Outside In Page 7

  “What’s wrong?”

  “He has a talent for finding bees. He doesn’t learn. Oh, here’s the stinger. I didn’t bring my pack. Have you got one of those hard plastic cards?”

  “Here’s my bus pass, if that helps.”

  “That’s good. I can use my fingernail but a piece of plastic is better. There we go. Out.”

  “How do you know how to do that?”

  “Fossick taught us. First aid is one of our subjects. Sometimes I hate it, though. When Artdog arrived he had an abscess and we had to drain it. He didn’t understand that we were making it better.”

  Abscess. Even the word was disgusting. A picture of Max wandered into Lynn’s head again. No first aid for Max. He was a regular visitor at the vet.

  “He’ll be fine but I should take him home and put some cool water on it. I’ll leave you here.”

  “Okay. Happy birthday again!” The sound of whistling disappeared into the trees.

  Lynn plunked into a seat on the bus. Life in the underground cottage, with a Shakespeare-spouting father, cardboard furniture, a toilet on a throne and Anime boy. She felt giddy with that much strangeness at one go.

  And what was that about toilet-paper tubes?

  NINE

  A Wilderness Guide

  to Trailing and Trapping

  “Have you thought further about bringing a friend to the flash mob?”

  Shakti was sitting in the kitchen, waiting for the Sunday moonlighting drywallers to turn up. Lynn was in transit from bedroom to fridge.

  “Maybe.”

  “How about Kas or Celia?”

  “I dunno. They’re still in Oregon.”

  “Still? I didn’t know the trip was going to be this long.”

  Lynn hadn’t shared news of the choir’s success. Or any news. She was working to rule as a daughter. “Yeah.”

  There was a clanking at the front door.

  “Oh, here they are. What are your plans for the day?”

  “Avoiding drywall dust.”

  “Good idea.”

  ≈≈≈

  Did Blossom and her family really exist? Lynn experienced a wave of doubt as she glanced around before running her key across the metal screen at the edge of the reservoir. No phone. No email. No street address. Did Blossom even have a last name? For Pete’s sake, it would be easier to confirm that Celia’s guinea pigs, stars of their own YouTube movies, existed.

  But, whether or not she existed, there she was, the opposite of virtual, grinning.

  “The visitor!”

  “Yeah,” said Lynn, “and wait till you hear my idea for a fun mutual activity.”

  As they headed down the path, Lynn described the flash-mob plans and Blossom got it right away.

  “So you’re trying to change people’s minds by being sneaky and you don’t really know whether it’ll work but you’ll enjoy it anyway?”

  “That’s more or less it.”

  “But that doesn’t sound like a citizen thing. It sounds like an Underlander thing.”

  “Well, citizens are not all the same, you know.”

  “I would love to do this with you but I’m not sure I’m allowed. Come on, we’ll ask Fossick.”

  They came through the cottage door to face a forest of hanging laundry. The girls fought their way through the damp to find Fossick bent over a plastic washtub and Larch carefully rinsing out a shirt.

  “The visitor returns,” said Larch.

  “Well met on wash day,” said Fossick.

  “Want to wring or hang?” asked Blossom.

  “Sounds kind of violent,” said Lynn. “I’ll hang.”

  Fossick listened to the flash invitation and asked a bunch of questions.

  “I applaud the idea but I don’t think it’s for us,” he said. “You’re looking for media attention, right? That’s the point?”

  “Pwfff,” said Lynn, as a pair of pants she was trying to loop over a ceiling pipe swung back in her face.

  “Well, as you’ve noticed, we avoid attention. That’s not to say that we don’t aim to make our mark. We just do it by stealth. Has Blossom told you about the traplines?”

  Lynn gulped. Trapping? Animals? She had been wondering about this ever since Blossom said, “There is plenty of food.” Wildlife? Squirrels? Oh, yuck. The part of her mind that knew that she herself ate dead animals was trying not to touch the part of her mind that was racing toward the dangerous cliff edge of raccoons as dinner. Were they even edible?

  She ducked behind a sheet. “Not really.”

  Fossick laughed. “Don’t worry. It doesn’t involve any chewed-off limbs. Blossom. Explain. Put the visitor out of her misery. We’re done with laundry anyway.”

  Blossom pulled a folder from under the work table.

  “It all started when we found a big box of these labels, sticky but clear. We think of words. Larch copies them on the labels and we go and post them in places on the citizen trail that are a bit secret.”

  “But what are you trapping?” said Lynn.

  “We’re trapping attention,” said Fossick. “Just for a second, maybe. Get people wondering, questioning. Distract them from their citizen concerns. Go on. Think of some words.”

  All words seemed to melt away at Lynn’s approach. “I don’t get it.”

  “Okay, how about some rules. Citizens like rules. Blossom, give us a rule starting with Never.”

  “Um … Never … soak your shoelaces in your tea.”

  “Good. Good rule for life.”

  Fossick scribbled on a scrap of paper and handed it to Larch. “Enough rinsing. New job for you.”

  Larch dried his hands carefully and went to sit down at the long table. He picked out a fine felt-tip pen and started to write on the label with tiny, precise letters.

  Lynn looked over Larch’s shoulder. “Wow, you are really good at lettering.”

  “Yes, Larch is good at that,” said Larch.

  Without thinking, Lynn held up a finger.

  “I’m good at that.”

  “Your turn,” said Fossick to Lynn. “How about, All somethings must report to something.”

  Lynn let her mind float. All visitors must report to the office. All pets, all customers, all aliens, all people. Peoples of the ancient world. “Okay. All Hittites must report to the office. No, not the office.”

  “The boss,” said Fossick.

  “The chief aardvark,” said Lynn. “All Hittites must report to the chief aardvark.”

  “Perfect, write it out.”

  They kept Larch busy copying until they had a complete sheet of labels.

  “Can I do some about the casino thing?”

  “Sure,” said Fossick. “Whatever you like. We like a good cause.”

  Lynn thought for a minute or two, going over what Jean and Rob and Shakti had discussed.

  “Larch, can you do a few that say, Developers do not own the earth?”

  “You have to write it down. I don’t write from talk.”

  Larch didn’t read or write?

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Good,” said Blossom. “Let’s go check the traplines. We’ll take bikes this time.”

  ≈≈≈

  Lynn hadn’t been on a bike in a few years. She still had one out in the garage, providing a frame for spiderwebs. This loaner looked beat up, but its gears clicked neatly into place as they wheeled along.

  The first stop was the coffee shop in a very skinny building with big windows. A few tables dotted the sidewalk outside.

  “Sit down and blend in,” said Blossom, producing a pair of to-go coffee cups from her pack. “This is your invisibility mug.”

  They placed their cups on the table and settled into the metal chairs.

  “Okay,” said Blossom, pointing at a corner of the
window, half hidden by a shrub in a pot. “This one is still here.”

  Lynn peered behind the leaves. A tiny sign in perfect black lettering: Best seat in the house.

  “You guys did this?”

  Blossom nodded. “That was from the appreciate-where-you-are series. It might be a bit too hidden.” She retrieved the empty coffee cups. “Come on, let’s post some new ones.”

  Once you started to look at the city as a collection of places to post tiny signs, the possibilities were rich. They rode around posting. Blossom checked on previous posts. Some had disappeared, some had been ripped. A few had been scribbled over with the usual obscenities. Blossom picked those off.

  “Cleanup.”

  The invisibility mugs gave them table room at a coffee shop whenever they wanted a break.

  Blossom’s idea of chat was sometimes almost as strange as Larch’s.

  “What do you think about the discovery of the Higgs boson?”

  “Um … what?”

  “You know, in particle physics.”

  “Blossom, if you don’t go to school, even home school, how do you know so much?”

  “I read. You can get anything from the library. Just-in-case Rainy let us use her address to get library cards. At the library you can stay and stay and you don’t even need invisibility mugs. You can go there and watch things on the computer. If I don’t understand things, Fossick and Tron explain them to me and I try to explain them to Larch. And I go to the university.”

  “You go to university?”

  “Yes. They have these huge classes out there. You can just go and sit down. Nobody pays any attention to you. Tron does it. He showed me how.”

  “But don’t they notice that you look kind of young?”

  “Not really. Maybe they think I’m one of those child prodigies.”

  “What subjects are you taking?”

  “Art history. That’s the best. The professor shows pictures and talks about them. I tried math but it was too hard. I need to do more on my own first. Fossick loves math but I don’t think it’s my best thing. What’s your best thing?”

  “I don’t think I have a best thing. I get okay marks in science, when I do my homework. But mostly school’s kind of boring, except for choir and friends.”

  “Then why do you go?”

  “I have to go. It’s the law. You know what Fossick said. Citizens like rules.”

  “I’m sorry that you have to go to boring school,” said Blossom. “Uh-oh. People are looking for places to sit. Time to go.”

  The day ended at a playground. Lynn posted her final rule, No Lingering, No Loitering, No Looming, on the underside of some kids’ swings and then plunked herself down.

  “What’s the point of all this?”

  Blossom shrugged. “It’s our work.”

  “I know, but it’s not exactly like a job at McDonald’s, is it?”

  Blossom moved into the next-door swing. “Fossick says that Underlanders rearrange the world. We reorder things. We collect recycling and take it back to where it is useful. We pull up weeds and put them in the compost where they turn into dirt to grow more things. And sometimes we just fancy things up.”

  “You mean, like graffiti?”

  “Not usually. That’s one kind of fancy but that kind of paint is a hard find.”

  “Well, plus it’s illegal.”

  “Yes, we try not to be illegal. Although, if you walk down a shopping street there are words and pictures everywhere, trying to get you to buy things. And that’s allowed. But graffiti’s not allowed even though graffiti isn’t trying to get you to do anything but look.”

  Lynn knew that there must be a good argument against this idea, but she couldn’t think of it at the moment.

  “Anyway, it’s better when you just rearrange things. The best fancy of all is when you can get the citizens to join in. Like, have you ever noticed those little piles of stones that appear along the beach?”

  “Those balancing ones? They are amazing.”

  “We started that.”

  “What?”

  “A few years ago. For a few weeks, every night we went out and piled rocks. Larch was agitated, nightmares. And this is the kind of thing that he is very good at, balancing. Then one night we noticed other piles. Suddenly, they were everywhere. The citizens had started to do it themselves. That was our best one.”

  “That was even in the news. It went viral! It’s like you’re famous but anonymous. What else have you done?”

  “Hydrant cozies. Floating flower chains. Those only last a day. Riddles in trees. Big picket fence piano. Beach mosaic.”

  “How do you think them up?”

  “We just start with what we have. Enough of anything is what you need. And there is always plenty of something that somebody wants to get rid of.”

  “But how do you get stuff if you don’t buy it?”

  “Sometimes we just find it. People put good stuff out with their garbage. Mostly we use Freecycle.”

  “Freecycle?”

  “It’s where things go before they end up in the dump. It’s great because you can get your hands on things before they get stinky. It’s a computer thing. We go to the library and see what’s on give-away. Then we think of how we can use it.” Blossom was pumping to the max.

  Lynn leaned back and let her hair volumize in the afternoon sun. “Can we do another one of these fancying things?”

  Blossom launched herself off the swing and landed like a gymnast. “Any time! I’m going to the washroom. It’s a good one here, very clean. Coming?”

  “No, I’ll wait.”

  Lynn twisted up her swing to tiptoe height. Rearranging the world? Not one of the usual career options.

  TEN

  A Hundred Trillion Germs

  Lynn knelt on the gym floor, dipped her paintbrush and carefully filled in a large N in bright red kindergarten poster paint. The banner to welcome home the choir was nearly done.

  When news of the choir’s return date reached the school, Ms. Yandle had Lynn into the office again.

  “There’s going to be a rally. Are you okay with this?”

  “Totally.”

  That was a lie. Celebrating the choir, that was just fine. What wasn’t so fine was welcoming Kas and Celia home.

  Lynn moved on to the fat S and switched to sunny yellow. What would she do when they asked about Heimlich girl? She couldn’t tell them. While they had been gone she had spent all her spare time with Blossom. Monday evening they’d gone to the art history class at the university and looked at pictures of fat pink and gold angels painted on church ceilings. Tuesday the whole gang had gone to the big bottle return depot. Wednesday they’d hung out at the cottage, listening to music, eating a big find of lychee nuts and making Artdog a new spring coat. They’d biked all over the city, to places Lynn had never known existed.

  How would that work when the Diode was back?

  She didn’t want to lie. She didn’t want to abandon Blossom and the Underlanders.

  She filled in the last of the S. Congratulations. Life was easier when you just texted and left stuff out.

  “Beautiful!”

  “Aaagh.” Splodge.

  “Oh, sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.” Ms. Yandle leaned over the banner. “Good job. I just wanted to say how impressed I am by how generous you’re being. You’ll be glad to have your friends home.”

  Lynn nodded. Yes and no. She turned the splodge into an exclamation point.

  ≈≈≈

  When Lynn arrived at the cottage, the whole crew was there, but it was nothing like the cozy party day. When Blossom opened the door she had the blotchy face of somebody who had been crying.

  “Hey, Blossom. Is this a bad time for me to be here?”

  “No. Come in. He’s horrible. I hate him.”


  As soon as the white door slid open, Lynn heard the sound of yelling.

  Fossick and Tron were standing face to face. Tron’s hands were clenched into fists. Larch was sitting in an armchair curled up in a ball, Artdog squished next to him. Nobody said hello.

  “I’m not doing it.”

  Fossick held up his hands, palms forward. “But, Tron, you know it can only work if everybody pulls his weight. It’s your turn.”

  “Listen. I don’t care. I don’t care about it all working. I’ve got something important happening.”

  “Then we can talk about switching chores.”

  Tron spat out the words. “You don’t get it. I’m sick of talking. I’m sick of you. I’m sick of this whole thing.”

  “Tron, son.” Fossick stepped forward, one hand outstretched, and Tron lashed out, swore and crashed out the door.

  There was a silence broken only by Artdog whimpering. Then there was a voice from the armchair. “Larch doesn’t like those words.”

  Fossick went and put his hands on Larch’s head. “It’s okay. It’s okay. He’s just angry.”

  He looked at Blossom and raised his eyebrows.

  “What about it? Can you take over Ginger for today? Larch and I will make some dinner.”

  “But Lynn’s here. And it’s not my job.”

  “Take Lynn with you.”

  The storm dissolved from Blossom’s face. “Can I really?”

  “Sure. Lynn’s one of us now. We’ll give her some work to do. Here’s the key.”

  ≈≈≈

  Ginger turned out to be a dog — a high-stepping, elegant light-brown poodle who looked as though she would be at home on a fashion runway. Her house was also elegant, with lots of metal and wood, not one bit of clutter and a pond with giant koi.

  As Blossom put on Ginger’s complicated leash, she explained the arrangement.

  “It’s all about teeth. Larch’s teeth. Teeth cost way too much money to fix. Ginger belongs to Clara. Clara’s a dentist. If you need your teeth fixed and you can’t pay money, Clara gets you to come and take care of Ginger when she’s working. Everybody has their slot. Thursday evenings are our time. That’s the day she works late. She’s not the usual citizen dentist, I guess.”