novel: "Touch" chapters 11-13

[violetcheetah]

Chapter 11



Amy's gaze flickered from the page to the pine needles surrounding her and Trudy. When she hadn't gone back to the book in a few seconds, Trudy cleared her throat. Amy closed her eyes completely. "Sorry, I just, I don't like the fighting parts, and I know there's more coming, worse coming, and I'm afraid, I'm afraid for them, and I don't want to read the something worse."

"You have to read that part to get to the end."

"But now Bigwig is hurt, and I don't want to see him die." Her voice was higher in pitch than usual, almost childlike.

"Look, the story's already been written, so if he dies, he's already died whether you read that part or not."

"Stop it!"

"It's true, though."

"I don't care, I don't want to read it. You can't force me." She opened her eyes and stared at the moss, brushing away the pine needles from a patch and picking out the few sprigs of grass.

"You've gotta be kidding me! You can't just bail! We're almost to the end!"

"What do you care? You've already read it, you know what happens."

"And I want to read it again. All of it."

Amy cleared the needles off another patch of moss and hunched over so her eyes were closer to it; she also shifted so her back was half-turned to Trudy and the book.

"Do not be an asshole now."

"You're the asshole, luring me into reading that thing."

Trudy flinched at "that thing," hurled as an insult. "Look, it's a story; there's supposed to be conflict. That's what a story is: conflict and resolution. How boring would it have been if they'd just decided to leave the first warren, and la-la-la-wander-a-bit, and let's eat some nice clover, and oh, that looks like a good place to settle, the end."

"I just, I can't stand to see them hurt."

"They've been hurt before. The snare scene, and the bullet wound..."

"It's not the same. This is... fighting. Punching and kicking and —" her vision wavered with tears. Trudy felt a spot of cold inside her chest, below her heart. She tried not to think, but she couldn't ignore the ice spreading up, to her collarbones, down through her upper arms, until she had to resist the urge to hug herself. She had never thought about Amy having a past, or what that past had been, or why she would be in foster care if her family had been sweetness and light. Amy had just been born 15, born at the moment she started speaking, with no memories to burden her. The coldness settled into Trudy's cheeks and behind her eyes, strange and uncomfortable.

She kept the hard edge in her voice. "Look. In your mind, the worst has happened, hasn't it?" Amy didn't respond, but she stopped plucking grass blades. "And it's always going to have happened that way unless you actually read what the author wrote. I don't want to give anything away, so I'm not going to promise you a happy ending, but right now, you don't have a happy ending anyway, you've got a horrible ending, the most horrible ending possible. And I can promise you that whatever's coming, it's not as bad as what's in your head right now. Make sense?" Time stretched out like the light from the sunset, but finally Amy nodded. "Okay. Can we finish the damn book now?"



***



"No," whispered Amy, as Vervain, one of the strongest enemy soldiers, advanced toward small, helpless, addled Fiver. "Not Fiver." She closed her eyes.

"Just. Keep. Reading." Trudy must have said it a dozen times in the last hour. She tried to keep the irritation in her voice, but the words had become a soothing refrain somehow. "And could you maybe dig your nails a little less into my arm?"

"Sorry." Amy opened her eyes and looked back to the page, first glancing at the page number — 452 — and murmuring, "It's almost over," which had become her own lullaby refrain.

---

The small rabbit made no move whatever, either to retreat or to defend himself, but only stared at him from great eyes which, though troubled, were certainly not those of a beaten enemy or a victim. Before his gaze, Vervain stopped in uncertainty and for long moments the two faced each other in the dim light. Then, very quietly and with no trace of fear, the strange rabbit said,

"I am sorry for you with all my heart. But you cannot blame us, for you came to kill us if you could."

"Blame you?" answered Vervain. "Blame you for what?"

"For your death. Believe me, I am sorry for your death."

Vervain in his time had encountered any number of prisoners who, before they died, had cursed or threatened him, not uncommonly with supernatural vengeance, much as Bigwig had cursed Woundwort in the storm. If such things had been liable to have any effect on him, he would not have been head of the Owslafa. Indeed, for almost any utterance that a rabbit in this dreadful situation could find to make, Vervain was unthinkingly ready with one or other of a stock of jeering rejoinders. Now, as he continued to meet the eyes of this unaccountable enemy — the only one he had faced in all the long night's search for bloodshed — horror came upon him and he was filled with a sudden fear of his words, gentle and inexorable as the falling of bitter snow in a land without refuge. The shadowy recesses of the strange burrow seemed full of whispering, malignant ghosts and he recognized the forgotten voices of rabbits done to death months since in the ditches of Efrafa.

"Let me alone!" cried Vervain. "Let me go! Let me go!"

---

Amy's gaze paused, and Trudy tried in vain to read the next words, but they wouldn't quite come into focus. "Come on, what now?"

"It's over."

"It's not over: there's 20 pages to go!"

"No, but this. He's won."

"What are you on about?" Trudy realized she was mimicking the speech of the British characters.

"He's won. He beat him. Little weird Fiver won. With words. No fighting, no blood. Just words."

Trudy sighed. "Yeah, yeah, the pen is mightier than the sword and all that."

"What?"

"You must have heard... of course you haven't. Oh my God, every stupid cliché in the world is new to you. Never mind, just read the damn book."



***



Amy's eyes lingered on the last words of Watership Down. Finally she closed the back cover. "I want to keep reading. I want it to never end."

"Yeah. That's pretty much every good book."

"You feel this, this sadness, every time you finish?"

"Well, not for the books that suck. But yeah. But you distract yourself with a new book, and it fills that hole, until of course it's over and you have to find another book."

"I'm not ready for another book." Then, after a moment, she added, "But I'm, it's like hunger."

"One book and you're an addict. Okay." Trudy uncurled her legs, dangled them over the edge of the bed, and slowly stood, shaking the foot that was asleep. "I think I saw The Once and Future King in the office. Ah, crap, you won't get half of it, though; it's about King Arthur, and you need to understand all this stuff about the legend, because it's... I don't know, the legends have been around for a thousand years, and there are all these variations, and even I don't know half of them." She paused. "I don't know, though, maybe it'll make sense, anyway. Maybe it's better if you don't have all the baggage."

"So the other... variations: are they written down, too?"

"Well, the ones we know about, cuz otherwise we wouldn't know about them now."

"So when we finish the story, we could read another story about the same people?"

"Yeah, sure."

Amy stood, moving past Trudy and tugging her toward the door. "Let's go grab it, then."



Chapter 12



"Wait, go back!" Amy flicked her gaze up to the second shelf again, and Trudy pulled down the two-inch-thick Norton Anthology of Poetry. " She does have it!"

"That's huge! It'll take weeks to get through it all." Amy's voice was a mixture of anxiety and anticipation, and Trudy almost hated to set her straight.

"It's not like a novel, where you have to read the whole thing, or even read it in order. They aren't even all by the same author." She turned to the index of poets in the back, flipped through those pages. See, there are hundreds of poets in here, I guess. Some of them have been dead for hundreds of years."

"And people still read their poems, after they die?"

"Well, yeah. I mean, if it doesn't suck, people keep reading it, and it keeps getting printed, and more people read it. There's even a poem in here about that — I don't remember if it's Shakespeare or one of the other old guys — about, like, the poem outliving the poet, or maybe outliving his love, or something." She shook her head sharply. "We can look for it later, but first I wanted to show you — " She hesitated in confusion: the corner of the page wasn't folded down. Well, of course it wasn't, since this wasn't her copy. She flipped to the index of titles to find the poem. But then her fingers froze; her mind seemed to freeze in place, too.

"What?" Amy's apparent annoyance seemed forced somehow, gentle, which only paralyzed Trudy further. "Look, Susan's gonna be back in two hours; are we gonna read a poem by then or not?"

Trudy sighed. "It's just, you might not like it."

"I like Watership Down. And U2."

"Well, you're not going to like everything I like."

Amy was silent for a bit. "Why are you afraid?"

"I'm not afraid! I just —"

"Yes, you are!" Amy said it almost gleefully. "You're afraid I won't like it because, because it matters. The poem matters, and, and it matters what I think."

"Don't even flatter yourself."

"Admit it! We're friends!"

"We are not friends. We are... we use each other, to get what we need. That's it. That's it."

"You: are chicken."

"Fuck you."

"Okay, prove you aren't. Read the fucking poem." When Trudy didn't move, Amy took the book out of her hands and opened it to the page the index had given. Trudy closed her eyes, but of course it didn't matter. She saw the words, and her breath caught even as she tried not to read them, because Amy was right. It mattered.

Amy was murmuring, reading softly aloud, which she never did. And it was the right rhythm, the rhythm Trudy heard in her head whenever she read the poem. But Amy didn't keep murmuring; each line come out a little louder than the one before, until her voice was strong as a performer in a play. Then she practically shouted, "Children, leave the string alone!" She laughed, maybe a little embarrassed, and went back to murmuring. When she reached the end, she started again at the first line, her voice strong and slow, savoring.



Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and pare the rind off:
In the kernel you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel -
Children, leave the string alone!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
he lives - he then unties the string.



They sat in silence again for what seemed like minutes, Amy's eyes flicking back and forth between lines, her finger touching certain words. Finally her gaze shifted to a spot on the floor by the desk; she glanced at Trudy for a second, then back at that spot.

"It's us."

"What?"

"It's what I feel when I try to think about the... whatever it is we do. It doesn't make sense, and the more it doesn't make sense, the more I try to make it make sense, try to untie the string on the parcel, and: Why us? Are we really the only people like this? 'Fewness.' 'Rareness.' I mean, billions of people, and that's just now, not counting all the people who are already dead, and no one ever had —" She peered at Trudy's face again. "And what if you hadn't come here? Would I have found someone else to give me, give me words, and everything! Butterflies are bugs, and how a sundog is made, and, I mean, how old I am. My name! It all makes sense, but it doesn't make sense, and I want to know, I want to know it won't stop." Her eyes dropped to Trudy's forearm, and now that Trudy saw it, she felt how tight Amy's grip was. "I can't go back. I can't. I can not." Amy's voice choked to nothing.

Trudy knew she should do something, hug Amy, something comforting, but she had no experience. But she ought to do something. She needed to. Wanted to. She put her free hand over Amy's white knuckles and pulled Amy's hand up until Amy let go of Trudy's arm, and now that her arm was free, Trudy reached up with that hand, pressed her fingertips to Amy's, and interlaced her own fingers with Amy's. It felt awkward, but right. She squeezed, and Amy squeezed back. Trudy suddenly felt incredibly fragile, and incredibly strong.

"You're right, you know."

Amy sniffled softly. "About what?"

"I'm afraid. I'm scared shitless. And you're right about the other, too."

"Other what?"

Trudy sighed. "We're friends. And see, I don't have friends, so I don't even know how to — I don't like caring what people think. Because usually what they think, about me, at least, is... "

Together they both said, "Freak." And together they both laughed, short and sharp and bitter. But then the laughter continued, then lightened, until they were both giggling; Trudy tried to remember the last time she had giggled until tears had come, until she couldn't breathe. Amy gasped out, "I don't even know what's funny."

"That's what's funny!" Trudy leaned back against the bookshelf and got control of herself partly because she was afraid of peeing. "Okay. Okay. We've got the get control before Susan gets back, because if we just start cracking up in the middle of lunch, she's gonna think we're on drugs or something. So think about something serious."

"Like graves?"

"Uh, yeah, sure, I guess." It seemed so out of the blue it threw Trudy. Then Amy looked back down at the poem, pointed to the poet's name: Robert Graves. She dissolved into laughter again, and Trudy shook her head. "Oh, great, your first pun. You much be so proud."

"Admit it, it's funny. It's punny."

Trudy sighed deeply, and her apparently disapproval only sent Amy deeper into laughter. "Hey, maybe next we should read Frankenstein, so you'll understand when I say that I've created a monster."



Chapter 13



Trudy gave a post-dessert stretch and pushed her chair back, ready to get up and wash the dinner dishes. She heard Amy's chair legs scrape the floor, too. But Susan said, "Before you get up..." She didn't continue.

"Yeah?"

She was silent for entirely too long. "I value privacy. I even value secrets; I don't need to know your every thought and feeling; I don't think it's healthy for anyone to be that intertwined. But..." Trudy prayed for time to stop, to rewind. Her legs itched with the desire to get up and wash dishes and have her back turned to the room and the table and Susan. "But there are things I need to know, as your guardian. I need to know you are safe — from others and from yourself. Yourselves. And right now — for a while now — I haven't been sure of that."

"I'm fine. We're fine." Trudy held her voice steady.

"But something's going on. I'm pretty hands-off, but that doesn't mean I don't see things. Yes, I know, poor choice of words. I hear things. I hear voices, in your room. I hear two voices, and one of them is Amy's, I recognize it, and I didn't listen closely at first, tried not to, but I hear words, sentences, I hear Amy talking in sentences, and I have got to know what's going on."

Time finally stopped. But it was too late. Time hadn't just stopped: it had ended. Trudy would be stuck here forever, trapped in Susan's stare even though Trudy couldn't see her staring, trapped naked and exposed in a camera flash that would never end.

"Trudy. Amy. You need to tell me."

"She can't tell you. Not now." Trudy stood, slowly, her knees and hips too loose, not quite connected right to the rest of her body. She circled halfway around the table, reached out, fumbled, and found Amy's shoulder. There was Susan's stare, like she'd known it would be. But there was something in it Trudy hadn't expected: fear. Trudy felt the familiar awareness that she was something to be feared, something to be avoided, and she knew it was over. Susan would send her away, she'd end up in a group home, or a mental ward, maybe share a room with her mother. She knew she was scared, but she couldn't feel it. She cleared her throat and squeezed Amy's shoulder slightly. "She knows, Amy. Susan knows."

Amy took in a slow breath, then sighed just as slowly. "I think I'm glad."

Susan gasped and raised a hand to press just below her collarbone. "Jesus. Amy. Amy." Even though she was 10 feet away, she reached out her hand toward them, lowered it again, and gave a short sob. She was wide-eyed still, but this wasn't fear, or not just fear. Tears trailed down her cheeks, yet she took a long, steady breath, and her face settled into calm. "Well. Okay then. I'm not crazy. Well."

"So." Trudy wasn't sure she'd said it loud enough to be heard. "So. What are you gonna do?"

Susan frowned, confused. "Uh, dance with joy? What do you mean?" Her frown softened from confusion to concern. "What's wrong, you two?"

It was Amy who spoke. "Will you make us, make one of us leave?"

"Why the hell would I do that?"

"It's not, not normal, what we do. The way we are."

"I don't understand. What exactly are you doing that's? God, I should be wondering, I'm talking to Amy — you're talking to me — and, yeah, how is this possible? How are you talking to me?"

"When we touch, me and Trudy," Amy pointed to Trudy's hand on her shoulder, "something, I don't know, but words make sense to me."

Trudy cleared her throat. "And I see. Not what I'm looking at, but whatever she sees."

Susan opened her mouth, then closed it and just gazed, not quite focused on either of them. When she finally spoke, it was with hushed reverence. "Holy shit." Trudy couldn't stop a short laugh from escaping her throat, born of a combination of surprise and relief. Susan chuckled, too, still quietly. "There is no way I would have ever thought I'd believe in, in psychic ability. You're freaking psychics! This is not possible, except I'm, you're — " she raised both hands in the air, an "I give up" gesture. "You've completely blown apart my world, and just, I don't think I've ever had a better day than this."

Trudy struggled for breathe to speak again, and she hated how tiny her voice sounded. "So we can stay together?"

"Uh, yeah! Why on earth would I even — Oh God, honey!" She stood and walked to them and half-reached out her arms, but then lowered them, and lowered herself to a kneel, looking first at Amy, then at a spot above her that Trudy realized was Trudy's own face. "This is not something bad, or forbidden, or something."

"But it's," Trudy's throat sobbed closed, and Amy continued, "Freakish."

"It's beautiful. It is entirely beautiful, and good, and, and deserved. There is no way in hell that I'd take this away from you two." She shuddered "I can't even imagine, no, never. No one will ever. Never."

Amy leaned forward, and Trudy's view changed to muted grey as Amy leaned into Susan's embrace. Trudy felt a hand on her arm, and Susan said, "You, too, Tru, if you can bear it." Trudy reluctantly knelt and then sat on the other side of Susan as Amy, let Susan put an arm around her shoulder, let herself be drawn closer. One hand still on Amy, she let her temple rest lightly against Susan's collarbone and closed her burning eyes.