Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best pdf ebook reader txt) 📕

Marci followed him home a week before Christmas break. He didn’t notice her at first. She was cunning, and followed his boot prints in the snow. A blizzard had blown up halfway through the school day, and by the time class let out, there was fresh knee-deep powder and he had to lift each foot high to hike through it, the shush of his snow pants and the huff of his breath the only sounds in the icy winter evening.

She followed the deep prints of his boots on the fresh snow, stalking him like he stalked rabbits in the woods. When he happened to turn around at the cave mouth, he spotted her in her yellow snow-suit, struggling up the mountainside, barely visible in the twilight.

He’d never seen an intruder on the mountain. The dirt trail that led up to the cave branched off a side road on the edge of town, and it was too rocky even for the dirt-bike kids. He stood at the cave-mouth, torn by indecision. He wanted to keep walking, head away farther uphill, away from the family’s den, but now she’d seen him, had waved to him. His cold-numb face drained of blood and his bladder hammered insistently at him. He hiked down the mountain and met her.

“Why are you here?” he said, once he was close enough to see her pale, freckled face.

“Why do you think?” she said. “I followed you home. Where do you live, Alan? Why can’t I even see where you live?”

He felt tears prick at his eyes. “You just can’t! I can’t bring you home!”

“You hate me, don’t you?” she said, hands balling up into mittened fists. “That’s it.”

“I don’t hate you, Marci. I—I love you,” he said, surprising himself.

She punched him hard in the arm. “Shut up.” She kissed his cheek with her cold, dry lips and the huff of her breath thawed his skin, making it tingle.

“Where do you live, Alan?”

He sucked air so cold it burned his lungs. “Come with me.” He took her mittened hand in his and trudged up to the cave mouth.

They entered the summer cave, where the family spent its time in the warm months, now mostly empty, save for some straw and a few scattered bits of clothing and toys. He led her through the cave, his eyes adjusting to the gloom, back to the right-angle bend behind a stalactite baffle, toward the sulfur reek of the hot spring on whose shores the family spent its winters.

“It gets dark,” he said. “I’ll get you a light once we’re inside.”

Her hand squeezed his tighter and she said nothing.

It grew darker and darker as he pushed into the cave, helping her up the gentle incline of the cave floor. He saw well in the dark—the whole family did—but he understood that for her this was a blind voyage.

They stepped out into the sulfur-spring cavern, the acoustics of their breathing changed by the long, flat hollow. In the dark, he saw Edward-Frederick-George playing with his matchbox cars in one corner; Davey leaned up against their mother, sucking his thumb. Billy was nowhere in sight, probably hiding out in his room—he would, of course, have foreseen this visit.

He put her hand against the cave wall, then said, “Wait here.” He let go of her and walked quickly to the heap of winter coats and boots in the corner and dug through them for the flashlight he used to do his homework by. It was a hand-crank number, and as he squeezed it to life, he pointed it at Marci, her face wan and scared in its light. He gave the flashlight a few more pumps to get its flywheel spinning, then passed it to her.

“Just keep squeezing it,” he said. “It doesn’t need batteries.” He took her hand again. It was limp.

“You can put your things on the pile,” he said, pointing to the coats and boots. He was already shucking his hat and mittens and boots and snow pants and coat. His skin flushed with the warm vapors coming off of the sulfur spring.

“You live here?” she said. The light from the flashlight was dimming and he reached over and gave it a couple of squeezes, then handed it back to her.

“I live here. It’s complicated.”

Davey’s eyes were open and he was staring at them with squinted eyes and a frown.

“Where are your parents?” she said.

“It’s complicated,” he said again, as though that explained everything. “This is my secret. No one else knows it.”

Edward-Frederick-George tottered over to them with an armload of toy cars, which he mutely offered to Marci, smiling a drooly smile. Alan patted him on the head and knelt down. “I don’t think Marci wants to play cars, okay?” Ed nodded solemnly and went back to the edge of the pool and began running his cars through the nearly scalding water.

Marci reached out a hand ahead of her into the weak light, looked at the crazy shadows it cast on the distant walls. “How can you live here? It’s a cave, Alan. How can you live in a cave?”

“You get used to it,” Alan said. “I can’t explain it all, and the parts that I can explain, you wouldn’t believe. But you’ve been to my home now, Marci. I’ve shown you where I live.”

Davey approached them, a beatific smile on his angelic face.

“This is my brother, Daniel,” Alan said. “The one I told you about.”

“You’re his slut,” Davey said. He was still smiling. “Do you touch his peter?”

Alan flinched, suppressing a desire to smack Davey, but Marci just knelt down and looked him in the eye. “Nope,” she said. “Are you always this horrible to strangers?”

“Yes!” Davey said, cheerfully. “I hate you, and I hate him,” he cocked his head Alanward. “And you’re all motherfuckers.”

“But we’re not wee horrible shits, Danny,” she said. “We’re not filthy-mouthed brats who can’t keep a civil tongue.”

Davey snapped his head back and then forward, trying to get her in the bridge of the nose, a favorite tactic of his, but she was too fast for him and ducked it, so that he stumbled and fell to his knees.

“Your mother’s going to be very cross when she finds out how you’ve been acting. You’ll be lucky if you get any Christmas pressies,” she said as he struggled to his feet.

He swung a punch at her groin, and she caught his wrist and then hoisted him to his tiptoes by his arm, then lifted him off the floor, bringing his face up level with hers. “Stop it,” she said. “Now.”

He fell silent and narrowed his eyes as he dangled there, thinking about this. Then he spat in her face. Marci shook her head slowly as the gob of spit slid down her eyebrow and over her cheek, then she spat back, nailing him square on the tip of his nose. She set him down and wiped her face with a glove.

Davey started toward her, and she lifted a hand and he flinched back and then ran behind their mother, hiding in her tangle of wires and hoses. Marci gave the flashlight a series of hard cranks that splashed light across the washing machine and then turned to Alan.

“That’s your brother?”

Alan nodded.

“Well, I see why you didn’t want me to come home with you, then.”