As I stepped inside, out came Becky Pepper, third-place winner in the All-American Essay Contest. I wondered whether she’d take my place at the leadership conference if I backed out.
I made my way to the dairy section and grabbed a gallon of milk. On my way back, I kept my eyes on the plank floor. If I glanced up, I’d see the trophies. Coyote heads preserved in full snarl, beady-eyed pronghorns, hawks with open beaks. The animals had decorated the grocery store my entire life. But now they made me think of Mandarin.
I’d almost reached the registers when I heard a high-pitched voice: “If it ain’t Grace Carpenter!”
I tried not to cringe.
Polly Bunker had the shiny-pink skin of a pig, though the wiry, pale curls sticking to her skull reminded me of a shorn sheep. Her grin was that of a shark. She wore a frumpy floral dress with a black slip peeking from under the hem.
“Mrs. Bunker,” I said. “You startled me.”
“I startled you!” She inspected me with a frown. “Then you must be skittish, girl, ’cause I never startled anybody in my whole entire life.”
I found that hard to believe. Back when Alexis and I had been friends, Polly Bunker was always materializing in the basement rec room with platters of Jell-O Jigglers and stainless steel bowls of Cheetos. She also used to come to our house unannounced, her chipmunk cheeks practically bursting with gossip.
She hadn’t come over in quite a while, though. I suspected that if Washokey weren’t such a small town, Momma might have defriended her years ago. At least now, after Taffeta’s pageant win, Polly Bunker couldn’t retroactively gloat about Alexis’s in quite the same way.
She latched on to my free arm and dragged me into the produce section. In May, grapefruits were the big sellers. Absentmindedly, I played with one while she tested the firmness of the green grapes. Pinch, pinch. I found it mildly depressing that the height of color in Washokey came from the seasonal produce shipped from other states.
“Alexis told me about your essay winning after all,” she said. “I’m so proud of you! I always knew you were a good influence on my Alexis. You’ve got some rock-solid wits in that skull.”
She squeezed a grape so hard it popped.
“So I been thinking to myself, I ain’t seen my second-favorite girl in the world around the house lately. I miss you, Grace-face! Especially with your birthday coming up and all.” Her gaze became one of exaggerated concern. “Tell me, dear … have you and Alexis been at odds?”
“We’re okay.”
“Well, that’s not what I heard. And what I did hear has me worried. Is it true you’ve been running around with that slut Mandarin Ramey?”
The gallon of milk slipped from my hand and exploded. It splashed all over both of us, our clothes, our faces, spiking across the floor. Polly Bunker gaped at me, milk dripping from her hair.
“Whoops,” I said.
I fled from the produce section, darting through the bread and cereal aisle to the front of the store. But when I reached the exit, I hesitated.
Momma was so pageant-brained, if I didn’t bring home any milk, there’d be hell to pay.
I hurried to the dairy case at the other end of the store. I had to step aside as a stock boy came out of the back room, carrying a mop. When he kicked the door shut behind him, I locked eyes with the jackalope-head trophy affixed to the back of it.
He was a crappy jackalope, unlike the glossy mass-produced ones at the souvenir shop. His head was the size of a baseball. He seemed undignified, with his sparrow-colored fur all matted down, beads of glue showing around the base of his tiny transplanted antlers. And here he was, trapped forever, where nobody would ever see him. Not that they’d appreciate him, anyway. Such a tragic leap from the fields of his first life.
I found myself thinking of Mandarin again. Just like the jackalope, she was misunderstood. Stuck fast. Unable to free herself—at least without a little help.
All of a sudden, I had an idea. An idea so good it made me bounce.
I glanced around and found nobody nearby. They had probably rushed to the produce section to gawk at soggy old Polly Bunker.
Whoops.
I grinned and bounced again for good measure. Kimanah Paisley and Sophie Brawls didn’t matter. They weren’t here, but I was. And I’d figured out how to bring Mandarin and me back together. Something so grand, so dangerous, so symbolic, I could hardly believe I’d come up with it myself. I didn’t know if I could pull it off. But it was worth the risk.
I just had to find the courage to take that first step.
I crouched beside Remy Ramey, patting one stiff ear. He appeared not to notice. Somebody had given him a haircut to make him look like a lion, but they hadn’t been particularly skilled at it. Probably drunk. I could hear country music coming through the closed door in front of me, and each twang of the acoustic guitar plucked at my anxious nerves.
I took a deep breath. I just have to do it quick. One big leap. Like bungee jumping off a bridge.
I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
Solomon’s was so massive it seemed even darker than the night outside. My eyes strained. The air was hazy with smoke. I felt the urge to cough, but restrained the tickle in time, not wanting to draw attention to myself.
But when my eyes finally adjusted, I discovered they’d already noticed me: the middle-aged men seated at the tall bar, nursing mugs of beer. Their red eyes gleamed through the smoke they exhaled. One of them leaned toward another and said something, and then they both glanced at me and laughed. I recognized the third man down as Earl Barnaby, the drunk from the A&W stand. He wore a straw cowboy hat, the five-dollar kind they sold at the Cody Walmart.
I was so far out of my element I felt like I’d left my body entirely. In that case, I decided, I had nothing to lose. I took another deep breath, tried not to choke, and approached the bar.
The bar top was made of glossy wood, sticky with spilled ale. I peeled my hands away and jammed them into my pockets, where I’d stashed my smallest red beryl stone for luck. The bartender’s back was to me. I waited for him to turn, my heart racketing in my rib cage, as he cranked a beer tap over mug after mug until foam slopped over the sides.
Finally, I spoke. “Mr. Ramey?”
I’d never noticed how much Solomon Ramey resembled Mandarin. Beneath his tangled strings of dark hair, Mandarin’s hazel eyes peered out. He had her height, her thinness. But his face was creased and aged, the folds of his cheeks so deep-set they could have been carved from clay.
“I ain’t serving you.” His voice seemed wet, as if he needed to hack something out. “How old’re you, twelve?”
“I just … I wanted to know if Mandarin’s here.”
No emotions crossed his face at his daughter’s name. “She’s probably on an all-night break, knowin’ her. Never up to no good. You’re welcome to look around, but watch out. There’s some weirdos on these premises.”
A bald man seated closest to me raised his half-empty mug and hollered, “I’ll drink to that!” The other drunks laughed.
“Thank you,” I said to Mandarin’s father. He winked at me. The corners of his eyes were crimson.
Like apparitions, people appeared and disappeared in the gloom as I crept through the bar. An older woman in a black beaded cowboy hat danced by herself, one hand atop her head. She pawed at me as I passed, trying to get me to join her. A trio of men stood around an old jukebox, sipping beer from longneck bottles. I passed the booths lining the side walls, peering into each one. Two old men playing cards. A collection of lipsticked girls in their twenties. A fat man sitting alone and smoking, the edge of the table wedged into his gut.
I found Mandarin in the very last booth. Or really, only part of her. The man she was making out with obscured the rest.
He had one hand nestled in her hair. I could hear them, the kissing noises. I felt like a pervert, but I was unable to take my eyes away. Finally, Mandarin pulled back to take a drag of her cigarette.
Whe
n she saw me, she just sat there, her cigarette jutting from her lips.
“Mandarin,” I said. “I’m sorry for coming here, but … I have something to show you.”
The man spit into a plastic cup of murky tobacco water. Had he been chewing tobacco and kissing her at the same time? Mandarin withdrew the cigarette from her mouth and tapped it on a blue ashtray. “I’m kind of busy right now.”
“Don’t be like that, Mandarin. Please.” My voice wavered. “I’m really sorry, I swear. Please! I still want to go with you! I—”
“Shhh!” she hissed. “Quiet. Not now. I’ll have a look at what you’ve got, all right? But real quick.” She glanced at the man. “All right?” Resentfully, he slung the dead weight of his arm from her shoulders, releasing her to stand.
Mandarin put one hand on the small of my back and herded me toward the front door. “What’re you doing in here, anyways? This isn’t any place for a girl like you.”
“But you’re here all the time.”
“I work here. And besides, I’m different.”
Once the door shut behind us, Mandarin withdrew her arm and stepped back, as if remembering she was supposed to be angry with me. Her eyes flashed under the blinking bar lights. “So? What’s going on?”
“Are you busy tonight?”
“Obviously. So can we just get on with it? What’ve you got?”
She was trying to act impatient, but I could tell she was curious. It gave me the upper hand. “Stay put for one sec,” I ordered.
I went around the corner and retrieved my gift from where I’d hidden it—the thing I’d stolen from the grocery store door and stuffed into my tote bag that afternoon. When I handed it to Mandarin, she shrieked and almost dropped it. I snatched it back and held it by the antlers, with its little jackrabbit face aimed up at her.
“Are you insane?” Mandarin said. “I don’t even want to look at it. The poor guy.”
I’d suspected she would react like that. “Well, it—”
“Did you buy it from the souvenir shop? Because that’s just, like, supporting the whole industry!”
“It’s not from the souvenir shop. And I didn’t buy it.”
“Well, how’d you get it? The only other place I’ve seen one …” She paused. “Oh no you didn’t. You stole it? Did you really? You are insane!”
“So are you busy later tonight?”
“Why? What did you have in mind?”
I brandished the jackalope head under the bar lights. “We’re going to liberate the trophies.”
The success of the liberation rested on two conditions.
The first was Mandarin’s father’s truck. Solomon Ramey owned a 1959 Studebaker Scotsman farm truck, pale green, with a wooden cage in back: the kind of contraption you saw stuffed with chickens or bawling baby goats on the highways. It had chubby bumpers, faded old tires, a front windshield dotted with chips. Maybe it would have been worth something fixed up—if it didn’t look wind-blasted and drop-kicked and spit out. Even so, I expected that Solomon would be possessive about it. Washokey men loved their trucks.
Luckily, when I met Mandarin on her porch at two in the morning, she was twirling the keys on a silver ring. It looked like a jailer’s key chain from an old western film.
“You got them?” I asked anyway.
In reply, Mandarin tossed the key ring at me. I held my hands over my face. The keys bounced painfully off my shoulder.
I leaned over to pick them up, wondering if she was still angry. But then she hopped from the steps and practically tackled me, hurling an arm around my waist. “This is going to be so much fun!” she exclaimed, towing me toward the driveway. “What a great fucking idea. You’re a genius, Gracey.”
I practically glowed.
“So what does your dad use his truck for?” I asked as we climbed in.
“Kegs,” she replied, turning on the ignition. The engine came alive with an exasperated roar. I glanced at Mandarin, concerned.
“What if somebody hears us?”
“I can deal with them.”
The second condition of a successful liberation might have been an even bigger gamble if I hadn’t known Washokey so well.
Townspeople tended to trust one another. Not that crime didn’t exist. While misdeeds behind closed doors generally went unreported, the weekly paper recounted occasional shenanigans: cars rammed into mailboxes, rocks through windows, fistfights in the parking lot of the Western Bar or the Old Washokey Sip Spot. But with the exception of the fights, there wasn’t much person-against-person crime. No robberies, no burglaries, despite what Earl Barnaby claimed. The single break-in I could recall had been blamed on a drifter by the town’s notoriously lazy police.
So I knew there were no alarm systems protecting Washokey’s businesses.
I was counting on Mandarin’s lock-picking skills.
Picking the lock had been Mandarin’s idea. My grandiose plans hadn’t taken locks into account. Fortunately, Mandarin’s roommate at the Wyoming Girls’ School had been an expert in forced entry, and eager to impress besides.
Mandarin went through a paper clip, a coat hanger, and three bobby pins before the padlock on the back door popped open. The whole while, I darted around anxiously, peering around corners, scanning the streets for nocturnal pedestrians, until Mandarin grabbed me by the back of my shirt and made me sit.
We slipped into the stockroom. Pallets were stacked to the ceiling, piled with shrink-wrapped cans of SpaghettiOs, green beans, Spam, neon boxes of macaroni. Mandarin used a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon to prop open the door into the store. I noticed four tiny nail holes—perfect for hanging a jackalope head.
Inside, we had a moment of silence, our eyes roaming from trophy to trophy. Their shadowy faces gazed sightlessly over the tops of the aisles. I hadn’t cared much about them either way. But now they seemed somber and lonely, anchored in the dark.
Don’t worry, I thought as I stared at the nearest one, a deer head. We’re going to free you.
Just as I turned to Mandarin to utter something profound—I hadn’t quite determined what—she whacked my shoulder.
“Tag! You’re it,” she shouted, and darted off into the canned-goods aisle like a kitten doped on catnip.
I had to keep calling her back as she skipped through the store, dancing, hiding, bursting out from behind displays of soda pop boxes. She devoured an apple and stuck the core among the lettuces. She drew angry faces on the eggs with her eyeliner.
“Who does this look like?” She held up a cantaloupe.
She’d drawn a face with a long droopy mustache. Mr. Beck, of course. “Ha,” I said. “Great. Can we hurry?”
We lugged a stepladder from trophy to trophy. As Mandarin tossed me each animal head, she shouted, “Heads up!” Hilarious. I insisted on whispering in reply, as if my voice might tone down hers. This might have been my idea and all, but I was terrified of getting caught.
We stacked all the trophies in a shopping cart, bobcats and pronghorns and foxes together, an animal kingdom united in death. So morbid. But I still giggled at the absurdity of it. A cart full of heads. Roadkill for dinner!
In the parking lot, Mandarin hopped onto the back of the cart. “Push me.”
I gave her a shove. Too late, I imagined the cart hitting a crack, and the trophies tumbling out all over the pavement. I hurried after her.
We loaded the trophies into the truck and tied a blue tarp over them so no one on the road would know what they were. “One sec,” Mandarin said.
I watched her wheel the cart to the entrance and leave it neatly behind the others.
On her way back, she got out her eyeliner and drew a mustache on the cement jackalope in front of the store. Then she drew eyelashes.
“I didn’t want to sexually discriminate,” she explained, slamming the door of the truck. “So how you feeling? Tired?”
I felt more wide-awake than I ever had. As if Mandarin’s energy from the grocery store aisles had invaded my body. My inst
incts had been right. This night would define our friendship, cement it, render it unbreakable.
“Not tired at all,” I replied.
“Good!” Mandarin said. “Then we can go get the others.”
“What others?”
“The other trophies.”
“What do you mean?” I squinted at her. “The ones in people’s houses? In their barns? We can’t, like, purge the town entirely.”
“I know that,” Mandarin said. “But it ain’t worth it unless I get one in particular—that old wise one, from the Buffalo Grill. That elk.”
“You want to break into the Buffalo Grill?”
“Why, you got a thing for the Dents?”
I thought about it. The thing was, the Buffalo Grill seemed more like someone’s home. Like the hospital, it occupied an old house. People ate in former bedrooms or living rooms, with all the walls knocked down between. And while I didn’t have a thing for Samantha Dent or her family, I didn’t have anything against them. When Alexis and Paige weren’t around, Samantha was actually kind of nice.
Then again, I knew Agatha and Dustin Wright, the owners of the grocery store. They weren’t bad either. But that hadn’t stopped me from pillaging their taxidermy.
“Let’s go,” I said.
As Mandarin drove, I kept catching whiffs of musk and old dead fur. I didn’t see how that was possible, since the animals were way in the back. Then I sniffed my hands. Yep, it was us.
“If Remy was an elk with its body chopped off, this is who he’d be,” Mandarin whispered.
We gazed up at the massive head. I supposed it resembled Remy Ramey, if I squinted. It had the same tawny beard, the same glazed eyes. Probably even the same fleas. As long as you ignored the dusty antlers, like alien hands.
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