A Taxonomy of Love by Rachael Allen (2)

FYI, when someone says they’ll see you around and then doesn’t show their face for four whole days, you can bet they are calling you Caterpillar Boy to any and everyone.

Dean just left for baseball camp, so I’m in the den playing whatever games I like for as long as I like because he isn’t there stealing the controller and giving me ultimate wedgies. It is a land of aliens and car thieves and zombies, and I am king, and I could play forever. Or just for the next ten minutes, because the king could really use a Mountain Dew break.

I’m walking back from the kitchen, drink in hand, when there’s a knock at the door, and I happen to answer (read: am forced to by Pam).

It’s her.

I’m tempted to shut the door and open it again just to make sure, but I don’t want to seem weird, so instead I stare at her awkwardly and wonder if her hair is made of sunlight.

“Hey, do you want to come outside?” she asks.

Yes, I say. Except inside my head and not with my mouth.

No, no, no, no, no. Not again. Is this what it’s going to be like every time I see her? My teeth sticking like someone superglued them together and my tongue falling down the back of my throat? I make a guttural, choking-type noise. Hope looks at me like she’s wondering if I have some kind of brain damage.

“Do. You. Want. To. Come. Outside?” She flashes me a reassuring smile. The porch fans spin in lazy circles, also known as The Speed That Sends Hypnotizing Ripples Through Hair.

“Sure,” I say, relieved that I no longer seem to have lockjaw. And then my shoulders twitch upward in a tic. Not a big one, but she must have seen it. Except she doesn’t react. Maybe she thought it was just the regular kind of shrug. Maybe my tic-shrug isn’t as different as I think it is.

And then I’m thinking about my tics, and Hope noticing my tics, and the tan lines painted across her collarbones, and whether she noticed me noticing the tan lines, and holy balls, my nose itches . . . Do it. Just do it. You’ll feel so much better. There are freaking fire ants crawling around inside my nose and tickling me with their scritchy-scratchy feet, and all I have to do is sniff, and they’ll all go away.

Hope is watching me.

Don’t. Tic.

I have to!

Don’t.

But the ants. I NEED TO TIC SO BAD, I—

Sniiiiff.

The relaxation is instant. I think this might be what my dad feels like when he sneaks behind the woodpile with a cigar. Except I’m also flooded with this tremendous sense of accomplishment, like at the cellular level. Releasing a suppressed tic makes me feel like I have just climbed a mountain, and all is right with the world.

I follow Hope down the stairs, hoping she doesn’t notice that sniff or the two that come after.

I tic a lot (dozens of times a day? hundreds?), but it definitely happens more when I’m anxious. And maybe I notice it more when I’m anxious? Probably both.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“I was gonna go climb trees. You wanna come?”

OMGPANCAKES, IS THIS REAL LIFE??? “Yes.”

I trail behind her, feet shuffling, mind spinning. I do this thing—okay, it’s dorky, but I have this deck of Magic cards, and I tape people’s names onto the cards based on what they’re like (not the valuable ones, obviously). I don’t know, I feel like it helps me get a handle on people or something. It started this one time when I threw up when we were hunting. Dad and Dean were laughing, and I was like, Minotaurs, the both of you! And if I had to guess for Hope, I’d say she’s a Satyr Grovedancer or maybe some kind of dryad. I’ve been wrong in the past (when Dad first started dating Pam, I thought for sure she was a mountain troll). But there’s the hair, the name, and then the tree climbing. No human middle-school girl wants to spend her Saturdays climbing trees. They’ve all received the standard-fun lobotomy by now and started acting like Bella Fontaine across the street. Bella divides her time between obsessing over boys, making fun of people like me, and plotting middle school domination via text message, and she is most decidedly not a dryad, though I could be convinced she’s a harpy.

“I found this grove of perfect climbing trees out past the cul-de-sac that way.” She points into the distance, her chin jutting out in a regal kind of way. It’s a strong chin for a girl, with just a hint of a cleft.

“Yeah! I know that place. Those are pecan trees.”

“They are? That’s so cool!”

“I know! In the fall we pick them, and Pam makes pies.”

Making homemade everything is Pam’s hobby (obsession). Pies, pickles, sourdough bread, peach-habañero salsa, bacon jam. BACON. JAM. I tell Hope about all the awesome stuff you can find in our food closet, which she seems to think is called a pantry, and also about how homemade pickles taste nothing like store-bought.

“I’m telling you, these pickles will completely change the way you see pickles.”

“That’s cool that you get along with your stepmom,” she says.

“Oh, yeah. Pam’s awesome.”

(Everything you need to know about Pam: She’s the one who puts the pictures on Pinterest that make other women freak out and reassess their abilities as wives/mothers/hot-glue-gun operators. Except she doesn’t do it on purpose. She just genuinely loves hot-gluing stuff to other stuff.)

Hope asks me what middle school is like here, and I tell her a version that makes me sound 20 percent cooler.

“Is it weird having to make new friends all over again?” I ask. “You probably had a ton of friends at your old school.”

“Oh, sure. Um, tons.” She eyes the basketball goal at the end of the street.

Our words ping back and forth as we leave the road and wade through briars and Queen Anne’s lace. I hold back a branch so Hope can pass, in what I feel is a supremely suave and gentlemanly move, and then I sniff for what must be one time too many because Hope says, “Do you have a cold?”

“Oh, uh, yeah.” And then I pause. I don’t want to do it. But I don’t have the kind of Tourette’s syndrome where I get to decide when and if I tell people. One fountain of verbal tics spews out, and people know something’s going on with me, even if they don’t know exactly what. And then I get the “What’s wrong with you?” or the more polite, “Are you okay?” while giving me a concerned look that really means, “What’s wrong with you?” I can’t stand to hear her say that, so I rip off the Band-Aid. “Well, no. Well, I have Tourette’s syndrome.”

I wait for her to lean away—that’s what 97 percent of people do when I tell them. Their eyes might be smiling, and their mouths might be saying nice things, but their bodies betray the truth: a primal urge to get away in case my weirdness is catching.

“What’s it like?” she asks. She leans forward as she says it.

It’s such a small thing, but in that moment, I am eleven feet tall.

I swing myself up into the nearest pecan tree, and she swings right up beside me. “I don’t yell out the F-word all the time or anything. I just, you know, sniff or shrug, and sometimes I want to repeat a word someone says. Like, over and over again. Like, I can’t not do it.”

She nods like she doesn’t know what to say and keeps climbing.

“Anyway, it’s not like it’s a big deal or anything.” Tic-sniff. Except that it is because I am totally embarrassing myself in front of a girl I like.

Hope sits on a branch and swings her legs, and I perch on one across from her. She grabs a handful of hard, green pods.

“So these are going to turn into pecans?”

“Yep. Pecans.” And then my Tourette’s brain decides it really hates me because it latches on to the word “pecans,” and I. Can’t. Stop. Saying. It. Pecans. Only I’m saying it like “pee-cans” because apparently I’m as southern as Mimi today.

“PEE-CANS.” If I can just keep my mouth—“PEE-CANS.” Ugh. I keep repeating it at a half-shout volume. My voice echoes through the grove of pecans, which I am currently not feeling so fond of. This is why I have to bring a washcloth whenever I go to the movies. I wish I could stuff something in my mouth right now. I try covering it with my fingers.

“PEEE-CNNS.” Well, that’s just great.

“You really can’t stop it?” She’s looking right at me. I’m used to people staring, but only for a second, just long enough to put me in a Box for People Who Shouldn’t Be Looked At or Spoken To. Then they turn away like they haven’t seen me at all. This is different.

“Nope.” Except I think I maybe finally have stopped, but I don’t want to fixate on it for too long and tempt it to come back, so I try to empty my mind of the word and rush to talk about the first thing I can think of. “But I went to Tourette’s camp this summer—I just got back last week, actually—and I got to meet other people who have it and share coping mechanisms and stuff.” Oh, man, I have to stop this ship from sinking. “I met Sophie there.”

“Sophie?” The sunlight streaming through the leaves hits her face, and she wrinkles her nose.

Yes! Sophie! Sophie is cool! Let’s run with this Sophie idea!

“Yeah. Soph’s great. We message each other, like, every day.”

See? Sophie’s a girl, and she likes me. You could like me, too.

“Oh.” She climbs higher, and I can’t see her face. “Well, that’s great. Um, so, Dean. Does he have a girlfriend?”

Something falls out of the tree and splats against the rocks below. My heart. I’m pretty sure it’s my heart.

Lie! Lie! Lie! “No,” I say (truthfully—ugh). “He doesn’t.”

Before she can do something terrible like ask me to ask him if he thinks she’s pretty, I say, “I’m gonna try another tree.” I’ve climbed as far as I can get in this one.

I pick my way to the lowest branch and hang by my fingers before falling the rest of the way to the ground. Before I can catch my balance, there are hands turning me around and pushing me against the trunk. I have a moment of complete and total disorienting fear, but I manage to stay upright. I look up. And up. And up. Into the face of Ethan Wells and two of his Sasquatch-size friends. How did I not know they were here? I guess I didn’t hear them over the sound of my still-breaking heart.

Ethan’s face gets so close I think it’s going to eat mine. “What’s up, Spencer?”

“Dean’s at baseball camp,” I say, as fast as I can. No Dean was supposed to mean two whole weeks with no towel-whips, no pants-ings, no stop-hitting-yourself. No purple nurples from Dean’s friends who seem to spend every waking moment waiting for me to walk around corners. It was going to be a glorious preview of this fall, when they’ll all start their first year of high school and I’ll be in seventh grade by myself.

The Sasquatches grin. “Yeah. Big brother’s not here to protect you now,” says the taller one.

Dean? Protect me? I’m still trying to process the validity of that statement when Ethan says, “We weren’t looking for Dean. We were looking for you.”

“Me?” I sniff and try to play it off by wiping my nose.

“Yeah, you. Have you been looking in my girlfriend’s window?”

“What? No.” Tic-shrug.

“You sure? Because you’re shrugging like you don’t know.” He smirks like he’s the master of all things funny. The Sasquatches snicker.

“No. I swear.” I wouldn’t get within twenty feet of that she-cow.

“You’re lying. Bella saw you with your binoculars pointed at her window, you creepy little pervert.”

Oh, crap. “I wasn’t. There was a red-headed woodpecker in the tree by her house. I was watching it store grasshoppers in the cracks in the bark.”

“A woodpecker. Riiight. Well, just in case you get any ideas, I think we’re gonna have to teach you a lesson about birdwatching.” He cracks his knuckles. My skin winces. I can’t believe Hope is going to see this. “Say you’re sorry. Say you’re sorry for watching her change.”

And then I reach that familiar point where I just can’t take it anymore. “Into what? A gargoyle?”

I’m pushed back against the tree. “What did you say?” They converge over me—a three-headed Cerberus—and I wonder if beatings work like muscle memory, because I can feel the bruises waiting to form. Ethan’s hands dig into my shoulders. My outbursts always feel like they’re worth it until the first punch. I wish I could blame them on the Tourette’s, but this is 100 percent my own stupidity.

“Listen here, mother scratcher.” Hope swings down from a branch and lands beside me with a soft thump. “My boy Spencer doesn’t give a crap about seeing your girlfriend in her training bra.”

Ethan’s fist is frozen in midair like this is a movie, and if you only hit play, you’d see the part where he breaks my nose. Hope seizes the opportunity to remove my face from the line of fire. The Sasquatches watch with stupider-than-usual looks on their faces, their knuckles and brains completely immobilized. I wait for Ethan’s punching muscles to start working again. Hope pops each of her fingers all in a row. Is she scared? She sure doesn’t seem scared. Ethan seems a little scared.

“We’re going to my house for a snack,” she continues. “And if you know what’s good for you, you won’t follow us because my mom’s the only female firefighter in Peach Valley.”

This is no ordinary girl. This is the Queen of Badassery. And apparently it runs in the family.

Hope leads the way, and I trail behind her in a daze, wondering how it is that I’m still alive.

“Cheese and Fries, Spence, did you have to say that thing about his girlfriend being a gargoyle? It’s like you want to get beat.”

Spence. She called me Spence. “You don’t know Ethan. He’s going to beat the crap out of me anyway, so I might as well make it worth it.”

She looks at me like all my cells have shifted and now I’m something else. “Huh. I like your style, Spence.”

“Thanks.” If she keeps calling me that, I’m going to walk into a tree.

Hope’s compliment puts me in such a happy haze that I barely notice anything during the rest of the walk through the woods, even when we clomp across her back deck, even when she grabs two string cheeses from the fridge. But then she throws open the door to her bedroom, and I feel like I have extra nerve endings and extra eyes, compound ones, with thirty thousand facets like a dragonfly. Because this room—I’ve never seen anything like it.

Photos of people and animals, like the kind you might see in National Geographic, are tacked from one end of the room to the other. Hot-air balloons next to a polar bear next to the Eiffel Tower. A canyon made of ice fractals. Tibetan monks holding the biggest horns I’ve ever seen. A map of the world that takes up half of one wall, and another one of the United States up over her desk. And then other maps, smaller ones, like the one of the Caribbean by her window. I shuffle closer and notice a purple pin shaped like the letter J sticking out of Haiti.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“It’s for Janie, my sister. Last month, she was in South Africa, and now she’s in Haiti.” She taps the J, but I don’t know her well enough to read the face she’s making. “She left nine weeks ago. It’s the longest we’ve ever been apart.” She shakes her shoulders back and forth like that will get rid of the seriousness. “But it’s okay. We’ve been messaging at night and sending each other postcards. And look! She draws pictures for me.” She points at a woman with her arms wrapped around her daughter; a crowded market; two little boys holding hands in front of the wreckage left by a storm. The drawings are beautiful, but the faces—I feel like I’ve had a Matrix-style mind dump of everything they’ve ever lived.

“Wow. The faces . . .” It’s all I can manage.

Hope nods. “I know.”

“So she’s an artist?”

“Nope. That’s just something she does. She’s over there on this project installing solar panels. Like, at hospitals and schools and stuff? She works for this foundation, and she’s going to get to help all these people and travel all over the world.” She throws her arms wide and does a half-twirl. “And someday I’m going to travel all over the world, too. Mom said I should plan a trip whenever Janie’s out of town—to help with missing her and stuff.” She gestures to a map. “So, here’s the one I’m planning to Haiti. We’re gonna see the Citadelle and the ruins of the palace of Sans-Souci. And the caves! You wouldn’t believe the caves in Haiti.” Her fingers skim across the map like water bugs, landing for a second on each place she’s drawn a cave icon. “And Janie and I are going to hike through all of them. Or do you think that’s overdoing it?”

“No way. I think it’s a great idea.” She beams, and I wrack my brain for something exciting enough to interest a girl who plans cave tours of Haiti. I’m still wracking as she moves on to the map she planned while Janie was in South Africa. And there’s Madagascar, practically blinking at me, and it hits me. “Madagascar has some of the coolest bugs in the world!”

Hope pauses mid-sentence. Smooth. Real smooth. But then she smiles. “It does?”

I take this as a sign that I should plow ahead. “Oh yeah. I mean, I know that’s not the same thing as South Africa, but maybe you guys might have a chance to go there, too, and they have the most beautiful butterflies, well, moths, actually, Madagascan sunset moths, and their wings are all kinds of pinks and greens and oranges. And the coolest thing is, their wings don’t even have any pigment. It’s, like, these micro-ribbons that are all woven together, and the light refracts off of them.” Did I really just tell her about the microribbons? I should stop, I really should. But the insect facts keep pouring out of me. “And there’s these spiders—Darwin’s bark spiders—and they make some of the biggest webs in the world, like eighty feet wide, and they’re stronger than steel or titanium or even Kevlar.” I am struck with the sudden realization that I’ve gone overboard and finish with, “If you’re into that.”

It takes hours for her to react. My shoes put down roots, and dust gathers on my shoulders. Oh, man, she must be thinking this is so lame. Do girls even like spiders? At least I led with the moths. But—

“Yeah. Yeah, that could be really cool.” And I can tell she means it.

I grin like an idiot. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I wish more people got that excited about stuff.”

She’s grinning back, and I can’t look at her, so instead I look at the map over her desk and notice there is a blue H. “So, I guess this is you?”

“Yeah. Mine’s pretty much always stuck here in Georgia.” She sighs. “But there’s so many places I want to go. See?”

She points to a piece of butcher paper that rolls from the ceiling to the floor. There have to be at least a hundred cities scrawled on it.

“We’re going to go to all of these together. You know, someday. And all these other pins—those are the places we’ve already gone.” She sweeps her hand over the map where a bunch of purple pins and also some blue ones speckle the United States. “Janie’s are the purple ones. I’ve got the blue.”

I touch a blue pin in New Orleans and think about how Hope has been there. “It’s so cool,” I say, almost to myself.

She looks at me like she’s sizing me up and what she sees passes the test. She rummages around in a desk drawer and places a box of pins in my hand. It feels like she’s giving me the keys to another world.

“You can be yellow.”