The Wig in the Window

by Kristen Kittscher

  The root of my rage? Agford smiled again, fastening her dead eyes onto me.

  “I’m not angry,” I said in a near whisper. I stared at a speck of dust on the coffee table. I felt a twinge of bitterness as I pictured Grace sitting at home, oblivious, listening to Miss Anita drone on. I wondered if it’d be any better if they knew Grace had been there. Then I imagined her parents finding out. I clamped my mouth shut.

  “Denial.” Agford clapped her hands together. “It’s textbook.” She addressed me at a volume reserved for the hard of hearing. “Sophie, you’re exhibiting very disturbing behaviors. You need help. And Sophie? I’m here to help. We’re all here to help.” She spread her arms. Officer Grady looked like he wanted to flee, lest she suggest a group hug.

  Tears welled in my mother’s eyes. My dad looked at the ceiling.

  “I recommend Sophie meet with me for therapy twice a week,” Dr. Agford announced. Mr. Katz’s posters blurred around me in a jumble of sunrises and bald eagles. Twice a week?

  “We pride ourselves on the support system we offer students, Mr. and Mrs. Young.” Mr. Katz touched his fingertips together as if illustrating his point.

  Agford handed a tissue to my mom. She’d made it materialize out of thin air. Had she taken it from her cleavage?

  My parents looked at me. My mom dabbed her tear-streaked cheeks with Agford’s tissue. My throat tightened. I was not going to cry. I couldn’t let them see me cry. Least of all Agford.

  My father squeezed my mom’s hand and turned back to the room. In a strained voice he thanked them all for their time. My mother added an apology so rambling that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d also begged forgiveness for having given birth to me.

  “Not to worry,” Dr. Agford said when they’d finished. She turned to me, her smile as tight as a ventriloquist’s. “Sophie is in very good hands.”

  As my dad told Grandpa Young the story at dinner that night, I felt as if I were being drenched in shame by one of the waterfalls in Mr. Katz’s posters. Grandpa prized smarts. I’d been anything but smart. It didn’t help that Jake sat across from me, on track to break a Guinness World Record for how long he could keep smirking. I almost couldn’t blame him. The last time I’d really been in trouble was when I scribbled all over my walls with purple marker when I was five. He’d had to wait years for a smirking opportunity like this.

  “Who the devil eats pickled beets?” Grandpa Young cocked his head. His fuzzy, flyaway gray hair made him look all the more puzzled. Relief washed over me. “We’re talking about the wacky one across the street?” he continued. He put down his fork and mimed two gigantic spheres in front of his chest. “With the big bazoo—”

  “You win at cards today, Don?” my mom interrupted as she shoved the breadbasket into my grandpa’s outstretched hands.

  “Nah.” Grandpa made a face. “Navy boys are a buncha cheats.” My grandpa spent his days playing canasta with other veterans down at the VFW, a club for Veterans of Foreign Wars. (Besides the Civil War, were there any non-foreign wars?) He’d gone there occasionally even before my grandma had died, but since he’d moved in with us, he walked down there all the time. It was a good thing he did; otherwise we’d have had to call in emergency fumigation experts every night. The man ripped a thundering fart at least every fifteen minutes. How the army ever put him in charge of stealth missions during the Korean War was beyond me. Talk about literally blowing your cover.

  Grandpa turned back to me. “You remember what General Sun Tzu said about spying, Sophie?” He always quoted Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to me. You’d think a book from the fourth century BC about some Chinese military general’s philosophy would be super boring, but Grandpa made it interesting. “He said,” Grandpa continued, shaking his finger at me, “you have to be subtle about it.”

  My mother nudged my father so hard, he almost spilled his iced tea.

  “I think Sophie’s learned more than enough about spying, Dad,” my father piped up. “Let’s give Sun Tzu a rest, huh? At least until Sophie’s not grounded.”

  “Fair enough, soldier.” Grandpa turned his attention back to his chicken.

  Jake spoke then. “Speaking of grounded, I don’t get it. I saw Grace at the Seashell today. Why isn’t she grounded?”

  My parents swung their heads around to me. My heart stopped. I could practically hear the puzzle pieces clicking into place.

  I pretended to finish chewing. How long could I reasonably do that? Thirty seconds? One minute? Half an hour? It was so tempting to tell the truth. “Jeez, Jake,” I said, finally. I did my best imitation of a Grace Yang eye roll. “Why would Grace want to spy on my school counselor?”

  I waited for Jake to provide a four-part explanation detailing exactly why, offering as evidence the unbelievably embarrassing time he caught Grace and me hiding in the Stenwalls’ bushes on a fake stakeout. Instead his eyes widened in alarm. “Oh, dude, right. Totally forgot she was homeschooled,” he said. It was the nicest thing he’d done since pricking his finger to add blood tracks on the fake snow in my The Call of the Wild diorama last year—and I wasn’t so sure that was supposed to be nice.

  Grandpa chimed in. “Yang’s got a nose for covert ops, that’s for sure. I was just telling her about the night in ’51 when we parachuted over the thirty-eighth parallel, and—”

  “If you want to know the truth, kids at school dared me, okay?” I flung up my hands.

  My mom and dad traded looks. My dad took another bite of his chicken and chewed for an eternity, then slowly wiped his mouth. “I never realized you were such a follower, Sophie.”

  I stared at my plate. I wasn’t sure which was worse—how right he was or that he’d never noticed before.

  Grandpa patted me on the back. “Aw, she’ll make a fine commander yet,” he said as he leaned forward and—right on schedule—punctuated his sentence with a single toxic blast.

  After dinner my parents condemned me to the prison of my room with no access to a computer or cell phone and no hope of getting in touch with Grace. I couldn’t bring myself to do homework. I couldn’t sleep. I stared at my poster of Kai Li (a Taiwanese superstar and musical genius) and wished he’d share some advice. After a while, though, even his smile started to remind me of Agford’s.

  A sound made me bolt upright. It was my closet. It hissed at me. I was sure of it.

  I waited on high alert.

  There it was again.

  “Psssst!”

  I sprang to my feet and was already half out the door when I realized I hadn’t turned off my walkie-talkie the previous night. I went into the closet and pulled the door shut.

  “Is that you, Grace?” There would be no code names tonight.

  “No. It’s someone who likes to radio little girls on their walkie-talkies at night. Mwahahaha!” Grace cackled. “Of course it’s me. I’ve been trying to get you on the phone all afternoon. What’s going on over there?”

  I told her every detail, right down to Officer Grady barely fitting into Mr. Katz’s armchair.

  “But it looked just like blood,” Grace blurted out. “And who chops beets at midnight?”

  “Apparently she roasts and pickles them every fall. Gives them out at Thanksgiving.”

  “When you chop vegetables, do you typically raise a cleaver over your head and swing it downward ferociously?” Grace asked.

  “All the time. Totally standard procedure.”

  Grace chuckled. “Seriously, though.”

  “Why would she murder someone on a cutting board?”

  “Maybe she was done with murdering and was chopping body parts to fit them in her trash bag?” Grace suggested.

  “Yeah, right. And she paused midmurder to curse out some raccoons and take a phone call,” I said. “Think about it, Grace. Unless she murdered someone who didn’t have vocal cords, wouldn’t we have heard screaming?”

  Grace pondered this in silence.

  “You didn’t tell them I was there, though, right?” she asked.r />
  “Of course not,” I answered, guiltily remembering how close I’d come to telling on her.

  “Thank God. If Monday and Janice find out, I’m dead.”

  Monday and Janice Yang were Grace’s parents. They were really high-powered cancer doctors. I called them Mr. Dr. Yang and Mrs. Dr. Yang to tell them apart. The two had met at Harvard Medical School when they first came over to the United States from Beijing in their twenties. Both of them worshipped Grace so much, she could have probably set fire to the house and they would have praised her match-lighting skills. They were crazy protective of her ever since she’d almost drowned when she was little. Still, they freaked if she was ever disrespectful. Grace once talked back to her teacher, Miss Anita, and she had to write an essay on the role of educators in society.

  “No worries. You’d have done the same for me, right?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding? I’d have sold you out in a minute,” Grace said. Then she sighed. “Of course I’d have done the same, you nerd. FBI protocol. A spy never betrays her partner.”

  Somehow Grace’s joke still stung. I fiddled with the pendant around my neck. At the end of sixth grade, Mrs. Dr. Yang had given each of us one teardrop-shaped half of a yin-and-yang pendant to wear. When you put the two together, they formed the yin/yang circle. According to Chinese philosophy, yin and yang are opposite forces that interact with each other. Yin is dark, quiet, colder energy. Yang is active, bright, and warm energy. The two need to be in balance for harmony. I had the black yin one with a dot of white yang, and I wore my necklace every day. Grace hadn’t worn her yang pendant even once. She claimed it didn’t go with any of her outfits.

  “Soph?” Grace’s voice had grown quiet.

  “Yeah?”

  “Did we really imagine all of that?”

  “I guess so.” My voice shook a little. It shouldn’t have been such a big deal. So we thought we saw something we didn’t.

  “So what now?” Grace asked.

  I explained the terms of my grounding: no cell, no TV, no going online, two-hour study halls every day after school with Grandpa Young. “Oh, and let’s not forget,” I added. “My parents are making me do yard work at Agford’s house every Saturday for six weeks. You know, to show how sincere my apology is.”

  Grace let out a gasp. Over the walkie-talkie, it sounded like a hurricane of static. “Oh, Soph. This is so unfair. That’s besides the therapy with her twice a week?” she said. “What on earth are you going to talk about?”

  I sighed. “The roots of my rage, Grace. The roots of my rage.”

  “Speaking of roots, see if you can find out what’s up with her hair.”

  “Ten-four, Agent Yang.”

  “Roger,” Grace said. I could tell she was smiling. “Over and out.”

  Chapter Four

  S.M.I.L.E.!

  My mom drove me to school the next day. It was only a mile walk, but I think she was worried I wouldn’t go unless she escorted me there personally. She was probably right. As soon as we rounded the bend and I saw Luna Vista Middle School perched over the Pacific, its low white buildings and outdoor hallways looked so exposed that I wished I could leap into the ocean and drift away.

  “Listen, Sophie,” my mom said as she pulled into the carpool line. She tucked my hair behind my ear like she used to do when I was little. “I know Dr. Agford is a little odd. But keep an open mind, will you? She means well.”

  Maybe she meant well, but I wasn’t sure she actually was well. All the same, I muttered an agreement, grabbed my stuff, and slipped from the car.

  Almost as soon as I stepped onto the sidewalk, a cluster of kids fell silent, then erupted into a flurry of whispers once I’d passed. Someone snickered. I tightened my grip around my backpack straps and strode ahead through the outdoor courtyard—until I nearly ran smack into S.M.I.L.E.’s bake-sale table.

  S.M.I.L.E., aka the Society for Making Improvements in Lives Everywhere, was the club that Agford advised. It was made up of five members: Marissa, Alissa, Larissa, Clarissa, and Jenn. (Jenn’s mom had probably shot down a legal name change to Jennissa.) S.M.I.L.E. was not only immune to the social consequences of being on Agford’s radar, they were her radar.

  Left to themselves, the members of S.M.I.L.E. would have simply been the kind of kids who lingered in teachers’ classrooms after school to help change bulletin displays and erase whiteboards. But Dr. Awkward had harnessed S.M.I.L.E.’s need to please to make it look like she was doing her job. Rolling backpacks in tow, S.M.I.L.E. would march across the campus handing out brochures with titles like “Sleep Hygiene: Much More Than Clean Sheets.” When they weren’t raising money for questionable causes, Agford had them hosting her famous Brown Bag Lunch Seminars on peer pressure and resolving conflicts. Still, somehow they managed to have enough energy left over to know absolutely everything and grunt oo, oo like monkeys every time they raised their hands in class.

  To be fair, they probably weren’t really like that—and I admit some of their names were actually different—but they had soaked up Agford’s attitudes so completely, I could hardly see them as anything else but carbon copies of her.

  That morning S.M.I.L.E. sat behind piles of baked goods, wearing pins that each featured a very ordinary-looking brown bird (Jenn’s was upside down). “Save the New Zealand Bush Wren! Buy a Tweet Treat!” a huge banner behind them announced as they handed out bird-shaped pastries. When I nearly ran into their table, S.M.I.L.E.’s president, Marissa Pritchard, was busy counting a sixth grader’s change. Sensing a sudden disturbance in her happiness force field, Marissa froze and looked up.

  She trained her blue eyes on me like lasers. She had no mercy for someone who’d caused trouble for her beloved patron saint. Even her straight blond hair seemed to quiver with rage. The rest of S.M.I.L.E. felt their queen’s unrest. They whipped up their heads to locate its source.

  Kids in the bake-sale line turned to see who had earned the group’s wrath. When had S.M.I.L.E. ever not smiled? Membership required smiling, just as it required heartfelt annual celebration of National Happy Hugs Week.

  Just then Charlotte Agford materialized beside the bake-sale table in a purple sweater with a plunging V-neck that (shudder!) threatened to spill out her gravity-defying boobs. S.M.I.L.E. turned to greet her, looking like baby birds themselves as they gazed up at her. Agford’s eyes flitted to me; then she leaned over and whispered something to Marissa.

  “We’ve made fifty-two dollars already, Dr. A!” Jenn interrupted, beaming.

  “Now, Jenn. We don’t measure success in dollars alone,” Agford said. “Think of the awareness we’ve raised today.”

  “We need to care about the journey,” Marissa added, her voice an eerie echo of Agford’s falsetto. “Not just the destination.” She exchanged a knowing glance with Alissa.

  “That’s right,” Agford said. “Now keep selling, ladies. Marissa, you’ll bring up the cash box to my office after? I’ll write you a late slip.” Marissa looked smug as Agford patted her on the shoulder and smiled.

  I wanted to throw up, and I hadn’t even eaten a “tweet treat.” I ducked through the archway and was about to enter the science lab when I stopped cold. Peter Murguia was standing just inside the door. “I heard the cops found a gun in her locker,” he said.

  “Nuh-uh!” answered another voice. “They would have sent her to juvie!”

  “I thought she called in a bomb threat,” a girl’s voice chimed in. “She always was a little off, wasn’t she?” It was my friend Stacy Pedalski. Correction: my former friend Stacy Pedalski.

  “I heard it had to do with Agford,” said someone else, setting off a murmur of questions.

  “You guys have got to get lives,” rang out a voice above the fray. It sounded like Rod Zimball. My heart leaped.

  I rounded the corner into the classroom. Rod sat facing the whiteboard. Had he seen me and turned away? If he hadn’t stood up for me, then who had? All I knew was that everyone but Rod watched as I walked to an
empty desk and sat down. Everyone but Rod watched as I opened my pencil case and took out a pencil and eraser. Was our love affair over before it had even started? Au revoir, secret-code texts.

  At lunch Stacy and my so-called friends walked right by me as I put my books in my locker. I made my way to the cafeteria and took my place in line alone. Or rather, I took my place behind Trista Bottoms. That’s what things had come to.

  It wasn’t like I had anything against Trista Bottoms. The universe was against her enough already. How could someone have the worst name on the planet and be at least two times as wide as the next biggest person in our class? I stared at her lunch tray. Steamed vegetables and brown rice filled her plate.

  Trista caught my look and frowned. “What?” She cocked her head at me and uncrossed her arms. Her T-shirt read TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES in all caps. “You never heard of a slow metabolism?”

  Trista moved forward, sliding her tray along the metal track. A refrain rose up from behind us in line.

  Boom, boom. Boom, boom, Bot-toms. Boom, boom. Boom, boom, Bot-toms! Trent Spinner and his friends’ song sounded like a bass drum thumping in a marching band. Trista stopped. So did the refrain.

  Trista’s body tensed. She gripped her tray. She took two steps and paused.

  Boom, boom—

  She took six quick steps.

  Boom, boom. Boom, boom, Bot-toms! rang out the chorus again. Stifled snickers followed.

  Trista knew exactly what was happening. So did everyone within earshot. None of us said a word.

  Her long, dark curls whipped around as she turned back. I don’t know exactly what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t what happened next. Mouth parted in surprise, cheeks aglow, Trista cast her brown eyes to the ceiling.

  “Oh, my lord!” she shouted. It never occurred to me that a girl who didn’t say much to anyone could have such a thundering voice.

  Trista grabbed my shoulder. Her strength surprised me.