The vending machines were all but barren save for some old Red Vines and packets of cherry Life Savers nobody wanted. Some fossilized Skittles.
Blush Gentry told her story from a beanbag chair. She and Foster, sealed inside the panic room. Without a window, with the air recirculation system blasting, neither could tell if it was day or night. Their drinking had given way to storytelling.
It was into this unforgiving peanut-free world that she had gone each day. And in exchange for every treat they’d loved and lost, the still peanut shell-shocked students of the sixth grade got a new classmate by the name of Lawton Taylor Koestler.
Blush pulled a who-cares? face. “He was a regular kid. Nothing two-headed about him.”
The only thing not to like was the kid’s mother, Mrs. Koestler, who accompanied her son to class on his first day and asked to speak to the kids in his grade. The teacher asked Lawton to step into the hall.
Her son was a very sick boy, Mrs. Koestler told Blush and her classmates. Deathly allergic to almost everything. But peanuts especially. And it was the responsibility of every boy and girl to ensure that Lawton never be exposed to peanuts in any form or, for that matter, any food that had been processed or packaged in any facility that dealt with peanuts. And she described, this Mrs. Koestler, how the tiniest particle of peanut enzyme would spur a full-body immune system reaction. Lawton’s lungs would quit working. His tongue would swell to suffocate him.
“There was no Mr. Koestler,” Blush said. “No wonder. The woman was a harpy.”
Blush pulled a handful of her hair near her face and began to pick through the strands, frowning when she found a gray one. “He made a basket from center court once, three points, and that alone should’ve made him popular, but his mom was a disability no kid could’ve got past.”
At times she’d stop mid-story. She’d get up and go to the touchpad and shut off the air. In the absence of the humming fans and blowers she’d listen as if she’d heard someone enter the house. They were walled in. Safe from nuclear attack, and she was nervous about a burglar. During these tense silences the air would grow warm and damp with their breathing.
After a spell of listening, listening and thinking, she’d activate the air-conditioning and settle back in her beanbag chair. At these pauses she seemed to be debating how far to tell this story.
She asked, “Have you heard of Munchausen syndrome?”
Foster nodded. “A person tells fantastic lies. Usually about his health, right?”
She smiled at a memory. “He came to our house for dinner one time. Did not eat a bite. I could tell he was terrified of the food. My mom felt sorry for him.”
The problem, her father told her, wasn’t just peanuts. It could be wasps. Bee stings. A friend of his had been riding a motorcycle and caught a bee in the face. He’d never been allergic, but now his cheeks had begun to swell. The guy’s vision blurred, and his throat swelled shut. All while still zooming along at freeway speeds. This friend of her father, he’d steered for the shoulder and braked hard, and even then he saw his own death, saw the real world disappearing and felt the motorcycle skid and topple onto the gravel. Blind and suffocating, he fell. A terrible pain shot up his leg, yet he didn’t die.
As doctors explained it, Blush’s father said, the cycle’s hot tailpipe had burned the man’s leg. Burned it to the bone. And the subsequent rush of natural adrenaline had stopped the allergic reaction. For the rest of his life, the man walked with a limp, but at least he had a life.
It had been her father who’d suggested Munchausen’s by proxy. Blush and her father had been washing dishes after the meal. After Lawton Koestler had gone home hungry. Munchausen’s by proxy was a mental illness and a form of child abuse. It prompted a parent to convince a child that he was frail. That he was allergic to everything or had a debilitating disease. It had been a lot for her eleven-year-old brain to grapple with.
“I thought I could cure him,” said Blush.
She rolled onto her side, scrunching the beanbag, so she could look straight at Foster. “I haven’t always been eaten alive by creatures from outer space, you know. I was raised in Idaho.” She nodded as if to assure him she wasn’t lying. “Mountains. Geodes.”
As a kid she’d been hiking and camping every free moment. “I didn’t grow up wanting to be hacked to pieces by an axe murderer.” She’d wanted to be a gemologist.
Foster laughed. “Really? A gemologist?”
“Don’t laugh,” she laughed. “Idaho is called the Gem State.”
Still laughing, he said, “Sorry, I’m sure you’d make a great…” He couldn’t say it with a straight face.
She said, “I knew schist and basalt and talus slopes.” She was a scientist at heart. So she talked Lawton into going on a hike one Saturday, just the two of them. She packed her own lunch. His mother packed him something nut-free and gluten-free, something non-soy and lactose-free. “And we took off on the trail to the top of Beech Mountain.”
She looked at Foster without speaking. The moment stretched as if she were testing him. This was a trial to see if he’d interrupt and change the subject, or if Foster was actually listening and engaged in her story. He allowed the minutes of silence to pass.
She said, “Don’t laugh, but I used to know every bird on sight. I knew their songs, too.”
Foster didn’t laugh.
“I
