“It is,” Bruno said.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Bruno paused. “I feel six feet tall just hearing it.”
Something in her chest fluttered, gentle and grateful. She felt tingling relief in her fingers and toes. Not every second had to be lived at a blade’s edge. The first-class warning bell rang, and, the spell broken, both she and Bruno looked down at their bag straps, which required sudden adjustment.
Bruno extended an arm for her to go first, some chivalrous instinct, and she went ahead, with him following, an inch too close this time as well, though again she didn’t mind it.
“There’s Doug,” he said.
Liv stopped, her hand automatically gripping the railing hard enough for her palms to gauge the layers of chipped paint. Trained to identify Doug’s slouch, the antithesis of Bruno’s perpendicular posture, Liv spotted him at once, a sweatshirted, shorts-clad smudge trundling beetlelike across the lot.
Doug, in turn, knew her shape. She could tell he was watching her. It was in his diagonal trajectory, how he slid in her direction while leaning in the opposite, the same way he always edged closer to her on school grounds despite knowing that she was a different Liv Fleming here, one who hung out with different people.
Except right now she was not with those people, but rather a boy Doug wouldn’t even recognize. Even at this distance, Doug would file away Bruno’s height, body type, clothing, and hair. Doug was, above all things, observant, and just under that, canny about knowing when to use those observations. His leaning lope scolded her. Wasn’t this a dangerous time, Liv, to be befriending new people?
“You want to wait for him?” Bruno asked.
Liv turned back to the school. She had to hold on to the version of herself that Bruno inspired, whatever scraps might survive this.
“No,” she said.
15.
They settled upon a methodology. Or Doug settled on one, and Liv agreed, because she could not think clearly, not when she looked at the thing that had, one way or the other, been party to her father’s eradication from earth. Their stated goal was to get the skinner, through pain, to express tangible information about what had happened to Lee. If he was still alive, if he was definitely dead. Unstated was the catharsis of simply doing something about Lee, no matter what shape it took, after years of just taking the hurt like punches.
At Doug’s direction, they gathered what objects existed that might still smell of Lee Fleming. Aggie had gotten rid of a lot, but she’d done it as she did everything—in fickle, fitful impulses. Lee’s gardening gear still hung from a garage hook. His winter hats, gloves, and scarves remained in the hall closet. A box in the bathroom was a veritable time capsule: his last-used bar of deodorant, his razor, his toothbrush. What could smell more like him than those?
They also gathered pictures. Most family photographs, Liv came to realize, focused on her. She had to dig out albums curated from before she was born, filled with photos shot on actual film. There was Lee Fleming at grad school graduation, pretending to weep in joy. Further back: Lee on the beach, looking up from a book at the photographer, his wife—or maybe, back then, only his girlfriend. Further back: Lee, impossibly sharp-boned, his hair full and whipped by wind, wearing a jean jacket, atop a picnic table, happy. The blessing of ignorance, Liv thought, remembering when she had it.
They entered the Armory with a shopping bag of these items. The skinner had had days to improve. Raised welts had lowered. Scratches had sealed over with crystalline crust. Wounds on exposed organs had faded from furious, red blemishes to dimmer blots. None of these improvements would last.
Doug spread Lee’s personal items around the skinner in a half circle. While the skinner goggled in instinctive fright, Doug donned a pair of work gloves and Liv her mother’s studded gardening gloves. Doug picked up a hollow metal leg he’d broken off one of the worktables. It was as hard and lightweight as a police baton. He tested several grips, then looked at Liv.
“Ready?”
No, she’d never be ready, not for this. She nodded.
He nodded back, blasted out a breath, inhaled quick, and whacked the skinner’s left hip with the baton. It made a loud clucking noise, metal on bone. The skinner’s strangely jointed legs scrabbled away to move its hips as far from Doug as possible, which, because of the zip ties, wasn’t far.
Liv knew what to do. They’d discussed it. She picked up the razor, a dull thing spotted with rust but still clinging to Lee’s hair and particles of his skin. Hunched by the skinner’s opposite hip, Liv held the safety razor in front of its face.
“Closer, Liv,” Doug said.
She blew out a nervous breath and scooted forward until she could feel the skinner’s warm flesh through her jeans. She positioned the razor inches from its face.
“Closer,” Doug pressed. “Get that thing in its nose.”
Liv didn’t want to hear a third critique. She shoved the razor into the alien’s face. Her reward was a queasy thrill, watching the skinner whip its rubbery neck to evade contact. A pointless struggle: Liv pressed the razor’s handle over the thing’s mouth, while the blade rested against its nostrils. The skinner flopped and, sure enough, the blade nicked the small, delicate flap of its nose.
Liv recoiled on instinct, but tried to push aside the nausea. A little blood was nothing at all. It might focus the skinner, help it get a big whiff of her father’s smell.
“Talk to it,” Doug said. “Like we said.”
Liv nodded and cleared her throat. This was nothing like speech class, and yet she found herself strangled with nerves.
“Lee Fleming,” she said. “Where is Lee Fleming?”
Skinners had mastered interplanetary travel. Doug’s rationale was that they therefore must be highly intelligent and capable of recognizing sounds if not words, though he did leave room for an alternate theory that, to Liv, felt plucked from science fiction: that individual skinners were indeed dumb and that their collective intellect rested in overlord figures like the Whistler or the Green Man.
Doug’s baton connected with the skinner’s hip a second time, and the alien’s body jiggled as if electrocuted. Liv jerked, too, and couldn’t help but notice where blobby tumors on its hip had been squashed flat, where whitish skin there had gone hot pink. She tried to focus; she’d missed her cue. She swiped for one of the photos of Lee and held it so close to the skinner’s eyes that, when it contorted, the stiff photo paper dug red scratches across the eyeballs’ plump white surfaces.
Keep going, don’t stop, don’t think, she told herself. She pushed the safety razor harder against the thing’s mouth. The plastic handle clattered off crooked teeth.
“His name was Lee Fleming,” she said.
Doug let loose, harder this time. The skinner thrashed about. The flesh of its left hip was rising like bread.
“Lee Fleming,” Liv repeated. “Lee Fleming, Lee Fleming.”
The violence drove everything from Liv but the anxiety that these three syllables were losing meaning, degenerating from words that symbolized her beloved father into nonsense prattle that meant nothing but oncoming agony. Doug hit the skinner a few more times, and Liv watched the thing learn to bear down in anticipation, muscles thickening before each strike.