She used to like fried chicken, but now she hated it, and it bothered her that Mom didn’t remember that. The milk clogged her throat. She wasn’t hungry anyway. When she took a piece of chicken off the bone for Patches, the sight and sound of flesh and skin and tendons tearing made her a little sick. She set the tray on the floor outside her room and shut the door tight. Chicken bones could kill cats.
The tray was gone when she got up the second time. On her way back from the bathroom, she heard Dad and Mom in their room talking about her. “Lucy,” Mom said, and then Dad said something that had her name in it, too: “Lucy.” Lucy wasn’t even curious. She just went on back to bed.
When she woke up again, it was morning, and Mom was at her door with a breakfast tray, and now Lucy was hungry. “Come in,” she said drowsily, and started to sit up. Wetness and itching and aching ran deep between her legs. She shouldn’t have to tell Mom her period had started. Mothers should just know, a secret message between women.
“Good morning, honey,” Mom said. “Here’s your breakfast.” She settled the tray over Lucy’s lap before Lucy was even sitting up all the way, and its legs tipped on the wrinkled sheets. This was the tray you got your meals on if you were sick in bed or on the couch in the family room. The beige plastic had faint stains on it from everybody’s cups and plates and hands.
She had to go to the bathroom. Naturally, Mom hadn’t thought of that before she trapped her with the tray, and Lucy wasn’t about to say anything.
She itched. Way up inside where she didn’t think she’d ever felt anything before. Nobody’d told her that your period made you itch.
Mom stood with her hands in the pockets of her blue robe. She hadn’t set her hair yet this morning, so the white streak wasn’t a streak; there was white all over the top and front of her hair. Mom was old. Lucy frowned and took a bite of toast. It wasn’t toasted enough and there wasn’t enough butter on it, but she was hungry. It hurt her throat when she swallowed.
“We were really worried about you yesterday,” Mom said.
“Why?” Lucy demanded through a mouthful of scrambled eggs. She liked her eggs sunny side up, but of course it didn’t matter in this family what she liked.
“Because we love you.”
“You don’t love me. All you, care about is Ethan and Rae.” Remembering Dad’s reaction when she’d said something like that to him, she waited to see what Mom would do.
Mom just closed her eyes for a second, then opened them and said quietly, “That’s not true, but I’m not going to argue with you about it. I just want you to know that we called Jerry Johnston last night and he said you hadn’t been at group.”
Lucy stopped chewing and stared at her mother. Then she shrugged elaborately, swallowed, drank some orange juice. Her throat burned. Why would he say that? “So?” she said out loud.
“So we know you were lying to us about where you were.”
“So? You never believe me anyway.”
Mom sighed. “Well, I hope you decide to tell us the truth soon. We all miss you when you’re stuck in your room like this. You have about an hour to get ready for school now.” She started to leave.
Lucy wanted her to stay. My period started. “I bet Pris doesn’t miss me,” she said sullenly.
Mom kept her back to her, but Lucy could tell she was smiling. “Pris’s mouth is fine, Lucy. How’s your hand?”
She looked at her hand where Pris had bitten it. She’d forgotten all about it, and there wasn’t even a mark. “It hurts,” she said, “but that’s all right.” She itched. She squirmed around on the bed and almost spilled the juice but couldn’t reach the itch. She itched, but Mom wasn’t smart enough to ask about that.
“Let me see.” Mom came back to her, and by the time Lucy figured out she was talking about her hand, she was holding it, turning it into the light, kissing it quickly and putting it back down. “I guess you didn’t damage each other permanently.” She started out of the room again, stopped, and touched the box of pads on the dresser. “Lucy. Honey, did you start your period?”
“What’s it to you?”
Mom came over to her, kissed the top of her head, whispered, “Congratulations,” and left the room in a hurry. It seemed to Lucy that she’d sounded and looked scared, but that wouldn’t make any sense. But then, nothing adults said or did made sense, except Jerry. He was a mystery, which wasn’t the same thing.
When you were grounded to your room, you couldn’t use the phone, so she couldn’t call Stacey to tell her about her period or even to say which corner to meet on to walk to school. She always timed it so she left the house either before or after all her brothers and sisters, so she’d wouldn’t be seen walking anywhere near them; this morning Mom wouldn’t let her leave until ten minutes before the first bell. “Right now, I can’t trust that you’ll go straight to school.”
“What makes you think I’m going to school anyway?” Lucy muttered, only half under her breath.
She was sorry right away that she’d said it, because Mom looked up from helping Dom with his boots, raised her eyebrows, and said, “Tell you what, Lucy. You’ll walk to school this morning with Molly and Dominic and me. That way we can be sure you get there.”
All the way to school Lucy held her books against her chest and watched her feet and thought about the blood and the itching from secret places inside her body. At the corner of the playground, Mom stopped and hugged the little kids, but Lucy just kept walking, and Mom didn’t call her back.
“You hear about Mike Garver?” Stacey asked her as they made their way up the crowded stairs to homeroom.
Lucy didn’t want to talk about Mike Garver. Mike Garver was dumb. She wanted to tell Stacey about her period. She wanted to find out if Stacey had ever been grounded to her room, which she seriously doubted, and to talk about how much she hated her mother and her father and her brothers and sisters. She wanted to tell Stacey about Jerry Johnston, but of course she couldn’t do that.
“He died,” Stacey said.
Lucy stopped on the stairs. Jeremy Martinez ran into her, called her a dirty name that she didn’t even know what it meant, and pushed around her. Ms. Abercrombie yelled at her from the top of the stairs to keep moving, but Lucy grabbed the back of Stacey’s sweatshirt, pulled her over to the wall, and said, “What?”
“He died. Last night. Come on, we’re gonna be late.”
“What do you mean, he died?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean?”
Stacey had on silver lipstick, and when she laughed her lips looked like tin foil. She laughed now and pulled away from Lucy just as the tardy bell rang, right over their heads. The bell was so loud that Lucy didn’t hear what else Stacey said, but she thought it was just, “He died,” again.
Some people said he’d OD’d. Some people said it was AIDS. Some people said he’d frozen to death in the snow. There was going to be a special assembly fifth period; right after lunch; some people said Mr. Li was going to tell them what had happened to Mike. Some people said it was a vampire, or a werewolf, and Mr. Li wouldn’t tell them the truth about that.
All morning Lucy kept feeling worse and worse. The cramps and the itching had spread all through that hole at the center of her body, the hole that was left when they’d taken all the different-colored plastic layers off the model in science. The place like a cave where all the organs and stuff with weird names were. Pancreas. Uterus. Fallopian tubes.
Her head ached constantly. Sometimes she was so hot she’d be sweating and faint; then, just a few minutes later, her teeth would be chattering. Every time she looked in the mirror, or put her hand to her face, there were hundreds more zits.
In the rest room before lunch while Stacey tried to get the flakes of hairspray out of her hair without ruining the style, Lucy said, “I started my period last night.”
Stacey tossed her head. Lucy saw admiringly that her glossy hair didn’t shift at all. “So? I started mine a long time ago.” Lucy didn’t know whethe
r to believe her or not. If she was lying, that was bad. If she had started her period a long time ago and Lucy hadn’t known about it, that was bad, too.
While she was standing in the lunch line, she saw Jerry Johnston go into the office. She knew right away that he’d come for her, and she could hardly eat lunch. It was pizza anyway, which was always disgusting at school because they put anchovies on it, and her stomach was kind of upset, and Jeremy Martinez sat across from her and stared at her the whole time, and she found a big zit on her neck. When the monitor pushed his way between the crowded tables to tell her she was wanted in the office, Lucy didn’t even care that Jeremy and his stupid friends started chanting, “Lu-cy’s in trouble! Lu-cy’s in trouble!”
Jerry seemed to take up most of the principal’s office; he was a lot bigger than Mr. Li, and he was wearing a bulky red sweater that made him look even bigger. Probably the sweater had been a Christmas present. Lucy wondered who’d given it to him, and was mortified that she hadn’t thought to get him anything.
He looked healthy, waiting for her. His cheeks were rosy. He had his arms folded across his stomach, and she knew if he held her against it, it would be firm this time, like a good mattress. He was smiling at Mr. Li; she wasn’t close enough to hear what he was saying, but she liked the way his voice sounded. He knew what he was doing. He was in charge. She could trust him.
Mr. Li said something to the secretary, Mrs. Davis, and Mrs. Davis came and opened the gate in the counter to let Lucy go in. Mrs. Davis was looking at her funny. Lucy was suddenly afraid she had blood on her pants, suddenly aware of how ugly her face was all covered with pimples, suddenly acutely shy. She couldn’t look at Mrs. Davis or Mr. Li. She couldn’t even really look at Jerry.
“Lucy.” Mr. Li didn’t exactly have an accent, but when he said her name, it sounded kind of Oriental, like Loo Si. “How are you?”
“Fine.”
“Well, I know you’re upset about Mike Garver. We all are. It’s a terrible thing.” He was sitting behind the desk, which made him look even smaller than he was. His hands were side by side, flat on the big calendar, which was all covered with tiny writing. Lucy couldn’t quite see what it said. She wondered if he wrote secret notes to himself in Chinese or Cambodian or whatever he was.
“What happened to him?” she heard herself ask. She still didn’t look at either of them, but she listened for Jerry to answer.
“That’s why I’m here,” he answered quietly. “I want us to process it together.”
“Mr. Johnston wants to take you out of school for the afternoon,” Mr. Li said.
“For a special group meeting,” Jerry said. “I think we need to process what’s happened.”
Lucy moved closer to Jerry, risked glancing up at him, with a little thrill found him watching her, looked down again. “He’s already talked to your parents,” Mr. Li said, “and they’ve given permission.”
Lucy looked at Jerry again, and he winked. He hadn’t talked to her parents. It was their secret. She felt honored, chosen, and very grown up.
“Would you like to go with Mr. Johnston for the afternoon?” Mr. Li asked kindly.
Lucy forced herself to look away from Jerry and at the principal. “Okay,” she said.
“The rest of the day will essentially be taken up with the assembly anyway,” Mr. Li was saying, as much to himself as to them, and then he kept talking while he wrote stuff down on a sheet of paper with the school name on it and hurried around the desk to the file cabinet and shuffled through a bunch of folders in there and stuck the paper into one of them.
There must be a folder in there that said
BRILL, LUCY ANN. BRILL, RAE ELLEN, too, unless they’d taken that one out already, and BRILL, PRISCILLA CAROLE, and BRILL, DOMINIC ANTHONY, and BRILL, MOLLY ELIZABETH. Maybe even BRILL, ETHAN MICHAEL, although Ethan hadn’t gone to this school for a long time. There wouldn’t be one for Cory yet—BRILL, CORY SCOTT—but he’d be starting preschool next year.
Mr. Li was still talking to himself, kind of fluttering his hands, when Lucy followed Jerry out of the office, through the gate, past Mrs. Davis, and out the front door of the school. She didn’t say anything about her coat because she didn’t want to go all the way down the hall to get it, and at first the cold air felt good, but by the time they got to the corner she was shivering.
“Mike died last night,” Jerry said.
Of course she already knew that, but she understood it was a way to begin.
“He was at your house last night,” she said. “How come you told my parents that I wasn’t there?”
Immediately she felt guilty. She didn’t want him to think she was mad at him. “That’s between us. It’s private. How come you ran away?”
Lucy was ashamed. “I don’t know.”
“Did you get scared?”
“I guess so.”
He put his arm around her, just for a second. His sweater itched against her skin, but it made her warm and she wished he didn’t have to take his arm away. But she understood. They were in public. Somebody might see and think there was something weird going on. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, honey. Not with me. I have something special to show you today.”
She nodded. They crossed the street and turned left, heading toward his house. Behind them, still not very far away, the bell rang at the school. Lunch was over. In a few minutes they’d be going into the auditorium for the assembly, where they’d hear what had happened to Mike. But she’d know a lot sooner and a lot truer, because Jerry was going to tell her.
“I wish you’d stayed,” Jerry said, “because what happened between Mike and me was beautiful. He really worked through a lot of that rage and sadness. He felt better than he had in a long time.” Jerry chuckled a little. “So did I.”
“He died,” she said, confused.
“It was beautiful,” Jerry said again. “Brief, but beautiful.” He shook his head and sighed. “Now it’s over and Mike is gone and the rest of us have to go on.”
Her back itched between her shoulder blades. She reached up under her shirt as far as she could, gasping as the cold air swept across her skin. Her back was covered with zits. Her breasts itched under her bra. The insides of her mouth and nose itched.
As they passed through Jerry’s prickly hedge, it broke off against her elbow and left little bits and pieces of wood on top of the hard snow. She felt blood spurt between her legs, and she burst into tears. The tears felt as if they were turning to ice before they even got out of her eyes.
Now that they were in his yard, on his porch, Jerry could do what he wanted without anybody seeing, and he picked her up. She put her arms around his neck and held on tight. Behind her back he put the key in the lock and turned it, his hand moving across her hip. Then they were inside his house where it was warm and dim, and he’d shut the door behind them, and Lucy was dizzy and crying, and Jerry was holding her and saying her name over and over and over as if it meant something else, as if it wasn’t about her anymore but about him, as if it meant love.
He laid her on the big pillows on the living room floor. He brought a blanket to cover her, but she was sweating now and she kicked it off. He lay down beside her and held her against him. Even though that was hot, too, she stayed there, and all she could see was the twisted red yarn of his sweater moving up and down as he breathed and talked.
“Mike wouldn’t let me take him home,” Jerry was telling her. “It wasn’t very late, and he always took the bus back after group. That’s part of what we teach in this group, how to take care of yourself in a dangerous world. Kids learn—” He stopped, laughed a little. “I guess you don’t care about theories of adolescent development, do you? Anyway, he’d been gone a couple of hours, maybe three, and I was just—uh, reading, pottering around the house, making progress notes, when his foster mother called and said he’d never made it back. We figured probably he’d run away, and she said she’d call the cops if he didn’t show up by midnight. He’d run lots of times befo
re.”
Dreamily Lucy wondered why he was talking so much. Right now she didn’t feel anything bad or mixed up. What she felt was feverish, a little dizzy, a little sick to her stomach, and she itched. She loved the sound of his voice deep, deep inside his body, the way his chest rumbled and his throat purred under her ear.
“But I was worried, so I went out looking for him. And I found him, under the hedge just outside my yard. That’s as far as he’d made it. I called an ambulance and the foster family, of course, but I knew it was too late.”
“What did he die of?”
“We won’t know for sure till they get the autopsy results back, but they think it was a heart attack brought on by drug use.”
“What’s an autopsy?”
His hand rubbing her back stopped for a minute; until then she hadn’t even really realized he’d been massaging her, under her shirt, and now she wanted nothing more than for him to start doing it again, even though she was embarrassed to think of all the zits he’d feel. “That’s where they look inside a body,” he said, “to see why a person died.”
Lucy stiffened in amazement. He started rubbing again, but she still had to ask, “They look inside?”
“Yes.”
“They cut you open?”
“Yes.”
Waves of nausea spread through her body, hot and then cold. Sure she was going to throw up, she rolled away from Jerry and tried to sit up, but she was too dizzy. “Everybody dies!” she wailed. “I hate it that everybody dies!”
He encircled her in his arms again and eased her back down on the pillow, then wrapped his heavy legs around her too. “Not everybody, darling,” he murmured. “Not everybody.”
He was scaring her. She didn’t want to be scared, but she was. Her head was spinning and her ears were ringing and she felt dizzy.
It was embarrassing. Here she was, alone with Jerry Johnston and getting his attention in a way she’d dreamed about. Here she was, as close to him as she could ever get without actually getting inside him or him getting inside her: his lips sucking at her neck, his teeth nibbling. Here she was: something was about to happen to her that would change her life forever and she was such a baby she was making herself sick.
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