The Ones That Got Away

by Stephen Graham Jones

  A bridesmaid, yeah.

  Except—it’s stupid and she knows it’s stupid—what if Bo Richardson really is there?

  It could be like all the movies, where the charity case loser girl finally puts on mascara, shows up at the dance, the air suddenly different around her, charged.

  Which Joy laughs at as well.

  She’s not twelve years old, after all.

  But what if she gets to keep the dress, too?

  This stops her.

  Is that how it works at weddings? It would be cut specifically for her, after all.

  Not that she would ever wear it again, of course.

  But it might be fun to burn at the parking lot or something.

  First she’s going to have to fit into it, though.

  Just in case Bo’s really there.

  “What’s that about?” her mom asks at five, nudging Joy’s smile with the knuckle of her index finger.

  “Nothing,” Joy says.

  Just to show that she’s not taking it seriously, Joy shows up to the fitting twenty minutes late. With a friend, Lacy.

  “So this is it?” Lacy says to Tammy, fingering a peach-colored spaghetti strap out from a rack.

  “Where’d you get those boots?” Brianne asks back.

  Everybody grins uncomfortably, and then Brianne keeps Lacy in the waiting room while Tammy leads Joy by the arm back to the curtained stalls and the fitting pedestal.

  “So what do I do?” Joy says, smiling with one side of her face.

  “Nothing,” Tammy says, “this is all me . . .” and starts taking measurements with a tape from what looks like a tackle box.

  “You mean I don’t try it on now?”

  “Not like—not like you are, no,” Tammy says, her lips tight around a straight pin she’s not going to be using.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We don’t want to, you know, stretch it or anything.”

  “Listen, I don’t—”

  “No, I say that in the nicest way. But, you can make a dress smaller, but you can’t really let it out. That’s all. There’s not enough material. That’s why you always start big.”

  “Then I can’t do this, right? Is that what this is about? God, I don’t even know why I’m here.”

  “Because you want to be beautiful,” Tammy whispers up to her. “Now, what size shoe do you wear?”

  Joy stares down at her for a long moment, then finally looks away, to the idea of the waiting room.

  “Seven,” she says.

  “Is that men’s or women’s?” Tammy asks, her voice syrupy with innocence.

  Joy smiles with her eyes.

  “Even if I don’t eat for the next two days—” she starts.

  “Leave that to me,” Tammy says. “Did you see what I ate in the cafeteria today?”

  “I wasn’t watching, sorry.”

  “A piece of pizza.”

  “Crust and all?” Joy asks.

  Tammy smiles, isn’t stupid.

  “I’m just saying,” she says, measuring from the point of Joy’s shoulder to the round bone of her wrist, “there are ways.”

  Joy looks down along her arm.

  “I thought they were sleeveless,” she says.

  “Just being sure,” Tammy says back, and then does the other arm. “You’re naturally dark, too, so that’s good. It’ll be a nice contrast against the fabric.”

  “It?”

  “Your sk— Your tan.”

  “This is a joke,” Joy says again, after the necessary lull.

  “If you’re not coming, you might let us know,” Tammy shrugs, stepping back, threading the pin from her teeth. “I mean, I know another girl.”

  “She needs to lose ten pounds too?”

  “No. She’s perfect.”

  “Then why me?”

  “Because—I can’t be telling you this. But . . . God. I saw Bo looking at you the other day. I think he likes your tights or something. He said something about—it was gross. Licking, and a candy cane?”

  On accident then, Joy smiles.

  “So tell me,” she said. “If I were going, I mean. What’s this trick?”

  “To what?”

  “Ten pounds,” Joy says, her voice perfectly even, and Tammy looks up, as if to make sure she’s serious.

  Tammy had come up with the plan in the department store, right there at Joy’s register, and then whispered it to Brianne in the aisle before they were even out of the store.

  All she had at first, standing there having her license checked, was the image of Joy, throwing up in the middle of the ceremony. Because Clarice was a slut of a bride, obviously. Because of the example she definitely wasn’t (to say nothing of Jill, the whore), Tammy’s mom had been tightening the reins the last few days. Joy throwing up during the vows, then, it would be like a sign. Like revenge, or justice. Same thing.

  The problem was getting to that image, though.

  Like Brianne said all the way to the car, it was complicated. If they were in a movie, maybe. But this was real life. Susan B. Danforth Detention Unit and Vomitorium. It was a word she’d heard in World History last year.

  Tammy knew it was complicated, she said. But she knew Joy, too. Her kind. She was jealous of what Tammy and Brianne had, of how Bo and Seth and Davis would all lift their chins and smile when they walked in.

  She didn’t want to be Tammy and Brianne, so much, but she did want Bo to notice her like that. At least once.

  Anybody would, right?

  He was Bo after all.

  There was nothing complicated about that.

  After the measurements, Tammy leads Joy into one of the fitting rooms and pulls the curtain shut behind them.

  “What?” Joy says. “This where you cut my arm off?” She holds it out as if weighing it in her mind.

  “This way’s better,” Tammy says, flashing the applicator between her thumb and index finger.

  Joy narrows her eyes, then has to squeeze over against the wall as Brianne wedges herself in.

  “What is it?” Joy asks.

  “Just some diet stuff,” Tammy says, nodding to Brianne. “We stole it from her mom. She got it in Greece or somewhere.”

  “On a cruise,” Brianne chimes in. “Then it’s not legal?” Joy says, her eyes watering from the fumes.

  “You’re really worried about illegal substances?” Brianne says back.

  “FDA illegal,” Tammy clarifies. “Not DEA illegal.”

  Joy smiles. With them, for the first time.

  The punch line of the joke is supposed to be giving Joy enough antacids or something the day of the wedding that she stops throwing up, and then give her another just before the ceremony. Only that last tablet is something else. Red food dye, maybe, so it looks like she’s dying, turning inside out at the altar.

  It’s going to be perfect.

  “Well?” Tammy says, holding the applicator up, and, to show it’s not dangerous, she dots her fingertip with it, swirls that finger behind each ear.

  “That’s all?” Joy says.

  Brianne has it now, is rubbing a drop between her wrists. “We just need to, y’know, burn off a couple of pounds by Saturday, yeah? I mean, I lose anymore, I’m going to be back to an A cup. Freshman year all over again.”

  Joy takes the plastic applicator.

  “Greece?” she says.

  “They don’t wear tops to their bikinis over there,” Tammy says, like that can be the clincher: Greek women, proud enough to go topless.

  Joy laughs to herself about this, studies the applicator, and says, “So, what? One drop is two pounds?”

  “Here,” Tammy says, and pinches the applicator away, upends it on Joy’s wrist until her skin is slick with it, “now just hold it and count to twenty.”

  At ten seconds Joy starts coughing from the fumes, but doesn’t let go.

  “Ten pounds,” Brianne’s saying, smiling.

  By Friday morning, the stomach bug the nurse had diagnosed Tammy and Brianne with (a
gain) has run its course (again), and they make it to school in time to breeze through lunch.

  Sitting on her side of the cafeteria, hunched over the table, is Joy. She’s pale, looks clammy even from this far away, and, Tammy and Brianne can’t be sure, but it looks like her tights aren’t even so tight anymore.

  “She’ll thank us,” Tammy says, holding her books tight to her chest.

  “If she keeps it off,” Brianne adds.

  They don’t talk to her, though, and Joy doesn’t look up to see that they aren’t talking to her.

  “Maybe her dad makes her come to school anyway,” Brianne says on the way to Trigonometry.

  “What, he makes that call from prison?” Tammy asks with a smile, then slows for Seth at his locker, which turns into Davis and Bo as well, which turns into being five minutes late.

  Brianne glares at her when she finally waltzes in.

  Tammy glares back, adds some oomph to it.

  On the other side of the classroom, hiding, is Joy. She isn’t lifting her head from her desk.

  Tammy shrugs to Brianne about it and Brianne shrugs back, makes the eeek! shape with her mouth.

  Halfway through class is when it happens, the thing that will spark an investigation that will span four high schools and never once interrogate either Tammy or Brianne, the real killers here.

  All at once, in the middle of Mr. Connors taking up last night’s problems, Joy slings her head up from her desk. A line of vomit strings down from her lip. And there’s more coming.

  She’s trying to hold it down, though. Trying just to look over at Tammy and Brianne for help, her fingers clenched around the edge of her desk.

  When she can’t talk, she finally lurches to a half-stand of sorts, lifts her arm to point across the room. At Tammy.

  Tammy opens her mouth as if to say something then looks behind her, at the chalkboard.

  “Wha—?” she starts to say, her fingertips touching her chest now in consternation, but then Joy is losing everything she’s been trying to hold down, only it isn’t just the bile and whatever that Tammy and Brianne already know so well. This time it’s blood, like’s supposed to happen at the wedding, clumpy and dark, and when her throat isn’t big enough to turn her inside out, it starts seeping from the corners of her eyes too, and her nose, maybe even beading up through her scalp.

  For a half-second Tammy is too shocked to react, but then her instincts kick in and she slams her open palms onto her desk and screams. Not in terror so much as in protest. Of having to be witness to this. It infects the classroom, the hall, and even the nurse when she gets there.

  Though Joy is unconscious by now, there’s still blood gurgling past her lips, her sides contracting over and over.

  Somehow Brianne thinks to raise her hand, ask without being called upon if what Candy—what Joy has is catching, or what?

  The nurse just keeps staring down at the blood, finally has to support herself with the chalkboard, which gives under her weight, sends her toppling into the brown metal trash can.

  By two-thirty, classes are cancelled.

  It’s so the paramedics can carry Joy down the quiet hall and out the door, a sheet draped across her face because it doesn’t matter anymore if she has air.

  Tammy and Brianne watch, their eyes saucers, and then they get in the car and put their seatbelts on and creep away, both Tammy’s hands on the wheel.

  “Shit,” she says, minutes later.

  “Exactly,” Brianne says back, then looks over to Tammy. “Can Deborah still fill in, you think? She Candy Cane’s size?”

  “Deborah?”

  “Tomorrow,” Brianne says, her tone all about how obvious this is.

  Tammy nods once, then again, yes: Debbie, her sister’s ditzy friend.

  The ride home is silent, no radio even, but then, standing from the car, using it to steady herself, Tammy gets out a shaky “Hungry?”

  Brianne laughs, doesn’t even answer.

  The day of the wedding is also the first day of Joy’s viewing. There’s going to be more of a crowd at the wedding, though, Tammy and Brianne know. And anyway, except for Lacy, who’s already been kicked out of Danforth twice in the short time it’s existed, nobody knows that they’ve ever even known Joy, much less stood in a dressing room with her. And anyway, it had been mostly to help her, really. It wasn’t their fault she’d turned out to be a pig, slopped so much of the stuff on.

  And, while Tammy had promised Bo a show at the wedding if he showed up, she’s confident she can still give him something to remember, anyway.

  All days are salvageable, if you’re really committed. If you can still smile.

  Of course, Tammy doesn’t know what Brianne doesn’t even know she knows: the super fertilizer compound from the infomercial.

  At the bottom of the leaky container is a warning not to eat any of the fruit this fertilizer has helped grow. It’s for pageants only. The fruit and vegetable kind.

  Brianne’s late to the dressing room of course, but that’s just because her mom’s made her go stand around the flagpole at school and hold a candle.

  Because Joy was in Tammy and Brianne’s grade, Clarice of course cancelled the rehearsal dinner last night. “In honor.”

  Tammy had thanked Clarice for both of them and then gone to the parking lot alone. It was empty, everybody already at one of the memorial services.

  Twenty minutes later Brianne showed up in the pants she was only just now fitting into right. She stood from her mom’s Volvo, smoothed her pants down along her hip and looked across all the empty asphalt. Even the pool was in mourning.

  “They think she was a saint or something,” Tammy said when Brianne was close enough.

  “Maybe I should try some red and white tights,” Brianne said back.

  Walking through Brianne’s living room an hour later, Frederick growled at them like he knew.

  But that was stupid.

  “It won’t . . . she must have been on something else too,” Brianne finally whispers to Tammy, the next morning. Not over breakfast—they’re going to be on display, after all, right?—but at the long vanity in the holy holy dressing room at the church.

  “At least they’ll be able to keep the flies off her now, yeah?” Tammy smiles back in the mirror, then turns before Brianne can register the joke.

  Their dresses fit so perfect they each almost cry.

  “Well?” Tammy says, shrugging in anticipation, her eyelashes tittering.

  Brianne takes Tammy’s hands in hers and bites her lower lip, and then the music’s started and their groomsmen—nothing special—are walking them up the aisle, and every note the organ plays is for them.

  It’s perfect. Even better than that. Like bathing in the silvery flash of cameras, in the powdery scent of groomed flowers. The ashy taste in the air is candles.

  Tammy scans the audience for Bo, and he’s there with the rest. But, on their lapels, they’re all wearing black—ribbons?

  For Joy. Of course.

  The bitch.

  She can’t even let Tammy and Brianne have this one day.

  “Bend your knees,” Brianne whispers to Tammy and Tammy just keeps smiling. In heels like she’s got on, what other choice does she really have?

  Moments later Clarice is waddling up the aisle on her father’s arm, and Brianne is laughing without smiling, and Tammy almost gives in as well, at the corners of her mouth. Instead her eyes just cry a little, but that’s to be expected.

  Except—and this is where things start going wrong—as Clarice gets closer, Tammy looks over to Brianne to be sure they’re seeing what they’re seeing: under Clarice’s dress, her lace and ivory wedding dress, is she really wearing motorcycle boots?

  No wonder she got pregnant.

  But there’s something . . .

  Tammy closes her eyes.

  Joy again. The boots are the same. “In honor.”

  Tammy grits her teeth, smiles past it, then, when it’s time to rotate forty-degrees over, to
witness this travesty, she sees a flash of red and white stripes somewhere in the pews, but can’t keep her eyes there without drawing attention.

  She’s dead, though, Joy.

  Dead dead dead.

  Maybe not next year, but the year after that anyway, the kids are even going to be calling her “Killjoy” or something, Tammy knows, and then she’ll just be a plaque in front of a tree that probably won’t even make it two summers.

  So, instead of being paranoid, Tammy smiles and stares past Brianne’s hair, up to Clarice and her catch of the day, and is only just starting to get bored with all the preaching that comes before anything can even happen—the reception is what matters, she keeps telling herself—when she sees something shiny and brown grope out from under the left strap of Brianne’s dress.

  A tick, its body impossibly flat.

  Tammy looks away, dipping her chin as if swallowing.

  Five seconds later, the tick’s gone.

  But.

  Tammy closes her eyes, holds her tissue to her nose as if trying to control herself. Or, not as if, just not for the reason everybody thinks.

  In her hair in the shower that day.

  The reason she could never find the scratch in her scalp was because it hadn’t been a scratch at all, but one of those pregnant ticks, bursting. The grittiness in the blood, in the tick’s blood, had been—it had been baby ticks.

  Tammy lowers her tissue to her mouth, is breathing faster than she wants to. Finally she has to reach out for Brianne’s back just to keep from losing her balance.

  Brianne turns around pleasantly, sees the danger Tammy is in, then turns back around just as pleasantly. Takes a polite half-step forward, even.

  Tammy shakes her head no, just a little—there are two-hundred and twelve invited guests, after all—but then it starts to rise in her throat anyway, everything she hasn’t eaten that morning.

  “I can’t—” she starts, and loses the rest all over the back of Brianne’s peach dress, and it’s red, even, and she was right: it does look perfect against that silk. Classic.

  For a second Tammy tries to believe that she’s imagining all this, torturing herself, that this is a side-effect of Frederick’s drops, but then the blood still coating her teeth, it’s gritty.

  Tammy shakes her head no, her hand rising to her mouth.