Free Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle Page A

two, sandy blond hair and a wispy mustache on his upper lip, popped himself out and over the side of the truck like an athlete landing a long jump, and stopped himself when I’d thought he was going to come directly at me. “Dude!” he said, lifting his head. It was early. I felt good. Usually I ignore the few people who call out to me when I’m in public, but I looked over toward him and lifted my head right back.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “Dude, your
face
,” he said.
    I read a book called
Stardance
when I was thirteen years old. It left a big impression on me, though it’s hard to say exactly how, since I don’t remember much about the plot. It had something to do with zero gravity and people dancing in space, maybe in order to communicate something to an alien race. It is probable that when I remember
Stardance
, I am inventing several details as I go along.
    Still, it was
Stardance
, or my memories of it, the ones I can either access or manufacture, that exploded momentarily in my mind just then as my eyes looked out from under the bulging reconstructed folds of skin that seem to hold them in place. I thought of dancers up in space, trying to stop aliens from enslaving or destroying the earth. I was turning the key in the lock on the car door but it felt like a kind of dancing to me.
    “Dude, come here,” said the sandy blond with the mustache. “Not trying to be a dick, just … can I see?” He blew a little smoke and turned his head off to the side as he did it; I saw this as a gesture of deference, of trying to make me see that he wasn’t blowing smoke in my direction. It may have been, though I wonder, that he thought smoke might hurt my skin, which has a fresh-scraped look to it at all times.
    Nobody ever asks me if they can look at my face. Except doctors and nurses, I mean. People do look at it, quite often, but usually only if they can convince themselves that I won’t notice they’re looking. They try not to let their eyes stop wandering when they look over in my direction; they pose as if they were surveying some broader scene. I understand, a little, the social dictate to not stare at misshapen people: you want to spare their feelings. You don’t want them to feel ugly. At the same time, though, even before I became what I am, I used to wonder: Isn’t it OK to stare if something seems to stand out? Why
not
stare? My own perspective is probably tainted by having spent long hours before mirrors after the accident. It would be pretty hard to make me feel “ugly.” Words like
pretty
and
ugly
exist in a different vocabulary from the one you might invent to describe a face that had to be put back together by ateam of surgeons. My face is strange and terrible. It merits a little staring.
    If I were to scream right now, these two would jump straight out of their skins. Just open up my mouth as wide as it will go and start shrieking. Watch them run or freeze in place or just start screaming right back. These urges are still present sometimes. They rise and pop like bubbles on the surface of a bog, and then they’re gone. They don’t trouble me. They are voices from a distant past. “Sure,” I said. I set my bag of candy in the car and I walked across the parking lot toward their truck.
    We talked for a long time. The guy who’d called me over was named Kevin and his friend was named Steve, and Kevin said the Koreans at the liquor store were known to not card anybody who had a mustache. He slapped a brown bag in his flatbed as he said this and the full cans of beer gave off a muted
thunk.
I told him that when I was a little younger than he was now, we didn’t even bother to try buying, because the owners knew our parents: we would chug beers off in a corner of the store behind the dusty greeting cards. Steve laughed and said they still had that greeting card rack in there and I told him I knew, that the cards in it were the exact same ones from when I was his age. Kevin offered me a beer. I told him