Because You'll Never Meet Me by Leah Thomas Read Free Book Online

adventure while we waited for the cabin to be repaired. When we finally moved back in, Mom set our suitcases down in the untouched living room and sighed.
    â€œ
Tch
. Even hellfire couldn’t kill the seventies?”
    I threw myself across the orange tartan couch, burying myself in cushions. “Nope!”
    Mom sat down beside me. “Ollie. Look at me.”
    She was so quiet that I did.
    â€œYou’re too young to remember the digital watch. But if Greg—Dr. Auburn-Stache—
ever
tries to show you something electric, you have to tell me right away.”
    â€œBut … he’s my doctor.”
    â€œI’m your mother.”
    I think I was just relieved to hear he’d keep visiting. That I’d get to see color in his face again.
    We’ve got a living room
covered
in bookshelves, Moritz, and one shelf is entirely stacks of encyclopedias. A couple years afterAuburn-Stache and Mom argued, I read the word
electromagnetism
.
    Basically, electromagnetism is as strong a force in the world as gravity. I mean, if you can count on anything, you can count on things falling when you drop them and the air being full of electricity. Subatomically, electric particles are attracting and repelling each other
all the dang time
.
    But if I’m allergic to electricity, how come static doesn’t kill me? I’ve had a few shocks in my socks on the wooden kitchen floor, and those didn’t give me seizures. And I know about anatomy. There’s electricity in
our
brains, Moritz. Walt Whitman doesn’t need to sing any body electric. We’re all a little electric already, with or without pacemakers.
    So how come I’m not permanently dead yet?
    This is my working theory: my epilepsy isn’t due to allergies. It goes beyond that.
    I don’t
get along
with electricity. I repel it and it repels me. Nobody’s just
born
that different. It defies science and logic, Moritz.
    It’s just easier to say I’m sick. Easier for Mom to coop me up like an invalid.
    So you
have
to tell me about the laboratory, Moritz. Even if it bores you. I’m not needling you now. I’m
asking
you. If you were created in a lab, was I created there, too? I mean, how else are you and I connected?
    What else can explain the mess I’m in? If I’m an experiment like you, I need to explain that to Liz. I need her to know that there were bigger issues than me being a walking disaster to excuse—well, not excuse—but to
explain
that I couldn’t help what happened when we went camping. I couldn’t help her and I couldn’t—
    Focus.
    I’m puffing on my bubble pipe, Watson.
    2. Junkyard Joe
    Mom put up “No Trespassing” signs everywhere around our property. You know. The kind that said, “VIOLATORS will be SHOT.” Which I don’t think is legal, but made for a decent threat. The reason that signs like these were even necessary had a lot to do with open season.
    Do people hunt in Germany, Moritz? When I try to imagine it, I think of men in pantaloons prancing around chasing stags, like on Mom’s tapestries.
    Anyhow, open season here is a big deal. There are a lot of white-tailed deer in the forests, and every November people travel here with beer bottles and rifles and tarps in tow. They say they’re after ten-point bucks, but it’s really more about getting drunk with your buddies and sitting in trees, Auburn-Stache says. He’s not the hunting type. Too British or something.
    The last thing Mom wanted was a hunter stumbling near our cabin. Most moms would be worried about drunks carrying guns. She was more worried about drunks carrying flashlights.
    Well, sure enough, when I was seven or so, some man wearing camouflage walked onto our property with a rifle over his shoulder.
    Mom was teaching me how to bike-ride. I still had training wheels on the back, but I was getting really into pedaling as fast as I could and then braking hard