by Tawni Waters
We walk to the bus stop in silence, except for the bumping of Iggy’s lunch, which he holds over his head and shakes like a tambourine. The bus is just pulling up as we arrive, and we file on with the other kids. Elijah Winchell manages to get behind me, as usual. I can feel his hot breath on the back of my neck and his blue eyes staring at my backside. I turn around and glare at him. He sneers.
Iggy and I walk to the back of the bus and slide into a tattered seat. As the bus rattles onto the road, Iggy smiles. “Elijah’s got the hots for you,” he says.
I slap him on the arm. “No he doesn’t.”
“He does. Rena said so.”
“Well, Rena can shove it.”
Even from the front of the bus, Elijah hears Iggy. His head snaps back and he laughs. In my aisle seat I can see his perfect teeth, bleached white and approved by the American Dental Association. He got his braces off last year. I suppose he’d be handsome if it weren’t for all his freaking pimples.
“Mara and Elijah sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G.”
“Shut up, Iggy,” I say. He doesn’t, so I punch him.
“Ow!” He rubs his arm. “Why’d you have to hit me?”
“ ’Cause you won’t leave well enough alone,” I say, turning to look past him and out the window. Cedars and cactus plants whiz by, as if trying to outrun the blue mountains looming in the distance.
“You don’t like Elijah?” Iggy asks.
“No.”
“Why not?” he asks.
“He’s a boy, and boys suck.”
“Oh.” Iggy starts to laugh.
“What?”
For a second his eyes get see-clear-through-you. “You like girls.”
My face flushes red-hot. “Kiss my butt, Iggy.” I turn to stare out the window again. My eyes sting. I blink, remembering the things Reverend Winchell says about women burning for other women, giving up the natural order.
And I remember Daddy sitting in his easy chair, reading aloud from a magazine about how some gay boy got tied to a fence and shot. “Good,” Daddy snorted. “It’s a damned abomination. If I ever found a faggot in this town, I’d do the same thing.”
I believed Daddy when he said it. Once a man at Al’s Roadhouse grabbed Daddy’s butt, and Daddy beat him so bad, the guy was in the hospital for a week. In his report, Sheriff Perkins called it “self-defense,” and Daddy didn’t have to spend one minute in jail. Daddy can get away with anything he wants, seems to me. He bragged about that man’s smashed-in face for months.
I write the word “abomination” on the seat in front of me with my fingertip, one letter on top of the other, so no one but me knows what I’m spelling. When we get to the school, Iggy’s see-clear-through-you eyes are gone, and his foggy eyes are back. He leaves his lunch under the seat.
“Iggy.” I pick the bag up and shove it into his hand as we file off.
“See you later, alligator,” he says. He smiles, revealing that one crooked tooth he has up front, which always makes me love him. I feel bad for being mad at him all morning.
“After a while, crocodile,” I say, and kiss him on the cheek.
He heads to the little red building where the special classes meet, tripping on the curb as he goes, making birdcalls—caw, caw, whistle, warble, so on and so forth. I head off for the big school where the regular kids go, where Iggy went too until six months ago. He was going to be valedictorian of his class. Now he can hardly count to fifty. If we went to the public school, we’d probably ride different buses, but since we’re in Christian school, all the classes are in one place. There are 172 kids, counting the kindergarteners and special eds.
The morning stumbles by. Since there are only a few people in my grade, we don’t change classes. We have the same damned teacher all freaking day. I have to listen to Mr. Farley drone on all morning about x squared and y cubed, and how Missy Larington is home with a busted kneecap, and how verbs and adverbs go hand in hand, like husbands and their wives. But none of it matters with the lightning zinging around in my brain. I feel like my head is making a voice-over track, going on behind everything I do. All I hear is Iggy saying, “You like girls.” It even echoes a little, the way bad thoughts echo in the movies.
I hand out my invitations. Although none of the kids like me much, they seem happy to have a party to go to. There isn’t much to do in Barnaby, unless you’re into hanging out at the Dairy Queen. Everyone asks if Elijah Winchell is invited. I tell them of course he is. His daddy is the preacher. They all ask, “Can’t you tell Elijah Winchell is hot for you?” I tell them I don’t give a rat’s ass if Elijah Winchell is hot for me. They say I’m lying, but I’m not.
I catch Mr. Farley’s questions though, even through the lightning in my head.
“Have you finished your paper on Leonardo da Vinci, Mara?” (I haven’t.)
“Who caught Rush Limbaugh’s broadcast yesterday?” (Elijah Winchell says he did.)
“What is the largest Great Lake?” (I have no freaking idea. Geography is not my strong suit.)
Even though I hear things, my brain is so full of lightning, it doesn’t have room to hold on to any thoughts for very long.
Until I see her. Xylia’s wandering down the hallway, staring straight ahead with wide, dark eyes. She moved from San Francisco two months ago, and she’s one grade higher than me. She wears clothes like nothing I’ve ever seen. Not just jeans and T-shirts, but fashion statements, like a magazine girl. Some of the kids laugh at her hippie skirts and bangles, but I love the way she looks. And I love her name, too. She’s not a Lisa or a Rebecca or a Michelle, but Xylia. Doesn’t that have a nice ring? It starts with an X, even though it sounds like it should be a Z. I know because her papers are always plastered all over the school bulletin boards with big, fat A+’s at the top. She’s smart, like Iggy used to be.
“Xylia,” I say. My voice comes out too quiet, but she stops, looking surprised.
“Yeah?” she says nervously. I never see her talking to anyone. Maybe she’s shocked someone knows her name.
This is the first time I’ve spoken to her. I almost throw up. “I’m having a birthday party. I thought you might want to come, is all.” I hold out an invitation, and she reaches for it, smiling shyly. As she takes it, our hands touch for a second. Warmth floods through me.
“Thanks. I’d like that.” She opens the invitation. “Wow,” she says. “This is really cool. You must have worked hard on these.”
“No,” I say, thinking maybe she is making fun of me. “My momma made them.”
“You must have an awesome mom,” she replies. She’s not making fun of me. She’s serious.
“She has her moments,” I manage.
We stare at each other, trying to find things to say. All the words that live in my head get jumbled up. I always thought Xylia was pretty, but I never noticed just how pretty until now. Her beauty stabs at my heart, makes the lightning crackle even louder between my ears. Her skin is the color of the white sand beaches on tropical islands that I’ve seen in books. Pale and perfect. Her black hair is long and stick straight. It looks soft. I wish I could touch it.
“Well, I’ll see you Friday,” I say finally. “The address is on the invitation.”
“Okay,” she says. “See you then.” She smiles again, and then continues down the hallway, her sparkly sandals click-clacking.
All through lunch all I can think of are Xylia’s eyes, and that makes everything worse. I want to go home, and I want to never go home again.
At the beginning of science class I try telling Mr. Farley I’m sick. He looks up from the papers he’s grading, scrawling big X’s everywhere with his ugly, red ink.
“Are you now?” He removes his thick glasses and squints at me. The clock on the wall ticks. I manage a feeble little cough. He rolls his eyes. “You’re no sicker than I am, Mara Stonebrook,” he pronounces finally. “Sit down.”
I go to the back of the room and slump into a desk. These two girls, Hannah and Keisha, are havin
g a grape fight, and one hits me.
“Watch it,” I snap.
Hannah and Keisha laugh in this hyena-meets-SpongeBob way that makes my skin crawl. Their hair is brown with orange stripes, like they tried to do highlights themselves. They wear tons of makeup, and both sport bright red press-on nails. They smell like armpits. Especially Hannah. They’ve been torturing me, and anyone else who isn’t cool, since sixth grade. It’s not that they’re popular, they’re just more popular than me. I don’t know why anyone likes them. I suppose because they’re Elijah’s buddies. They all sing in the choir at church on Sundays, so I guess they bond while singing “glory hallelujah” together. Hannah throws another grape, and it hits me in the eye. Clearly, she did it on purpose this time.
“Go to hell,” I say. Hannah and Keisha laugh.
I stare at the front of the class, hating the sight of the dusty blackboards. Every school in the United States of America upgraded to whiteboards years ago, if TV is to be believed, but our school is stuck in the fifties. I put my head on my desk. My stomach really is feeling rumbly. I wasn’t lying when I said I was sick.
Someone swats the back of my head. I sit up fast. Elijah’s standing there, leering. Hannah and Keisha squeal gleefully. Mr. Farley doesn’t even look up from the papers he’s grading.
“Screw you,” I whisper.
Elijah just keeps grinning and slides into the desk beside me. I glance at him out of the corner of my eye, thinking how stupid it is for a kid his age to wear his hair all slicked back like an old man. I let my gaze drift to his feet. His black shoes shine, the way they always do the day after he polishes them. Which is every day.
Elijah slips a piece of paper onto my desk. I open it. Give me ur digits. But it’s a command, not a request, which pisses me off. I’ve had just about enough of that from my daddy, thank you very much. Elijah’s handwriting is messy. And he doesn’t have the wherewithal to write out “your”? Give me a break.
“Digits?” I whisper. “You think you’re a rapper or something?”
“I think you like me,” he says back.
“Well, I don’t.”
“Come on. Give me your number.”
“I don’t have a number,” I say. “My daddy won’t let me have a cell phone. And even if I did have one, I wouldn’t give my digits to your sorry ass.”
Elijah looks like he’s going to say something mean, but Mr. Farley interrupts him. “Invertebrates,” he says, letting the word hang in the air like it’s a cliffhanger. I guess he imagines we are all sitting there holding our breath, waiting to hear the big news about animals with no spines. He takes off his glasses and taps them against the back of his veiny hand. Finally he launches into some speech about earthworms. He walks around the room while he talks, stopping to lay a hand gently on his worm farm, encouraging us to take the time to get to know our soil-saving friends. “Were it not for the existence of earthworms,” he says slowly, weighing each word carefully, “we might not very well exist either.” He says eye-ther, not ee-ther, and it gets to me. When he’s done singing the praises of worms, he slips out to get coffee from the teachers’ lounge. Mr. Farley does that a lot. I think it’s mostly to get away from us “hooligans,” which is what he calls us. I wonder, sometimes, if his heart will explode from too much caffeine. When he goes on and on about worms, I hope it will.
“I’m going to get to know my soil-saving friends,” Elijah says. A few kids laugh, and everyone watches as he struts over to the terrariums. Elijah’s the most popular kid in school. It’s not like in the movies, where people are popular because they are good-looking or funny or the quarterback on the football team. In our town Reverend Winchell’s family is royalty. Pimples or no pimples, Elijah is the prince.
“Here wormy, wormy, wormy,” he says. He removes the screen over the worm farm and digs into the dark, wet soil with his fingertips.
“Gross,” a girl whispers.
He laughs. “Can’t find one.” I know he could if he really wanted to. Through the glass I can see segmented purple bodies everywhere, nestled in their little tunnels.
“Some big man you are,” I snort. “Scared of a scrawny little worm.”
Elijah’s eyes widen, and he thrusts his hands into his pockets. “What did you say?” He reminds me of my daddy, the way he always makes you repeat yourself if you say something he doesn’t like.
“I said, you’re a wimp.” I march over to the terrarium and bury my hand in the dirt. Seconds later I pull out a writhing, pink squiggle.
Elijah’s frozen, fists clenched, huffing and puffing. I can tell he’s trying to come up with a way to put me in my place. Finally, he yanks the worm from my hand, drops it on the floor, and brings his shiny black shoe down on its tender little body.
Normally I wouldn’t cry over a worm. I fish regularly, for God’s sake, bait my hook with worms practically every day. But somehow this worm reminds me of my kittens dying, and tears burn my eyes. “No!” I shout, but it’s too late.
Elijah grinds his foot back and forth until the worm is nothing but a smear on the tile. All the pain in the whole wide world rushes over me. I think about all the innocents being drowned in bags or squashed by folks like Elijah. Worms and kittens and even people. People like Iggy. I think about that two-by-four and about the blood oozing out of Iggy’s head. I sink to the floor and touch the worm’s remains.
“Asshole,” I say to Elijah.
“Freak,” he says, going back to his chair. The other kids start to giggle, and when Mr. Farley comes back, all he sees is me sitting on the floor, trying not to cry while the rest of the class goes wild.
“Mara Stonebrook,” he says. “I am not even going to ask what you are up to. Get back to your seat.”
Slowly I stand, saying “I’m sorry” inside my head over and over to the dead worm, wishing I’d never been so stupid as to call Elijah Winchell a wimp.
As I’m sitting down, Mr. Farley says, “I look forward to seeing you at lunch detention tomorrow, Ms. Stonebrook. Our blackboards could use some industrious scrubbing.”
I nod.
The rest of the day is a blur, and me and Iggy are sitting at the back of the bus again. Thank God he doesn’t say much. When I get home, Momma is in the kitchen, cooking up a storm like she was never sick at all. The smell of frying chicken fills the house.
“Hi, Momma,” I say, heading straight for her bedroom. I hang her funeral dress back in her closet, making sure the new stain on the elbow faces the wall.
After homework and chores I have dinner with Iggy, Momma, and Daddy. Fried chicken is my favorite, but I can’t eat much for the churning in my stomach. There are also biscuits and garden green beans, which Momma reveals she got in trade from Nancy Witherspoon for some fresh-baked bread and six eggs. Daddy sings “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” at the table and even smiles when Iggy says he has a joke.
Daddy says, “Tell us.”
“A duck walks into a bar,” Iggy starts.
“Yeah?” Daddy asks through a mouth full of beans.
“And the duck says, ‘Got any grapes.’ The bartender says no.”
Daddy nods, chewing forcefully.
“So, um, the duck goes to the guy again and says, ‘You got any grapes?’ And the guy says no. And then the duck asks again, and the guy says, ‘Listen, duck, if you ask me for grapes again, um, I will nail your feet to the floor. So the duck says, ‘Got any nails?’ and the guy says no. And the duck says, ‘Good. Got any grapes?’ ” Iggy starts to laugh, spewing little bits of chicken over the table.
“Good one, sport,” Daddy says. He laughs for real, and I think it’s probably because he likes the idea of a duck getting its feet nailed to a floor. I hate that man. I think that if someone walked past our window right now, they would never know what our daddy really is. Sure, they would see the green beans trapped between his teeth, and maybe that’d gross them out, but otherwise they’d think he was a decent human being. The kind of human being who sings “I’ve Been Worki
ng on the Railroad” all the time, the kind of person who never stops smiling green-bean smiles, the kind of husband who never raises a hand to his pretty wife, even when she does talk a little too long with the handsome checkout boy at the grocery store. The kind who probably would never tie a gay kid to the fence and shoot him to death if he had half a chance. They would think that someone can’t be so good and so bad at the same time, and they would never believe the stories that I have to tell.
During times like this I used to forget why I was scared of my daddy. I’d look at him and think: He’s nice. He smiles and laughs, so how can he be bad? It’s not like he ever hits me. Iggy, sure, and Momma, too, but maybe they really do deserve it. You’re crazy, Mara, I’d think. You’re crazy to hate him; you’re crazy not to love him; you’re crazy to make up those stories about the terrible things he does. And then I would love him, just for a minute. I’d look at him and imagine what he must have been like when he was a little boy, getting picked on at school or winning at Monopoly or playing fetch with his puppy. Sometimes I’d start singing right along with him, because it’s so much nicer to have a daddy who sings and smiles and pats Iggy on the back and calls me rosebud. But my singing never made it true.
I stare at Daddy as he pats Iggy on the shoulder. Daddy’s teeth are really ugly. With those bug eyes of his, he looks like a giant praying mantis. I think about how much I hate the sound of his voice and how much I hate the way he laughs. I think that someone as ugly as him should never be allowed to laugh like that, and I consider taking the issue up with God in my bedtime prayers. I tell myself that I will never forget that my daddy is a monster. Iggy and his broken brain will never let me.
I excuse myself from the table, and Momma asks if I’m feeling ill.
“Why, yes, I am, thank you for asking,” I reply, and she raises her eyebrows and shakes her head and reminds me that it is church night, and if I think I am getting out of it by playing sick, I’ve got another thing coming.