Bat Summer Read online

  She has had the same pair of pink-rimmed glasses since forever. The problem is her head has grown a lot in the past few years and now her glasses make her eyes look like pinholes. The arms of the glasses cut into the side of her head. She spends a lot of time rubbing the side of her head and getting her fingers caught in that mess of curly mophead she has.

  Elys graduated from the University of Toronto last year and hasn’t been able to get a single job. She even applied to be a house painter. She almost applied to McDonald’s, but my mom said Elys’s job search attitude was pathetic and she ripped up the application.

  I grab a banana and head for the TV. Mom never gets home before 8:30. The cable channel says it’s only 4:48. See what I mean by gaps?

  I can guess the ending to every single show on the tube. I can’t remember the last time I made a bad prediction.

  You would think it was satisfying to be right about the endings of things all the time. It’s not. Knowing how everything is going to turn out — it’s the worst thing I can think of.

  4

  Lucy has new kites flying out the sides of her eyes today. One is orange and the other is green. You’d think she’d make them match, at least.

  We’re going to fly the kite in the ravine behind St. Clair West subway station. It’s pretty close to the park, but it feels like it’s far away because I never walk that way.

  “You ready?” Lucy says when I get there. Rico is standing beside her holding the kite. It’s got a tail on it with pieces of black garbage bag tied to it.

  “Yeah, you ready to see if this loser kite flies?” says Rico.

  “He brought a spool of kite line with him, so I said I’d let him watch. He’s not allowed to fly it, though.” Lucy does not look happy.

  “Fly? There’s no way this loser kite is going anywhere but down,” Rico grins. “And I plan to be right there when it crashes and burns.”

  “Where’d you get the kite line?” I ask.

  “What’s the difference? I got it, didn’t I? Loser thought she could fly a kite with wool. Ha!”

  As we climb down the hill beside the subway station, Lucy points out the bridge that spans the ravine.

  “Bats live under bridges,” she says. “They like it where it’s dark and they won’t be disturbed by human beings. It’s not hard to disturb a bat. Bats can hear bugs walk. Humans can wreck a bat’s hibernation by just walking in a cave. How would you like it if someone came into your house and scared you out of a deep sleep? Never mind that it takes you forever to get back to sleep again and you might not have enough body mass to make it through the whole winter anymore because some stupid human made you waste it all on being freaked out. Humans don’t care about bats. They don’t even know when they’re killing them.”

  She’s on about the bat junk again. Still, I wonder if there are any bats living under the bridge.

  Where does Lucy get all this information anyway? I want to ask her about it but not with Rico around. He has a way of making every conversation be about him. Even the kite is about him now.

  The ravine is all overgrown and wild. The grass comes up to my knees in some places and there’s all these little purple flowers around. There’s never anybody down here. It has this feeling about it, like it’s been forgotten by the rest of the city.

  When we get to the middle of a clearing in the ravine, Lucy licks her finger and holds it up to see which way the wind is blowing. Pretty soon we’re all holding spitty fingers up in the air. Then Rico licks his whole forearm to get a more accurate reading.

  “I can’t feel nothing,” he says and waves his arms around. “Wait! I feel the wind beneath my wings. Arrrooooo!” He circles us, flapping his arms like a madman. What a goof. Why couldn’t it have been Daphne who found the kite line?

  “Where’s your sister?” I ask Lucy.

  “Why?”

  “Isn’t she supposed to take care of you?”

  “Yeah. Right. Where’s your sister then?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Lucky you. I’m gonna choke if I have to eat one more Fatso burger for dinner. I must be a vegetarian bat.”

  I’m about to ask her more about the bat thing, but Rico is in our face flapping his arms.

  “Do you want to fly this kite or not?” Lucy asks, and Rico quits his bird impersonation.

  It’s Lucy’s bat cape that proves conclusively which way the wind is coming. The stupid costume turns out to be useful.

  Rico takes the kite and runs around, pumps his arms for speed, but mostly looks like a scared chicken.

  “Stand still a sec,” Lucy yells at him.

  The kite keeps slamming Rico in the back of the head. He won’t stop running even though he’s getting slammed in the back of the head and is sweating down the back of his shirt.

  “Rico,” Lucy hollers. Rico isn’t listening. You can tell from the way he isn’t looking at us that he is determined to get that kite in the air before Lucy has a better idea of how to do it. If Tom were here he would holler at him to quit being such a running-around-like-a-scared-chicken dork.

  “Hey, Rico,” I holler. But I don’t holler loud enough and Rico’s still running. I open my mouth to holler again, but this time Lucy takes the cue and we yell out together, “Hey, Ricoooooo.”

  Finally he stops. Lucy grins at me.

  “I can’t get any wind under it,” he says between breaths. “I knew that thing wouldn’t fly, man.” He bends over to catch his breath, and I take the kite from him. I look at Lucy’s cape to see which way the wind is blowing. I lift the kite above my head and angle it into the wind. I can feel the wind pulling it out of my hands. I stand on my toes and let the kite slip out of my grip and into the sky. Lucy gets busy trying to control the spool.

  “Get out of town,” Rico says. “I don’t believe it. No way.” He falls over onto his back and sticks a piece of grass in his mouth.

  “No problemo,” I say and go to help Lucy with the line.

  We all take turns holding the line. The kite looks cool when it’s in the air. There’s something about flying things and the way they seem to find invisible paths in the sky. Flying a kite, even a dorky Christmas wrapping-paper kite, is as close to flying as you can get. You can feel the sky pulling you up. You can feel yourself nearly get swallowed by the sky.

  Rico is lying on the ground eating grass and watching the kite. He looks a little disappointed. The thing goes higher and higher. For sure it’s going to reach a cloud. I want it to poke the edge of a cloud and make it start raining. I want it to rain on Rico’s head. It could happen. You never know.

  The kite line strains through my hands.

  “The line cuts into your hands,” I say to Lucy. She wraps her bat cape around her hands and takes the line from me. “Thanks,” I say. Now that we’ve got the thing up, it’s never coming down. It’s like it’s a bird and we’re holding its tail and it’s trying to get away from us by flying to the stratosphere. No way are we letting go. No way is Lucy letting go. No escape for that bird, man.

  We can’t get the thing to reel in, it wants to get away so bad. You can feel the line stretching, and, since it’s our only line, we don’t want it to break by forcing it too much. I’m secretly rooting for the kite. I want it to get away, to take off forever into the world of wind.

  Lucy figures out a way to get it to do tricks by tugging on the line. When it swoops, Lucy swoops with it. The kite zigs and she zags. It’s like Lucy and the kite are dancing. She teases it so it looks like it’s about to nose-dive straight onto the bridge over the ravine and die under the wheels of some car.

  Rico jumps to his feet and yells, “Timber! She’s coming down.”

  “Don’t say that!” screams Lucy. She seems really angry all of a sudden. I swear I see tears in her eyes. She tugs at the line furiously with this scrunched, mad look on her face.

  At the last possible second, the kite sweeps up into the air and makes me gasp with how much it wants to go up and away. Lucy looks relie
ved. I watch a smile crawl back to her face. She looks so different when she smiles. Most of the time she looks kind of cross.

  I wonder if Lucy’s bat nature means she knows about flying. I wonder if her soul leaves her body at night and flies around as a bat like she said. Could be true. You never know.

  “What’s it like to be a bat?” I ask her.

  I can feel my heart knocking against the back of my throat. I didn’t mean to ask her straight out like that. I’ve been thinking more about what it would be like to be something else instead of me. Like Lucy is a bat. She said it was something that chose her. I want to know if it was in a dream or what. I have twice flown in dreams, but I have never been anyone else but me in one.

  Just once, I’d like to be someone or something else. Just for a day, or an hour, or a minute.

  I used to think I wanted to be Tom, but now I think — and I know it’s crazy — I’d rather be a bat. Something that escapes into the night sky like a kite that snaps off its line as the sun’s going down. Something that flies, almost invisibly, through dark and quiet air.

  She looks at me and then up at the kite. Maybe she didn’t hear me. It’s a private thing, wanting to be something else. I don’t have any business asking about Lucy’s batdom. I’m almost relieved she didn’t hear me.

  “I see things upside-down,” she says. I barely hear her say it. It’s like she’s telling it to the kite spool. She’s usually loud, louder than Tom even. Not now.

  I take a step closer. She’s still got her bat cape around the kite line.

  “Upside-down? How do you mean?” I want to know now.

  “It’s like I know things are supposed to look one way, but I keep seeing them the exact opposite. Bats sleep upside-down all day long. Me, too. And when I close my eyes at night and just listen… that’s when I’m most awake. That’s when I know exactly what’s what.”

  “When you’re dreaming?”

  “No. Before sleep. Like when my mom gets home and before my dad goes to work — he works the night shift at the bakery. They don’t talk, but you can tell what’s going on. You can listen to the spaces.”

  “I don’t get it.” That’s what I say, but the second after I say it I do get it. It’s like those gaps I keep noticing.

  “Never mind,” she says. “Forget it.” She shoots a look at Rico to make sure he’s not listening. The guy’s busy rolling up the sleeves of his T-shirt.

  “I think I know what you mean,” I say. I want to get it in before Rico gets tired of checking out his tan. “It’s like when people say they’re fine, but you can tell they aren’t. It’s like the way people smile at you when they want you to get out of their way. Right? Like when you feel like something is supposed to be happening, but something else happens instead.”

  Like when your mom says she’ll take you to a movie on Tuesday night but your cousin comes to pick you up instead, and you aren’t supposed to say anything about it because you’re getting to see the movie, aren’t you? Like when you make a point of asking about summer camp and then school’s out and you find yourself not at camp but flying handmade Santa Claus kites with Rico the spit-boy and a bat in a ravine,

  “Yeah. Almost,” she says. “You know anything about bats?”

  “A little.”

  “I have a book. I’ll bring it tomorrow.” She hands me the spool. “Here. My hands hurt. Bats use their wings to hold things and scoop things. But we have to be careful not to get holes in our wings.”

  We work it so that her bat cape is tied to the line to protect my hands. I am very careful with the cape. I don’t know what Lucy would do if it got a hole in it.

  She has to have her back to the kite to make it work. The cape pulls straight up the line as the kite flies even higher.

  “Wheeeee,” Lucy sings. “I’m flying now. I knew this cape was good for something.” Which is funny, because I was just thinking that.

  “That is the dorkiest thing I’ve ever seen. You are one twisted loser,” Rico says. He stares at us, shakes his head and throws up his arms, but I can tell he wishes he were on the end of the line watching Lucy’s cape bubble in the breeze.

  Like I said, these weirdos sure come up with some good stuff sometimes.

  No way would Tom get this in a million years.

  5

  I’m late going to the park the next day because of Elys. Turns out my mom was having a sleepover date with Farley, so Elys stayed to take care of me, only she didn’t do so good a job because she slept in.

  She should get up on time at least.

  “It’s not like you have anything better to do,” I tell her.

  “Thanks for reminding me, kid.”

  “You have one thing to do all day and you can’t even do that.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who cares? I don’t remember signing on as your alarm clock, Terence. I’m doing your mom a favor, okay? Don’t give me any grief.”

  “You’re not even dressed yet.”

  “That’s my business.” She takes a sip of coffee and looks at me. Her eyes look like little black marbles when she doesn’t have her glasses on. “Didn’t you say you had somewhere to be?”

  “If I miss kite-flying today, I’m sticking cheese slices in your slippers tomorrow,” I yell and slam the door behind me.

  When I finally get to Wells Hill Park, Lucy is swinging on one of the baby swings, sitting on top of the cross bar. She’s way up there where the chains start to go slack. Her bat cape billows out behind her. You can’t go much higher than Lucy is right now.

  Now that I’m here, I feel strange about yesterday. I don’t see the kite anywhere and, for some reason, I can’t quite look at Lucy straight. It makes my heart go all funny.

  I see Rico hanging out with Boobacious by the wading pool. I think I’ll go join them.

  I’m careful not to look at Lucy. It’s like, if I don’t see her, she won’t see me. I map out a route through the playground that takes me past the swings, but not right toward them.

  I can’t really be friends with a weirdo like Lucy anyway. Yesterday was just a freak thing. If Tom ever found out, man, I’d never hear the end of it. Tom’s my real friend. If he were here, we’d be playing frisbee with Steel. Tom always knows what to do, and I just do what he does. Tom says that’s because I’m easy-going. I think it’s because I’m clueless.

  I’m halfway across the playground when I see Lucy heave herself off the moving swing. She lands right smack beside me.

  “Holy,” I say. I still can’t look at her.

  “Bats are the only mammals that fly,” she says. She looks me straight in the eye and I want to look away but I can’t. I remember seeing in this vampire movie how the vampire mesmerized his victims with his eyes before sucking their blood.

  “Are you a vampire?” I ask.

  “Are you whacked in the head?” she says. “There’s no such thing as vampires. Don’t talk crazy talk.”

  What do you do when a human girl bat tells you not to talk crazy talk?

  “I guess that means the chess guy isn’t a vampire pervert then.” She hauls back and socks me in the arm. It hurts something fierce, and I feel my eyes tearing up. I have to tilt my head back a little to keep them from falling out.

  “Ow.” I say it sarcastically, though I’m blinking back tears. I rub my arm. She left a mark.

  “You can’t talk that way about my friend. You don’t even know him. Friends stick up for friends, but I guess you don’t care about loyalty. You walked right past me like I wasn’t even here. You should treat your friends with respect, Terence. You’re supposed to be smart.”

  How would she know that? She was in a class way at the other end of the school last year. She was in the cootie class with the dumbheads and the problem kids.

  “I don’t respect violence,” I tell Lucy. I wonder why she was in the cootie class, because she isn’t a dumbhead. Must be the outfit.

  “No? What do you respect?” She’s turning on me again. “Huh? Lifeguards with big bo
obs?”

  I can feel my face flush, I’m dying, I don’t, even know what to say, I’m so dead. I decide to keep to the original plan of heading for the wading pool. There’s a water fountain there. I am suddenly so thirsty.

  I get to the water fountain and gulp down a river. The water is so cold I can feel it going all the way down into my stomach and freezing up my insides.

  Lucy’s eyes slowly come into view on the other side of the drinking fountain. She has multi-colored magic marker squiggles fanning out from the corners of her eyes, like a cat.

  “Sorry,” she says. She looks over at Rico and Boobacious. Rico’s resting back on his hands, trying to look casual. “I know what you guys call her. But it’s really none of my business if you want to act like jerks.” She stands up to full red-asparagus height and sticks out her hand. She wants me to shake it.

  “I shouldn’t have hit you,” Lucy says. “Bats don’t hit.” Her hand is still out there waiting for me to do something with it.

  “Or draw blood?” I say.

  “Or draw blood…at least the kind of bat I am doesn’t. I’m a brown bat. A microbat. We echolate. We eat mosquitos. I guess some mosquitos have blood in them, but it’s not the blood we’re after.”

  I wonder if Lucy has ever really eaten a mosquito.

  I take Lucy’s hand and shake it. She’s got a handshake that means business. I can’t help noticing she bites her nails. Me, too. It’s hard to explain the satisfaction of nail-biting to anyone who doesn’t indulge. It’s like a secret club that lots of people belong to, adults included, but nobody ever says anything about it. Nail-biters notice other nail-biters. We know about each other’s secret life of click-click chew. It’s not a proud thing, but it is a bonding thing.

  Tom doesn’t bite his nails. I don’t hold it against him. In fact, Lucy is the only friend I have who bites his nails. I mean, her nails.

  “I brought that book,” she says and starts walking toward the picnic table under the big tree by the sandbox where the chess-playing pervert sits. He’s in the middle of a game with a black man who is wearing a blue suit blazer even though his shirt is undone underneath. I’m afraid to follow Lucy because it means hanging with these guys.