Lay It on My Heart

by Angela Pneuman

  Kelly-Lynn eyes the book. “My mom’s boyfriend has lots of books,” she says. “Last night he flushed her cigarettes down the toilet and she called him a fag.” She stops talking and peers into my face, and I’m wondering if she’s observing the light of the Lord within. I am peering closely at her, too, at the gentle way her eyes lead into a small, straight nose. Even as I show her my teeth in what I hope is a beatific smile, it is sinking into me that I don’t look anything like Kelly-Lynn and that I wish I did.

  “Your scab’s getting smaller,” she says. “How’s your boyfriend?”

  “Okay,” I say, alarmed by the way untruths return. “I saw him last night.” I imagine this lie to be one of the things that comes between me and the Lord, making it harder for me to keep up my prayer. Which I have stopped, again, and so I dig out my pen and make another hatch mark on my thumb. Inhabit me, O Lord God. Out of nowhere, I hear myself sharing an actual truth with Kelly-Lynn. “He wants to look at my, you know.” I dip my chin toward my chest and feel my neck grow hot.

  “Tell me about it,” she says. “It feels funny once you figure out what they want, but then you get used to it.”

  “Lust,” I say with some authority, wondering if lust shows up on your brain in its own white storm.

  The flyers for the Main Event are right there on my lap. I say the prayer a few more times. I separate one of the flyers with my fingertips and take a deep breath, preparing to smile so invitingly at this pretty, indifferent girl that it will seem as though a great idea has just occurred to me. But when the bell rings, Kelly-Lynn turns her head the other way and I end up slipping the flyer into her bookbag instead. Which, depending on how the Lord wants to look at it, could be seen as cowardly or as taking advantage of an opening he may or may not have provided himself.

  “You tell your mother to watch herself around Morris Osborne,” Daze warns me after school as she loads the washing machine.

  “She says it’s nice of him to help out,” I say.

  “There’s helping out, then there’s helping out. Some people just can’t stop helping out. You can bait those types like fish with the lonely and the sick.”

  “He says he’s been friends with Daddy since they were kids.”

  Daze frowns.

  “Or has known him,” I say.

  “It’s hard for people not to know people in this town,” says Daze, “whether they want to or not. But it’s true, Morris Osborne came around when they were boys. Right up until his mother showed up at our back door and said, ‘Morris, there’s nothing wrong with your own house.’ She was proud that way, and your grandfather believed in preaching from the pulpit, not meddling one-to-one. Which is exactly the kind of man Morris Osborne turned into, a meddler. In everybody’s business, and when everybody means a married woman, living on her own for now—a moderately attractive married woman like your mother—and the oh-so-helpful person in question is a bachelor, well then . . .”

  I think of how Phoebe called Dr. Osborne “Morris.” How she admitted the hard times.

  “There’s some married folk who should have thought better of it, for sure,” Daze says. “But there’s plenty never-marrieds who would have been well served. So don’t talk to me about helping out.”

  “Okay,” I say, hands up. Daze is almost never cross with me.

  “Sorry, doll,” she says, softening. “Your mother’s still young.”

  “She’s almost forty.”

  “She has a pert figure,” Daze says. A shadow of worry crosses her face. “Let’s pray your father gets home soon.”

  The next day, while our English class makes lists of possible how-to speech topics, I watch for some sign that Kelly-Lynn has found the Main Event flyer, but it doesn’t come.

  “How to cheer,” Kelly-Lynn says, when called upon to share the best of her brainstorming options. “How to babysit.”

  Mrs. Teaderman prompts her to be more specific, to show how one writes one’s own cheer, or how to care for infants.

  “How to sew,” I say when it’s my turn, and then, “How to sew a skirt.”

  “Those might be complicated props,” Mrs. Teaderman cautions.

  For freewriting, I tell my father that two of my three people are already on board with the Main Event. This is on the inventive side, but it will motivate me to invite Tracy right away, before he gets my letter or I lose my nerve. I feel in my heart that if I get them to the Main Event, the Lord will guide me from there. I’m not sure I feel this in my heart, exactly, but I am trying to have faith. Then I am erasing the “I feel in my heart” part and writing “I have faith.”

  “No erasing,” Mrs. Teaderman says.

  Maybe by the time I see you, maybe this week? I will have reached the last person. Maybe I can invite them all to more things, maybe to see me playing Ruth. I stop writing but keep my pencil tip to the page. I would like to show him how much I remember about biblical lineage. Ruth, a Moabite, descendent of Lot’s unfortunate wife, is an ancestor of David, who is an ancestor of Christ. But my father knows all this and knows that I know he knows, and trying to impress him never works. In a town of seminarians, he considers biblical knowledge a duty, not something to be congratulated for.

  “How come you only ride the bus home sometimes?” Tracy asks me after school. She’s already in our seat, waiting. “I seen you getting on that other bus. That town bus.”

  “I go to some people’s houses,” I say. “Where’s Ravenna?”

  “Cigarette break,” Tracy says. “And it’s not Ravenna, it’s that damn fool sub.”

  This morning, Tracy’s hair was a scraggly mop and her face was blanched white, bare of makeup. Now all her hair has been slicked back into a tight ponytail that bushes out behind her in a giant ball of frizz. She has lined her eyes in bright blue and applied so much mascara that her eyelashes look thick and spiky as thorns.

  After the junior high lets out, there are ten minutes before the high school bell. That’s the time they give Cecil Goode to make his way to the bus, and now he emerges from the building with the skinny textbook-burning kid. When Cecil moves slowly enough, he walks with less of a hitch. Almost with a swagger. And the skinny guy’s talking the whole time, or singing, using his hands to play an invisible guitar. When they reach the bus, the skinny guy hooks the bag he’s been carrying crosswise over Cecil’s chest, taps him on the back, then hunches away down the row of buses.

  The sub has started in on his second cigarette behind the bus while Cecil waits at the bottom of the steps. He’s still waiting when the high school bell rings. Then the school doors open and kids start to swarm out onto the lawn.

  “That bus driver should fix the ramp,” I say.

  “He will,” says Tracy.

  “Before the other kids get here, though.”

  “All right,” Tracy says. “Don’t have a conniption.”

  But as the first of the high school kids reach the bus and clamber aboard, Cecil is still waiting. Then there’s a hollow banging as he starts swinging his claw into the side of the bus next to the door.

  Finally, the sub, a gray-haired man in jeans, emerges from around back, climbs the steps, and struggles with the plywood while the rest of the kids keep collecting on the blacktop.

  “Any day now,” Cecil says. When the ramp’s finally in place, he lurches up it more violently than usual. He falls into his seat behind us with a grunt, and I can hear him trying to catch his breath. I’m thinking it’s got to get to him, having to wait for other people’s help. Two seconds later, though, he’s pitching his voice in my direction. “Looky who it is. Cousin, you tell that girl she’s next.”

  Tracy arches one of her nearly invisible eyebrows me.

  “I’m not going to sit on his lap,” I tell her. “No one can make me.”

  “It’s just for a second,” Tracy says. “Just until you can feel his thing. If you don’t do it, you have to take what’s coming. You get a choice, like truth or dare.”

  “What do you mean, ‘what’s comi
ng’?”

  “Hard to say,” Tracy says.

  I hunker down and push my forehead against the dirty window. The rest of the river kids jostle each other down the aisle with a lot more noise than they make when Ravenna’s behind the wheel. The bus feels heavy as it fills up, sinking a little on its tires. It smells different than it does in the morning. Even more strongly of cigarettes, and then I see that one of the girls coming down the aisle is still smoking.

  “You wish,” says the girl to a boy behind her.

  “What,” says the boy, pushing at her back. “What?”

  Through it all, the sub just stares out the windshield at the emptying lawn.

  “It doesn’t hurt none,” Tracy says.

  “Did you do it?”

  “No,” she says, squinting at me until her crusty eyelashes stick together. “We’re kin. It’s not for real, anyway. I mean it’s for real but not really.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” she says, mimicking me again. “Don’t give me your dictionary talk.” She throws herself back against the seat. “You just can’t help yourself,” she says in disgusted wonder.

  “Tell her,” comes Cecil’s voice. I raise myself up and turn toward him, and he looks down at the front of his pants, then back up at me and licks his lips. I duck behind the seat again. In my lap, my thumb is covered in hatch marks, and I dig out my pen and cross a group of four for a bundle. Inhabit me, O Lord God.

  “You counting something?” Tracy says.

  “No,” I say. I pray the prayer over and over again, and I keep praying as the sub pulls the lever and the bus doors swing closed, as he backs the bus out slowly and we creep down the school drive in the long line. It’s like we’re part of a segmented tapeworm, like we saw diagrams of when Mr. Catterson gave his missionary presentation. One of their friends, he said, had a worm like that in his stomach. The friend, a prisoner, got so hungry that he could feel the tapeworm coming up through his throat, poking around at the back of his mouth for food. The tapeworm was starving, too.

  Behind us, Cecil says, “Rosemary Cooney, you know what you want.”

  “Rosemary,” a few kids start in. “Rosemary.”

  Inhabit me, O Lord God, I pray.

  “That’s right,” Cecil says. There’s a shuffling behind us.

  “Rosemary, Rosemary.” Most of the back of the bus is chanting now. Everyone keeps it low, but we’re crawling slowly down the highway and the sub doesn’t even check the rearview.

  I peek over my shoulder. The girl who was smoking when she got on the bus, a girl with enormous breasts and stiff, brassy hair, shifts over her seatmate in the back and does a crouched walk up the aisle to Cecil’s seat, while Cecil’s seatmate makes his way back to hers.

  Still nothing from the sub. “He just lets this happen?” I say to Tracy.

  “What did I tell you? He probably wishes Rosemary would come sit on his lap. You see those titties?”

  It’s true. The girl’s chest, in her deeply scooped T-shirt, is so ample that it makes me think of Daze’s word, bosom. My own breasts haven’t stopped hurting, but I’m getting used to the way it feels, a fact that makes me gloomy. Even my bra has turned a dingy gray, as if depressed by its big job.

  “What size are you now?” Tracy asks, catching me looking down. “C?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. When I check behind me again, Rosemary is sitting on Cecil’s lap, her knees to the aisle. He fits the top of his head underneath her chin and ducks his face into the deep crevice of her bosom.

  “I see you in activity,” says Tracy. “With that girl everyone hates. The one who used to be Melinda when she lived here before. I hear she gave Mister Cooper a pair of her panties. I hear she’s a lesbian. A girl who likes girls.”

  “Then why would she give her panties to Mister Cooper?”

  “I hear she gave them to Missus Teaderman, then. You-all both have Missus Teaderman. I have her first period. You have to do speeches?”

  “How-to speeches,” I say. I try to imagine Kelly-Lynn giving her panties to Mrs. Teaderman, and all I can think is that Mrs. Teaderman would wash them, maybe, and give them back, like Daze does with mine.

  We’re approaching the turnoff to East Winder, where the shoulder gets shaved down to only about a foot. The tire catches the edge of the asphalt, and for a second it feels like we’re about to tip over. I look down again at my marked-up hand. Inhabit me, O Lord God.

  “I feel it,” Rosemary is saying, behind us. She’s squirming on Cecil’s lap, his face still buried deeply in the front of her shirt.

  We roll through town and out the other side by the time Rosemary untangles herself and makes her way back to her seat. Everyone in the back of the bus cheers.

  “Cousin,” Cecil sings softly when the cheer dies down. “I got time for one more.”

  I hold my breath. We pass the historic sign for Tate’s Bridge, then we near the gas station where Tracy gets off, high above the river on the ridgeline.

  “Tell your friend,” Cecil says, but Tracy ignores him. She stands up into the aisle, and light from the window panels travels across her pale face and neck, turning her skin yellow. The sub brings the bus to a stop.

  “Girl,” Cecil says to me, and just like that, I stand up, too. “Next time,” he promises as I follow Tracy off the bus with a small group of kids. We wait there in the dirt while the bus rolls away and the rest of the kids disappear into the tiny gas-station store. I’m almost a whole head taller than Tracy, and I never realized it before.

  “You following me?” she says.

  “No.”

  “What, you need something from the store?”

  I nod. I don’t know what else to do.

  “Well, come on, then,” she says, and I head inside after her. A bell over the door tinkles. The light overhead is dim and the air smells old. The other kids from the bus are all bent over a cooler of pop, lifting cans out of the ice.

  “What do you want, chips?” Tracy says.

  “I forgot money,” I say. I make a show of going through my purse as if there might be money in it.

  Tracy plucks two bags of potato chips from clips on a rotating stand. “Momma,” she calls to the woman behind the counter. The woman has orange hair like Tracy’s, only it’s fading to gray and tied back in a red bandanna. Behind her, floor to ceiling, are cigarette packs stacked neat as cells between narrow plastic barriers.

  The woman behind the counter lifts her hand, but she’s keeping her eye on the kids at the cooler.

  “I don’t have any money,” I say, wondering if Tracy missed it the first time.

  “Two bags.” Tracy holds up two fingers toward her mother. “You get that?”

  The woman raises her hand again and nods. She’s scooting change across the counter with the fingertips of her other hand. Several of the kids grab their sodas and leave, and when Tracy and I start to follow them, the woman calls out, “What’s your name, girl?”

  “Me?” I say.

  “I know Tracy’s name.”

  “Charmaine Peake.”

  Tracy’s mother tucks a red curl into her bandanna. Her eyes are small, bright blue chips of glass set deep into a squint. “Daddy knew some Peakes.”

  I wait for her to say something more, but she goes back to counting change. Tracy pushes open the door.

  “Thank you for the chips,” I say.

  “Tracileen, wipe off that handprint you just made,” says her mother, and Tracy swipes at the glass with her sleeve.

  Outside, she heads across the dirt yard of the gas station to a cinder-block house in back of it that I never noticed before. “You coming or what?” she says to me without looking back, and I follow her. It seems like the right thing to do after the chips.

  You can hear a dog barking inside, throwing himself against the door as Tracy tries to shoulder it open. “Sometimes this sticks,” she says. She takes a step back and rams it hard, bursting into a dark, damp
room lit watery blue from the television set. A brown-and-white-speckled dog growls at my knees. “Careful,” she says. “He only likes Momma.”

  The place is a mess. Dishes on the table, beer cans on the floor, ashtrays on either side of the velour sofa, and another two on the coffee table in front of it, all of them spiky with cigarette butts. The dog is still growling at me. I reach my hand down to let him sniff, and he snaps at my fingers.

  “Corky, stop.”

  “I have to get home before my mom does,” I say.

  “What’s stopping you?” Tracy says. “Corky, shut up.” She holds the dog away from me with her foot. He’s really snarling now, baring long yellow teeth.

  “Thanks,” I say, holding up the bag of chips. I back away from Corky onto the stoop and am relieved when the screen door closes.

  I don’t know exactly how long it will take me to get home, walking from up here on the ridge. The days are getting a little shorter. Already the sun’s falling behind the palisades, turning the gorge gray under a bright swath of sky. Then I remember the flyer, and I’m crossing back over the yard, knocking on the frame of the screen door. Tracy appears with a cigarette in her mouth. “This is for you,” I say through the screen, and when she cracks the door, I thrust a flyer into her hand, then turn and walk away fast, before Corky breaks free.

  That night, over the dinette, Phoebe informs me of what I already know: the shirt I’m wearing, like every other shirt I own, is too tight to keep wearing much longer. She pulls it away from my chest, trying to stretch the fabric, and I wince when she lets go and it stretches back against my nipples.

  “Does that hurt?”

  “Not really.”

  “I don’t know what ‘not really’ means,” she says. “How many days since your period?”

  “Since it started or ended?”

  “Started.”

  I think back. “Twenty,” I say. “Twenty-one.”