Pretty, Nasty, Lovely

by Rosalind Noonan

  “There are two mountain peaks. Obstacles to climb? Or opportunities?”

  “Mmm.” Kizzy held up one finger. “I hope an opportunity to kick Stella out. Do you see a boot? Or a hook?” Defiance shook her head no. “What do I do about this woman? You can’t kick someone out of prayer group.”

  “I don’t know, but some of the tea is sticking together. A brown blob.”

  “That’s trouble. Is it near the handle?”

  Defiance shook her head. “On the other side.”

  “Good, then it’s not my fault.”

  I held back a laugh. These two spun a strange mixture of the supernatural and humor.

  “I guess I have to put up with Stella for now.” Kizzy turned to me, her eyes magnified behind the round lenses. “Do you want me to read your leaves, Emma?”

  “I wouldn’t know what to ask.” Actually, I didn’t know how to narrow my hundreds of questions down, and the important questions couldn’t be shared with Defiance and Kizzy.

  “You don’t have to tell us the question,” Defiance said. Damned if she wasn’t reading my mind again.

  Before I could refuse, Kizzy opened the teapot and spooned some of the sodden leaves into my cup. “There you go. Are you ready with a question now? Let it float in your mind as you drink.”

  “You can ask about a guy,” Defiance said. “Everyone wants to know about relationships.”

  “Love and happiness,” Kizzy said. “It’s universal.”

  But to ask about Rory seemed too superficial when so many other things cut deeper.

  I cradled the cup in both hands and started to sip. Drinking in the question.

  Will I get away with this?

  They chatted as I sipped and focused. I thought of Lydia’s death, my trip down to the ravine that awful morning, Detective Taylor pressing me, her dark eyes reading into my soul. And the baby. My baby. No amount of sugar in the tea could sweeten bitter regret.

  When I was nearly finished, I swirled the cup in my hand and took one last sip, careful not to suck in the leaves. I fumbled a bit as I fit the saucer over the cup.

  “I got it.” Kizzy took it away and drained the liquid, an expert. She adjusted her glasses and scratched her nose as she stared into my cup.

  “First thing I see is a long knife. You know, a very long one. A sword. In tarot cards, the suit of swords represents air. Action and change.”

  “Positive action?”

  “It could be good or bad. That I can’t see. It might also be a soldier or a cop.”

  The damned police. A pulse throbbed in my ear.

  “Or it could signify something painful that cuts straight to the heart.” Kizzy pressed a thumb to her chest and winced in mock pain. “Does any of this ring true?”

  “All of it.” The cops following me around. And trauma in my life? Past and present, take your pick.

  “A sword could mean violence,” Kizzy went on. “Or the opposite. Someone is championing you. A hero is fighting for you.”

  “I want to believe the hero part,” I said, thinking of Rory. Or Dr. Finn? “But not the violence.”

  “Time will tell.” Kizzy pursed her lips as her eyelids swooped low. “You have an owl. It’s cute. Like a cartoon owl. That’s wisdom. Is that you? I think so. You have a good head on your shoulders.”

  “Emma has good sense,” said Defiance. “She’ll make the wise choice.”

  I shifted in the chair, not wanting any choices on my shoulders. This tea reading wasn’t supposed to make my life more difficult. I wanted an enchanted path to a happy ending. Not birds and swords and violence.

  “Something else about the wise old owl.” With her silver hair framing her face, her round glasses shining, and her huddled stature, Kizzy herself seemed owlish. “They sit and watch from the tree. They see all; they know all. They know so many secrets. And you have a lot of secrets, Emma. I can tell.”

  Defiance popped a piece of cake into her mouth, nodding. “You know that’s true.”

  “Everyone has secrets,” I said.

  “Yes, yes. We’re all entitled to hold some things inside. Some things would only do harm if they got out.”

  I nodded, relieved that Kizzy understood.

  “But some secrets can be a heavy burden. Too heavy. They’re like poison. They get stuck inside us, cramped and dark secrets that rot our insides.” Kizzy shrugged. “Those secrets have to come out or else you just, you know . . . throw them up.”

  I nodded politely, trying not to get upset. How much of this was real? Kizzy’s advice could have applied to anyone, right? I turned to Defiance, who was polishing off the small square of cake. “Are you going to have your tea leaves read, too?”

  “Wait a minute.” Kizzy scowled into my teacup, not yet finished. “This is bad,” she said. “Very bad.”

  My heart was beating like the wings of a large bat in my chest. “What’s wrong?”

  “The tea is clumping again. It could mean trouble for you.” She tilted the cup slightly. “Or maybe the tea is old. It shouldn’t stick together like that.” She showed it to Defiance. “Look at that. That’s not right. And you saw it clumping in my cup, too. I think we should throw it out and brew a new pot.”

  Defiance frowned. “What’s not right? So we see trouble in two teacups? You can brew tea all day long, Kiz, but the future is what it is.”

  “Such a rebel.” Kizzy reached across the table and smacked her granddaughter’s hand three times, somewhere between a slap and a pat. “Your parents named you well. So full of wind.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Those days at Defiance’s house gave me time to breathe. It felt good to be in a safe space, surrounded by people who wished me well. Thanksgiving Day we worked in the restaurant from eleven until nine, cleaning tables, serving food, and scrubbing bowls and pots in the kitchen. When it was through my hands were red and my feet were sore and swollen, but there was satisfaction in feeding people who wouldn’t have had a dinner without us. My reward? That night, I slept for nine hours without waking up.

  The next day was festive with all her aunts and uncles and cousins arriving with covered dishes and bottles of wine. Most of the women were dressed up in dresses and high-heeled shoes worthy of a wedding, and they all wore heavy makeup. False eyelashes! I was definitely underdressed. The men wore dress slacks and button-down shirts. When the cousins began to assemble, I got a sense of Defiance’s issues with her family. The female cousins gathered in her bedroom, most of them with a baby on the hip, while the men stood together in the backyard smoking and laughing. It seemed that a lot more fun was being had out back, but we couldn’t hang there; we didn’t belong.

  When it was time to return to campus Saturday morning, I felt ready.

  “I feel like I was transported to another world for a few days,” I told Defiance as Stevo’s car sped along the expressway. “Thank you for inviting me.”

  “Anytime,” she said. “My father said you’re a very hard worker.”

  “For a gadji,” Stevo added.

  “That means a non-Roma,” Defiance explained to me as she smacked his arm. “Just drive, okay? No name-calling.”

  “It was a joke,” he said. “You get that, right, Emma?”

  “It’s cool.”

  The part of the weekend that stuck with me most was the tea-leaf reading. Maybe it was Kizzy, her big heart and her obvious attachment to her granddaughter. Or it might have been Defiance opening up and acknowledging that some of the girls in Theta Pi were still cool toward her. For her tea reading she had asked if they would ever warm up, and the answer appeared to be that it didn’t matter. The important thing was that she stay true to herself.

  As we cleaned up the tea things, I asked if there was magic in the tea leaves.

  “Let’s put it this way,” Kizzy said. “Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it. But if you believe . . .” She shrugged.

  * * *

  The days I’d spent away from Merriwether had cleared my head and ma
de me crave some alone time. The campus still had that tired, abandoned feeling, clinging to sleep and unprepared for the coming weeks of papers and finals. I got that. Snow had fallen on Mount Hood, and Rory texted that he wouldn’t be back on campus until Monday. I spent six hours in the library, knocking off the papers that were due. That night there were nine of us back at Theta House, so we headed out to a Thai restaurant in town and shared platters of pad Thai and curry and chicken skewers. As we dug into our food and compared notes on who would be having a welcome back party Sunday night, the familiar comfort of sisterhood hovered over us. This . . . this is what I’d missed since Lydia had died. At last, things were swinging back into place.

  “I have something disturbing to report,” said Megan. “I was at work today. You know, in the bookstore? And I was wearing my Theta Pi shirt. And this girl came over with her mom and told her, ‘That’s the sorority with the girl that was murdered.’”

  Alexa made a gagging gesture. “Great. We’re notorious now.”

  “People are strange,” I said. “Did they at least say they were sorry for your loss?”

  Megan stabbed at her noodles. “The mom just shushed her daughter and pulled her away. Like I had some contagious disease or something.”

  “I’ve heard some frat guys dissing us,” Jemma said. “I won’t say who they were, but they were calling us Theta Die.”

  “That is so obnoxious.” Chloe slammed her cell phone on the table. “Who said it? We need to report them to the Panhellenic Council.”

  “Oh, my dear sisters, let’s not go there.” Suki looked around the table, fierceness in her dark eyes. “We’re going to take the high road on this. These people who prey on others when they’re in pain? We refuse to see them. They are nothing to us.”

  “Exactly,” I agreed. “Don’t engage with those guys. We’re not going to be taunted.”

  “Or . . .” Defiance held up her hands, commanding our attention. “We could put a curse on them.”

  Silence.

  “A curse would work,” I said.

  As if in one great sigh, we burst into laughter. And all at once the girls were asking Defiance if it was possible, could she do it? How did it work? Was she kidding? How long would it take? With a smile, I watched Defiance field their questions, telling them that she could cast a curse, but these frat boys were not worth the time or effort. She was winning some of the sisterhood over. Had the tea leaves been right?

  * * *

  The next day I was far enough ahead on my work to attend a work session for the task force. Kath, Chase, and I were the only ones back on campus, so Sunday morning we brought our laptops to Dr. Finn’s office and set to work revising the various parts of our platform. As we worked, Kath threw out sardonic comments and Dr. Finn pointed out a few pitfalls in our ideas. No idea was too stupid to brainstorm in Dr. Finn’s world, and at times I tuned out and focused on my own writing. Chase had a similar work style, quiet and dogged. At one point we joked that Kath probably had nothing written, and she turned her laptop around and showed us three pages of text.

  “Don’t you hate those multitaskers?” Chase said.

  It was after noon when Dr. Finn ordered some meze platters from a Lebanese restaurant in town, and we took a break and pulled up chairs to the food on the big walnut desk.

  “Do you ever use this desk as anything besides a dining table?” Chase asked.

  “Sometimes it’s a laptop holder.” Dr. Finn picked up a spinach pie. “Mostly it keeps my coffee off the ground.”

  “I wonder why grape leaves don’t taste like grapes?” Kath asked, holding up a grape leaf stuffed with rice. “They don’t even taste like wine or grape bubble gum. They’re probably not grapes at all. Probably manufactured in a plastics factory in China.” Cutting and silly at the same time, Kath delivered monologues designed to lighten the intensity of our discussions. When things got serious, she could snap to sincerity in a heartbeat.

  “You know,” I said, “I think you’re going to make a great therapist. But if that doesn’t work out, there’s a place for you in stand-up comedy.”

  “Thanks, Emma. Two professions that pay nothing and have no future.”

  After we ate, Chase packed up his laptop. “I have to go. I have two reports due online by midnight.”

  “I feel your pain,” I said. “I submitted my stuff late last night.”

  “We’re in the home stretch,” Kath said. “One week of classes, then finals.”

  After Chase left, I got up to get the kinks out, and Kath stretched out on the sofa.

  “I just need to close my eyes a few minutes to let it all hit rock bottom,” she said.

  “Don’t let us keep you up,” Dr. Finn said, perching on his desk. “I’ve been thinking about the health center, about our demands, and let me play devil’s advocate here. I’m wondering if we’re expecting too much.”

  “What?” Kath opened one eye. “You’re selling out already?”

  “Hear me out. I’m not giving up, but I also want to submit a plan that’s doable, and it seems to me that we’re asking a clinic to stretch themselves and perform the function of an ER, a women’s clinic, and a counseling center.”

  “They may be small, but for a student like me, the health center is my only resource.” I paced to the window and turned back to them. “I don’t have a car. I don’t have a doctor anywhere else. To get help I would have to pay out of pocket for a doctor and take a shuttle bus to Portland. I’m paying for health services here, and I need them to work.”

  “Good point.” Finn rubbed his chin. “There seems to be a huge, yawning gap between the health care that exists and the health care that we need.”

  “And Emma is just one student,” Kath pointed out. “Keep in mind, we’ve got twelve thousand students here on campus. That little overcrowded clinic is not big or functional enough to serve a small city the size of Merriwether. If they need to grow, let them build a new facility.”

  “We’ve been focused on the mental health part of the clinic,” I said, “but they’ve failed at women’s health care for a while.”

  “How so?” Kath asked. “I’ve never had to go there, but I’ve only been here a few months.”

  “A few years ago, they screwed up and ruined the life of a girl who had a baby on campus.”

  “Jennifer Saunders.” Dr. Finn crossed his arms. “I was here then.”

  “Who’s that?” Kath asked.

  “A campus legend because of what the health center did to her. Oregon has that safe-haven law. If someone brings a baby to a medical facility, they’re supposed to take the baby, no questions asked, no ties. She brought her baby in, and they screwed her. Told her parents and messed with her scholarship money. And her father was a minister, so she had the wrath of God crashing down on her, too.”

  “Isn’t that a violation of the privacy act, too?” Kath asked.

  I nodded. “But Jennifer didn’t sue them. I don’t think she knew any better, and her parents blamed her, not the school.”

  Kath covered her face with her hands. “Grrr! Things like that infuriate me. How did you find out about it, Emma?”

  “From the girls in my sorority. It’s a cautionary tale now. Whenever someone needs to see a gynecologist or has birth-control issues, they try to avoid it. A lot of my friends go to their doctors at home. Some of us take the bus to a free clinic in Hood River.”

  “That’s a hike,” Kath said.

  “But it’s the closest place.” I remembered going there with my sisters. The dusty motes circling in the sun of the waiting room. The pocked ceiling tiles that I’d stared at so long I’d begun to see clown faces. The waiting . . . forever waiting for awful news, trying to hold it all in but failing.

  “That’s unacceptable.” Dr. Finn sighed. “What’s the point of having a student health center if the students can’t use it?”

  “The snotty white boys can go for their team physicals and high-five the doctors,” Kath said.

  “No
, seriously. It’s a problem.”

  “It is a problem.” I looked out the window and stared down at the lawn, the morning frost long melted by the sun, though it would be back tonight. The cold would return with the dark. There was some foot traffic on the library plaza across the way, as people arrived back at campus and rushed to finish weekend assignments.

  “I have a friend . . . she could have died. She almost did.” In the weeks since it had happened, I had been hit with the pain of that day every time a candle was lit for a ritual. And when the memory came back, it rushed in like a ferocious wave. That familiar stab of desperation, the exhaustion and fear mixed with the strange glow of jack-o’-lanterns. Funny how memories wove themselves into your mind. The smell of candle wax, the sheen of a red latex costume cape.

  “A friend?” Kath’s voice was softer now, speculative. “Is that code for ‘This happened to me but let’s pretend it didn’t’?”

  “It was my friend,” I said. “I can’t tell you her story. I’ve been sworn to secrecy. But I can tell you my part, what happened to me because that goddamned clinic wouldn’t take her baby.”

  “Did they turn you down?” Dr. Finn asked.

  “We didn’t go there. We couldn’t take the chance that they wouldn’t take the baby, or that they’d ask questions. Especially since the baby . . .” I hugged my elbows, remembering the initial shock, then the stark fear of being found out. “The baby was stillborn.”

  In the silence I could feel them processing, sympathetic but struggling to make sense of something that made no sense at all.

  “I feel for you, Em,” Kath said. “How’d you handle that?”

  “Not well. I had never seen a newborn baby in real life, and I never expected to be holding a dead one.”

  I would never forget that night, the protracted pain and anguish. I thought it would never end. And just when I thought it was all over, the second nightmare began.

  * * *

  “You have to get rid of it,” Tori ordered.

  “I can’t.” The glaring candles of the sorority lounge made my eyes tear, but I didn’t swipe at my cheeks. I didn’t have an ounce of energy left.