by N. Griffin
He seemed lovely, his smile very kind. Bett closed her eyes against the cold gray air and the smell of the water was everywhere.
The man in the water spoke again. Bett frowned. He repeated himself, but she still couldn’t make out what he was saying.
Bett stood on one foot. Then she shook her head and backed away. Back to the path, and then she ran Plusly and wrongly again, skidding and tripping over rocks and sand to the tiny shack of a house she lived in now.
* * *
At the house there was much more wind than on the path. There always was. There was nothing to break its force. The trees ended here, and there were only grasses, sharp and green, and the skinny strip of dirt that led up to the house. All through the first days of the summer when Bett’s mother had brought her over to look at the progress she’d made on the little house, Bett’s legs were full of tiny slices from those grasses.
“Wear jeans,” her mother had said, but Bett was committed to the short-jean-shorts mortification, and the grass slices were another good antidote to any accidental Pluses that might come up during the course of a day, too. And it wasn’t like their house overlooked real, warm-weather kind of water anyway, with sand and sunshine and people in bathing suits. It was just a rocky semi-bay near the mouth of a river, its water scraggly and cold even in July, Bett knew, although she wouldn’t let herself go near enough to touch it, not even to drabble a finger through its surface. The river itself was too Plus.
She slowed to a walk as she reached the stretch of path just in back of the house.
“Mom,” she called, crashing through the door. “Mom!”
“What?” said her mother. She was right there. Actually, she was in the kitchen, but the house was so small, all she needed to do was back up one step and poke her head into the living room, where the doorway framed the pale light in which Bett was standing. “Bett, you are a pile of dirt. Please remember to bang your feet before you come in!”
“What?” said Bett.
“Bang your feet!”
Bett banged them.
“Not in here! Bett, for God’s sake. Use your head.”
“Whatever,” said Bett. At least her left ear was unplugging a bit. She bent down and used the side of her hand to force her foot dirt into a pile and pushed as much as she could into the palm of the other hand.
“A broom would be better,” said her mother. “But I appreciate the gesture. How was the first day?”
“Do you have any whalers?” Bett asked in response.
“What?” Her mother’s brow crinkled.
“Whalers,” said Bett. She thought it would be kind of cool for her mother to be able to walk right into the river, like the man had, not getting wet. Maybe she could even walk straight across to the other side. She imagined the weight of the water pushing against her mother’s body and the work of walking through it against a strong, sure current.
“You mean people who hunt whales?” her mother asked. “What, you want roommates in here? Please. It was all I could do to build a house big enough for the two of us.”
“Come on.” Bett exhaled with disgust. “Not people. Like, those big gray clown pants.”
Her mother stared at her. “Bett,” she said. “Help me.”
“I met a man. The neighbor man with the saw, I think. He was standing in the water with clown pant things on.”
“Clown pants!” her mother exclaimed. “Bett, I don’t think that was the neighbor man. And that guy with the saw wasn’t an actual neighbor, just someone who lives on the way back to town.”
“Well, this man seemed really nice,” said Bett. “And he knew you.” He knew me, too. But she didn’t say that part out loud.
“Bett. What the hell? It’s not enough that I’ve been a cop for twenty years and you’ve sat through more child-defense programs than any kid in the USA? You still talk to strangers? Jesus holy God, what am I going to—”
“I didn’t talk to him much,” said Bett. “I backed away. But it was just the saw guy, I’m pretty sure. He looked familiar. I knew you’d be mad.”
“Well, Bett,” said her mother, “you are correct there. I have to tell you that the man who lent me the saw is really not the type to wear clown pants to stand in the middle of a river. I think who you saw is probably a crazy person, and you did the right thing by backing away from him.”
“I know,” said Bett. “But he didn’t seem crazy. And he needed those pants. He would have gotten wet otherwise.” She stood up, holding her little handful of dirt carefully so it didn’t spill back onto the floor. “They were, like, waterproofed or rubberized or something.”
There was a little silence. Then: “Waders,” said her mother. “Waders. I think what you mean is waders.”
Waders. Waders. Of course. Deep gray sea shapes stretched away and high-pitched song sounds faded into nothing but something sturdy and practical. Of course, waders. Bett remembered the word for them now. What was all that about the whale song? Not a very Bett-like thought.
Something, though. Something.
The man greeting her, his eyes so kind. Bett couldn’t shake the feeling that she shouldn’t have backed away.
“Are you sure you heard him correctly?” Bett’s mother asked, peering into Bett’s face like an overweening cat.
“Mom, my ear is fine.” Which was actually true right then, but Bett wasn’t about to tell her about the ear go-outs of the day and discuss the reasons for them. The principal had already taken care of that. And even though the thought of her mother all up in school business was a giant ugh, if she was honest, Bett was still feeling uneasy about those fiery, burning pictures, and wouldn’t mind if her mother got to the bottom of who did it after all.
Still, Bett and her mom had fought about her ear so many times, Bett wished she could rip it off and present it to the woman. But the upside was that Bett knew she could nearly always get off the hook of hearing her mother by turning away from her face. Even if she could still actually hear, which she really pretty much always could because her right ear was fine, it was convenient to make her mother, and teachers, and anyone, especially her father—who she refused to see and barely spoke to on the phone, even though he called and e-mailed and texted all the time, living in the next town with his Floozy, as her mother and Aunt Jeanette referred to her—think that she could not.
“You wouldn’t tell me if you couldn’t hear, anyway,” said her mother, and Bett said nothing.
Just as well that there were no waders in the house. Bett might have been too tempted to do the work of water-walking herself.
That reminded her of the satisfaction of pounding up the slope from the bus, a true Plus that Bett knew had to be undone—now. The familiar terror and anxiety mounted in her stomach until she couldn’t take it, until all she wanted was to grab a bag of Oreos and run up the four little steps into the even smaller SIM card space that was her room and hunch over her sneaker sole to eat the cookies and retrace the STOP printed there until the ink was as black as it had been when she wrote it this morning.
But her mother was already talking to her again.
“What’s all this about art being destroyed up at the school?” she asked Bett.
Bett shrugged quickly. “I don’t know,” she said. “Some deranged person. You all will catch them.”
“We’ll do our damnedest,” said her mother. “I don’t like the thought of you in that school with someone like that on the loose.”
“Quit being a cop at me.”
“I’m not,” said her mother simply. “I’m being a mother.”
“I’ll be fine,” said Bett.
Her mother raised her eyebrows briefly and turned back to the stove and, fast as a catamount, Bett grabbed the bag of Oreos from the cupboard and ran up to her room and ate and ate and ate, hoping the carbs and sugar would still the well of terror in her mind, but also knowing that terror would be replaced by self-hate for eating too much, a loathing for the big body the Oreos helped make, and that was not
better than the terror. But it would cancel out the school anxiety and the running Plus, and that was what Bett was after.
The sugar finally hit her body like a ton of bricks and Bett lay on her bed, eyes closed, beached like a whale and almost asleep. Thoughts of the day floated unbidden through her mind. Ranger, the smoke, the flames, this new bus. It was so weird that Eddie the bus driver also worked at the Vet Social Service Center with her dad. Bett didn’t like it one tired bit. She wanted her worlds separate, and Eddie intersecting with her father was as creepy and unwelcome as the psycho art slasher-burner at the school.
Bett shook her head slowly as her ear filled again and went out. Her father and his life were the last things she wanted to think about right now.
11
TWO YEARS AGO . . . In the spring of ninth grade, the ice was cracked in the ragged ribbon of the river and so was the Venn diagram between Stephanie’s friends and Bett’s. Now instead of the intersection of the circles being filled with just her and Stephanie, the two of them hung out with groups of one or the other’s friends as well, planned or not, and, despite her mother’s annoyance at that first impromptu visit to Stephanie’s, Bett now had standing permission to get off the bus there whenever she wanted.
Stephanie’s parents were divorced. Her father lived in Rayfen, just the next town over, and her mother, small and redheaded with slim, pale fingers, worked at the insurance office here in Salt River. Stephanie’s two uncles and Bill worked the Christmas tree farm, the work more intense in season and lighter the rest of the time, planting and maintaining the trees.
Mrs. Roan wasn’t often home when Stephanie and Bett got off the bus together. When she did come home after work, though, Bett noticed, if she was still there, that Mrs. Roan often had a bouquet of flowers in her arms, all made up with ribbons and bows.
“I always tell them to gift wrap,” she told the girls. “Why not? It’s nice to feel like you got a present. Like a Happy Birthday to Me.”
“Let me unwrap them,” Stephanie begged, and her mother always let her before she trimmed the stems and arranged them in vases herself with those slim fingers, her movements so delicate that they made Bett shudder and want to grab the flowers from her and just shove them in the vase already.
Stephanie’s mother called Bett’s house once and asked to speak to Bett’s dad.
“Insurance policy,” she told Bett. But her dad wasn’t home.
“I like that Stephanie,” said Bett’s mother. “She’s got a way about her. You know what it is? Charisma, that’s what. That is a kid who has a lot of charisma.”
“Like myself,” said Bett’s Aunt Jeanette, who was over, as she always was, Led Zeppelin playing on the stereo again, and Bett wanting to die because not only was Aunt Jeanette so sure she was charismatic, but her neck was working in an awful, chicken-like way in time to the music, and Bett’s mother’s neck was doing the same, and it was all so painful to witness that Bett had to leave the room.
At any rate, Bett’s and Stephanie’s friends had mixed a little, albeit not smooth like a cake, but lumpy like a fruit cobbler. Still, they were mixing, and making out was a thing now, which did its bit to bring the groups together. Fresh blood was always a good thing. Stephanie was nearly always one of the ones making out, most memorably at the last accidental gathering of kids at Stephanie’s own house. They were all downstairs in the basement, Stephanie sitting on the washing machine kissing a boy who was perched on the dryer, while another boy was crouched on the other side of the washing machine, kind of making out with Stephanie’s arm. Sometimes Bett made out, too, often with this random boy from the Catholic school who admired her muscles and long legs.
Bett was impressed at how Stephanie was almost universally liked. Not just for making out, but as a friend, too. How does she do it? wondered Bett, but she knew. Sure, Stephanie was pretty, but she was also funny and liked everybody. Plenty of people liked Bett, too, but there seemed to be some social secret to people that Stephanie just knew how to access, whereas what Bett just knew was how to memorize a license plate at a glance and catch a foul ball. Bett knew she was her mother’s daughter, competent and strong, someone who could help move a couch. This generally made her feel powerful and tough, but sometimes, if Stephanie was making out with someone and there was no one readily nearby to talk to, Bett wondered if maybe it would have been good to have inherited some of her dad’s more delicate genes after all, though he was so skinny anyone could snap him like a twig.
Stephanie disagreed about Bett’s dad’s looks. “Your dad is good-looking,” she said, “for a dad.”
“Ugh!” shouted Bett. “Don’t say stuff like that about people’s dads!”
But opinions about fathers notwithstanding, Stephanie was generous with sharing boy secrets and makeup tips with Bett. Stephanie wanted to do makeup tutorials online someday so she watched a lot of them now and then practiced what she learned on Bett on the bus whenever it stopped, the application punctuating the trip to school like ellipses. Stephanie would get in trouble at her school for so much makeup, but not Bett, who had grown to kind of love the way Stephanie made her look, not like a Twinkler but like something even better. And by now, with the crocuses coming up and it being actual genuine spring, although still pretty cold out, Stephanie had made Bett up so many times that Bett could do it herself at home if it was just her dad around in the mornings.
“You look great, honey!” he always said, and Bett felt guilty for thinking him too skinny and too whatever-you-want. “Like a bird with sleek, beautiful plumage.”
But if Bett’s mom was the one who was still around in the morning, makeup was strictly a bus thing, done between stops and jounces, because Bett’s mother believed in no makeup to school before you were fifteen, never mind plumage, and so Bett had to make sure it was washed off before she went home, too.
“You’re actually really good at this,” said Stephanie one morning when Bett was the one making her own self up. “I think you’re, like, my protégé.”
The two of them were especially excited this morning because Bett was going to sleep over at Stephanie’s after school, even though it was a school night, and Bett had a Fizzicle Feet in mind that was so good she couldn’t think of anything else.
Fizzicle Feets completely were a Thing now. Usually Bett begged Stephanie to think of them. “Give me one,” she begged, at her house or Steph’s, and Stephanie always began with guilty hemming and hawing about not wanting Bett to get hurt and offering the stupidest easiest things, like jumping off the picnic table, for God’s sake, with Bett pleading for something harder and harder and harder until they finally came up with something. If he was home, Bill often came to watch, too, and helped think of some of the best ones.
Thus, so far, Fizzicle Feets had included:
1) Bett jumping from that rocky ledge at Stephanie’s house to the hill it abutted. (“It’s like an eight-foot leap. With a running start!” Bett told Stephanie that day, and showed her on the ground first how easy it was. “Your mother will arrest me for killing you!” Stephanie worried, but Bett said no, she’d just finish killing Bett herself first.)
2) Climbing up to the top of the roof of Stephanie’s house. Stephanie leaned against the first gas pump and watched as Bett scaled the porch roof—easy with a run and a jump to grab the lip of that porch roof, which was flat, and then all she had to do was swing over onto it, walk across, and then climb up the steep eaves to the tip of the housetop itself. It was so easy, it was barely a Fizzicle Feet, so Bett wanted to jump down from the eaves part as well. But Stephanie had cried actual tears of worried fury, so Bett didn’t.
3) This was a good one: letting herself be chased, through appreciable and foot-pulling mud, through the one Christmas tree field where they were not, repeat, not allowed to go, because there was a pack of coyotes living up in that field right now, and one of the males was not happy at all to see Bett in his space. Thank God for her speed and her strong legs. The feeling of legging it up and ov
er that fence with the coyote snarling and howling in the field behind her was worth it. Worth it. More than. Because breathing hard and muscles spent and being one inch from danger was the everything of it all.
But the best Fizzicle Feet was going to be today. It was one Bett had thought of, because Stephanie never would have, not in the least because it involved using her brother’s mountain bike without really letting him know, which how could they right now, anyway, because he was staying late at the Catholic school to rehearse for some performance or other—maybe the band with his French disgusting horn, with its spit valve that Bett didn’t even want to hear about, much less have demonstrated to her.
Anyway, this Fizzicle Feet was going to be done at night, after midnight even, and Bett wouldn’t tell Stephanie what it was, except for the Bill bike part, and Stephanie was part scared and part excited and hugely afraid, as she always was.
“It’s tough to witness you almost die on, like, a weekly basis,” she said to Bett as they lay in the twin beds in Stephanie’s room, waiting for the house to quiet. Bett had already written Flight on the sole of her shoe five days ago, and had been jogging it into herself ever since.
“I never almost die, Steph,” Bett objected.
“It looks like you do.”
But Bett couldn’t find the words to say that a Fizzicle Feet was so far the opposite of almost dying, there wasn’t even a word for it.
Finally, the house was silent and the girls crept outside and into the small side barn where Bill’s bike was.
“Going for a ride?”
It was Bill himself, and both girls jumped a mile, hearts pounding.
Stephanie socked him. “What is wrong with you?” she whisper-yelled, not wanting to wake up their mother.
“What is wrong with you?” Bill whisper-yelled back. “Are you out here meeting some guy? Because, Stephanie, there really are some sketch dudes out there and—”
“No,” Bett interrupted. “It’s me. I was going to use your bike. Not for a guy. Fizzicle Feet.”
Bill’s face, weird in the silver of the moonlight, changed on a dime.