“How did you even get my phone number?”
“I have my ways.”
I bite my lip, unsure what to say. Why isn’t there a manual on what to do when a rude boy at the new school where you’re considered a freak seems to like you? Although he is definitely good-looking, in a kind of scary catlike way.
“I just think you’re really pretty. And you seem interesting. I’ve never met anyone like you before.”
“Like me? But you don’t even know me.”
“I know, but I would like to. The other girls at school, Olive and the rest of them, they’re immature. They just care about makeup and partying. You seem different. You care about things that are important.”
“I guess I do.”
“You do. I can tell just by looking at you. Hey, do you want to go to San Francisco with me some weekend? We could take the train. I’ll take you to City Lights bookstore where the Beats used to read their poetry, and I can show you where the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin used to live.”
“I don’t … know if I’m allowed.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but it would be fun. We could get to know each other in that beautiful city. Think about it.”
“Okay,” I say after a pause. “I’ll think about it.” But my insides are all trembly and I feel a surge of excitement thinking of the two of us on the train together. It sounds romantic, like an old movie. I do want to go to San Francisco with him. I’ll find a way.
“Good night, Lacy Fin. Sweet dreams.”
“Night,” I say, and another little shudder of pleasure goes through me as I close the phone.
After Cheyenne goes to bed, I walk outside to my garden. The planets are bright and piercing in the night sky. A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over one hundred million tons. Random science fact.
When I was little and couldn’t fall asleep, my dad always took me outside to watch the stars. When I was with him and Anna, I was usually homesick for my mom. I would be in tears and gulping down sobs, my legs would hurt, and he’d lift me from my bed and carry me outside.
“Don’t wish on the first star you see,” he would whisper in the gathering dark. “It’s a planet. If you want your wish to come true, wait until the real stars come out. There,” he would say, pointing toward a small flickering light. “There.” He would point, and I’d trace his movements with my fingertips across the sky.
My dad was tall and scruffy, with a little bit of a beard and eyebrows that shot into a million different directions. He always wore a Columbia hat he’d bought at REI. Anna said he wore it because he was self-conscious about his receding hairline. She said people gave him a hard time about it, and I didn’t need her to clarify which people.
I know he wasn’t perfect, but I loved him more than anyone. I remember splashing in the water while he stood by at Alligator Hole. He was blowing bubbles from a plastic jug, and I was running through the water ankle-deep trying to catch them. There were dragonflies and damselflies everywhere, and later, cold, I snuggled into his arms and he said, “This is my favorite moment. This moment has wings, can you see that?”
The birds came to his funeral. Owls and egrets, hawks and quail and mourning doves. They flew in from the clouds, perching in the oak and Japanese zelkova trees. People put up their umbrellas even though there was no rain. The birds had come to grieve for my dad, the man who had once rescued a pigeon from a hawk, who had carried the pigeon home in his arms while the hawk cried out angrily above them. Birds landed on the weeping angel of grief. The wings of the statue seemed to flutter in the cool winter air. The pastor called the grave his final resting place, and I cried into Anna’s lap. The birds looked on, their black eyes like river stones, and I wondered even then if Cheyenne was watching, somehow, from some undetected place.
In English class, we’re talking about The Scarlet Letter, which I already read last year. I take out a piece of paper like I’m taking notes, but instead I write DRAKE with each of the letters right on top of another so that anyone who looks at the paper would not be able to read it. Then I write LACY over the letters. Our names overlapping like this look like a birdcage. I write the names again, but in lowercase. Then I write LACY MACLACHAN, and it looks like a tree in front of mountains. Or a stained-glass window. It all looks really pretty, if you look at it the right way.
“Lacy?” Mrs. Kesey is saying.
“What?” Everyone laughs.
“I’ll repeat the question. Why was Pearl upset when she first saw her mother without the A?”
“Um, because she was used to it?”
“Okay. Can anyone expand on that?”
I look at Drake. He winks at me and I smile back. Then I go back to my notes. In cursive, our names look like a turtle on its side.
After school, I ride my bike to the American River Bike Trail and sit beside the river to harvest wild fennel and California mugwort, both of which can be dried for tea. I’m also low on my plantain tincture, so I grab batches of plantain leaf too. It grows in clumps like a weed but is a natural remedy for stings and wounds and even acne. The Native Americans called it life medicine because it can be used for so many things.
The sun is still high in the sky — every day another reminder that summer is coming. From down the river, I hear high-pitched voices, and soon a group of children appears wearing rain boots and tie-dye shirts and matching sun hats of various bright colors — pink, yellow, blue, green, purple. Their teacher carries an African basket like the one Anna carries to the farmers market.
For a single moment, I want to be one of those children, stomping through the mud in my rain boots, finding clovers and pretty leaves for my teacher to put in her basket. Once they have passed me, I feel supremely alone. The teacher had nodded her head at me, and her smile had seemed so quiet and shy. Maybe she was the kind of person who could only stand to be around little kids. Maybe she was terrified by the largeness of teenagers and grown-ups.
The leaves rustle in the trees, and I close my eyes to listen. They sound dry, like autumn leaves cracking against one another, but they are green against the blue sky. I hear a sound behind me, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It is Drake MacLachan, walking his own bike behind me.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, scowling. “Did you follow me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” he says. But then he kneels beside me. “Yeah,” he admits. “What are you doing?”
“I’m collecting these herbs. Look, this is Queen Anne’s lace. See the little red flower in all the white? It’s supposed to represent a drop of Queen Anne’s blood from where she pricked her finger while making lace. Random herbal fact.”
“Cool. How did you learn all this?”
“Books mostly. I have a collection of old books I bought with my stepmom. We try to learn everything. ‘The more you learn, the more power you have over your life.’ That’s what she says. So what do you want, anyway?” I am trying to sound cool but I sound like a little girl instead.
He looks into my eyes and takes my hand. “I want you.”
I snap my hand away. “Why?”
“What do you mean, why?” He looks so genuine, so true. “You’re beautiful. And you’re fascinating.”
“Me?” I laugh and turn away, his eyes so golden, his gaze so intense. “I’m not fascinating.”
“You are, though. Like a girl in a poem.”
I laugh again, a snorting type sound from my nose, but he won’t let me dismiss him. He takes my hand again. “Come sit with me,” he says. Then he pulls me toward the river, away from the bikes, and he’s pulling me and we laugh. Not all that different from the little kids on the path. I picture us in tie-dye and rainbow hats. He’s only a boy. He makes me nervous, but he’s really just a boy. I think about a movie I watched about a bunch of boys at summer camp. Not that long ago, Drake was the age of those boys. Telling poop jokes and making fart noises with his armpits.
He pulls me down and we sit beside the river. He takes a book from h
is back pocket. “Rimbaud,” he says, indicating the book.
“Rambo? That boxer guy?”
Drake laughs and I immediately feel stupid. “Rambo was an army guy played by Sylvester Stallone, who also played a boxer in Rocky. Rimbaud is a poet.” He shows me the cover before opening the book and beginning to read. “ ‘I laughed at the blond waterfall that tousled through the pines: on the silver summit I recognized the goddess. Then, one by one, I lifted up her veils. I wrapped her up in her gathered veils, and I felt a little her immense body.’ ”
“It’s beautiful,” I say, but I bite my lip and feel heat rise to my cheeks. It is partly the language of the poem, which somehow makes me feel exposed, like those dreams where you’re at school with only underwear on. Also, I’m still embarrassed about the whole Rambo thing.
“He must have written it about someone just like you.”
It’s cheesy, I know. But no one has ever looked at me this way before. I carefully pluck a blade of grass from its sheath and break the delicate green leaf of grass with my thumbnail. I form perfect wet green squares that rest on my fingertip.
“You’re a little dangerous, aren’t you?” Drake says, and I feel like he’s looking right into my soul. “I like danger.” I imagine myself the way I must seem to him at school when I regard Olive and her friends with a cold stare. Like a fierce bird with stony eyes, or an animal with a snarl and sharp teeth. I give him a brief smile. He tells me he’ll come to my house at midnight.
All night I lie awake listening for the light tap of pebbles on my window. Finally, long after midnight, I hear a car door slam and the sound of footsteps on the sidewalk outside. And then the sound I’m waiting for. Click. Click. Pebbles on the glass. Before pushing off the covers, I revel for a moment. I am the kind of girl who draws men to her bedroom window in the middle of the night. A girl from a poem. I am that girl.
I open my window and climb through it. I could just as easily go out through the front door, but this seems more glamorous, more romantic. Of course, it’s a one-story house, but my window is raised, level with the front porch. I step onto the edge of the fence and hop down into the wet grass at his feet. Drake stands above me, his body silhouetted against the moonlight. He reaches out his hand and I take it. We are a music video under the moon.
“I stole my parents’ car to get here,” he tells me, and it seems bad and dangerous and awesome.
“Where do you want to go?” I ask.
“I just want to be with you.”
We cross the street on foot and walk several blocks to the baseball field hand in hand. He holds a sound dock the shape of a cube under his arm. The moon is low in the purple sky, and the song he plays is “Moondance” by Van Morrison, and he reaches out his hand for me again and we dance. My cheek is against his chest and he smells like cloves. He feels so strong and I feel fragile in his arms. I will love you forever, some deep part of me whispers to my brain, but I would never say it aloud. I rest my head against his chest and picture myself saying those words, and I picture the way he would look at me, eyes wide and nervous, and he might leap like a gazelle back to my house, and by the time I got back, he would be gone in his parents’ car, disappearing into the moonlit night. So instead I say, “This is nice.” And he puts his hands on the sides of my face and he tilts my face up, and then we are going to kiss. And I want to freeze in this moment. My insides are all trilly and his face is so close to mine. And the kiss is so soft and his lips are so soft, and my underwear is getting wet. His hands are in my hair and he is kissing my neck, and then he takes a step away. And I am glad, because for a moment there, I thought this might be going too fast. But Drake is an old soul, the kind of person who reads poetry, who sneaks out in the night to play music for a girl, to hold her close in intimacy and dance.
After a while, he walks me home.
At school, Drake stands holding open the door to English class.
“Mademoiselle,” he says. I glide past him, feeling like a princess or a debutante. In black fairy dress and black leggings, I feel beautiful, and not because I look like my mother. “You’re a little dangerous,” he had said. It’s like he sees something true inside me.
“Thank you,” I say, and he smiles at me, sending the trillies back into my chest. I remember the kisses from last night, the one on my lips and the one on my neck. He bends down to whisper in my ear. “Tonight?” he asks. I suck in my bottom lip and smile and nod. Tonight again. I am the luckiest girl in the school.
After lunch when I come out of the stall of the girls’ room, Stacia Graham is standing at the mirror. She is taller than most of the boys, and she wears short hair and red lips like a valentine. The kids at school all say she’s a slut, but everyone’s afraid of her. She looks like she could slaughter you with a glance, like she could slice you to pieces with her chipped blue fingernails.
I quickly wash my hands and try to duck past her, but she steps in front of me. She maneuvers her neck in such a way that we are eye to eye, even though she is so much taller than me.
“Fin,” she says. “I notice Drake’s sniffing after you.” She waits to let me speak, but I have nothing to say, so I let her continue. “He’s a total jerk. I’m just letting you know.”
“Okay,” I say. “Thanks.” I duck my head, and this time she lets me pass her.
He’s waiting for me by my bike after school, where he’s parked illegally in the red and is leaning against his parents’ Prius. A couple of his guy friends are standing there too. “There she is,” he says, and his eyes fill with warmth. They usually still look cold to me, like cat eyes, but just now, in the parking lot next to the bike rack and his friends, they are gold and amber and full of something beautiful.
“Hi,” I say, shy because of his friends, but I reach my hand out and he takes it.
“Hi,” he says, pulling me closer. His friends laugh and Drake smiles. “Ignore those assholes,” he says, and he kisses me right there in front of his friends and God and everyone. “Tonight,” he murmurs against my cheek, and then he releases me and I float away in the direction of home before I remember I need to go back for my bike.
When I get home from school, Cheyenne is still in bed. I know she doesn’t get out of bed on rainy days; those days she spends in her pajamas, her head beneath her pillow. But today is as warm and clear as any spring day in Sacramento, and I know she has to get to work by five.
In the kitchen, I make her a cup of dandelion root tea, good for energy and endurance, and bring it to her.
“Cheyenne,” I say, pulling on her brocade sleeve. “It’s past three. You need to get up.”
“Why?” she drawls, smacking her lips like a sleepy child and putting her hand over her eyes.
“You have work. You can’t just lie in bed all day.”
“Mmmm. You’re no fun. Come on, lie down, let’s go to sleep.”
“Cheyenne, I’m not tired. I have homework. It’s like three thirty.” But looking at her, all warm and snug beneath her Egyptian cotton sheets, I think how nice it would be to take a break from the rest of the day, to let the homework rot in its pile, to collapse into the soft warm sleep of a child. I could still be up by the time Drake gets here. In fact, if I go to bed now, I’ll be more rested for the evening.
But what am I thinking? I can’t do that. I have a history paper to write, three to five pages on the French and Indian War due tomorrow, not to mention algebra and French. Pataud the chien awaits. J’attends, tu attends, il/elle/on attend, nous attendons, vous attendez, ils/ells attendent.
I have to dig beneath some magazines and newspapers to find the phone. I dial the number for the bar Cheyenne works at. “I’m calling in sick for my mother,” I tell them. But I know how this goes. She probably won’t be going back there again.
Right before my mom disappeared, we’d started getting along. By then I’d chopped off all my hair and had started wearing eyeliner. I’d started smoking cigarettes and stealing and cutting class. I was thirteen. Maybe it all made h
er think of me as a grown-up. She talked to me like one, and I liked it. I liked that she was talking to me at all. “We are rare birds with sharp teeth and gilded wings,” she would tell me. “We soar above the roofs and treetops, shooting through clouds and tickling the moon. The stars are our nightclubs where we dress in silver bangles and eat men whole before spitting them out. People tell us we have our heads in the clouds and we laugh, ferociously, baring our teeth. We don’t much like to be pulled down to earth.”
We were going to New York, she told me. We would get a little apartment in the Village, become bohemian artists; we’d lock our doors and let no one inside. We’d let vines grow up to cover the windows so no one could see in. From there we’d go to Paris, where we’d carry baguettes home from the market, speaking French to the street artists as we walked along the Seine.
“Just you and me,” she told me. “My blood is in you. Our bones are intertwined.” And I believed her. I packed my bag. I was ready to leave everyone behind.
But then she was sleeping all the time — nothing new there until she started throwing up as well. I thought she was sick. That was when I learned to make tea myself — I made it for her and brought it to her cluttered bedside in thick clay mugs we’d found at a park fair for cheap: 70% CLEARANCE. She drank the tea, but it made her cry. I didn’t know why. I drank the same tea, and it didn’t make me sad at all. It made me think of my dad, and that made me happy.
And then I started noticing something. A bulge at her navel. Right where her belly button was. My always skinny mother. She didn’t like me to touch her. And I knew. Something was going to come between us and we would never be the same. And I knew then that I would stop at nothing to keep it from happening. After all, I was my mother’s daughter.
My dad got his guitar from his grandmother. It’s very old, and the backs and sides are made of Brazilian rosewood. He used to play it when we were camping out, and Anna would beat her little djembe drum. He said he wasn’t a very good player, and maybe he wasn’t. But he was good enough that the Treehuggers asked him to be in their band. He said no. At the time, he was married to my mom.
When My Heart Was Wicked Page 8