Lucia got out of the car, slid around the hood, and opened Mindy’s door. She undid her seatbelt and pulled her up. The frustration and anger had abandoned Mindy. All she had now was the sadness. And that thump.
“Please don’t—” Lucia said, pulling Mindy away from the car. “Don’t go into your head. It wasn’t your fault.”
“I was driving too fast.”
“Bullshit. Five miles over the speed limit.” Lucia shook her head. “No. No.”
“Poor fucking dog—fucking dog didn’t ever do anything to anybody.”
Lucia sat Mindy down on the hood and looked around, desperately checking the wheels, the bumper. “There’s no blood, okay? How can you have hit him if there’s no blood?”
“I crushed him. I’m a stupid fucking jerk, and I put a tire tread through his belly like it was nothing—”
“No!” Lucia said it as emphatically as a curse. She stood there in the headlights’ glow, a performer in the spotlight. Her shadow shot out behind her like it was fleeing from her. “This is not your fault! You listen to me! It’s not!”
“I hit him! I saw him, and I didn’t, I couldn’t—whose fault is it if it’s not mine, huh?”
“Dog catchers!” Lucia took a step closer to Mindy, her shadow growing bigger. “It’s their job to pick up dogs so this doesn’t happen! Why are we even paying those guys if they can’t find a big dog like that? Huh?” She came even closer as Mindy wiped the tears off her blotchy, reddened, murderer’s face. “And we have leash laws! We have fucking leash laws, Mindy! If that dog belonged to someone, and we don’t know that it did, but if it did? It’s their job to make sure he doesn’t get out. They need a fence or an electric collar thing and a fucking leash! And if he did get out, they should’ve gone after him. We’re—we are a long way off from houses. We’re in the middle of nowhere. A dog shouldn’t have gotten this far if its owner gave a crap. He should’ve been driving around looking. It’s his fault, not yours. Please don’t cry Mindy, it wasn’t your fault, it’s not fair.”
And she kissed Mindy. It was like being set on fire. One moment Mindy was so cold, a chain of thoughts wrapped around her, biting into her, and then Lucia’s lips were against hers and her body was so close and her hands were right there, on her face, in her hair. Lucia replaced everything. Put herself in all the places where Mindy felt sad or alone or awful. Became a little world for Mindy to feel safe in.
Mindy lay back, relaxing into, then away from Lucia’s lips. Her hands lay on the hood, feeling the heat of the slumbering engine. It seemed like it would burn her. And she shimmied up the hood as if she were fleeing from Lucia. Or daring her to follow.
And Lucia crawled up the hood with her, on her hands and knees, kissing Mindy again, again, until the back of Mindy’s head was on the cool glass of the windshield and the front was all lips, being kissed and licked and held. She felt like she would freeze and she would burn up and she would explode.
Until Lucia rolled off her, out of breath, speechless for once, and they laid there on the hood of Mindy’s car with their backs to the windshield. Lucia’s left hand was lying next to her right hand. Mindy joined them. She couldn’t believe how quickly a set of lips could cut through her sorrow. It was like Lucia had hijacked her mind. Stolen her.
“Sometimes death is inevitable,” Lucia said at last. “It’s not anyone’s fault. It just happens. So you go on. It’s not a story, but—it happens.”
“Okay,” Mindy said softly.
Lucia looked at her again. With the headlights under them, her face was all shade and stars. Except for her eyes. Those Mindy could see. They looked brand-new.
There was one last tear on Mindy’s face. Lucia reached out, wiped it away.
“I’ll drive,” Lucia said. Nodding to herself, like that was who she was talking to. “You just have to sit in the passenger seat, and when we get back, you tell Dario you’re not feeling well and I’ll take you home. You get some sleep. In the morning—”
“Can we stay here a minute?” Mindy interrupted her. “Just a minute?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
They laid there. Mindy put her arm under her head and Lucia turned on her side, doing the same. Their bodies didn’t touch, but there was an electricity, a vibration Mindy knew Lucia felt too. The night was cold. The engine was still warm underneath them, but it would cool soon. If they stayed there long enough, the light from the car battery would flicker and go dark.
Then, like fingers playing a cello’s strings, the darkness pinned down by the headlights stirred. It shook and broke apart, and Lucia sat up to see it clearly. She smiled.
“Look,” she said. Her voice was still gentle, so unlike how she usually talked but so her. “Bats.”
They were coming out from under the bridge, streaming out, not in an apocalyptic flood, but in a steady flow of twenty or thirty at a time, a scarf that wound down the river and emptied into the night sky. Mindy sat up too. She saw her breath frost in front of her. “I thought they only had those on Congress Avenue.”
Lucia shook her head. “That’s the big colony—two million—but there are smaller ones all over. Like this one. Maybe a couple hundred thou. The bridge must have those deep, narrow little hidey-holes they like. The mommas come up here from down in Mehico to give birth and stay spring through fall, hunting together. Binge on thirty thousand pounds of insects a night. Then in October, they go back down south.” The swarm had formed up now, become a storm cloud of crying, chittering bats. They were everywhere, but Mindy wasn’t afraid. Not when Lucia was so calm. “They make such beautiful music…”
“You sure know a lot about bats.”
Lucia looked at Mindy. Her eyes were still tiny stars in the dark. “I love them.”
* * *
Lucia drove them back home, even though Mindy said she was okay to drive. They got out and went into their houses and up to their rooms. Lucia got there first. She must have rushed. The blinds were drawn when Mindy got up there. They would be down in the morning too.
In the bathroom, Mindy finally noticed Lucia’s lipstick had left a wound smudged on her mouth.
CHAPTER 5
Everyone always left Coach Bakula’s class so quickly. Mindy thought they were intimidated by his intellect. He was the one person in Millarca High who called people on their shit, whether they were the star quarterback or a Hufflepuff.
Last class of the day, the halls became a mild riot, everyone headed for their cars or the buses, but Mindy stayed in her seat. She shuffled her things into her backpack with care before slinging it onto her shoulder and approaching Bakula. He leaned back in his seat, looking at her with a big smile.
“Ah, Ms. Murphy! I saw you at the game this Saturday,” Coach Bakula greeted her. “I hope you weren’t planning to be there when history was made and our streak ended.” He faked a sigh. “Yet another victory.”
“Yeah, it was pretty boring,” Mindy shot right back. “No wonder the crowd had to cheer so much. Otherwise they’d fall asleep.”
Bakula put the finishing touches on some paperwork as Mindy leaned against her old desk in the front row. The past few weeks, she’d been sitting a few rows back with Lucia. Things shuffled. Sometimes they sat next to each other, sometimes there were a few people in the way…it’d been a while since Mindy had been up front. The view was getting unfamiliar.
“Now, Ms. Murphy. What can I do for you?”
“I was just—I mean—you’ve been around, right?”
“Oh yes.” Bakula nodded. “I’m practically ancient.”
“Stop. You’re not that old.”
He tilted his head to the side in a tiny gesture of reconciliation. “Well-regarded teen movies to the contrary, we don’t have a wise old janitor to offer illumination—not to disparage Senor Navarro. Please. Ask me anything.”
Mindy took a deep breath and checked the open door. The hallway was clear, the scuffle of shoes and the murmur of voices having moved down the school. “How do you know if someone�
��a boy—likes you?”
Bakula sorted through the papers of his desk, came up with one, and held it out to Mindy. It was the essay she’d turned in last week, a red A added to it. “They give you good grades.”
“I’m serious,” Mindy insisted, though she tucked the paper into her backpack with a bit of pride. “There’s this friend of mine…”
“Ah,” Bakula said perceptively.
“Don’t ‘ah’ yet. It’s not like that. It might be. I don’t—just listen.”
Bakula leaned back in his chair. Mindy sat back on the desk as well, hugging the backpack to her chest like a shield. She paused for a long moment, trying to conjure Lucia’s name, or maybe a pseudonym. Nothing came. Not even the name of a boy.
“My friend,” she said at last, “is really great. Really…great. S—smart, funny, pretty… good at Mario Party.”
“Marry them,” Bakula said quickly.
Mindy laughed, nearly dropping her backpack. She scooped it back onto her knee. “Sometimes it feels like we’re almost the same person, you know? Like we’re two halves of—I don’t know. Batman. And then it’s like we’re a million miles apart. I just want to get on the same wavelength. That would be enough! Just understanding each other. I don’t want a kiss—well, I do—but if we just had, like, I don’t know—” Mindy waved her hands around each other, like she could say it in sign language. “I think there’s a connection trying to be made, but I don’t know if it’s just on my end or if she’s trying and just can’t—maybe it’s my friend, maybe they can’t make a connection.” Mindy rolled her neck, staring up at a dead florescent light in the ceiling. “Course, makes a connection to the ol’ bf just fine…”
“Boyfriend?” Bakula asked. “Wait, are you interested in Billy Carlyle?”
“No! Wait, maybe. This is all anonymous. It could be anyone. Don’t think about it. Yes, it is Billy.”
Bakula tapped a long fingernail on his desk a few times. “Mm. I know it’s difficult. Seeing someone you have feelings for every day, and not being able to tell them. Planning it out…seeing it in your head…then…the not knowing.” He stood, pushing his chair back, his bones gracefully erecting themselves to their full height. His long legs stretching out in their gray Dickies. “You see it going off without a hitch—your love returning all your affection, your only regret that you did not ask sooner. And almost more enticingly, you see it going the other way. Raised voices. Tears. Recrimination. Hate.”
Mindy shivered, winced. It was hard to picture Lucia hating her, those warm eyes gone cold and her lovely face twisted into anger. But Bakula made it sound almost inevitable.
“Have you told this…Billy, how you feel?” Bakula asked, coming around the desk at last to stand across from her.
“No. But I think—he knows. We kissed.”
A thick eyebrow steepled on Bakula’s face. “I see. But you don’t yet know where you stand, so to speak?”
Mindy looked down. “He could never see me again, and I wouldn’t be surprised. And he could be right outside that door, waiting for me, and I wouldn’t… I love…him. Way too much to be in love with him. I’d only mess it up.”
Mindy’s breath went away as Bakula’s finger caressed her chin, raising it softly until her eyes met his. “In my experience, the heart is not so willful a beast. It can be tamed. This person, the feelings you have toward them—they wouldn’t exist in a vacuum. Your friend has encouraged them. Kindled them in you. They belong to him. They are his responsibility. Now that you burn for him, you mustn’t let him ignore that. Go to him. Win his heart. Do not let him give up on what he himself has started. And you don’t give up either.”
“What if he doesn’t feel the same way?”
“My dear girl, how could anyone not be in love with as sweet a young woman as you?
* * *
Mindy wasn’t Lucia’s only friend, of course. Lucia was friends with practically the entire school, except for the inevitable backlash minority, and they were smart enough to save it for people who were more self-evidently heinous. Her two chief cohorts were fellow cheerleaders, Pammy and Tera.
Pammy was an African-American woman so light-skinned and straight-haired that Mindy suspected most people thought she just had a great tan, while Tera was even more fashionable than Lucia—she wore berets. If she had an ounce of sense, she probably would’ve taken Lucia’s place as queen bee.
Mindy noticed them behind her when she ducked into the restroom. Pammy and Tera’s kitten heels rocked on the tile floor as they went to the sinks. Makeup kits were opened, blouses were adjusted, a little soundtrack of feminine upkeep.
“You see Mindy Murphy in class today?” Pammy asked, her voice snappy and a little musical, like a comedian warming up. Mindy cringed in her stall. “She looks like a Wal-Mart shopper sat on someone.”
Tera replied in her own spacey drawl. “Yeah, heard when she eats alphabet soup, she chokes on the D.”
“As if she even likes the D.”
Mindy drew her legs up so they couldn’t be seen under the stall. It made her feel better to pretend they couldn’t notice her. The girls laughed. Maybe they’d seen her retreat. “You think she’s really a dyke?” Tera asked.
“Might as well be. Not like she could get a man anyway.”
The door squeaked again, and a new set of Keds popped the floor. Mindy tightened her arms around her knees. Her legs pressed into her chest like a vise.
“But do you think she’s… I don’t know. I wouldn’t change if she were in the locker room with me.”
“Me neither. I heard she kissed Becky Davis.”
“Who hasn’t kissed Becky Davis?”
“Sup?” Lucia called, and through the tiny side gap in the stall door, Mindy could see the glow of her at the sinks. She did nothing more than give her hair a brush in the mirror. “So, who kissed Becky Davis?”
“Mindy Murphy,” Pammy said.
Mindy thought that blur of motion through the slot was Lucia shaking her head. “Bullshit.”
“It’s the word—”
“The word is wrong.”
“Don’t tell me you’re buying that straight act of hers.”
“Did you have breakfast today?” Lucia asked. “You know you’re a jerk when you don’t eat breakfast. Go get some waffles.” Pammy began to protest. “WAFFLES!”
Keds on the tiles. The door squeaked twice, once when Pammy opened it and once when Tera shoved it to keep it open. Then Mindy heard the bubblegum pop of Lucia’s sneakers coming to her stall. She knocked on the door. Mindy wiped at her eyes, wondering if she was crying. She wasn’t. Not yet.
“Mindy, come on… If it’s not Mindy, I’m going to feel really awkward.”
Mindy undid the lock. Lucia opened the door. Her smile was weak, but it was genuine and reassuring nonetheless.
“These two, I cannot. So tacky I could stick them to a wall.”
Mindy was silent. The wave of relief that washed over her, just hearing Lucia talking shit about her dumbass friends was so immense. And yet it hurt at the same time that Lucia could love her in some way or only so much, and then… There was a part missing, and without it, she was incomplete. And how, how could she put that on Lucia when she was probably straight, probably in love with Quentin, probably going to get married and have five kids and be the happiest fucking housewife in Texas?
None of which Lucia could see in her red-rimmed eyes. Or maybe all of it. “Are you gonna cry?”
“Not that desperate for you to kiss me again.”
Lucia’s eyes swiveled to the door. It was safely shut. “That’s not funny.”
“Sorry,” Mindy said quickly, with the biological instinct of a chronic apologizer.
“It was just to make you feel better, you know? Like kissing your sister.”
“You kiss your sister?”
“I don’t have a sister. Get the point?”
Mindy didn’t get her point.
“I’ve gotta go,” Lucia said, turning to the si
nks to wash her hands. “You should too. Class is about to start.”
Mindy tried to stand, ended up putting her feet down on the tile so hard that the sound was like a rifle shot. Lucia looked over her shoulder at her, and Mindy felt six inches tall. “Lucia, I’m not gay. I mean, I might not be gay. I’m not going to gay on you. We’re still friends, right?”
Lucia worked the air dryer. Her voice emerged haltingly from under the thick sound. “Yeah. We’re still friends.”
“I just don’t want you to stop hanging out with me again. Because you think that I’m…or because you…”
“We’ll hang out,” Lucia said after the dryer cut off. “Soon. But Quentin’s taking me out a lot, so it’s hard to find time. And there isn’t a lot we can do together. We don’t have much in common.”
“Yes we do.”
Lucia looked at her and her eyes were almost fond, like she almost understood how much it hurt for Mindy to not be able to figure out what she was supposed to say—what Lucia wanted her to say. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Work,” Mindy sighed.
“All night?”
“I get off at eight.”
“Perfect. I’ll call you.”
“Promise?”
Lucia smiled, lifted up her hand, and crossed her fingers in front of Mindy. “Promise.” She uncrossed her fingers. “Keep your phone charged, ’kay?”
“’Kay,” Mindy replied dully as Lucia swept out of the room, leaving Mindy alone with the cracked mirrors.
* * *
Without Lucia in it, the Taurus felt lopsided. Off-center. Even getting a ten-dollar tip on an order of eight large pizzas did nothing for Mindy’s mood. When her phone rang, it was like a drug kicking in. She nearly swerved into oncoming traffic fishing it from her car’s sunglasses holder.
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 6