.
But it had been a hell of a first couple of days of school. Liv was aware that if there was a pecking order in her group, she was at the bottom of it, but she didn’t feel like thinking about it. She yielded to the gentle pressure of Bruno’s hand on her tray and sat. She stared down at her unappetizing food and pushed a sigh from her chest. If the sigh was deep enough, perhaps it would expel the toxins that made this topic so poisonous.
“What, exactly,” she asked, “did you hear?”
For the first time, Bruno looked less than confident. He winced, probably only now realizing the sorts of things he would need to say aloud, and exhaled in a blast, like this was hard on him, not her. That should have rankled Liv, but instead she hid a small smile.
“I heard your dad had some … strange experiences he worked into the play.”
“You could say that.”
Bruno put one of his sharp elbows on the table so he could face her more directly. “What I don’t get is that, from what I heard, everyone knew something was wrong with him. Not just the drama kids. People told me he was just talking about his Oliver! plans right in the middle of class. I don’t see how—”
“How no one did anything to stop it?”
Bruno gestured his confusion on this point. Liv had lost her appetite, but she picked up her knife just to have something to wield; it made her feel safer entering into this dialogue.
“I guess everyone had a clue. Just no one pulled it all together. I can’t blame anyone. My mom and I didn’t do any better. I heard things, for sure. How he was talking weird in class. How he’d stand up and just walk out of school. I know how it sounds. Like, how could we not have done something?”
“No, I get it,” Bruno said. “You only know how hard things are when they actually happen to you. Everything’s complicated. No matter what you do, it’s always going to hurt someone.”
It was the most sensitive statement Liv believed she’d heard spoken by a teenage boy. Everything’s complicated—was there a truer, more graceful summation of life? Liv nodded, noting she was being too enthusiastic but unable to restrain herself. Speaking honestly about her dad was the rarest of things.
“So then he disappeared for four days,” she said. “There were search parties and APBs. It was scary. But then he came back.”
“Naked in the park. Everyone mentions that.”
Liv screwed the point of her knife into the tabletop. “He acted normal at the hospital. Ashamed and embarrassed, all that. But the second he got home, that’s when it got bad. He told us the truth. What he thought was the truth.”
“Which was…?”
Liv narrowed her eyes at Bruno. She didn’t trust the gleam in his eyes. Her story wasn’t a torta. So she kept the full answer for herself, as the awful scene screened in her mind. She remembered coming home with her dad and how she’d expected him to retreat to his bedroom as the implications of the town-square event hit him. Instead, he’d marched about the house, unplugging or removing batteries from communications devices—the TV, the computers, the shower radio—while John padded after him in jubilant fascination. Aggie perched on the edge of the sofa, winded by the flutter of activity. Liv took a chair, worried her knees would buckle from the press of descending doom.
Had her father actually said everything Liv recalled that he’d said? She felt like she could recite his rant verbatim.
I was in the woods. I couldn’t even tell you where. There was a place, like a clearing. And tubes—two giant tubes. I think these tubes suctioned me up. That part is confusing. It felt like I was going downward, into the earth, because it was cold. But I know I was going up. It was so dark up there. Their eyes aren’t like ours. They only need a little illumination to see. And it was cramped. I didn’t expect that. Something comes from that far away, you’d think their ship would be gigantic, but it was small. It makes sense if you think about it. Think about our space capsules and space shuttles. All those little astronaut tunnels. No wasted space. That’s what it was like. Like they couldn’t fit past each other fast enough to get to me. But they did.
Who? Aggie had asked, and Lee’s answer was all that Liv gave to Bruno:
“Aliens.”
Bruno nodded in sage confirmation. “The skinnies.”
Liv looked away from the sawdust the knife had dug from the table to give Bruno a reappraisal. He sounded genuine enough. But Lee Fleming had sounded genuine, too.
“Skinners,” Liv corrected. “That’s what he called them. He said they had blue, wrinkled skin they’d shed every day. There were a few specific skinners he was obsessed with.”
She set down the knife.
“Don’t you want to know who they were?”
Bruno registered her darkened tone.
“Yeah.” He sounded hesitant. “I guess?”
Liv sniffed and realized her nose was runny, which meant she was close to crying for the second time in two days. What was wrong with her? She crashed onward, trying to outpace the sob. “Because to me, it’s the worst part. I mean, anyone can get sick and see little green men. They’re in all the UFO movies. But the skinners he dreamed up? He was really sick, you know? Really, really, really sick.”
“Hey, let’s stop,” Bruno said.
But her voice was growing louder. “There was the Whistler. When the skinners were doing experiments on him, Dad said the Whistler stood out of view, whistling. That was weird because, guess what? Skinners don’t have mouths.”
“C’mon.” He was looking around in concern. “Stop.”
Louder now, losing control. “Then there was the Floating Pumpkin. This big, orange orb that floated over his body during experiments. He thought it emitted anesthetic rays. Oh, and the Green Man. The Green Man was the scariest one of all. Dad thought maybe the Green Man was what a skinner looked like after it shed its final skin. The Green Man was ten feet tall and just stood there, reaching for him with big green fingers.”
“Enough, all right? I’m sorry I made you talk about it.”
“But we haven’t even gotten to your question. We haven’t even gotten to the play.”
“That’s okay. I get it. He jammed all this stuff into Oliver! and it was weird. Right? Look, that fried cheese isn’t going to eat itself.”
“But you think that’s the point of the story. How weird it all was. You probably heard all sorts of stuff about the play. The orphans wearing big, blue smocks—skinners, check. An orange disco ball—Floating Pumpkin, check. A huge green stripe down the stage—the Green Man, check. What else? Oh, how by the end of act one, all the actors were holding each other and crying. Does that about cover it?”
Bruno’s regret had given way to a less charitable look. She was on the offense now, for no good reason, and they both knew it. Liv swiped the napkin from her tray.
“Is any of that true?” Bruno asked.
Liv blew her nose. “Some of it.”
“Well, I’m sorry.”
“The point,” Liv snapped, staring through swollen eyes, “is that it wasn’t a play. It was a crack in my dad’s head, and we were all staring inside it instead of helping him. Everyone knew Dad wasn’t okay, but we all let the play happen anyway. Because they already sold tickets? Because me and Mom hoped it would set everything straight? We were so stupid.”
“You didn’t know what to do. It was a new situation.”
“Gamble did. He stopped the play.”
“Principal Gamble?”
If there was a bearable part of the story, this was it. Liv embraced it, because it signaled the end.
“He went up onstage and made the orchestra stop, and when my dad came out all mad, Gamble just … he put a hand on Dad’s shoulder, and he said, ‘Lee.’ And I know it sounds stupid, but it was like he was saying goodbye. Goodbye from everyone. And Dad knew it. He walked off the stage real slow. Someone lowered the curtain. It took a hundred years. I remember thinking that curtain would never make it, and I’d have to stare forever right into my dad’s broken brain.”
Liv threw her wadded napkin into her salad and pressed her palms into her eyes. She had a sense that Bruno’s hands were near, one at her elbow, one at her back, but he probably hesitated, uncertain if he knew her well enough to touch her. He did not, Liv told herself, and she stood up, her thighs walloping the table hard enough to rattle cutlery. Talking had been a mistake. Maybe secrets didn’t go away with words after all; maybe words were the invocation to bring them back from the dead. Baldwin’s Oliver! would perform this rite on a scale Liv didn’t want to imagine.
She glared down at him. “So now what? You’re still going to try out for the play, aren’t you?”
Bruno blinked up at her, his brown eyes wide and injured, because he was, of course he was. To make a stand against a frivolous school musical would not affect a thing. Right then, when Liv should have been her most upset, her brain betrayed her: She did wish, quite suddenly, that those lovely hands of Bruno’s had settled on her elbow and back while she was still within reach, no matter what Monica might mutter to the gang when she saw it.