This Is Not Your City
By CAITLIN HORROCKS
An Excerpt
Zolaria
It is July and we are a
miraculous age. We have been sprung from our backyards, from the neighborhood
park, from the invisible borders that rationed all our other summers. We are
old enough to have earned a larger country, and young enough to make it larger
still. The woods between Miller and Arborview become haunted. Basilisks patrol
the Dairy Queen. We are so beset by dangers we make ourselves rulers over them,
and by July we are the princesses of an undiscovered kingdom. We make maps with
colored pencils. Here be Dragons, I write across the square of Wellington Park,
at the end of our street. Here be Brothers, Hanna writes across her own
backyard, and we avoid them both. We are too old for these games, too big for
this much imagination, but we are so unpopular that summer that there is no one
to care. We have finished the fifth grade alive and we consider that an
accomplishment. We have earned this summer.
The neighborhood has been
emptying of children. There are bigger houses being built past Wagner, past the
edge of the western edge of town. The houses here, one story, one bathroom,
have become a place to live after children or a place to move away from when
they come. This year Hanna-Khoury-eight-houses-down and I are best friends, a
thing I haven't had before and won't have again until I'm married, both of us
twenty-four, an age my family will say is too young and I will be proud years
later of proving them wrong.
That summer we pick
blackberries in the Miller woods and take them to Hanna's house where her
mother rinses them in a plastic colander. Hanna's parents still live together
and their house feels friendlier than mine. When Mr. Khoury visited our
fifth-grade class our teacher introduced him as a man there to talk about his
"troubled homeland." He was a man from somewhere else, a troubled country
people left and then called home, a country defined only by its perpetual
unhappiness. Mr. Khoury told us that we were lucky, lucky boys and lucky girls,
lucky American children, and Hanna rolled her eyes, embarrassed. Mr. Khoury has
a Lebanese flag on the wall of his study and I think it must be a kinder sort
of country that puts a tree on its flag. This is one of many things I do not
understand that summer.
The gas station at the
corner of Miller and Maple closes and there is a sign in the windows announcing
upcoming construction, Project Managers Ogan/Veen. We don't know that the
construction will never happen, that nothing will ever be built there, because
the gasoline has leached into the earth 100, 200, 300 feet down, some
impossible depth that no one will own up to and that can't be cleaned. That
summer we ride our bikes around and around the empty gas station and look in
all the windows. Hanna says Ogan/Veen looks like the name of a monster, and
from then on he haunts our summer in a friendly sort of way, a goblin who lives
in an empty Shell station and wanders the neighborhood at sundown. If we are
lucky, he will encounter only the children who have spent the past year
tormenting us, and he will grind their bones for bread.
"Ogan Veen, Ogan Veen,
His farts all smell like gasoline, His stomach's full of children's spleens,
Ogan Veen, Ogan Veen,"
we sing. There are other verses but this one's my favorite because I've come up
with "spleen" all by myself. Hanna doesn't know what it means and I'm
not so clear either, but it rhymes and my mother's said it's a part of someone
that can be eaten.
"If you're a cannibal,
I guess," she said, and I said perfect.
On one of my dad's weekends,
I ask him to take us to Dolph Park, too far to bike to. The hiking path circles
two lakes, Little Sister Lake and Big Sister Lake, and since I am an only child
and Hanna has two brothers, we decide to split the lakes between us. We fight
over who gets which. We are the same age and nearly the same size, although
Hanna's arms and legs are gangly and seem destined for great height. In seventh
grade, the year Hanna will slip a note between the vents of my locker that
reads "I Hate You" over and over, filling an entire notebook page, I
will be 5'2" and as tall as I will ever grow. My father is 6'1" and
will call me "Midget." When I briefly register with an online dating
site after college I will call myself "petite." Hanna will never grow
tall, either, and because we can't know these things, we ask my father to flip
a coin over Big Sister Lake. I can see him peek and scuttle the coin when I
call heads, a move too quick for Hanna to notice. She cedes the lake to me,
accepts the smaller for her kingdom, and I try to tell my father that night
over carryout Chinese what I am only beginning to understand myself, that the
way in which he loves me is not quite the way I wish he would.
In fifth grade Hanna and I
doomed ourselves. On the second day of school we took out our folders, our
pencil cases, organized our desks, and Hanna had space dolphins and I had pink
unicorns. Two years ago all the girls had school supplies like this, and I
don't understand why they have abandoned the things they loved. Hanna and I
were startled but not stupid, and if no one had noticed us that day we would both
have begged our mothers to take us to K-Mart that night and exchange them. But
it was too late. We were the girls with the wrong school supplies, and
everything we did after that, even the things that were just like everyone
else, were the wrong things to do. I will never tell Hanna that space dolphins
aren't really as bad as pink unicorns, and that she wasn't really doomed until
I made her my friend.
The Little and Big Sister
Lakes are the eastern edge of what we name Zolaria that summer, simply for the
sound of it, the exotic "Z" and the trailing vowels like a movie
star's name. The northwestern border is the Barton Dam. It takes us most of the
summer to get there, sneaking closer and closer, up Newport Road and through
the grounds of what will be our junior high school. One day there is a door
propped open by the tennis courts and we decide to explore. There is a sticker
beside the door: No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service. I am barefoot and we are so
timid this sticker foils our plan until Hanna takes off her left shoe and gives
it to me. Now we are within the law, and follow a chlorine smell as far as the
locker rooms, the labyrinth of showers, the locked door to the pool. We hear
footsteps and run, directionless, past the library, the main office, the Cafetorium,
past the music room where I'll play flute for three shrill years. Hanna will
have quit band by then; Hanna has only so much energy, her mother will tell
mine on the phone, and doesn't want to waste it on the trombone. We run past
the glass trophy cases in the foyer and finally we find the open door, the
patch of blue sky and red and green tennis courts. In the homestretch Hanna's
shoe flies off my foot and she yells, "Forget it! Don't stop!" but I
go back and we make it out anyway.
The next day we bike through
the junior high parking lot and across the freeway overpass just north, where
we yank our arms up and down until three trucks have honked their horns. We
take our bikes into the nature preserve and ride them until the hills get so
steep they rattle our teeth. We ride bikes like girls, throw like girls, we
know it, and there is no one around that summer to make us ashamed. We walk our
bikes through the forest, the sound of the freeway to our right and a creek to
our left, a symmetrical hum. Eventually there is a fence and a gate and a dirt
road that leads to the Barton Dam. We ride to the huge gray wall of it, the
rush of water at the base, the scum scudding across the surface of the river
like soap suds. There is a dead animal floating at the base of the dam, bloated
and spongy and colorless. Its fur is breaking off in hanks, drifting in the
patches of foam. It is a cloudy day and we are alone on the river path. A man
comes out of the pump station at the top of the dam and walks out along the wall.
He leans against the safety railing and shades his eyes with a hand and looks
down at us. We know we are in the borderlands, where our kingdom meets a
stranger's, where Ogan Veen wanders in daylight, and where we should not
linger.
Thirteen years later, Cal
and I will announce our engagement on Christmas morning over crumpled wrapping
paper and freshly-squeezed orange juice. It will be the coldest morning of any
year of my life so far, the paper's lead headline the temperature, 26 below,
but as we unwrap presents we will see one of the Khoury boys outside walking
their dog. My mother will call me into the kitchen to tell me I am young.
"You're young," she'll say. "You're still so young."
"Not that young,"
I will tell her.
"Yes, that young. You
barely know each other."
"I know him."
"You don't know
yourself," she'll say. "That's what I worry about. How can you get
married when you don't know yourself yet?"
"I know myself
plenty," I'll say. "I think I know all I want to."
One night in July, Hanna and
I have a sleepover and dream almost the same dream, in which Ogan Veen is
chasing us, gnashing his long, stinking teeth. Zolaria is not his to haunt, so
we build traps in the woods, stretch fishing line between trees, scatter tacks
in the dirt and make piles of throwing-rocks in places with good cover. In my
backyard is a half-dug decorative fishpond, a project my father started and
abandoned, and we lattice the top with long sticks, camouflage it with leaves
and cut grass. Every day I wait for Hanna to come up the street so we can check
it together. I do not want to face our quarry alone. We bow branches, harp them
with yarn, notch twigs and practice our archery. We strip the leaves from long
tendrils of weeping willow and crack the whips in the air. We run shouting
through the woods brandishing foam swords from a Nerf fencing set. We are
girded for battle, but the enemy will not show himself. We catch nothing, but
we have made ourselves afraid. It seems unfair, that a kingdom we invented
should have its own mysteries, its unvanquishable foes. By September, we are
almost eager for school to begin. We are tired of checking a dry fishpond for
ogres every morning. But as princesses of Zolaria, we cannot say such a thing
out loud. We have certain duties to our kingdom, to our adoring subjects. We
must give the appearance of keeping them safe.
My father will take me once
more to Dolph Park, when I am in high school, for old times' sake. The lakes
are in the middle of an algae bloom, the weather hot and the water full of nitrogen
and phosphorus. I will explain this to my father, nitrogen, phosphorus, when he
grimaces at the damp mat of green over the pond, looking solid enough to walk
on. My high school will have implemented an experimental science curriculum the
year I enter tenth grade and I will know a great deal about eutrophication and
very little about anything else. We will pretend to skip rocks but will really
just be throwing things, stones and sticks and clods of dirt, watching them
break apart the algae and sink out of sight. We will throw until our arms are
tired and I will talk about the environmental benchmarks of healthy aquatic
environments. We will get milkshakes at the Dairy Queen on Stadium Boulevard
and two weeks later my father will move to San Diego.
In sixth grade Hanna and I
will still be in the same Girl Scout troop. We will sing Christmas carols for
the old people at Hillside Terrace nursing home, and in the spring we will sell
cookies. I will sell enough to earn a stuffed giraffe, while Hanna sells only
enough for a patch to be sewn on her vest. She will already be sick and I will
have no idea. She will miss the whole last month of sixth grade, and four Girl
Scout meetings, but it will be summer before my mother takes me to visit her.
The hospital will remind me of a shopping mall, places to buy medicine and
gifts and food, departments for having babies and looking after babies and
looking after children and fixing all the different things that can go wrong
with them. It is a weighty place but exciting, the way my mother asks the front
desk for Pediatric Oncology and I press the button in the elevator.
Hanna's mother and mine will
go for coffee, leaving us alone. Hanna will be wearing a violet-colored
bandanna. She will say she is a gangster, and I say she would make the worst
gangster in the world, which is true. She says a highwayman, then, which feels
a little closer, and when I suggest pirate, we're off. We go once more to
Zolaria, the bed rails marking the deck of our ship, and Hanna says climb on, that
I won't hurt her, and our kingdom acquires an ocean, high seas. Aweigh anchor,
we say, trim the sails, cast off, fore-and-aft, and we are all right for a
time. We will be eleven, almost twelve; we will keep looking at the door,
hoping no one comes in and sees us. After half an hour Hanna will throw up
twice in a plastic tub beside the bed. She will say she leaned over to take a
sounding, that the sea is a thousand fathoms deep where we are, that if we
don't make it back to port we'll drown for sure. I will ask her if she wants
some water. She won't say anything, but I'll fill a plastic cup from the jug on
the nightstand.
"I had a dream the
other night that Ogan Veen was back," I will say. "It was in the
woods and he was chasing us and when we went out the fence we were saying, 'I
don't hear him, I think we made it,' but then he was right there in front of us
smiling and then I woke up." Hanna will look at me and her eyes will be
dark and flat and I will know it was a terrible idea, to tell her this dream.
She will sip her water and I will watch her sip it and we will wait for our
mothers to come back and when they do we will be glad.
I will be unprepared for how
long this sickness takes, for how long Hanna will be neither cured nor
desperate. I will visit her once more at the hospital, twice more while she's
at home. I will realize I am waiting for her to be either well or dead. She
will feel very far away. I will start junior high alone, and when Hanna comes
for her first day, in late November, I will be startled to see her. Our morning
classes must all be different because I recognize her for the first time at
lunch, sitting by herself. I will already be sitting in the middle of a long
table by the time I see her, my lunch unpacked in front of me. I will be
pressed tight on either side by people who, if asked, would probably say I am
their friend. Hanna will be wearing an awful wig, stiff and styled like an old
woman's perm. The hair will be dark brown, not black, and will no longer match
her eyes. She will be pale and her face swollen and she will not seem like
someone I can afford to know.
*
* *
The summer we are ten we
sketch maps of our kingdom and outline its Constitution, its Declaration of
Independence, its City Charter. In the end they all become zoological surveys.
The Haisley woods harbor griffins, borometz, simurghs. There are dragons on
Linwood Street, basilisks on Duncan who turn children to stone. We understand
that we have no sway over basilisks and dragons; we understand that they are
the minions of Ogan Veen. He has servants now, he has armies, and despite all
our efforts Zolaria is not as safe as it was.
We make other lists, too, of
"People Who, In Zolaria, Would Be Imprisoned In The Dungeon FOREVER."
Hanna keeps adding her brothers' names to the list and then erasing them until
the paper is ready to tear and I tell her to leave them off, if she's going to
feel so guilty about it. We make a list of "Animals That Can Be Ridden:
Pegasus, Centaur, Griffins, and Space Dolphins." We decide this is too
charitable, and amend it to "Animals That Can Be Ridden By Us." We
decide to hire young men to look after our stable of space dolphins, and when
we deem ourselves a little older, and ready for love, we will notice the
groomsmen and swoon. We prepare speeches of protest, in which we declare our
unwillingness to marry foreign princes, our determination to follow our hearts,
until we are disappointed to remember that in our kingdom we have no parents,
and may marry whomever we choose.
(Continues...)
Excerpted
from THIS IS NOT YOUR CITY by Caitlin Horrocks. Copyright © 2011 by Caitlin
Horrocks. Excerpted by permission of Sarabande Books. All rights reserved. No
part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in
writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely
for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
