8

“I'm kidnapping you,” Emmet announced suddenly.

  

    She stared.

   

     “Is that hard to do?”

   

    “Kidnapping? Kidnapping you? Certainly not. Type in your address.”

****************************************

    Her apartment looked very small and drab as she looked in. He told her

pack the things she wanted. There were surprisingly few things she

wanted, and they were back in the car, hurtling towards who-knew-where.

    My whole life, she marveled. My whole life, and I don't even care.

    They didn't talk for a long time. She bit her nails and watched the

glimmering road, the people tiny blurs behind half-opaque plastic.

    “Oh!” he suddenly remembered, and she looked over at him. “I'll have

to shut your phone down, of course.”

    “You don't have to,” she said. “I won't message anyone.”

    “They'll message you.”

    She tilted from side to side, contemplating.

    “No,” she resolved finally, “I don't really think they will. I really don't

think anyone will realize I'm gone... I'll put in my resignation this evening,

so then they won't notice me at work, and there's no one else who'd text

me, there really isn't.”

    She frowned. I'm crazy, crazy or else just very lonely. Here I am leaving

everything with some strange guy, just like one of those stupid romance

novels I can't avoid in the bookstores... I bet there weren't so many stupid

romance novels when people still lived Outside...

    “No friends?” he interrupted. She shook her head.

    “No mother?” he persisted mercilessly. She shrugged.

    “We're not on speaking terms, me and my mother. We don't really get

along.”

    “Why?” This question itself was an entire interrogation; his eyes flashed

so dark they burnt her.

    “I don't know-- no reason, really. She just doesn't like me and I don't like

her. She always needs attention, she's always crying and gossiping and

falling in and out of love. Everything's a game to her, and I'm just a little

pawn, her little doll...”

    **************************************

    She looked up at him, and she did look so much like a doll, big blue

china eyes and upturned cherry china mouth and soft, dark, downy hair,

and for an instant all he could see her as was a lost little doll with

outstretched arms and a smudged face, left sitting in a sidewalk

somewhere.

    “... She had a lot of boyfriends, see, one after another, real fast. She'd

date one for a couple weeks, and then if he said he didn't like her she'd

throw a fit and if he said he liked her she'd throw a fit. It was all the same,

the boyfriends were all the same, the hysterics were all the same, the

drinking binges and half-attempted suicides were all the same.” She

paused for breath-- all this was said very rapidly-- and seemed

embarrassed. “I... I don't know. I just don't like her.

    “I'm sorry,” she said after a second. “I'm as bad as she is, I know, and

more melodramatic. I just can't help it-- but then, I guess she can't either.”

    She squirmed in her seat at his continued silence and asked, “Do you

like your mother?”

    “I did, yes. She's dead.” He suddenly, strangely, had an urge to say more.

He didn't.

    “Oh.” Her tone was low, ashamed. “I'm sorry.”

    *************************

    He seemed unwilling to reply, and they drifted in the isolation of

colliding bubbles.