Mockingbird

by Chuck Wendig

  Like at any moment a big tentacle is going to burst out of the front door, coil around her, and drag her into its depths. Past other kids who mock the way she looks, walks, chews, exists.

  Fucking school.

  Let's get this over with, she thinks.

  Time to find "Miss Wiz."

  TWELVE

  Trust Falls

  Miriam passes an art class on the back lawn of the school, kids sitting in a half-circle around some wispy moonbeam teacher in a batik frock, all of them trying to sketch a fallen leaf.

  Closer to the river, though, Miriam sees her target – no, that's not it, that's not right. Not target. Not victim. Customer.

  How things have changed.

  The woman sits on a park bench underneath a red maple, the leaves shuddering and shushing above her head as squirrels bound from branch to branch.

  School squirrels are forever unafraid.

  The woman is dowdy. Frumpy. Not what Miriam expected. Pink blouse, gray slacks, a build like a linebacker gone to seed. She's got a sweet face. A lullaby face. Were you to go to sleep every night and see that face, you'd feel safe, comforted, snoozy.

  As she sees Miriam approach, she stands, offers her hand.

  "Miss Wiz," Miriam says. She's not sure how to begin this exchange, so she snaps her fingers and points a pair of finger-guns at the woman. "Pow pow".

  The woman seems taken aback.

  Miriam clarifies. "We probably shouldn't shake hands. Because of the thing. You know. The thing. The reason I'm here."

  "Right. Right. You're, ah, not what I expected."

  "Nor you," Miriam responds.

  The woman laughs. "Here people always tell me I look like a teacher."

  "It's not that. It's just… you know. Katey."

  "Katey." The teacher doesn't understand.

  "Right. Katey is – see, I have a thing for names, names that don't match, and yours is – okay, it's like this. Katey? Total pixie girl name. Katey is a tiny sorority girl who only drinks vodka because she doesn't want to put on weight. Katey dresses up like a slutty witch every Halloween. Katey has a bob-cut, wears size zero jeans, marries a banker who was once a quarterback. You look like a…" She gives the woman another good look over. "Kathy. There you go. See how easy that was?"

  "Well. My name's Katey." The woman laughs, but it's cagey, nervous. For a moment the only sound between them is the river behind them. The forced smile wilts like a spinach leaf in a hot pan. "Maybe this was a bad idea."

  "What?" Miriam asks. "No. No! No. It's fine. It's all good. Sit."

  They sit. Hesitantly. Miriam drums her fingers. Beneath her hands, the table is carved with girl's names: Becky Vicki Rhonda Bee Georgia Toni Tavena Jewelia and on and on. Nothing profane. Just names.

  "Oh, here," Katey finally says, pulling out a plastic JC Penney bag. She slides it over to Miriam.

  "This my stuff?" she asks.

  "Everything you asked for on your list."

  "A rider," Miriam says. "It's called a rider. Like a band might ask for, a bowl of all blue M&Ms, or a Longaberger basket filled with heroin and clean needles, or maybe a dwarven sex gimp swaddled in Saran Wrap."

  "Yes. Well." Another spike of nervousness. This time punctuated by a pursed frown, a grit of irritation forming a pearl of disgust. "It's all there."

  Miriam upends the bag.

  Out tumbles: A bag of Utz pretzels. A carton of Native Spirit cigarettes. A jar of Tallarico's hot hoagie spread. Two mini-bottles of booze (one a bottle of Glenfarclas Scotch, the other Patron Silver tequila). A travel-size bleach. And finally, a single box of hair-dye. Fuchsia Flamingo. The kind of nuclear pink you might see in the heart of a mushroom cloud. Just before the blast turns your eyes to aspic.

  Nice. A good choice.

  Miriam says so. Holds up the box. Winks.

  Then she starts setting up shop. Opens the hoagie spread. Tears into the bag of pretzels. Uncaps the Scotch.

  Pretzel into the spread, then into the mouth. Crunch crunch crunch. Mouthful of Scotch. Everything is salt and spice and smooth caramel burn.

  As she does this, Katey slides out a stack of money onto the table. Starts to move the money toward Miriam but pulls it back to her chest.

  "Whuh's wrong?" Miriam asks, licking boozesoaked pretzel bits out of her teeth.

  "This is all… strange. You're very strange, a very strange girl. You're the real deal? You can tell me about…"

  Miriam swallows. "Yeah, yes. How you suck the pipe, feed the worms, find yourself on the Holy Shit I'm Dead Express."

  Blink. Blink. "How do I know you're telling me the truth?"

  "You don't, I guess. Louis knows. He can vouch for me. So if you trust him, then you know I'm on the upand-up. If you don't trust him, then I guess we don't have much more to talk about."

  Katey slides the money across. "Five hundred, you said."

  "I did." As Miriam takes the money, Katey quick pulls her own hand away.

  "Not going to count it?"

  "I trust you. Besides, the count's wrong, I'll cast a hex on you. A pox. A pox-hex on your home and school." She swirls another pretzel into the jar of pepper relish. "I'm just fucking around. I can't curse anybody. I'm the cursed one." Crunch crunch crunch.

  "You been this way since you were a little girl?" Katey asks.

  "This way? What way? A crazy bee-yotch? Or a psychic bee-yotch?"

  She's interrupted. A young girl yelling. She turns, sees one of the girls in the art class – a little red-headed freckle-machine, maybe twelve or thirteen years old – standing up and holding her sketchbook like a mighty Viking weapon.

  The girl whacks another girl across the face with it. The other girl – a little blonde thing, probably named Katey – shrieks and goes down, flailing.

  After that it's all just a pile of limbs and whipping hair. A sensible brown shoe goes pirouetting up in the air.

  "Boy, she nailed that other girl good. Pow. Right in the kisser."

  "Par for the course here at Caldecott. These are good girls… for the most part. But many of them are troubled. Or just unwanted. It leaves… well, it leaves a mark. Inside. Sometimes outside, too."

  "I hear that."

  "My break is almost over," Katey says. Suddenly her eyes narrow. "You know, I don't want to do this anymore." She stands. "You can keep the items but I'd like the money back."

  "Whoa, whoa, what? No, hell with that, we're doing this. Louis said you're some kind of raging hypochondriac and so I came all this way and we are jolly well fucking doing this. Give me your damn hand."

  Katey's face sags. Her eyes go sad. "Is that what he said? Hypochondriac? Is that what people think of me? I suppose I knew that."

  "No, it's not what he said, it's what I said. Now shut up and let me do this."

  The woman reaches in. Goes to grab the money.

  Her hand knocks the Scotch bottle over.

  Whisky spills between the wooden boards of the table top.

  Her fingers touch the stack of cash.

  Miriam grabs her arm, quick twists the sleeve to expose the skin.

  Fingers encircle, skin on skin–

  Katey Wiznewski looks the same as she does now, with her broad shoulders and motherly moon face, but she's in a blue raspberry bathrobe so fuzzy it looks like she killed some imaginary beast and now wears its pelt for warmth. She sits on the edge of a loveseat and the cancer is all through her. It's like the roots of a tree piercing dark earth and those roots drink and drink and drink, and they come from a gnarled tumor nestled tight against her pancreas. In her hand is a tall thin glass of iced tea with a crooked lemon wedge sticking up over the rim, and she goes to hand the glass to a large jowly man with a warm smile and she says to him, "It's not sweet enough, Steve. Nothing's really sweet enough anymore. Please take – " But then the electrical current that goes through her, that keeps her moving, that keeps us all moving, is gone – bzzt, power down, plug pulled, darkness waits – and the glass drops and shatters against a coffee t
able and–

  –and Miss Wiz gives her a quick shove and Miriam topples backward, her head thudding dully against the earth.

  The grass catches most of the lost twenties. Some of the bills ride a quick breeze and tumble end-over-end toward the river. Then they're gone.

  Miriam sits up with a groan. Begins collecting the money.

  Katey just stands there. Hands kneading hands. Eyes wet.

  "I'm… sorry," the teacher says.

  "Without standing, Miriam reaches over and grunts as she grabs the fallen bottle of Scotch. "Alcohol abuse," she muses, then turns the bottle over and lets the last few drops plop onto her tongue.

  "What did you see?" the woman asks.

  "Do you really want to know?"

  "I do. I want to know. I need this."

  And then Miriam tells her, but what she tells her is a lie. She doesn't say that Katey has pancreatic cancer. She doesn't say that the cancer is present now, right now, and that the woman has nine months almost to the day to live. That's the truth.

  Instead she says, "Heart attack in twenty years. You're eating an egg-white omelet at your breakfast nook and your heart seizes and that's that." She preserves one detail. "You drop a glass of iced tea. With lemon. The glass breaks."

  Katey's face falls. Shoulders sag as she expels a long breath and as disappointment settles across her back like the yoke of a plow.

  "Well. Thank you for that." Her voice quiet, nasal, the words clipped short as though cut at the ends by a razor. "I'm… sorry again about pushing you. That's not like me. Not like me at all."

  And then the teacher walks away. Toward the school. Head low.

  THIRTEEN

  Lies, Damned Lies, and Cancer Diagnoses

  The lie. There it waits. Like a sword over her head. Like a pubic hair in rum punch. A mystery. A sharpened question mark like a sickle ready to slit her throat.

  She doesn't get it. It makes no sense. Why the lie?

  She stands there, looking out over the river. Pitching pretzels into its mud-churned milk-waters. Picking at the lie. Teasing apart the motivation behind it.

  Part of her thinks she's doing this woman a favor. Katey's got less than a year left. Pancreatic cancer – Miriam, that crow on death's shoulder, has seen it before. It's like an oil-fire. Once it starts, it won't go out. Spreads fast, too. Tell the woman about her diagnosis and it's – what? Just a series of debilitating therapies, each worse than the last. All futile. The door to despair thrown wide, the impossible and impending dark beyond.

  Maybe, though, it's punishment. Maybe she wanted to punish this woman. Say, fuck you, you don't want my help? You spill my Scotch, cause a hundred dollars of my money to get swallowed by the river? Like a passive-aggressive child pushing a plant off the sill to make Mommy mad: She lied. A lie borne of small and secret vengeance. A momentary reprisal.

  Even that doesn't add up. It isn't the whole picture. A part of the puzzle, maybe – the edge of it, the margins, painting by negative space – but it's not the whole of the image.

  She does all she can do for the moment. She smokes.

  What to do, what to do.

  She's got a pocket full of money. She could do anything. Catch a cab. Find a greasy spoon. Hit a strip club. Ditch her cell phone, buy a burner. Grab a bus to somewhere she's never been. To nowhere. To Maine, California, New Orleans, Montreal, Tijuana. Lobster, avocados, beignets, donkey shows.

  None of it sounds appealing. That surprises her. Those things should all be pretty great. But the very notion of escaping again doesn't do anything for her. Like a flat soda, the bubbles have all gone.

  Miriam takes the tequila, breaks the cap.

  Drink up.

  Smooth and sour going down. It sits in her stomach like a gym sock soaked in cider vinegar and scorpion venom.

  She belches. Nearby, scared birds take flight.

  Right now, her thoughts are like hangnails. She wants to pick at them even if that means pulling them so far it unzips her arm into a bloody bisected mess.

  Easy solution to soothe the soul: Hair dye. A balm for bad thoughts.

  Goodbye, ugly chestnut mop. Goodbye, old original. Goodbye, good girl.

  Hello, fuchsia motherfucking flamingo.

  FOURTEEN

  The Bad Girls' Club

  Well. That didn't work out.

  Miriam sits outside the principal's office with a handful of flimsy brown paper towels wadded up around her collar. All of them, sodden. In her pocket, an as-yet-unopened package of pink hair dye.

  Her scalp burns. Especially around the bullet-dug skin-ditch.

  She figured, fuck it, I can dye my hair in one of the girls' restrooms. Who cares, right? She went in, wandered around for a while, found a bathroom. Started killing the old chestnut color with a bleach wash, and while she was in there she shared a couple smokes with some of the older girls who came in. One of them was a nice black girl named Sharise, the other her gawky white friend Bella.

  They smoked. Talked about the hell of high school. Good times.

  But then – po-po came rolling in. Five-oh. Someone must have seen her wandering the halls and called the front desk and before she knew what was happening she was being escorted here by a pair of security guards. One guy who looked like a hyper-roided authority machine with a shorn scalp and muscles ill-contained by his guard uniform. The other guy looking like the Italian plumber from that video game. But shorter. And a little fatter.

  And now the principal's office. Or just outside it. Facing a wall with wooden wainscoting. Brass sconces. Dullsville. Boredopolis. Yawnworld.

  Next to her is some red-haired little twat with a smear of freckles across the bridge of her nose, sitting there with her smug arms folded over a bunched-up navy blazer hugged tight against her chest. The girl smells faintly of cigarettes. Different brand from what Miriam smokes.

  Wait.

  Miriam gets another look at her.

  "You're that girl."

  The girl scowls. Sneers. Eyebrow arched. "What?"

  "The girl. With the sketchbook. And the–" Miriam mimics the slap-down move. "Blammo."

  "Oh. Yeah. She said my leaf looked like dog butt."

  "Did it?"

  "Mostly. But that's no reason to be rude. A lot of the world looks like dog butt. Doesn't mean you should go around saying so."

  Miriam shrugs. "I dunno. That's how I treat life."

  "Your breath is rank."

  "And that's obviously how you treat life, too. Yeah, I know my breath is rank. I just drank tequila."

  "Out of a Port-a-Potty toilet?"

  "Cute. That'd be the bleach you're smelling."

  "This isn't a hair salon, you know."

  "My god," Miriam, "you are such a little See-You-Next-Tuesday."

  "I don't get it."

  "Spell it out."

  The girl does. "Oh. I get it. Cunt." The girl rolls her eyes. "Whatever."

  "Don't you roll your eyes at me, missy. And you shouldn't say that word."

  "Okay, Mom."

  "I'm not your mom."

  "I know that. I'm not a moron. Did you think that for a moment I actually believed you were my mother?" She thrusts her tongue into the pocket of her cheek with a bulge, looks Miriam up and down. "You're old enough to be my mom, though."

  "I am not, you little fucking jerk. I'm only in my mid-twenties."

  She shrugs. "So is my mom."

  "You're what, thirteen?"

  "Twelve." She sees Miriam looking at her. "Yeah, my mom was fifteen when I was born. And since I'm not a total tardcart, I can do the math, and that means she's twenty-seven. See? Mid-twenties."

  "Late-twenties," Miriam corrects. "And even then, it's not like she's some old-ass hausfrau. Respect your elders. Or something."

  "I would but she's gone."

  "Gone. Like, poof, evaporated into nothing? Gone like dead? What?"

  "Like, left me alone in her studio apartment a year ago to go off and see the world. Or shoot heroin. Because sh
e really likes heroin."

  "So she kind of sucks, then."

  "Kind of."

  "My mother was the opposite," Miriam says. She tries to picture her mother's face. It's hard. The face swims in a cloud of features – noses and eyes and cheeks and skin palettes. Some drift into place before floating away again, rejected. "Prim and proper. Had me locked me down pretty good. That woman probably could've used a little heroin. Loosen her up a bit."