I am out of breath, wheezing a little bit, running with this unusual-looking boy who joined me just past Grandma’s trailer. He is apparently one of the neighbors, and it must be that boy they told me about.
The kid has this weird skin condition. He’s all wrinkled, like an alligator except more rumpled in a human flesh kind of way. He has pitch-black long and floppy skater hair, and he’s wearing a faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt, which I guess kind of goes well with old-man skin.
“Queenie Grace, she’ll run toward the lake,” the boy says, panting. “I saw her take off.”
Luckily, there isn’t much time for me to stare, or to ask any questions. We’re actually way too busy running to be awkward. You don’t have much time to be shy when you’re on the trail (or tail) of a runaway elephant.
We run and run, quiet except for our shoes and our breath, through the trailer park with its glitzy Christmas decorations. Nothing more disorienting than Santa and reindeer and gigantic inflatable snowmen when it’s sunny and seventy-five degrees.
I’m wheezing worse, with that tight-chest feeling I sometimes get. My heart is a crazy thing, and it’s like invisible fingers are choking my throat. The boy is breathing hard, too. We run in pretty much the same rhythm, as if we’ve practiced, slapping the baking macadam as we run around potholes and big jagged stones.
“Watch that hole,” the kid gasps, and I swerve around a big dip that might go clear to China. A few people stare, but I don’t care. Nobody knows me here.
“Hey, Henry Jack!” croaks an old man, but we just keep going.
We pound out of the trailer park, past the giant boot statue, and now we are running on the real road: yellow lines and blue sky and signs. Plus cars. Dad would have a conniption if he knew this.
“There she is!” huffs the boy, and we both skid to a stop by the side of the road.
Queenie Grace looms between green trees just off the right side of the road, drinking from a lake. Cars are stopping, and shocked people are going wild with surprise. All I see are cell phones, held up, clicking pictures. All I hear are voices, saying the same thing: “Elephant!”
Queenie Grace stops drinking, swings her head for a glimpse of the road, and then starts to run. I can feel the thunder of her weight shaking the earth from here. We’ll never catch her. She’s a wild animal and she’s going to go where she wants to go, do what she wants to do. Run if she wants to run.
“Queenie Grace!” calls the boy. “Wait. Please stop! Wait for us!”
She does. The elephant stops in her tracks, remains frozen in place.
“I . . . can’t . . . believe . . . she . . . listened,” I say, panting, bending forward and trying to catch my breath. I look up at the boy beside me.
The boy smiles, which is quite a sight when his face is a human map of crinkles and ruts in his skin. It’s as if his entire face turns into a crumpled-up piece of paper that some little kid scribbled on.
“This elephant always listens to me,” the boy says. “We’re like that.” He crosses his middle finger over his index finger in that way of wishing for something lucky.
We take off again, but not nearly as fast, and when we finally arrive by the side of the patiently waiting elephant, we stop again to catch our breath. Queenie Grace just stands there, like this is any old normal day, and without thinking, I lay my hand against her. She is warm, almost like an enormous friendly dog. I leave my hand there for a few seconds, letting it sink in: I am touching an elephant. My. Hand. Is. On. The. Elephant.
“She stopped because she totally knows me,” says the boy. He leans his forehead against the elephant for a few seconds, as if he’s pressing away a headache. Or maybe he’s just extremely relieved.
“Wonder why she ran away,” he says. “She never does that.”
“Well, they chained her up to this tree last night,” I reply. “She broke a window and she stole my peanuts and cut her trunk. See, she has a bandage? Then this morning, while we were opening presents, all you heard was her crying and throwing fits. By the time it was dinner, she just broke loose, I guess.”
“Wow,” says the boy. “They chained her? They never chain her!”
I shrug. “Maybe she deserved it. Like being grounded. She was bad, you know. Like now they have to fix the window and all.”
The kid shakes his head.
“Queenie Grace is awesome,” he says, turning his head to look at me. “She’s always awesome. We’re best friends, Queenie Grace and me. We’ve known each other since we—I—was born. Queenie Grace used to rock my cradle with her trunk.”
“I was afraid of her when I was a baby. Actually, I still am.”
“You might as well be afraid of the sky,” says the boy. “It’s way more likely that you’d get hurt by the sky than get hurt by Queenie Grace.”
The kid’s skin is as wrinkled as the elephant’s, and he’s quite comfortable keeping his cheek pressed against her side. The elephant swings her head to look back at him and she almost seems to smile, then she reaches her trunk over and hugs his shoulders with it. It’s a surprising moment, and I melt a little bit inside, kind of like when you’re watching a movie with a sweet scene and the background music tells you to feel the feelings.
“I’ve known this elephant all my life,” says the boy. “More than twelve years. By the way, my name’s Henry Jack. Henry Jack O’Toole, otherwise known as the Alligator Boy. I was part of the Twins with Alligator Skin, but now it’s just me.”
“So where is the other one?”
“He died,” says Henry Jack O’Toole, all matter-of-fact. “Sometimes people with this condition don’t live too long.”
“Oh.” I never know what to say to something like that.
“See, when you work with the circus, they like to make a big deal about skin,” Henry Jack says. He steps back from Queenie Grace and flips his hair away from his face by throwing his head back like a rock star.
“Like there’s Elephant Skin and Rubber Skin and Elastic Skin and Armadillo Skin and Butterfly Skin. But really, skin is just skin. It comes in different colors, and random states of wrinkled-ness, but really it’s all the same. It just covers what’s underneath, the important stuff, the organs and the bones and the heart and the soul.”
I nod, look down at the elephant’s monstrous feet, take a few steps back. It’s so quiet here by the water, under the trees, that I can almost hear her tail swishing back and forth, and I definitely hear elephant breath. Sometimes it sounds like snoring. Plus my own whistling-wheezing breathing. Not that I need my inhaler, not yet.
“So you’re Lily, right?” asks Henry Jack. “Lily Rose. I remember seeing you with Bill, in West Virginia.”
“Yes. I’m Lily Pruitt. Bill was my grandpa.”
“I know. I’m really sorry about him. About your grandpa.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“And, oh yeah! You rode Queenie Grace into the big top in West Virginia! I remember she was running like crazy!”
“I’m never doing that again,” I say. “I did it for my grandpa.”
“I remember him talking about you,” says Henry Jack. “He always called you ‘Lily Rose.’ And he talked about you, like, all the time. Bill bragged about you nonstop.”
“Really?”
“Sure.” Henry Jack pulls his T-shirt away from his body, fanning himself, and I catch a glimpse of wrinkled belly skin.
“What did he say?”
“Just stuff about how wonderful his perfect granddaughter is, all that.”
“Huh,” I say. “Well, I’m far from perfect, but maybe he really thought that I was. He is—was—so nice.”
“I know. Bill was so freaking cool. I could not even believe it when I heard. I still can’t.”
“I know, right?”
We’re so caught up in our conversation that I realize I’m kind of forgetting about the elephant, and the fact that the three of us are in this together. So I stretch my arm out and touch her again, carefully, two fingers, just to remind myself that she is here. That she is real.
Queenie Grace just stands there, patient, swaying her trunk and shifting her weight from side to side. Through the trees, I can see that a few cars remain stopped along the road; people must still be gawking.
“Well, I guess we’d better get this runaway elephant back home,” I say. “Before people call the police or shoot at her or something.”
“If anybody shoots at Queenie Grace,” says Henry Jack, “they are going to have to get through me first. I would take a bullet for this girl.”
“Seriously?” I say. “That’s cool. Well, not that you would be shot . . . but that you can love an elephant so much.”
Henry Jack O’Toole pats the elephant, looks up into her right eye, and talks soft and low.
“Come on, sweetheart,” he says. “We’re taking you home.”