A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Liza says, out loud, “I wish I had a little sister.”

  The mother next to Mrs. Richardson says, “Oh, I bet you wil soon enough,” and for some reason this makes the mother in the middle laugh, but not nice. It’s a nasty sound.

  The nasty laugher says, “I’m surprised you don’t have two or three already.”

  Even Melissa’s mother smiles a sour smile at that, but she says, “Hush, now. Little pitchers.”

  Later, Big won’t explain why it was funny. She gets choky-sounding and says, “Do you know what a week of day care costs? And you are starting real school next week.”

  Al Liza understands is, it’s the last day of double VBS, and she clings to Melissa, who bares her teeth like a mean dog when Big reaches to peel Liza away. Big says to Melissa’s mom, “The girls are so attached.…Maybe we could…”

  Liza—legs braced, hands fisted in Melissa’s sparkly T-shirt—sees for the first time how her Big doesn’t look like the other mothers. She looks like Miss June or one of the Calvary youth-group kids who did the Bible play. It is Melissa’s mother who at last puts firm hands on their shoulders and peels them apart, saying in a stern motherful voice, “Now, stop being so dramatic. Good grief.” Her hands pinch just short of hard enough to hurt. Liza is helpless against her firm hands, her grown-lady tone. She turns Liza and bundles her into the back of the car.

  “We’l always be best friends!” Melissa yel s after her as Big drives away.

  Then Big gets choky and won’t explain anything. Liza cries in huge gulping cries, aimed at her unfair mother’s cruel back, al the way home.

  By the time they pul in to their driveway, Liza is bored of crying, and when Big speaks, the choky voice is gone. She sounds like Big again. “If you can dry it on up, I have a surprise for you.”

  Liza sniffs and swal ows. “What is it?”

  Big wil only say, mysterious, “It’s a week of double VBS instead of day care, is what it is.”

  Inside, on Liza’s bed, is a brand-new backpack, hot pink and splashed with Muppet Babies. There is a new Muppet Babies lunch box, too, and a little heap of brightly colored clothes with tags stil on. There’s a pair of Keds so white she knows they came from Penney’s, not New to You or Hand Me Ups. The backpack is stuffed with school supplies: fat wax crayons, pink erasers, composition books.

  She flips open one of the notebooks, but the pages are blank. The word she is looking for isn’t here. There are no words here, and Liza rol s in the water, rol s away, leaves her little self trying on a first-day-of-school dress.

  She is stil seeking this word to send to Big, so intent on finding it that she almost misses the message she is sending to herself: As she spins through her memory, she wordlessly skims past Melissa-less moments, sticking in the places where she finds Melissa waiting.

  The taste of salt on her lips. Melissa at the beach. That last day.

  “It’s you,” Liza says. “You’re the key.”

  Melissa smiles, agreeing, smug.

  Bitch always did have to be the center of attention.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mosey

  NEXT MORNING, BY the time Big tapped at my door and caled, “Mosey? You up?” I had my school stuff ready to go and I was dressed al the way to my shoes.

  “I’m up,” I cal ed back, trying to sound sleepy even while I was beaming laser-hot “Do not even peek in here” rays at her through the wood. I heard her walk away, and I slunk across the room and pressed my ear against the door. I listened to Big help my mom into her walker and take her up the hal . As soon as the swinging door to the kitchen started flapping, I darted out of my room and into Liza’s.

  I started with the dresser, sifting through her underthings in the top two drawers, but I didn’t find any convenient secret diaries buried in her bras. I opened the deep bottom drawer and felt my way through the stacks of clean T-shirts that had been folded the way Big did them, into threes. I found a big fat bunch of nothing there, too.

  Most of Liza’s books were on the hal shelves, but one was on the bedside table, open in a tent, like any day now she would remember how to read and pick it up and finish it. I grabbed it by the covers and shook it, pages down, but no letters from old friends fluttered out to say, “Congrats on stealing that baby in this specific town on that specific date.” Not that I wanted it to, much. I wasn’t real y looking for anything about me or where I might have come from. I was looking for her, trying to meet the secret baby-stealing person she’d been al this time.

  In the closet Liza’s clothes hung in neat Big-sorted rows, al her jeans and leggings together, then her tops, then a couple of emergency dresses for when she had to get her taxes done or Big made her come to a parent-teacher conference. Her pretty shoes used to be al in a tumble in the bottom, but Big had them standing in neat pairs, toes pointed toward the bedroom door like they were waiting in line to leave. These days al Liza ever wore was Keds. The top shelf held only clean sheets and towels and an old stuffed bear of mine crammed in the corner. She stared at me al accusing with the one button eye she had left.

  “Oh, shut up, Pauline,” I whispered to her. “Like you wouldn’t do the same thing.”

  It wasn’t as if Liza could tel me anything even if she wanted to, and I didn’t think she wanted to. I felt like I ought to hate her over it, or at least be mad enough to spit at her, but it was the opposite. While I pressed down the toe of each shoe, checking for secrets, my insides were bubbling up al through me like a brook with a bad case of happy.

  From the kitchen I heard Big hol er, “Mosey, are you real y up?”

  I froze. Big was making breakfast, thinking I had the right to cal her Gramma, if I wanted. Liza and me, we knew better. Even though Liza was al brain-hurt and didn’t know that I had figured out her secret, in some weird way it made me closer to her. Big was the only one in the house who was clueless that I did not belong here, and the way she kept treating me so regular and ignorant was making me crazy.

  “I said I was, oh, my God!” I hoped she couldn’t tel I was yel ing from the bedroom next door to mine. My voice sounded shaky, even to me.

  My mom kept her flat plastic picture bins under her bed. I slid al three out, then popped open the first one. It held a buttload of her weird photos in a loose stir. I dug my hands in and sifted through them. Nothing. In the middle box, I found the digicam she’d gotten at the flea market, more photos, and a ziplock bag with al her old, ful memory cards; we didn’t have a computer at home where she could store the files.

  The only personal thing I found was a picture of Bunnies, one of my mom’s old foster dogs, tucked al by itself into a white envelope. Liza stil had a scar on her arm from the day she stole Bunnies. She’d had to shimmy through barbed wire to untie him from a tree. Bunnies had been bald from mange, so skinny I could have run my hand along his sides and counted his ribs if he hadn’t been too gross with sores for me to stand to touch him.

  We had Bunnies for almost thirteen months, longer than my mom had ever kept a dog. Big stil cal ed that time the Year of Whispers, because Bunnies was so trauma’d up that if anyone raised their voice at al , Bunnies would cut loose and pee a bucket. He was some little kind of terrier, but his bladder must have taken up 90 percent of his inside space.

  I’d never known my mom to shoot pics of any her fosters, or of Big and me either. She liked to snap tea sets and garden lizards and stranger babies in hats and interesting shapes in the sidewalk cracks, not stuff from her life. In this picture Bunnies was a silky bal of toast-colored fur with a laughing face, standing al confident in the grass. My mom must have taken it right before she gave Bunnies away. I stuffed it in my back pocket.

  I pul ed the last box toward me, ticked that al I’d found so far was a picture of a foster dog she’d ditched three years ago. If some TV detective went through al the crap tucked away in my room, he’d be able to tel my age and who my best friend was and that I hate math but like science and that I have a bad Strawberry Bubble Tape habit that Big sa
id was going to rot my teeth. A real y good detective would find the stash of unused preggo tests under the loose floorboard in my room and assume al kinds of exciting things about my nonexistent sex life. In Liza’s room there was nothing more personal than her underpants, and al they told me was that my mom sure liked thongs.

  The last box only held the molding photo albums that Big had bought from a sale bin at Dol ar General a few years back. Liza had named them the Old Maids because they had fussy floral covers like for a spring wedding, and she’d added, “And no one I know is ever going to slip a single picture between their pure white pages.”

  I sat back on my heels and peered around the room. There wasn’t anyplace else to look. I blew the air out of my lips in a flappy raspberry, then started pul ing the Old Maids out of the box, one by one, just to be sure.

  The velvet pouch fel out of the third one.

  It was a rich purple, almost as wide and long as the cover of the Old Maid. I flipped the album open and saw that Liza had removed a bunch of the empty pages. Then she’d slid this in between the covers. It looked like the kind of pouch Crown Royal came in, but my mom didn’t drink. Plus, the pouch was pushed into a rectangle, like it had a box inside shaping it instead of a bottle.

  “Breakfast!” Big yel ed from the kitchen at the worst possible second ever in the history of interruptions.

  “Just a minute!”

  I picked open the strings of the pouch and pul ed the mouth wide. I tipped it, and a sleek wooden box came sliding out. It had a gold clasp that latched it shut at the front, but no lock. I took a deep breath to steady myself, then thumbed back the clasp and opened the lid.

  For a second I wasn’t sure what al I was looking at. The box was lined in more velvet that was spread over a frame shaped to hold the objects inside: a couple of pink tubes, one large and one smal , a string of smooth stone beads, each the size of a rubber bouncy bal , and a smal , ivory-colored hooky thing. I picked up the bigger tube. It was blunt at one end and tapered at the other. It felt cool and too heavy to be solid plastic. I shook it, and it rattled; something was inside, al right. On the flat end, the bottom had a seam. I thought it must be a lid. My heart was thumping so hard. I twisted at the lid, and the tube came alive and started vibrating in my hands. I dropped it and let out a little scream.

  “Your eggs are getting cold!” Big yel ed.

  “Oh, my God, can you ever leave me alone for one second?” I hol ered back, and it came out just raging. No answer. I was suddenly horrified.

  What if I’d been snotty enough to cal Big back to lecture me and she found me in my mother’s room playing with a box of creepy sex things?

  I picked up the one I’d dropped like it was a mouse corpse, barely touching it with a thumb and finger, but then I realized I had to turn it off or it would buzz and rumble in the bottom of the box until Big tracked it down by sound. I grabbed it around the base and shut it off, saying, “Ew, ew, ew,”

  the whole time. I got it al put back the way I’d found it, box in pouch, pouch in album, albums in bin, and then shoved the whole mess as far under the hospital bed as it would go. I stood up and backed up al the way across the room.

  I peeked out Liza’s door. The hal was clear, so I ran to the bathroom and washed my hands with water so hot it turned my skin pink, wishing I had Clorox and freaking out. I couldn’t stop myself from wondering if she’d ever taken this box into the woods, when she was druiding, and that made me have to wash my hands again.

  “Grow up,” I said to the Mosey in the mirror. My mom hadn’t brought a boyfriend home to meet me in my whole memory, but different men used to cal the house a lot, asking for her and not leaving messages. Sometimes I heard her coming home three hours after The Crow had closed. It wasn’t as if the idea that Liza liked men and men liked her back was new or shocking to me. Besides, I knew Liza’s biggest secret now, and it bound us in a way that was fifty mil ion times bigger than her box of buzzing yuck, bigger even than the fact that her religion wasn’t about any kind of god I’d ever heard of.

  I went to the kitchen and found Big at the sink, washing her dishes. She glanced at me and said, “Hey, sugar-doodle, your breakfast is on the table,” like everything was regular. I glared red needles into her head, but she didn’t feel it. My plate was sitting in front of the chair by Liza’s good side, the place I’d gotten used to sitting. I didn’t feel like sitting there now. I sat down across the table from her instead, my back to Big, and pul ed my plate across.

  I said, “Hey, Liza.”

  She was looking right at me, and she made her Mosey-baby noise. I felt it again, that weird burble of happy feeling, like I wanted to lean across and kiss her on the hurt side of her face. I sat there swinging my feet and looking at her until Big said, “Eat your breakfast.”

  “Not hungry.”

  “You need the protein.” I rol ed my eyes for Liza, and the good side of her mouth twitched up, like she was laughing with me at this dumb-ass nutrition stuff when she knew and I knew that Big didn’t have the right to make me eat any damn thing. Big asked, “You want to stay home, Mosey? I could take the day off if you want.”

  The very idea of sitting at home with her being Biggish and talky and helpy made my skin want to al come off and crawl away. I was glad I had my back to her. If Big knew I was some sort of squawky cowbird that Liza had slipped into her nest, would she be looking at me al worried, wanting me to eat her cooling eggs? They stared up at me with their yolks shining like glazy yel ow eyes. Vile.

  “Makeup civics quiz. I gotta jet.” I gave my mom a fast conspirator’s grin and then grabbed the toast and shoved my chair back, almost running to bang my way out the front door and get fast as I could away from Big’s looky eyes.

  I made the bus with time to spare. As I dragged my backpack to my usual seat near the middle, Beautiful Jack Owens looked up, pushing his floppy blond hair off his forehead.

  “Hey, Mosey,” he said.

  I stopped dead and said, “Hey.”

  I guess I would have stood there goggling at him with my mouth swinging open til drool fel out, but the bus jerked forward and sent me staggering past him. I hustled to my usual place and plopped down. But after I sat, BJO turned and flashed me a smile over his shoulder, that lopsided one that could make a thousand pairs of cheerleader panties fal down on the floor in a pattery avalanche.

  I ducked my head down fast and powered up my phone. My thumbs were already tapping out, ZOMG BJackO knows my name, when I saw I already had a couple of texts from Roger. The first one was from yesterday, and it said, # of missing babies = none babies.

  I rol ed my eyes. Roger had this bee completely up his butt that he was going to trace my mom’s route and find out who I was. He’d sent me fifty mil ion texts about it last night, using so many abbreviations I felt like I was being told his whole lunatic plan by lolcats. I’d final y turned my phone off when he’d said he was searching news archives to see if any babies between here and Pascagoula had mysteriously gone missing the same week my mom ran away. Apparently he’d come up empty, which of course he would. The whole idea of using Google Maps to trace my mom’s drugged-up, hitchhiky route across America, fifteen years later and with her unable to help, was so wildly unpossible.

  He had not downloaded any wisdom in his sleep, because his text from this morning said, What was L’s first road job?

  I sent him back one that said, U can b replaced, u no. BJackO just smiled at me w/ al his teeth. I am Bones in the Yard Girl now & total y superfamous.

  His answer came back, Superfamous = ur destiny. If u were here @ Cal? You’d be Luau Stroke Mom Girl. So.

  I texted, Way to brightside, giggling loud enough that the bug-eyed freshman girl on the seat across from me stared at me harder than she’d already been staring.

  His next text said, I need u to sho me her route on map. Meet on roof of TRP?

  He meant Charlie’s Real Pit BBQ, which he cal ed The Real Pit. It was this craphole right by my school that had this
huge bil board with a picture of a vile person-style pig on top, like ten feet high, very fat with al his chunks lumping out of overal s. Roger’d once planned to spray-paint a talk bubble over that pig’s head that said, COME ON IN AND EAT MY KIN! But once he found a way to use the back Dumpster to get up on the roof, he liked the shady spot behind the sign too much to cal attention to it.

  No. U must Stopppppit. For realz. Stop. I wasn’t laughing anymore. I clicked my phone al the way off, done hearing about him snuffing around to find me like a lunatic bloodhound, not asking if I wanted for a single sorry second to be found.

  At school the sudden friendliness of Beautiful Jack Owens had caught and spread. As I walked from homeroom to bio to lab, stoners and jocks, cheerleaders and mathletes al smiled at me or waved or said hel o. I wasn’t so stupid as to think I’d woken up hot enough for Jack, or cool enough for the wild kids, or that my 3.5 GPA was suddenly good enough to get me frenemied into the cutthroat Valedictorian-or-Die smarty set. This was like when a drunk driver kil ed a senior who went to Moss Point High, and al of a sudden everyone who ever met her (and some who total y hadn’t) had these memories of her, and they stood around talking in soft voices about The Time They Shared a Coke with Her, like she’d so mattered to them. Now I mattered, too.

  On my way to study hal , I stopped short when my ex-BFF, Briony Hutchins, came bouncing out of Coach Richardson’s classroom door right in my path without ever noticing me. She paused right in my way to hump her amazing boobage up out of her shirt.

  “See you fifth period,” she chirped at him. He was such a creeper that fluffing her C cups was getting her an easy A in his Life Skil s class. But when she turned and saw she’d almost run me down, she actual y paused her grade whoring long enough to flash her teeth and say, “Mosey!

  What’s the haps?”

  I shrugged and tried to look through her.

  “Wel , text me,” she said, and twirled away. I stood there for a sec, dying to tel Roger, even though it meant hearing more about his Mom-Mission Unpossible. Unfortunately my craptastic cel could only get a signal near the fire door, because the wal s were super-thick concrete. There were hardly any windows, too, so they’d painted everything a putty-pink color that Roger cal ed Mental Institution Blush because it was supposed to make us feel cheerful.