Ralph

RALPH

The next morning, I head to Sophie’s first thing. I decide to stop in the Good Mug for coffee. I wait for Oskar to comment on the two coffees, on the fact that one of them is for Sophie, but he doesn’t. He does ask me if I’m feeling all right.

“I feel great,” I say. “Why?”

He shakes his head.

It’s nippy, and there’s a shimmering layer of frost on the ground, but it’s not bothering me at all. I like the way it makes me feel, how it reminds me of my body. You’re here, the cold says. It’s now.

I trot up to Sophie’s door and set the coffees down so I can knock twice. The door opens itself and I step inside. Sophie is at the top of the stairs wearing a long purple velvet robe with black fur trim.

“Pet,” she says, yawning, “good morning.”

“Am I too early?” I ask. “I have coffee.”

“I’m tired is all,” she says, descending the steps. “Thank you for the coffee. How was your date?”

I hand her the cup and she removes the lid to sip. She looks at me, her eyes bright and eager.

“You don’t know?” I ask her.

“Know what, darling?”

“About the date?”

“What do you mean?”

“We talked,” I say. “Last night. On the stall?”

I was so sure. I didn’t doubt for a second.

“The stall?” she asks.

“Are you messing with me?”

She leans back, puts a hand over her heart. “No, darling. I’m sorry. I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh,” I say. “I guess I had too much to drink or something. I could have sworn . . .”

“Tell me,” she says. “Come. Let’s sit.”

We sit on the stairs and drink our coffee as I give her a play-by-play of the night. I tell her about handsome, terrible, bland Pascal. I tell her about Dan and his repulsiveness. She scoffs.

“Some men are so foul you wouldn’t even bother to save their blood,” she says.

“Sorry?”

“Never mind,” she says. “Continue.”

I tell her about how the restaurant was tacky and the food was gross, about how I drank straight whiskey and escaped to the bathroom. I tell her about how I saw the graffiti, the message that I assumed was from her. The red ink.

She keeps shrugging and shaking her head like she had nothing to do with it, like she has no idea what I’m talking about. I’m not sure I believe her. Part of me hopes she’s lying, because the alternative is scary. Did I hallucinate? See what I wanted to see? Was I drunker than I realized?

I tell her about how I started to get sassy, but then realized it was futile.

And then I tell her about the bones.

She’s silent as I recount the story. She doesn’t sip. She doesn’t move. I don’t think she breathes.

“I laughed. I started laughing. It took me over. I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen, the funniest thing to ever happen. He was bleeding from his mouth, spitting out bones, and I was laughing. I laughed. The whole restaurant was staring.”

Last night, the laughter made me feel immortal, but in the yellow light of day, I feel ashamed of it. It was crazy to laugh. Why did I laugh? What was so funny?

“I thought maybe it was you,” I say. “Like the spider. I thought it was a curse.”

“It wasn’t me, pet,” she says, stroking my hand. “It was you.”

I have a flash of memory. Me spinning around and around, a swirl of trees, the house. The moon hovering above me. My feet numb. A mist like a silver aura delicate as lace. My voice. A strange song.

I remember how it felt. How I felt.

I conjure it. The feeling. The feeling of watching Dan spit bones from his wretched mouth. The feeling of dancing on the grass, in the moonlight. Of being seen by Lynn and not caring. Not caring at all.

I wasn’t myself. I’m not myself.

Or maybe . . . maybe I’m more myself than I’ve ever been.

“But how?” I ask. “How?”

Sophie puts a finger to her lips, a thought haunting her face.

“What?” I ask.

She smiles widely. “Nothing at all, my dear,” she says. “Let’s go out for breakfast. We can talk over pancakes.”

“You’re obsessed with pancakes.”

She shrugs. “What can I say? They are cake disguised as breakfast. I’ll go get dressed. How’d the dress work out, by the way?”

“It was perfect. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, my pet,” she says, walking upstairs.

I’m left sitting on the steps drinking cold coffee and questioning everything.

I let my eyes wander around the foyer. They distinguish each detail. The shape of the crystals dripping from the chandelier, not quite teardrops. They’re too sharp, and in this exact light, at this particular time of day, they look dangerous, like the kind of icicles that kill people.

The colorful silhouettes the crystals project onto the walls, they’re in constant movement. They make me dizzy.

I put my face in my hands and rub my temples with my thumbs. It smells like incense in here, a scent so rich it’s almost rotten. I’m finding it hard to breathe.

There’s a pain in my chest. A gnawing.

Once Sam and I were watching some show on the History Channel about medieval torture, and there was one type where the torturers would adhere a bucket of rats to your chest and then heat the bucket so the rats would panic and chew through you.

“That’s actually happened to someone,” I said to him, “to multiple people.”

“I don’t want these anymore,” he said, setting the bowl of Cheetos we’d been snacking on down on the coffee table. Then he used his foot to push them farther away.

“I feel bad for the rats,” I said.

He laughed.

“They didn’t do anything! Must be scary for them.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, still laughing, “too bad for the rats. Not the guys getting eaten by them.”

“I feel sorry for the people, too,” I said, because I did feel sorry for them, and because I didn’t like it when Sam laughed at me like that, like I was crazy in a not-adorable way. But then I decided to be honest. “I feel worse for the rats, though.”

I thought about how terrifying it must have been for them, to be minding their own business, happily nibbling on garbage and scurrying through the streets, only to be scooped up and find themselves in a situation in which they thought they’d burn to death if they didn’t eat through some smelly dungeon human.

“Pet,” I hear. Sophie emerges from her room in a dress that looks pretty much identical to the robe. I don’t know why she bothered to change. “You look upset.”

“Just thinking about rats,” I tell her. “Do you think I have too much empathy for rats?”

I ask because I know she won’t laugh at me. She won’t think I’m crazy in a not-adorable way. She would never.

“Rats are selfish creatures,” she says. “They want to survive, and they do whatever they can to survive. I admire them.”

“Yeah.”

She reaches for my hand and helps me up.

“Shall we?” she asks.

I follow her out the door. I hear it lock behind us.

We walk in silence for a while, the ground chomping beneath our feet like it’s something alive, like it’s something we bring to life with our contact, with our presence.

“Are you still thinking of rats?” Sophie asks me.

“No,” I say, “I’m back to thinking about last night. What do you mean, it was me?”

“Here,” she says. “Open your palm.”

I do. In it, she deposits a large spider. So large I can see its face perfectly without having to squint. Countless eyes and a smile. A big lively grin.

“This is Ralph,” she says. “He and I are good friends. He’s very cheery.”

“Is this real?” I ask her.

“Annie,” she says, “there’s only so much I can tell you, only so much I can teach you. I can show you things about the world, about yourself. Beautiful, wonderful things. But I can’t make you believe them. There are some things you need to discover on your own. Do you understand?”

“I . . .”

I look down at Ralph, whose smile is so big it takes up most of his dark, fuzzy face.

He’s the most adorable creature I’ve ever seen. And she’s right. He is very cheery.

And suddenly, I’m cheery, too.

“He’s amazing.”

“I thought you two might hit it off,” she says. “He’s good company. Almost as good as me.”

When we arrive at the diner, we sit in our usual back booth and order pancakes. Sophie pours maple syrup into her spoon and lets Ralph stick his face in it.

“Should he eat that?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “But he loves it.”

“This is so weird.”

I almost say that I can’t believe it, but I stop myself. Instead, I say, “There’s a lot I used to believe wasn’t possible.”

She smiles, picking an apple out of thin air and tossing it to me. She says, “I know.”