Other Worlds Than These

“I doubt it,” he said. “East Wells isn’t big enough to put together a gang of anything bigger than two people. Deputy Chad is just really, really bored.” He reached up and twisted his new earring stud. He’d pierced it himself with a sewing needle. Ana had held the swabs and rubbing alcohol while he did it. She’d felt obliged to help, because she already had pierced ears so she could offer him the benefit of her knowledge.

“Don’t forget to clean that when we get home,” she said.

“I won’t,” he said. He sounded annoyed. Ana decided to change the subject to something casual and harmless.

“Why isn’t there a West Wells?” she asked.

Rico stopped walking. They were in the gas station parking lot, only a few steps away from soda and air conditioning. Ana turned around. Her brother was staring at her.

“What did you say?”

“West Wells,” she said again, trying to be extra casual and harmless. “We live in East Wells, but it isn’t actually east of anything. There’s just, you know, the woods by the school and then endless fields of grain on all sides. There’s no West Wells.”

Rico exhaled, loudly. “That’s right,” he said. “There is nothing to the west of this dinky little town. You are absolutely right.” He walked by her and went inside. Ana followed. She had questions, endless questions bubbling up somewhere near her stomach and she had to swallow to keep them there because Rico was definitely not in an answering kind of mood.

She shivered in the air conditioning, even though she’d been looking forward to it. Rico knew which soda he wanted, but Ana took a long time to choose.

Ana got her cat backpack from her bedroom closet. It was brown and furry and had two triangular ears sewn onto the top. She pulled a stack of library books out of it and replaced them with a flashlight, rope, chocolate-chip granola bars, band-aids, a notebook and magic markers. She filled up the small, square canteen that had been Tio Frankie’s with water and packed that, too. Then she took out the flashlight, because it was summer and it didn’t get dark outside until long after dinnertime, and she needed to be back by dinner anyway.

“Did you clean your ear?” she asked Rico’s bedroom door.

“No,” he said from behind it.

“Don’t forget. You don’t want it to get infected.”

“I won’t forget,” he said.

She walked to the East Wells high school, taking a shortcut through two cornfields to keep off the highway. It wasn’t a long walk, but during the school year almost everybody took the bus anyway because of the highway and the lack of sidewalks. Rico liked walking, even in wintertime. Ana saw him sometimes through the bus window on her way to East Wells Elementary.

She walked between cornrows and underneath three billboards. Two of them said something about the bible. One was an ad for a bat cave ten miles further down the road. Ana had never seen the bat cave. Rico said it wasn’t much to see, but she still wanted to go.

Ana crossed the empty parking lot in front of the high school, and skirted around the athletic field to the back of the gym. She knew where to find the gym because it doubled as a theater, and last summer a troupe of traveling actors had put on The Pirates of Penzance. After the show Ana had decided to become a traveling actor. Then she decided that what she really wanted to be was a pirate king.

A little strip of mowed lawn separated the gym from the western woods.

Three of Rico’s friends were there, standing in front of the graffiti. Ana could see green paint behind them. They were smoking, of course. Julia and Nick smoked cloves, sweet-smelling. Garth wore a Marlboro-Man kind of hat, so he was probably smoking that kind of cigarette. His weren’t sweet-smelling.

“Hey,” Ana said.

“Hey,” said Julia. Ana liked Julia.

“Hey,” said Nick. Nick was Julia’s boyfriend. Ana was pretty sure that her brother was jealous of this. Nick and Julia were both in Rico’s band, and both of them were really, really tall. They were taller than Rico, and much taller than Garth.

Garth didn’t say anything. He chose that moment to take a long drag on his cigarette, probably to demonstrate that he wasn’t saying anything. Garth was short and stocky and scruffy. He wasn’t in the band. He had a kind of beard, but only in some places. He also had a new piercing in his eyebrow. It was shaped like the tusk from a very small elephant. The skin around it was red and swollen and painful-looking.

Ana thought eyebrow rings were stupid. She liked earrings, and she could understand nose rings, belly-button rings and even pierced tongues, but metal sticking out of random facial places like eyebrows just looked to her like shrapnel from a booby-trapped jewelry box. She didn’t like it. The fact that Garth’s eyebrow was obviously infected proved that she was right, and that the universe didn’t like it either.

“You should use silver for a new piercing,” Ana told him. “And you need to keep it clean.”

“This is silver,” said Garth. He didn’t look at her as he said it. He looked at the tops of trees.

“Don’t worry about him,” said Nick. “He likes pain. He gets confused and grumpy if something doesn’t hurt.”

“Oh,” said Ana. She edged around them, trying to get a better look at the wall and the paint.

Garth threw down his cigarette, stepped on it, and reached out to knock the cloves from Nick and Julia’s hands. “Bertha’s coming,” he said.

Bertha walked around the corner. She was the groundskeeper. Rico used to help her mow the school lawn as a summer job, but this year he hadn’t bothered. Her name wasn’t really Bertha, and Ana didn’t want to ever call her that, but she didn’t know what Bertha’s name really was.

Bertha sniffed, and smiled. Her hair was a big, feathered mullet.

“One of you isn’t smoking cloves,” she said. “One of you is smoking real cigarettes, and I am going to bet it isn’t the one with the kitten backpack. One of you is gonna buy my silence. ‘Why no, officer, I sure didn’t see any young hooligans smoking near your site of vandalism.’”

Ana, Nick and Julia all looked at Garth. Garth grunted, handed over his pack of cigarettes and walked away. He walked away into the woods.

“Bye, Ana,” Julia said. “Say hi to Rico. Tell him we need to rehearse.” She took Nick’s arm and the two of them followed Garth.

Ana could see the graffiti, now. It was red and green and it wasn’t anything Ana knew how to decipher. Parts of it were swoofy, and other parts had sharp, edgy bits. It looked like it was made up of letters, but she wasn’t sure which letters they were.

Bertha lit one of Garth’s cigarettes. “Gonna have to rent a sandblaster,” she said. “Won’t come off without a sandblaster, and it’s brick so I can’t just paint over it.”

“Deputy Chad thinks it was gangs that did it,” Ana said.

Bertha snorted. “Town isn’t big enough for gangs,” she said. “Doesn’t matter anyway. This is just somebody marking their territory. This is colored piss with artistic pretensions.”

Ana took out her notebook, but she didn’t have any guesses to write down yet. “How’s the novel?” she asked Bertha. This was the usual thing to ask. Bertha had always been writing a novel.

“Terrible,” Bertha said.

“Sorry,” said Ana. She wondered if it was better to be a novelist or a traveling actor, and decided it would still be better to be a pirate king.

“What’s with the notebook?” Bertha asked. She flicked her cigarette butt at the graffiti, and it hit the bricks above the paint with a shower of orange sparks.

“I’m going to draw it,” Ana said, “I’ll take it home and figure out what it says, and then… then maybe I’ll know who did it. I’ll solve the mystery.”

“Have fun,” Bertha said. She opened a door in the gym wall with one of the many jingling keys at her belt and went in. The door shut behind her with a loud metal scrape.

Ana drew the graffiti tag. Luckily she had the right colors of magic marker. It took her seven tries to get it right.

The screen door squeaked when Ana opened it. The kitchen lights were on. One cold plateful of food sat on an otherwise bare table. Ana’s mother sat at the other end, face down on her folded arms. She was snoring. Ana