He kept jumping up. “Bunnatine. Let go.” He grabbed her wrist and yanked her off. She made herself as heavy as possible. The ground rushed up at them and she twisted, hard. Fell out of his arms.
“Bunnatine!” he said.
She caught herself a foot before she smacked into the ruins of the Yellow Brick Road.
“I’m fine,” she said, hovering. But she was better than fine! How beautiful it was from down here, too.
He looked so anxious. “God, Bunnatine, I’m sorry.” It made her want to laugh to see him so worried. She put her feet down gently. The whole world was made of glass, and the glass was full of champagne, and Bunnatine was a bubble, just flicking up and up and up.
She said, “Stop apologizing, okay? It was great! The look on your face. Being in the air like that. Come on, Biscuit, again! Do it again! I’ll let you do whatever you want this time.”
“You want me to do it again?” he said.
She felt just like a little kid. She said, “Do it again! Do it again!”
She shouldn’t have gotten in the car with him, of course. But he was just old pervy Potter and she had the upper hand. She explained how he was going to give her more money. He just sat there listening. He said they’d have to go to the bank. He drove her right through town, parked the car behind the Food Lion.
She wasn’t worried. She still had the upper hand. She said, “What’s up, pervert? Gonna do a little Dumpster diving?”
He was looking at her. He said, “How old are you?”
She said, “Fourteen.”
He said, “Old enough.”
“How come you left after high school? How come you always leave?”
He said, “How come you broke up with me in eleventh grade?”
“Don’t answer a question with a question. No one likes it when you do that.”
“Well, maybe that’s why I left. Because you’re always yelling at me.”
“You ignored me in high school. Like you were ashamed of me. I’ll see you later, Bunnatine. Quit it, Bunnatine. I’m busy. Didn’t you think I was cute? There were plenty of guys at school who thought I was cute.”
“They were all idiots.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that they were really idiots. Come on, you know you thought so, too.”
“Can we change the subject?”
“Okay.”
“It wasn’t that I was ashamed of you, Bunnatine. You were distracting. I was trying to keep my average up. Trying to learn something. Remember that time we were studying and you tore up all my notes and ate them?”
“I saw they still haven’t found that guy. That nutcase. The one who killed your parents.”
“No. They won’t.” He threw rocks at where the owl had been. Nailed that sorry, invisible, absent owl.
“Yeah?” she said. “Why not?”
“I took care of it. He wanted me to find him, you know? He just wanted to get my attention. That’s why you gotta be careful, Bunnatine. There are people out there who really don’t like me.”
“Your dad was a sweetheart. Always tipped twenty percent. A whole dollar if he was just getting coffee.”
“Yeah. I don’t want to talk about him, Bunnatine. Still hurts. You know?”
“Yeah. Sorry. So how’s your sister doing?”
“Okay. Still in Chicago. They’ve got a kid now. A little girl.”
“Yeah. I thought I heard that. Cute kid?”
“She looks like me, can you imagine? She seems okay, though. Normal.”
“Are we sitting in poison ivy?”
“No. Look. There’s a deer over there. Watching us.”
“When do you have to be at work?”
“Not until six a.m. I just need to go home first and take a shower.”
“Cool. Is there any beer left?”
“No. Sorry,” she said. “Should’ve brought more.”
“That’s okay. I’ve got this. Want some?”
“Why don’t you leave?”
“Why go wait tables in some other place? I like it here. This is where I grew up. It was a good place to grow up. I like all the trees. I like the people. I even like how the tourists drive real slow between here and Boone. I just need to find a new job or Mom and I are going to end up killing each other.”
“I thought you were getting along.”
“Yeah. As long as I do exactly what she says.”
“I saw her at the parade. With some little kid.”
“Yeah. She’s been babysitting for a friend at the restaurant. Mom’s into it. She’s been reading the kid all these fairy tales. She can’t stand the Disney stuff, which is all the kid wants. Now they’re reading The Wizard of Oz. I’m supposed to get your autograph, by the way. For the kid.”
“Sure thing! You got a pen?”
“Oh, shit. It doesn’t matter. Maybe next time.”
It got dark slow and then real fast at the end, the way it always did, even in the summer, like daylight realized it had to be somewhere right away. Somewhere else. On weekends she came up here and read mystery novels in her car. Moths beating at the windows. Got out every once in a while to take a walk and look for kids getting into trouble. She knew all the places they liked to go. Sometimes the mutants were down where the stage used to be, practicing. They’d started a band. They were always asking if she was sure she couldn’t sing. She really, really couldn’t sing. That’s okay, the mutants always said. You can just howl. Scream. We’re into that. They traded her ’shine for cigarettes. Told her long, meandering mutant jokes with lots of hand gestures and incomprehensible punch lines. Dark was her favorite time. In the dark she could imagine that this really was the Land of Oz, that when the sun couldn’t stay away any longer, when the sun finally came back up, she’d still be there. In Oz. Not here. Click those heels, Bunnatine. There’s no home like a summer place.
She said, “Still having nightmares?”
“Yeah.”
“The ones about the end of the world?”
“Yeah, you nosy bitch. Those ones.”
“Still ends in the big fire?”
“No. A flood.”
“Remember that television show?”
“Which one?”
“You know. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Even Mom liked it.”
“I saw it a few times.”
“I keep thinking about how that vampire, Angel, whenever he got evil, you knew he was evil because he started wearing black leather pants.”
“Why are you obsessed with what people wear? Shit, Bunnatine. It was just a TV show.”
“Yeah, I know. But those black leather pants he wore, they must have been his evil pants. Like fat pants.”
“What?”
“Fat pants. The kind of pants that people who get thin keep in their closet. Just in case they get fat again.”
He just looked at her. His big ugly face was all red and blotchy from drinking.
She said, “So my question is this. Does Angel the vampire keep a pair of black leather pants in his closet? Just in case? Like fat pants? Do vampires have closets? Or does he donate his evil pants to Goodwill when he’s good again? Because if so then every time he turns evil, he has to go buy new evil pants.”
He said, “It’s just television, Bunnatine.”
“You keep yawning.”
He smiled at her. Such a nice-boy smile. Drove girls of all ages wild. He said, “I’m just tired.”
“Parades can really take it out of you.”
“Fuck you.”
She said, “Go on. Take a nap. I’ll stay awake and keep lookout for mutants and nemesissies and autograph hounds.”
“Maybe just for a minute or two. You’d really like him.”