Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

and ejecting rowdy drunks with equal
aplomb. One of them was talking into a phone, and two more were moving
cautiously toward them, sizing them up.

"We should go," Mimi said.

"I need my library card," he said, and was as surprised as anyone at the
pout in his voice, a sound that was about six years old, stubborn, and
wounded.

Mimi looked hard at him, then at the librarians converging on them, then
at the mesh back kid, who had backed all the way up to a work surface
several paces back of him. She planted her palms on the counter and
swung one foot up onto it, vaulting herself over. Alan saw the back of
her man's jacket bulge out behind her as her wings tried to spread when
she took to the air.

She snatched up the card, then planted her hands again and leapt into
the air. The toe of her trailing foot caught the edge of the counter and
she began to tumble, headed for a face-plant into the greyed-out
industrial carpet. Alan had the presence of mind to catch her, her tit
crashing into his head, and gentle her to the floor.

"We're going," Mimi said. "Now."

Alan hardly knew where he was anymore. The card was in Mimi's hand,
though, and he reached for it, making a keening noise deep in his
throat.

"Here," she said, handing it to him. When he touched the felted card
stock, he snapped back to himself. "Sorry," he said lamely to the
mesh-back kid.

Mimi yanked his arm and they jumped into the car and he fumbled the key
into the ignition, fumbled the car to life. His head felt like a balloon
on the end of a taut string, floating some yards above his body.

He gunned the engine and the body rolled in the trunk. He'd forgotten
about it for a while in the library and now he remembered it
again. Maybe he felt something then, a twitchy twinge of grief, but he
swallowed hard and it went away. The clunk-clunk of the wheels going
over the curb as he missed the curb-cut back out onto the road, Mimi
sucking breath in a hiss as he narrowly avoided getting T-boned by a
rusted-out pickup truck, and then the hum of the road under his wheels.

"Alan?" Mimi said.

"It was my first piece of identification," he said. "It made me a person
who could get a book out of the library."

They drove on, heading for the city limits at a few klicks over the
speed limit. Fast, lots of green lights.

"What did I just say?" Alan said.

"You said it was your first piece of ID," Mimi said. She was twitching
worriedly in the passenger seat. Alan realized that she was air-driving,
steering and braking an invisible set of controls as he veered around
the traffic. "You said it made you a person --"

"That's right," Alan said. "It did."

#

He never understood how he came to be enrolled in kindergarten. Even in
those late days, there were still any number of nearby farm folk whose
literacy was so fragile that they could be intimidated out of it by a
sheaf of school enrollment forms. Maybe that was it -- the five-year-old
Alan turning up at the school with his oddly accented English and his
Martian wardrobe of pieces rescued from roadside ditches and snitched
off of clotheslines, and who was going to send him home on the first day
of school? Surely the paperwork would get sorted out by the time the
first permission-slip field trip rolled around, or possibly by the time
vaccination forms were due. And then it just fell by the wayside.

Alan got the rest of his brothers enrolled, taking their forms home and
forging indecipherable scrawls that satisfied the office ladies. His own
enrollment never came up in any serious way. Permission slips were easy,
inoculations could be had at the walk-in clinic once a year at the fire
house.

Until he was eight, being undocumented was no big deal. None of his
classmates carried ID. But his classmates *did* have Big Wheels,
catcher's mitts, Batmobiles, action figures, Fonzie lunchboxes, and
Kodiak boots. They had parents who came to parents' night and sent trays
of cupcakes to class on birthdays -- Alan's birthday came during the
summer, by necessity, so that this wouldn't be an issue. So did his
brothers', when their time came to enroll.

At eight, he ducked show-and-tell religiously and skillfully, but one
day he got caught out, empty-handed and with all the eyes in the room
boring into him as he fumfuhed at the front of the classroom, and the
teacher thought he was being kind by pointing out that his hand-stitched
spring moccasins -- a tithe of the golems -- were fit subject for a
brief exposition.

"Did your mom buy you any real shoes?" It was asked without malice or
calculation, but Alan's flustered, red-faced, hot stammer chummed the
waters and the class sharks were on him fast and hard. Previously
invisible, he was now the subject of relentless scrutiny. Previously an
observer of the playground, he was now a nexus of it, a place where
attention focused, hunting out the out-of-place accent, the strange
lunch, the odd looks and gaps in knowledge of the world. He thought he'd
figured out how to fit in, that he'd observed people to the point that
he could be one, but he was so wrong.

They watched him until Easter break, when school let out and they
disappeared back into the unknowable depths of their neat houses, and
when they saw him on the street headed for a shop or moping on a bench,
they cocked their heads quizzically at him, as if to say, *Do I know you
from somewhere?* or, if he was feeling generous, *I wonder where you
live?* The latter was scarier than the former.

For his part, he was heartsick that he turned out not to be half so
clever as he'd fancied himself. There wasn't much money around the
mountain that season -- the flakes he'd brought down to the assayer had
been converted into cash for new shoes for the younger kids and
chocolate bars that he'd brought to fill Bradley's little round belly.

He missed the school library achingly during that week, and it was that
lack that drove him to the town library. He'd walked past the squat
brown brick building hundreds of times, but had never crossed its
threshold. He had a sense that he wasn't welcome there, that it was not
intended for his consumption. He slunk in like a stray dog, hid himself
in the back shelves, and read books at random while he observed the
other patrons coming and going.

It took three days of this for him to arrive at his strategy for getting
his own library card, and the plan worked flawlessly. Bradley pulled the
books off the back shelves for the final time, the librarian turned in
exasperation for the final time, and he was off and out with the card in
his hand before the librarian had turned back again.

Credentialed.

He'd read the word in a book of war stories.

He liked the sound of it.

#

"What did Krishna do?"

"What do you mean?" She was looking at him guardedly now, but his
madness seemed to have past.

"I mean," he said, reaching over and taking her hand, "what did Krishna
do when you went out for coffee with him?"

"Oh," she said. She was quiet while they drove a narrow road over a
steep hill. "He made me laugh."

"He doesn't seem that funny," Alan said.

"We went out to this coffee shop in Little Italy, and he sat me down at
a tiny green metal table, even though it was still cold as hell, and he
brought out tiny cups of espresso and a little wax-paper bag of
biscotti. Then he watched the people and made little remarks about
them. 'She's a little old to be breeding,' or 'Oh, is that how they're
wearing their eyebrow in the old country?' or 'Looks like he beats his
wife with his slipper for not fixing his Kraft Dinner right.' And when
he said it, I *knew* it wasn't just a mean little remark, I *knew* it
was true. Somehow, he could look at these people and know what they were
self-conscious about, what their fears were, what their little secrets
were. And he made me laugh, even though it didn't take long before I
guessed that that meant that he might know my secret."

"So we drank our coffee," she said, and then stopped when the body
thudded in the trunk again when they caught some air at the top of a
hill. "We drank it and he reached across the table and tickled my open
palm with his fingertips and he said, 'Why did you come out with me?'

"And I mumbled and blushed and said something like, 'You look like a
nice guy, it's just coffee, shit, don't make a big deal out of it,' and
he looked like I'd just canceled Christmas and said, 'Oh, well, too
bad. I was hoping it was a big deal, that it was because you thought I'd
be a good guy to really hang out with a *lot*, if you know what I mean.'
He tickled my palm again. I was a blushing virgin, literally though I'd
had a couple boys maybe possibly flirt with me in school, I'd never
returned the signals, never could.

"I told him I didn't think I could be romantically involved with him,
and he flattened out his palm so that my hand was pinned to the table
under it and he said, 'If it's your deformity, don't let that bother
you. I thought I could fix that for you.' I almost pretended I didn't
know what he meant, but I couldn't really, I knew he knew I knew. I
said, 'How?' as in, *How did you know* and *How can you fix it*? but it
just came out in a little squeak, and he grinned like Christmas was back
on and said, 'Does it really matter?'

"I told him it didn't, and then we went back to his place in Kensington
Market and he kissed me in the living room, then he took me upstairs to
the bathroom and took off my shirt and he --"

"He cut you," Alan said.

"He fixed me," she said.

Alan reached out and petted her wings through her jacket. "Were you
broken?"

"Of *course* I was," she snapped, pulling back. "I couldn't *talk* to
people. I couldn't *do* anything. I wasn't a person," she said.

"Right," Alan said. "I'm following you."

She looked glumly at the road unraveling before them, grey and hissing
with rain. "Is it much farther?" she said.

"An hour or so, if I remember right," he said.

"I know how stupid that sounds," she said. "I couldn't figure out if he
was some kind of pervert who liked to cut or if he was some kind of
pervert who liked girls like me or if I was lucky or in trouble. But he
cut them, and he gave me a towel to bite on the first time, but I never
needed it after that. He'd do it quick, and he kept the knife sharp, and
I was able to be a person again -- to wear cute clothes and go where I
wanted. It was like my life had started over again."

The hills loomed over the horizon now, low