“Do you?”
“I’m a kid. I’m not supposed to.”
“I don’t like them,” he said.
“How do you call people?”
“Let’s go,” he said, waving her on.
“How do you call people?” she asked again.
“I don’t.”
“Jesus,” she said. “You’re weird.” She caught up to him after just a few steps. “My sister would die without her phone. She uses it instead of a brain.”
“You’re the neighborhood watch?” Dobbs said.
Just as quickly as she reached him, now he was falling behind. “I keep an eye on things.”
“Who else are you watching?”
She said, “There’s this cat …”
“And have you told your parents about me and the cat?”
“They don’t notice anything,” Clementine said.
He kept slipping farther and farther back. But she didn’t need him to lead the way anymore. She already knew a shorter route than the one she’d seen him take.
He stopped. He seemed to be struggling to catch his breath. There was a chain-link fence running along the sidewalk. He let his weight fall against it.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“I’m fine.” The coils of hair on his forehead had dried into greasy springs.
“You look like you’re about to fall over.”
The top rail was missing from the fence. The linked chains were cradling him like a hammock.
“Don’t you ever sleep?”
He gazed back at her blankly.
Clementine grabbed his elbow. “Come on.” She could see he’d never make it home without her.
It should have taken only ten minutes to reach the house on Bernadine Street, but by the time they got there, the moon was gone. She could tell by the light in the sky that school had already started. There’d be trouble when she got there. It was just a question of how much.
She steered him up the path to the front door. He removed the key from his pocket, and she took it from him and fit it into the lock. Once inside, she pushed him toward the mattress.
“I don’t want to lay down,” he said, but his knees were already folding beneath him.
“Too bad,” she said. “I have to go.”
She got detention, of course. The moment she arrived at school, she was steered straight into Ms. Crossman’s office, and she had to sit on her hands and wrinkle her nose and try not to sneeze at the old lady’s perfume as she pounded out a speech about responsibilityandmaturity and Clementine’s educationalfuture. All the while Clementine watched the hands on the wall clock tick away even more of her precious educationalopportunities.
From experience she knew the worst thing about detention wasn’t detention itself but what would happen when Pay and her mother found out. But today in particular the punishment also meant she wouldn’t get out of school until after four o’clock, and by that time who knew what might have happened to Dobbs.
The day rambled on endlessly, and when they finally opened the doors to let her go, Clementine stuck out her tongue and sprinted down the street, backpack crashing against her with every stride.
When she reached the house on Bernadine Street, she was relieved to find Dobbs sitting on the back step, hidden by the overgrown shrubs.
“You still look terrible,” she said. In truth, though, she’d half-expected to find him dead.
“Might as well get used to it.”
She pulled a bright red slip from her backpack. “I got detention, thanks to you.”
He barely glanced at the paper flapping in front of his face.
“What kind of hoodlum are you?” she said.
He squinted past her into the sun. “I help people.”
She waited for him to laugh. Instead he looked at her crookedly. “Who could you possibly help?”
“No one.” He gave her a shrug. “I was kidding.”
Yet another person who assumed she was dumb.
Clementine tried to picture people sleeping on those mattresses in the disgusting warehouse. It was their own stupid fault, asking for help from someone who lived in a place as crappy as this.
“Where do they come from?”
“What does it matter?”
“Why would they want to be here?” she said.
“It’s better than where they’re from.”
Clementine found that hard to imagine. She tried picturing one of those landscapes from the movies, brownish-purple skies crackling with electrical storms, and people living beneath the earth in things that looked like submarines, hiding from their killer robot overlords.
“This is your job?”
“It’s not about money,” he said.
“Pay sells cell phones. He could get you one.”
Dobbs looked down at her, the way everyone else did when they wished she would go away.
“What?” she said.
Dobbs stood up, drifting into the sunlight. The wide, bright rays looked like a tractor beam trying to pull him into the sky. “You’re better off without one.”
“It’s all my sister does, play with hers.”
“People take them for granted,” Dobbs said.
“Everyone has one, except you and me.”
“They’re full of metals,” Dobbs said. “Rare ones. And there aren’t enough.”
“They’re going extinct?”
“We’ve mined the easy ones. The rest, it’s too expensive.”
“Good,” Clementine said. “I can’t wait to tell her.”
“Electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines, batteries. All the stuff that’s supposed to save us,” Dobbs said. “They all need these metals.”
“I’ve been reading this book,” Clementine said. Then she changed her mind, reaching out and grabbing his hand. She gave him a tug. “You’re coming with me.”
“Where?”
She pulled him forward, and he stumbled after her down the steps. She led him through the yard, not letting go until they’d made it all the way around to the front of the house.
“Come on!” she yelled over her shoulder as she launched herself across the street and into the empty lot.
She was surprised when he did what she said.
She’d never seen him move so quickly. High-stepping into the weeds, he looked like a different person. It was as if it had never occurred to him there was a way to get places that didn’t involve sidewalks. She felt like a rabbit, and he was the fox. But even with this sudden burst of energy, he couldn’t keep up with her. After half a block, she had to pause to make sure he was still behind her.
She stopped again when she reached the pricker bush. The cat had been there for two weeks now, and its skin was almost completely gone, except for the caramel-colored tip of its tail. The carcass was mostly bones and black stuff swirling with flies and white wormlike things she thought were larvae.
Dobbs’s footfalls were heavy for someone so skinny. She raced off when she heard him coming.
A lot and a half away Clementine stopped at another of her favorite spots. Buried in the grass was a low concrete elbow, a piece of some sort of foundation missed in the bulldozing of whatever had been here before. In the corner was a little nook where Clementine kept a collection of things she’d found out here: a metal spring, a ceramic mug covered in poppies, a pocketknife so rusted the blade wouldn’t open. She stood up on the concrete, using it as a step. From there she could see Dobbs still back by the pricker bush, bent over the cat. Then he looked up and saw Clementine here, and the chase resumed.
From the elbow she sprinted across another overgrown field to a thicket of scaly red bushes skirting a squat silvery tree. She got down on her knees. There was an opening in the thicket, and inside was a big hollow space, like an igloo made of sticks. Once inside she couldn’t see Dobbs anymore, but she could hear his heavy footsteps. The sun was beating down on the bushes, and when Dobbs got there, he was a long, dark shadow blocking out the light. Through the webbing of the thicket, she could see his feet and legs.