“Where’s what?” I ask, immediately on edge.
Ember pauses next to me, her whole body tensing visibly at the tinge of accusation in Mrs. Stuart’s voice.
“The money,” she hisses. “There’s exactly forty dollars missing from the cash box.”
I let out a little laugh before I can stop myself. Wouldn’t you know it? I stopped myself from stealing anything, and someone else did it for me.
“I can assure you,” I reply, offended—after all, I have a gift, damn it—“if I had stolen money, I wouldn’t have been stupid enough to get caught.”
“So you’re bragging about it?”
“No, I’m saying I didn’t steal it.”
“Empty your pockets,” Mrs. Stuart says.
“No.”
“Empty them right now, young lady.”
“Why do you think Trix took the money?” Ember asks.
“I saw her standing over here a little too long earlier in the evening. She looked awfully suspicious.”
“I can look how I want. I didn’t take anything.”
“We know you were in some kind of trouble,” Mrs. Stuart says. “That’s why you were dumped on Mia. Teenage girls don’t just show up out of the blue like that without a reason.”
“You don’t know shit,” I reply, my temper flaring. “So you can back the hell off.”
“Excuse me? You steal from the homecoming committee and then you have the audacity to speak to me that way?”
“I can speak to you however I want if you talk to me like that.”
“What’s going on here?” Mia asks, coming back inside. Auntie and Vera’s mother follow behind her, surveying the scene.
“We’re exactly forty dollars short, and I saw your niece over here messing around earlier,” Mrs. Stuart huffs. “And now she was very rude to me.”
“You were very rude to me,” I retort. Every muscle in my body is screaming run because it would be so much easier to leave this situation than to face it. But I have to be brave like Ember, facing down the things that I’m afraid of. If she can touch the hands of dozens of strangers in two hours, then I have to try to hold my own against Mrs. Stuart.
Mia looks at me, and I realize as I watch her face, the furrowed brow, the pursed lips, that she’s trying to decide who to believe before she speaks again. Trix: abandoned, thief, drifter. Or Mrs. Stuart: PTO mom, former homecoming queen, and longtime acquaintance.
I guess things don’t look so good for me right now.
Mia touches her left hand, the empty finger where she sometimes still wears her wedding ring.
Of course, the wedding ring.
I close my eyes, hold my scars, and will my skin to turn to steel. There was another time that I didn’t steal, even when someone begged me to. It was a moment that set Mom and me down a path we could never come back from.
One breath, two, three.
“If Trix says she didn’t take the money, then she didn’t take it,” Mia says.
Her words snatch my breath away, and I open my eyes to make sure that what I heard is real.
“Besides,” Auntie adds practically, “if she did take it, you wouldn’t know.”
“Well, we know that no one else took it,” Mrs. Stuart says. “So where could it be?”
“Excuse me?” Mia says, putting her hands on her hips so that she mirrors Mrs. Stuart. “What is that supposed to mean?” Mia’s fighting for me. Finally, someone is fighting for me.
“It means that we all know that none of the other girls took it. Come on, Mia. Be reasonable. Trix is clearly running from some sort of colorful past. She must have done something to get kicked out of her parents’ house.”
“Colorful past?” Mia says. “She’s a seventeen-year-old kid from out of town, Gemma. Not a seasoned convict. And if she says she didn’t take the money, then she didn’t take it.”
“Well, I’d like to know where that money is, then.”
“Did you look around? Under all the equipment? On the floor? Did you do a second count to make sure your totals are right before you accused her of stealing?”
“I counted twice, Mia. I’m not an idiot.”
Mia turns to Auntie. “Tally the money again. We all know math wasn’t Gemma’s best class in school.” She looks at Vera’s mom. “Help me look around the concession stand. We’re going to figure this out.” Then Mia points at me and Ember. “You two, go wait in the car.” Ember opens her mouth to disagree, but Mia merely adds, “Now.”
Outside the concession stand, while the crowds are filtering back to the parking lot to head home, I realize that I’m sweating and my hands are shaking. I feel like I could puke. “Are you okay?” Ember asks, looking worried.
“I’m fine,” I tell her. Everything in me wants to shut down, turn inward. I hold my arm, my fingers squeezed over my constellation of scars. I didn’t do this. I didn’t take the money. But the way she looked at me, the way Mrs. Stuart pointed her finger at me cracked something inside that I thought I’d sealed shut a thousand times over.
This won’t be like the other times. I fight to make myself stay here, in this moment. Not like the other times before, with the ginger. The glinting rings. Don’t think about it, Trix, I tell myself.
“Come on,” Ember says, her voice keeping me grounded. “Let’s go to the Suburban. Mama will make this right.”
Mine couldn’t, I want to say. But I don’t.
Twenty minutes later, Mia comes back to us, her face pale and tight. Auntie follows her, still getting into the passenger side door when Mia cranks the engine. Mia peels out as soon as Auntie shuts her door, making me think that maybe crazy drivers run in this family after all.
No one speaks. Anger fills the car.
“What happened?” Ember asks after a beat.
My hands are still sweating, and I put them under my thighs, my chest tight and heaving. Maybe I was wrong about Mia fighting for me. She’s furious. She’s going to ask me to leave. She covered for me in the concession stand to save face, but now it’s all over. She’s thinks I stole that money, like I stole her wedding ring. She’s never going to trust me after this.
Auntie cackles, breaking the silence. “It was too good. I wish I had a camera.”
“We shouldn’t gloat, Auntie,” Mia chides, her voice softer than I expected. “Even if it feels damn good.”
Something loosens a little in my chest.
“We found the forty dollars under the hot-dog roller. The wind must’ve blown it under there, or it got stuck on the bottom of the change tray and then fell out when someone lifted it,” Auntie crows. “You should’ve seen Gemma’s face.”
Mia lets out a chuckle. “I thought her whiskers were going to fall off.” Then just as quickly, she frowns again. “But you know she only accused Trix because she still hates me because she thinks I stole Jordan from her in the tenth grade.”
“Well, it serves the old biddy right. Accusing our Trix of stealing,” Auntie harrumphs.
Our Trix.
I let out a breath of relief.
I think I could get used to that.
Eighteen
THE DAYS BEGIN TO FALL into a pattern. Ember and I go to school. Jasper and I steal moments alone between football practice and work. And then there are his pie deliveries, which tend to double in time when I ride along. I work my shifts at the tea shop, where the regulars know me by name. And then every evening I park myself at the dining room table with its worn, scarred top perpetually covered in stacks of books, half-empty teacups with chipped saucers, and a napping Bacon.
Because the table is where everything really happens. If the house is an atom, the dining room table is the nucleus. After work, Ember and I do our homework there while Mia and Auntie squabble back and forth in the kitchen if it’s not our turn to cook. I’m finally able to focus on my schoolwork with my new routine, my grades getting back to what they used to be before I quit last year. Then we eat dinner at the table, and I learn that while Mia is an excellent baker, non
e of the women in this house is a particularly good cook. The sauces are always too bland, the meat a little charred, the vegetables limp. The only food we’re really good at making is pancakes, so we eat breakfast for dinner at least twice a week.
At the table each night, Mia continues to list every high-school-age boy she saw that day who could possibly take me to homecoming. Auntie categorizes the boys as she complains about dinner: tool, turd, a hot muffin she would butter.
I haven’t said anything about going to homecoming with Jasper yet. I guess I’m afraid once I tell them, they’ll never let me live it down. Mia will be planning our wedding, coming up with seating charts and possible names for our future children. Ember’s noticed how Jasper’s moved across the lunch table to sit next to me, how he waits around by my locker between classes, and that I never miss a chance to help him deliver pies, but she wisely says nothing in front of our audience at home.
After dinner, Ember brings down one of our dresses and works on it at the table with a sewing machine that looks like it was made before the Civil War. Mia thumbs through fashion magazines that customers leave in the shop and tells random stories about Connor. Each anecdote I catalog away in my brain, imagining every story a stroke detailing some small crevice or shadow on his portrait, making him clearer, stronger. And Auntie yells commentary from the couch in the living room, letting us know when her favorite show about Hollywood psychic pets comes on. It’s the only thing that will make her switch from the made-for-TV movie network.
But tonight is different. Tonight, as we’re sitting down to eat pancakes for the second time this week, Mia slides a phone across the table to me. “Here it is, Trix. This one’s on our local network, so you’ll have a signal everywhere.” She smiles at me. “I got them to put your old number on it and transfer all your contacts.”
“Thank you,” I tell her, picking up the phone.
“Don’t see why kids need phones on them all the time,” Auntie grumbles.
“She needs to be able to contact her friends. Besides, what if there was an emergency? Like the house was on fire?”
“Well, she wouldn’t know it because she’d be fiddling around on her phone.”
Ember chokes back a laugh, nearly spitting out her mouthful of banana-nut pancake.
“Go ahead,” Mia tells me, ignoring Auntie. “It’s rung three times since I activated it. Somebody named Charly? Is that a boy from the city?” I can tell from her tone that she’s dying to know.
“Charly’s a girl.”
“Oh,” Mia says sadly, taking a delicate bite of blackened bacon. I can tell she wants more, some detail or tidbit that will shine more light onto my murky past. “Maybe you’d like to invite her to come stay with us for a weekend.”
“Yeah, maybe sometime,” I reply noncommittally.
“Go on,” Mia says. “Call her back. I’ll clean up the kitchen.”
I go outside and sit on the front porch. It hasn’t been cold enough to kill off the roses, so I settle on the first step, stroking the delicate, velvety petals of a low-hanging bloom. Bacon follows me, yowling while he twines himself between my boots. I look at the phone again. Three missed calls from Charly today. What can that mean? Deep in the pit of my stomach, I know.
I call Charly back, my heart beating frantically in my chest: half dread, half anticipation.
It rings only once before he answers.
“Trix? Trix, is that you?”
Shane.
“It’s me.”
“Where are you? Do you need me to come get you? Are you all right? Charly said they took you.”
My chest hurts. Maybe my heart cracked my ribs while it was beating so fast. “I’m okay, Shane.”
“Tell me where you are. I’ll come get you. I don’t care how far it is.”
“I don’t need you to come get me.”
“Why? Is there a bus you can take back? Are you on the bus?”
His faith that I will always find my way back to him, to the Starlite and those Coke-and-cherry slushes, nearly makes me lose my conviction. I know what I have to say, even if each word is a struggle to get out. Because I know it will hurt him, even if there are months and miles between us now, even if it is the right thing to do. “No, Shane. I’m with my family now.”
“Trix. You don’t mean that. I’m your family. Me and Charly, we’re your family. I know I was a jerk when I broke up with you. I was an asshole. I hurt you. I know that. But I didn’t want you to wait around for me those two years. It wasn’t fair to you.” He takes a breath like maybe his chest hurts, too. There is something vulnerable in his voice when he adds, “But Charly said you waited anyway.”
Silence on the line again, like he’s expecting me to assure him that I did. Like he knows, deep down, that I’m going to tell him that I’ve always loved him because he’s the only person who ever loved me back. To tell him that I want everything to go back to the way it was. To tell him I need him to save me like he always wanted to save me. A year ago, I thought that was possible. But now I know it’s not. I’m changing. I’m changed. And it’s not Jasper or Ember or Mia or Auntie who changed me. I changed myself. I put down roots.
“Shane,” I murmur, but I can’t get anything else out because it aches too much.
“I’ve got plans for us, Trix. It’ll be just like it used to be. We’ll get that little place we talked about. I’ve got connections with a guy—”
I say the hardest five words, my hands trembling so much that the phone quakes against my cheek. “I’m not coming back, Shane.”
I end the call.
My eyes are blurring already, and then all at once I’m sobbing on the front porch of the big, rambling farmhouse full of McCabe women, the only witnesses a fat, orange cat named Bacon and the jungle of roses around me.
I pull up my sleeve, looking at the scars that haunt me the way Shane has, the way my mom always will, cursing at the way they make me wander the Starlite Motel and the Jasmine Dragon when I close my eyes.
I tug out the fountain pen from my pocket. On top of the first scar a few inches from the crook of my elbow, I draw a blooming rose, its petals black-tipped with ink. And then another, and another, until my arm is covered, and instead of a constellation of scars, I have a constellation of roses.
I’m still outside when the stars appear, even though it’s too cold now to be sitting out here without a jacket. My body eventually stops shaking, apart from the occasional shudder, and the tears have finally dried when Ember joins me. She’s in her pajamas, wearing an old yellow-and-white afghan like a shawl, holding a blue afghan in the crook of her arm. She stops above me on the top step and lowers the blue afghan over my shoulders. Then she sits down next to me.
“Nice night for looking at the stars,” she says quietly.
“Yeah.” I surreptitiously wipe at my nose.
Ember lifts a hand like she wants to squeeze mine, but stops. She won’t take secrets I don’t offer.
“I’m here if you want to talk,” she says, putting her hand back in her lap.
Long, quiet moments pass. It’s only the sound of the wind rustling the leaves and blooms of the roses. Beneath the sweet scent of the flowers is the crisp burst of fall leaves, the tang of a frost that promises to arrive soon. A purr in the back of Bacon’s throat. The creak of the wooden stairs as Ember leans back on her elbows to look at the stars. The sigh of her breathing; quiet, patient, someone who will wait for me to find the words I need. The patience of a friend, the patience of family.
I look down at the constellation of roses on my arm.
“I used to love him.”
Ember shifts slightly, waits for me to continue.
“But that was a long time ago. I’m not that girl anymore.”
Ember sits up, adjusts her yellow afghan-shawl over her shoulders. “I’ll get the blueberry pie.”
Nineteen
THE SEVENTEENTH OF OCTOBER. SOMETHING about that date niggles in the back of my brain when I check the calendar before
we leave for school. The only thing Mia has written on the date is pay car insurance. Nothing important.
When we get to school, Jasper’s not leaning against my locker, waiting with that grin that tugs on his scar. He’s not at the morning classes we share, his desk scrunched close to mine. And when noon rolls around, Jasper’s not at the lunch table, either. Adalyn is, though. She apologized to me profusely after her mother’s behavior in the concession stand, and things are good between us. Now she has notebooks spread across the table with schedules for homecoming activities that still need volunteers, lists of community donors for the dance, spreadsheets with columns and rows indicating the location and amounts of chicken wire and tissue paper stashed around the town of Rocksaw that will go to decorating.
“Where’s Jasper?” I ask anyone else who can hear me over Adalyn’s frantic planning.
Linc, still recovering from his football injury with his arm in a sling, looks up at me from his cheeseburger. “I haven’t seen him all day. Maybe he’s got that flu bug that’s going around. I heard someone threw up all over in the locker room last night. Super nasty.”
Grayson nods, making a face.
“No, you jerks,” Ramani says, and when I look over at her for the first time, I realize her eyes are red. Dry, but red. Like she’d been crying earlier.
“What?” Linc asks defensively. “It was nasty.”
“It’s October seventeenth,” she replies.
“I know, I know! Twelve days until homecoming!” Adalyn exclaims, only halfway in the conversation.
Ember’s eyes widen at Adalyn’s outburst. Ember’s been at this table almost as long as me now, but Adalyn’s intensity still alarms her. One day, Adalyn will storm boardrooms and presidential elections, command a fleet of ships or an army of business executives. But sometimes she still misses the little things.
A Constellation of Roses Page 19