Eleven
Bobby Randolph was calling to her, but old memories
held her captive for a moment longer. Mr. Peters was the day care
center's handyman. He was a monster with calloused hands as rough as
sandpaper, breath like garbage, and the toothless grin of an old witch.
The first time he pulled five-year-old Becky Marple into his utility
closet, Becky spent the rest of the day numb with shock.
Nobody noticed anything wrong.
The second time it happened, she learned the futility
of trying to escape. He was too big and strong. He pounced on the
children from almost anywhere, never with the slightest warning. When
they wailed at the sight of him, the attendants thought their reaction
amusing, and they chased the old man back into his dark corners in
exasperation. Mr. Peters' peculiar ugliness was reason enough for a
child's tears. They had no reason to suspect the children had other
reasons to be so frightened. They never knew that, sometimes, the
children were not able to cry out.
It happened several more times before he was caught.
Becky learned to pull herself in, like a turtle into its shell, deep into
a dark place, alone with her own thoughts. When he turned her loose after
trying to comfort her in his own special way, his gruff voice was a
trigger that signaled freedom. "Run along and play now, China doll," he
would growl. "We'll play again later." And she would flee for her life.
They caught him and sent him to an institution a week
before her parents removed her from the day care center and put her in the
public school system. For Becky Marple, it was far too late to undo the
damage he had caused.
Becky sighed and drifted. Bobby shadowed her, but in
silence. Years of her life fled past. Becky considered her newfound
skill of blinding and deafening herself to unpleasant realities a blessing
in disguise. Her parents thought her skill an unusual ability to
concentrate utterly upon any task at hand. When she discovered the
colorful world of her parent's computer screen, they encouraged her and
gave her one of her own. They gave her games to play and interactive
educational programs to master. When it became apparent that she
preferred the computer to reality, that she used one to block out the
other, they took the computer away from her and introduced her to
playmates her own age.
That, too, backfired.
They introduced her to Bobby Randolph.
Bobby was bedridden at the time, bald, pale, and safe
from Becky's fear of being touched. Bobby had leukemia, which Becky knew
to be cancer of the blood. Both the cancer and the chemotherapy to fight
it had taken its toll. She had no idea at ten years of age what leukemia
would do to him, except that it made Bobby very sick, and the adults very
quiet and solemn when in his presence.
Bobby had his own computer. It played chess,
although he could beat the software most of the time. During the course
of two summers, during which his cancer went into remission and then came
back, Bobby taught Becky how to play chess. After she learned the rules
and how to apply them, she let him beat her exactly half the time. She
kept a running tally of games won and lost. She made certain she lost the
last game she ever played with Bobby Randolph.
During Becky's friendship with Bobby, her parents
returned her computer. Her grades soared at school. She excelled in her
studies, and she was sent to a private school for advanced students. It
was there during a summer vacation that a younger incarnation of Mr.
Peters found her for the second time of her young life.
"China doll," he called her as he dragged her into
the trees.
The incident happened at summer camp. The boy
belonged to a neighboring, all-boys camp. Neither she nor her assailant
had any business exploring so deep into the woods. They stumbled upon one
another entirely by accident, although Becky was never convinced that it
was coincidence that he called her that same horrible name. Her mother
assured her with tears in her own Asian eyes that ‘China doll’ was a
common enough expression among occidentals.
Becky had little memory of that summer. Terrified by
the prospect of Mr. Peter's spirit following her throughout her life and
attacking again and again from the shadows, she retreated from the world
with renewed passion and determination. Helpless and desperate to save
their daughter's sanity, her parents put her in a hospital ward for crazy
kids. During that same year, Bobby Randolph was readmitted to a hospital
for children with cancer. He went in, and never came out.
Her parents rushed her to the hospital to see Bobby
one last time. It was his dying wish to see her again, to say good-bye to
his best friend ever. But they were too late. They were putting a sheet
over his face when Becky blundered into the room. They dragged her
screaming all the way back to her own special hospital.
It was then that she turned into a vegetable. She
overheard the reference often enough through her mental fog of apathy.
"Becky's turning into a vegetable!" Dimly, it amused her. She thought it
appropriate that she should have a choice of the vegetable she was to
become. She chose a turnip. Turnips were rather unpopular. As a turnip,
perhaps they would quit fussing over her so much.
It was her doctor, young and handsome Dr. Michael
Oppenmeier, who suggested a desperate, last-ditched effort to wean her
back to reality. Otherwise, her withdrawal would become a mindset and
doom her forever to an autistic existence. They took her out of the
hospital. They gave her drugs that made her too alert to space out and
daydream.
And they enrolled her in Armstrong High.
"Becky," Randolph's ghost said gently. "What are you
doing?"
She smiled. She was daydreaming regardless. She
floated far above the desolate landscape. The wind carried her like a
lost children's balloon.
Bobby's pale figure was falling away below and behind
her. "Come with me," she said with her eyes on the distant horizon.
"Let's just float forever and never go back."
Bobby was falling away more rapidly now. "I can't,
Becky. I'm only here because of you, and you won't listen to me."
Becky held out her arms and sailed through the gray
skies. "I'm like you now! I'm a ghost, too!"
He looked up at her sadly, slowly loosing altitude.
He was being dragged feet first by an invisible force toward the
cemetery. Alarmed, Becky dove after him, remembering that Bobby, too, was
helpless against the cruel forces of the world.
"Don't worry!" Becky cried. "I'll go with you!
We'll be together always!"
With his arms stretched out to her, Bobby was pulled
into the ground. Becky tried to follow him in. Her feet struck earth and
sent her tumbling painfully across the cold ground. She banged her head
against a tombstone and looked up, bewildered.
Robert Randolph it read. 2095-2107 A.D. Beneath the
date was engraved a hand upon a hand. One of those hands belonged to
Bobby. The other, she remembered, was an imprint of hers.
Sobbing, grieving her loss, Becky Marple tried to
claw her way screaming into the earth with her bare fingers.
