by Nancy Rue
The third one, though, it was green on top, and it came down to a point right below where my waist would be, and then it flared out a little bit into a striped skirt. Like a princess who didn’t think she was all that.
“Try that one,” Dad said. “But I want to see it on you.”
I hesitated.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure it’s the right size.”
Dad took it and held it up to me. “It should work.”
I didn’t remind him that I wasn’t a plank he was fitting into a floor. I just went to the fitting room and got a plastic number 1 from the lady and went behind a curtain. I kind of jumped when I saw me on all three sides. They didn’t put the mirrors inside the dressing rooms at Goodwill.
I tried not to look at myself as I took my other clothes off and slipped into the dress. It was a struggle getting my arms behind me to zip it up, but I felt kind of weird about going out and asking Dad to do it. I peeked out of the curtain, and a lady just going into the cubicle across from mine smiled at me.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Yes?” she said.
I hesitated a second, but she had nice brown eyes with grandmother lines around them.
“Would you please zip me up so I can go show this dress to my dad?”
“Absolutely I can!” She hung up her purse and motioned for me to turn around.
I held my breath. It probably wouldn’t fit on my smushy body. If it didn’t zip up, I wasn’t even going to look in the mirror. That way it wouldn’t feel so bad when I didn’t get it.
“I think this dress was made just for you,” the lady said.
“Am I in it?” I asked.
She laughed. “Yes, you’re in it.”
“It zipped up and everything?”
“And everything. Look at yourself.”
She pushed back my curtain, and I stared at myself in the mirrors. It did fit. And nothing squishy bulged out anywhere.
“Your daddy is going to think you’re beautiful,” she whispered. “But I wouldn’t go out in the tennis shoes and socks. What size shoe do you wear? I’ll slip out and get you a nice pair of ballet flats.”
“Six,” I said, “but—”
She was already gone. I turned back to the mirror. This was the nicest thing I ever had on since I outgrew the last outfit Mom bought me before the accident. But this dress was probably way expensive, and I didn’t know why Dad even brought me here.
The tag hung from my armpit, so I had to read it in the mirror and figure it out backward. $19.95. That seemed like a lot to me.
The lady came back with some tan slippers that matched the stripes in the skirt and had perfect tiny bows on them. “Slip into these,” she said. “I put some little footie things in there.”
I put everything on and stood up.
“You’re a lovely young lady,” she said.
Maybe she needed glasses. But maybe I should just thank her and be happy somebody was being nice to me. Somebody who didn’t even have to be.
So I said thank you and held my breath and stepped out of the fitting rooms. Dad had his back to me. He was looking at a display of headbands.
“Um, you want to see?” I said.
He turned around, and things kind of went into slow motion. His hands slid from his hips to his sides, and his rusty eyebrows lifted and pushed his freckles out of the way, and his mouth formed a little O that air blew softly out of. It all happened as I watched, and everything else stood still.
“You look like your mom,” he said. “Just like her.”
“I’m okay, then?”
He nodded.
“It costs $19.95,” I said.
“I know.”
“I don’t have to have the shoes too.”
“Yes, you do. And one of these. You like this?”
He picked up a green headband that matched exactly.
“I like it,” I said.
Was this really happening?
“All right, get changed,” he said. “We’ll take it home.”
When we got to the check-out, the nice brown-eyed lady was right in front of us.
“I see he approved,” she whispered to me.
“He did,” I said. “Shoes and everything.”
“You look like a young lady who deserves it,” she said.
She left, and Dad piled my new outfit onto the counter.
“I didn’t know their clothes were this che . . . inexpensive,” Dad said. “’Course, I didn’t know you liked clothes either.” He pulled out his wallet. “You never said.”
Maybe because I didn’t know that myself?
Maybe I didn’t know a lot of things about me, but one thing I did know: I wanted Dad to stay where he was—out in the light.
We had a big storm Saturday night that blew a bunch of branches down from the evergreens and slapped the windows with needles. I was glad it stopped before church, because of my dress and all. I even thanked God for all of it during the sermon. I also looked around for Colin, but he wasn’t there. He might not have recognized me anyway.
On the way home, Dad said he wanted to swing by his project and make sure it wasn’t damaged in the storm. Jackson didn’t care. He was in the behind-seat wearing sunglasses and a black hoodie over the white dress-up shirt Dad made him wear. That meant I got to sit in the front seat, and as soon as we pulled up to the house, I was glad I was getting the windshield view.
The place was, like, out of Anne of Green Gables, at least the way I imagined it. There was a wrap-around front porch and two little towers with pointy roofs and white lacy-looking wood around the windows and doors.
“Is this a mansion?” I said as Dad was climbing out of the driver’s seat.
“This is a mansion,” he said. “Stay put. I won’t be long.”
He closed the door, and I started dreaming. What was it like to live in this mansion back when it was first built? I bet the girls wore white silk stockings and big bows and slid down the bannisters and read books in the trees. I was imagining breakfasts with whipped cream and strawberries at a long, polished table when a car pulled into the circular driveway.
All dreams dissolved.
The car was small and silver, and it had that circle emblem on the trunk, with the other circle inside it. I could see all the letters this time: BMW.
Don’t freak, I told myself, even as my breathing got faster. A lot of people must have cars like that.
A lot of people like Kylie Steppe, who got out of the passenger seat and stood with her back to me, fluffing out her hair and pulling down the ankles of her pink-and-white-stripped leggings and taking the bags the driver handed to her over the roof of the car.
What was Kylie doing here? Did she know these people? Of course she would know them. She was rich too.
One thing was for sure—I didn’t want her to see me. I might be halfway to the Heights, but I just didn’t want to deal with her today.
I slid slowly down in the seat, and as I went, I saw the driver join Kylie. She was a teenager, taller than Kylie but just as skinny and with the same flippy hair, only longer. They went to the front door, but they didn’t knock. Kylie just opened it and went on in.
She lived there?
My dad was working for her dad?
Before I could slide down any farther in the seat, someone with a shrill voice like the Zabriskis’ whistles said something from inside the house. The teenage girl said, in a voice almost like it, “I don’t know,” and whipped her hair around to look over her shoulder.
I froze, and so did she. At first I thought she saw me, but then I realized she was staring at the side of our van. Even from the street, I could see her eyes go round and scared.
“Move, Kylie!” she said, and she flung herself inside the house and crashed the door shut behind her.
“Don’t slam it!” the first whistle voice said. “It’s brand-new!”
I sat there and shook. I looked back at Jackson, but he was slumped over like he
was asleep or pretending to be. It was just me then. And now I knew for sure. I did before, but I could never figure out how Kylie could get to my house in the middle of the night. It was that girl—probably her sister. She looked way guiltier than I ever felt, and I’d felt some pretty serious guilt. Yeah. They did it.
They did it, and I should tell someone. But as I watched my dad walk toward the van, the dad who bought me a beautiful dress and was looking at me differently ever since, I knew it couldn’t be him I told. What was he going to do? Go to his boss and say his daughters messed up his van when he needed this big job for us?
“Looks good,” he said when he climbed back into his seat. “You feel like burgers for dinner? That could be Easter, right?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Picked up some potato salad . . .”
I didn’t hear the rest of the menu because I was thinking about the other reason I couldn’t tell him or anybody else. I still didn’t have any proof. I saw a car like their BMW that night. I just saw Kylie’s sister look like the police were coming after her with handcuffs. Kylie was Twittering or whatever about Dad all over the place. But that was all. I still had nothing.
So Monday during lunch, I didn’t tell Lydia anything after all. And when she asked me if I had a nice Easter, I didn’t write it down, I didn’t think it through, I just blurted out, “Every time I think things are getting better, something else bad happens. Yesterday was all about Jesus saving us, but how come He doesn’t care about me? Why do we have to do this all on our own—people like Colin and me—why?”
Lydia slid a quesadilla toward me across the little table, but I ignored it.
“You’re not doing it on your own,” she said. “God’s there.”
“Choosing to make it hard so I’ll get character?”
Lydia pulled in her chin. “Say again?”
“God chooses for bad stuff to happen to people so we’ll get stronger. I don’t want to be stronger. I just want to be happy for more than five minutes.”
I opened my eyes wide so my face wouldn’t crumple. Lydia shook her head at me.
“Who ever told you that?” she said.
“A preacher. In a sermon.”
“When?”
“Back when we lived in—I don’t even remember.” My throat got thick. “Could we not talk about this?”
“This is one time when I’m going to insist we talk.” Lydia scooted to the very edge of her chair. “I hope that preacher didn’t actually say that. I hope you just misunderstood. Ginger, that is not what God does. Would your father leave you out in the woods someplace and tell you to try to survive so you would be stronger?”
“No.”
“Then why on earth would your heavenly Father, who loves you more than anyone else, possibly make bad things happen to you so you’ll be wise and strong?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I’d stopped trying not to cry.
“I don’t either. Nobody really knows why bad, hard things happen to us. Sometimes it’s because we make bad choices. But God forgives us and helps us through. Sometimes it’s because other people make bad choices. God forgives them and helps us through. Sometimes it doesn’t make any sense at all. God comforts us and, again, helps us through.” She squeezed her little hands together. “I don’t mean to preach at you, Ginger, but somebody has to replace that other sermon. We do learn and get stronger through the hard stuff, but that’s because God is love, not because God’s putting us through some kind of obstacle course.”
“He’s not like Coach,” I said.
“Oh, heavens no!”
I still shook my head.
“What part of that doesn’t make sense to you?” Lydia said.
“What if I don’t pray that much—because I’m mad at God? I bet God doesn’t help then.”
“You’re mad at God for taking your mom.”
“Yes.”
“That shows you believe in God. You wouldn’t be mad at someone who you didn’t think existed. Besides . . .” She tilted her head of big curls at me in that wonderful way she had. “You have other people praying for you.”
“You,” I said.
“And not just me. Your Tribelet.”
“Even now? I thought they would hate me for ditching them. Only, I had to protect my dad and my brother and Tori. Kylie hates it that Tori has more friends than her now and people actually respect Tori, and she can’t stand it, so she used me to get at Tori, and everything got all messed up and it ended up not helping anybody.”
“Exactly,” Lydia said. “Exactly.” She cleared her throat. “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
Her voice changed. My stomach warned me with a sharp pain.
Lydia pulled two sheets of paper out of her red bag and handed me one. “Did you send this to me?”
It was a typed message with my e-mail address at the top.
Dearest Lydia, it said.
Gee, thanks for letting me know you don’t care enough about me to change your stupid doctors’ appointments to meet with me like you promised you would.
I decided to stop trying anyway. It doesn’t seem to be helping much right now. So I won’t be talking to you on Monday or ever.
And I’m not going to start that lame list. I don’t like myself. Actually I hate myself, and you won’t even help me with that because you’re not going to show up. I can’t stop other people from doing what they do because I deserve it anyway.
Thanks for nothing.
Insincerely,
My hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t even read my name. “I didn’t write this,” I said. “I swear I didn’t.”
“You don’t have to swear to it. I believe you.”
Lydia’s face was perfectly calm. I knew mine wasn’t.
She handed me the other sheet of paper. “How about this one?”
“Is it like that one?” I said.
“Just read a few lines and tell me if you sent it.”
I looked down at the paper, sure the words were going to come up and strangle me like a boa constrictor.
Dear Tori,
This is the stupidest poem ever, and I’ve read a lot of poems, so I should know.
1. You tried to make it like a real sonnet, and it’s not even close.
2. It’s supposed to be about your best quality, but you don’t have one so I don’t know why you even tried.
I couldn’t read the rest.
“I didn’t write this either,” I said. “Does Tori think I did? Is that why she said I was mean about her poem?”
“She was stunned at first, yes, but after we talked about it, she thought maybe Kylie made you do it.” Lydia folded her neat hands. “I just couldn’t see that, but I couldn’t tell her what you and I have been talking about because it’s confidential.”
I looked at the tops of the papers, both with my e-mail address at the top. “I don’t get it,” I said. “How can these look like they came from me when they didn’t?”
“Somebody got into your e-mail account,” Lydia said. “Have you ever given anyone your password?”
“No,” I said. “Not even my brother. It’s written down in a book my dad keeps at home, but nobody ever comes to my house.”
“Do you use your e-mail account here at school?”
“Sometimes. Maybe once or twice.”
“Was anybody around, close enough to see you type in your password?”
“No. Nobody ever gets that close.”
The bell rang, and I started to spiral down into a little hole.
Lydia tapped her hand on the arm of her chair. “No, no, there will be none of that. You’re starting to figure this out, and you can’t stop now. You have to keep trying.” She nodded, hard. “I will try to get to the bottom of this e-mail thing, and in the meantime, we’ll keep praying. Agreed?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Do you feel safe?”
My turn to nod. “It’s all coming out now. They can’t do anything else
to me.”
Lydia twitched her eyebrows. “Well, just in case, Report Alert is still the rule.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
Keep trying. That’s what I told myself as I got ready for fifth period. Those Girls had ways of bullying that I didn’t even know were possible, ways I didn’t understand. But I was going to keep trying.
Besides, Colin and I had our storyboard to present to Mr. Devon.
He did a lot of “mmming” and “aahing” and nodding as we talked and showed him our pictures, and when we got to the Bleakest Moment he stopped us and said, “Do you see what you’ve accomplished here? It’s just as Tolkien does it.” His ponytail swung as he leaned over the table. “The closer Samantha and Frank get to the Heights, the stronger they are, and the harder the Others work to hold them back until they can’t stop them because they have no power against True Selves.”
I straightened way up. “Could I ask you something?” I said.
“Of course.”
“Do you think that’s what happens in real life?”
“I know that’s what happens in real life,” Mr. Devon said. “I’ve had to get past many, many Others in my life, so I know whereof I speak. This, my young friends”—he smiled down at our storyboard—“This is brilliant. The fair would be a wasteland without it.”
“You mean, we get a booth?” Colin said.
“You have a better opportunity than that,” Mr. Devon said. “You have one of the slots to do a presentation to all the fifth-graders, and of course our sixth-graders, the hosts. Eight minutes can hardly do it justice, but I think we can work with that, don’t you?”
I was still back on “presentation.”
“Do you mean, like, act it out or something?” I said.
“Whatever you decide would be most effective.” Mr. Devon rubbed his hands together like he always did when he thought something was about to be even more brilliant than it already was. “The fair is Tuesday. That gives you a little over a week to prepare.”
“We’ll be ready,” Colin said. When Mr. Devon left us, he said to me, “Right?”