Calf

by Andrea Kleine

  Gretchen wasn’t very good as Dorothy. She sang very softly and very high, but she was loud enough when she was talking. She had her hair done in two braids and was wearing a blue dress with a checkered apron and ballet slippers covered with red glitter. Toto was a wind-up toy dog. Gretchen was supposed to be able to clap her hands to make him start and stop. When she set off down the yellow brick road, she put Toto in her picnic basket, but he didn’t exactly fit and had to be stuck in nose first. He fell out once, landed on his back, and turned himself on with his feet moving in the air. Gretchen had to clap four times before it would stop. Someone in the audience yelled out, “Toto’s dead!” Everyone laughed.

  Tammy’s first scene was with Kenny. She put on her golden hat and called him and the other flying monkeys to the castle. The boys flapped around in a circle, acting more like superheroes than winged monkeys. Tammy told them to go get Dorothy and bring her to the castle. The boys flapped away and the narrator explained how they find Dorothy, kidnap her, and fly her to the Witch’s castle. Tammy was onstage during this and she was supposed to look out at the audience and rub her hands together like she was watching what was going on in her crystal ball. Tammy looked out and saw the music teacher sitting in the front row. She held up a card from her lap that said, “Good Job!” Tammy didn’t think the music teacher was supposed to do that because now Tammy was looking at her instead of looking out at the audience and rubbing her hands together. The music teacher sorted through the cards on her lap and held up another one that said, “Talk Louder!” She sorted through them again, but couldn’t find what she was looking for and the narrator was almost done with his speech. She shook her head and held up “Good Job!” again.

  Kenny reentered, delivered Gretchen with a rough shove, and flapped offstage.

  Tammy grabbed Toto out of the picnic basket and told Gretchen to hand over the ruby slippers. Gretchen said she wouldn’t and threw a bucket full of confetti water on Tammy, at which point Tammy dropped Toto and he turned himself on again. Everyone laughed.

  Tammy felt tears well up and she worried that she was about to cry. It wasn’t about the play being messed up; it was about something else. Tammy realized she didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to disappear under her black cape and turn into nothing. But that’s what was in the script. Those were the rules. Dorothy has to go home in the end. And the script said that someone had to die. It said that Tammy had to die. Was there somewhere a script for real life, Tammy wondered, and if so, did that script say that Kirin had to die? And if it did say that, then what did Kirin have to die for? No one got to go home and no one got anything good out of it.

  Tammy did her melting scene the way she was supposed to and didn’t cry, but she did wonder what it would’ve been like to have been a good witch.

  When Tammy was completely hidden under her cape, Gretchen pretended to sweep her offstage with the broom while Tammy slithered along the floor like a black blob. Everyone laughed at this too. Then Gretchen went home to Heather as Auntie Em and everything worked out fine. All the kids came onstage to take a bow and Kenny wound up Toto and let him walk across the stage. There’s no place like home. The end.

  All the girls piled back into the bathroom. Heather told them to keep their costumes on for the cast party at her house because her mother wanted to take pictures.

  Tammy ran into Hugh in the hallway outside the bathroom. His little mouth dropped open and he looked around him at all the other kids and parents like he was lost in a department store and couldn’t find his way out.

  “What?” Tammy asked.

  “I thought you were dead,” he said. He reached out and pressed his hand against Tammy’s arm to test if she was real. He kept his hand there for a moment and then unexpectedly hugged Tammy around the waist. Tammy let him stay like that for a second, but she felt awkward about it. She reached behind her back and pried him loose.

  “I was pretending. It was a play, stupid. Come on.” Tammy figured she had to drag him with her to the party, but she decided it wouldn’t be too annoying since all the fourth graders from the chorus would be there too.

  The party was just hot dogs and orange drinks. Heather was trying to act like it was some big thing, but the only reason they had it at her house was because she lived so close to school and they couldn’t have it in the auditorium because the janitor had to lock up.

  Hugh sat on the couch by himself shoving a hot dog into his oval mouth. His feet didn’t touch the floor.

  People from Mrs. Perkins’s class were sitting in a circle on the carpet with Toto in the middle. The boys were trying to clap and stomp on the floor to make him change directions. They were doing this all at the same time, which basically made Toto twitch in place.

  Gretchen was sitting with her long skinny legs stretched out in front of her. Kenny suggested they try and get Toto to crawl under her skirt and she quickly switched to a kneeling position and tucked her skirt under her shins.

  There was nothing else to do. The party was boring.

  “This is so boring,” Gretchen said.

  Everyone agreed that the party was stupid and all the fourth graders running around were annoying. Gretchen said that the hot dogs were gross and Kenny took one out of the bun and started wiggling it around. He wrapped his fist around it and poked it in and out of his hand. He got right up in Tammy’s face.

  “Guess what this is, witchy witch?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Oooohhh, witchy witch doesn’t like it. Witchy witch is a bitch.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Hey, what would happen if we poured orange drink on your green skin?”

  He threatened Tammy with his Dixie cup, but he didn’t do it because Heather’s mom walked by right then. Instead he held the Dixie cup up to his mouth and took a long slurp. When Heather’s mom was gone, he opened his mouth wide, showed her his orange tongue, and said, “Ahhhh!”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Gretchen said.

  “Who’s gonna drive us?” Josh asked.

  “No one. Let’s walk. It’ll be cool,” Gretchen said.

  It was agreed that this was a cool idea. They were too old for this kind of stupid kids’ party. After all, they were going to be in junior high next year. In a year, they would be teenagers. And it wasn’t that late. It was maybe eight thirty or nine p.m. and it wasn’t a school night.

  No one noticed the group of sixth graders leave out the back door. If they had, some mother probably would have said she had to drive them. Heather had to stay because it was her house and her mother was there, but Monique, Kenny, Colin, and Josh came along. When they were on the back stoop, Gretchen said to Tammy, “What about your brother?”

  “Shit.” She had forgotten him inside. Tammy walked back in the house and saw him licking the icing off a tinfoil cupcake wrapper. She grabbed his wrist.

  “We have to go.”

  “No.”

  “Come on, we’re going.”

  “No.”

  “Do you want another cupcake?”

  “Yes.”

  “If we leave right now, you can take one with you.”

  Hugh climbed off the couch and walked over to the food table. He took another cupcake even though some mother gave the two of them a mean look. Tammy scooted him toward the kitchen and out the back door.

  “Are you the baby?” Kenny asked.

  “No,” Hugh said.

  “You have a baby-sitter.”

  “I’m not a baby.”

  “But you have a baby-sitter.”

  Hugh stood on the back porch and refused to move.

  “Come on,” Tammy said as she pulled his sleeve and tugged him down the steps. She yanked on him a little too hard and his cupcake fell to the ground. He whimpered and asked if he could go back inside and get another one, but Tammy said, no, they had to go. He started breathing funny like he might start bawling really loud. Tammy whispered to him, “Just pick it up and see how dirty it is.”

  When he pi
cked it up the icing stuck to the ground and peeled off, but the cake part looked fine and he ate it.

  “Gross!” Monique said.

  “Let’s go before they come out here,” Gretchen said.

  They walked through Heather’s backyard, ducked under the fence that ran along the school playground, and started what was the normal route home. As they walked down the street, Monique started to sing, “We’re Off to See the Wizard.” Everyone joined in, even though the chorus sang this song in the play. Everyone knew the words from the movie and as they skipped down the street, they looked like they were in the movie. Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Lion. Tammy and Kenny were a little out of place since, in the movie, they weren’t in the yellow brick road scenes, but they were still in the movie.

  When the song ended, everyone was quiet and the only sound was seven pairs of feet thumping along the sidewalk. They arrived at 43rd Street on the corner across from Tammy’s house. They were on the edge of the nice neighborhood.

  Tammy had been so caught up in the play, she had completely forgotten about Steffi. It wasn’t until she saw her house that she put it all together. This was the best time for her to go to Kirin’s house, get the gun, and pour the wine down the sink. It was dark out so no one would see her at Kirin’s. Her mother and Nick hadn’t given her a specific time to be home. They didn’t know how long the play was or what time the party ended. And the party was still going on. Her mother and Nick might not be home. Nick could still be at work, and her mother could have taken Steffi to the emergency room because of an asthma attack.

  “See ya,” Gretchen said as the group turned down Bemis Street and continued on.

  Hugh had chocolate cupcake crumbs stuck to his face. Tammy had to get rid of him. She wanted to go to Kirin’s house and walk a little bit behind Gretchen and the gang so she wouldn’t feel so alone walking in the dark, and if anything happened, if someone tried to jump out and kidnap her, she could try and catch up with them. Or she could scream and Gretchen would probably recognize her voice.

  “Look,” Tammy said to Hugh, “go inside and tell them I had to go to Gretchen’s house to pick something up.”

  “What do you have to pick up?”

  “Nothing. . . . My book bag, I left my book bag at school and Gretchen’s mom accidentally took it home.”

  This was too confusing for him, although it was a good excuse.

  “I don’t want to go by myself,” he said.

  “You’re not going anywhere by yourself. Our house is right there. Just go in.”

  “I don’t have a key.”

  “You don’t need a key. Just knock on the door and they’ll let you in.”

  “I want to go with you.”

  Tammy was worried that if she argued with him anymore he would start to cry and someone would hear them. And in a weird way, even though he was six years younger, Tammy felt safer with him around.

  “Come on,” Tammy said.

  And so the two of them crossed 43rd Street and entered the dark, forested neighborhood. And at night, the interior of Friendship Heights felt far more unfriendly than its shady borders.

  Tammy didn’t want to run into Gretchen and Monique, so she opted to walk through the alleyways that ran behind the houses, parallel to Bemis Street. The alley pavement was broken in places and full of pebbles and broken glass and other stuff that had erupted from the street. Hugh bent down every now and then to pick up bottle caps, checking to see if someone accidentally threw one away that could be turned in for a prize. Once he won a free soda and made Tammy take him to the grocery store to redeem it.

  When she got to 46th Street, Tammy crouched down between two parked cars and held on to Hugh’s sleeve so he wouldn’t walk out into the street and give them away. Tammy had to make sure no one was around and that Gretchen and Monique had already gone inside their houses. She looked both ways, grabbed Hugh’s wrist, dashed across the street, and entered the alley that ran behind Gretchen’s and Kirin’s houses.

  Tammy wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do next. She had never broken into someone’s house before. She had never done something that was against the law. She might have to break a window. If she did, she would do it with a rock so she wouldn’t cut herself.

  “Is this Gretchen’s house?” Hugh asked in his little voice. He wasn’t curious as to why they were going in the back way because he and Tammy were used to it. They only had a key to the back door of their own house and they rarely used the front.

  “No, this is Kirin’s house,” Tammy said. She lifted the latch and pulled the gate open.

  “What are you doing?”

  Tammy spun around. Gretchen was peeking through the cracks of the tall wooden fence from her backyard. More than one pair of eyeballs blinked at her between the cracks. Gretchen’s gate swung into the alley and Monique, Colin, Kenny, and Josh spilled out.

  If it had been just Gretchen, Tammy might have told her what she was really doing at Kirin’s house. But she couldn’t tell all of them. She had to think of something fast.

  “I thought this was your house,” Tammy said. “I was trying to catch up with you.”

  Tammy wasn’t sure if anyone bought that explanation or not. No one said anything for a minute and then Kenny blurted, “Shit, she almost went in there!” He laughed out loud as Tammy stepped away from the gate. Tammy forced herself to laugh a little bit so she blended in with the group.

  “Let’s go in,” Gretchen said. “Let’s check it out.”

  “What’s there to see?” Josh asked.

  “Ghosts,” Gretchen said, “and blood.”

  “There’s not still blood.”

  “Yes there is. It’s hard to get bloodstains out. My mother had to throw out all her bloody clothes.”

  “I don’t know,” Monique said.

  “Let’s do it,” Josh said. “We’re here anyway.”

  “Yeah,” Colin said.

  The boys moved in toward Kirin’s gate, but Gretchen pushed ahead of them. She obviously wanted to be the boss since she lived next door. Tammy thought the best thing to do was to go along with them. Then she could either stay behind and get the gun, or leave with them and sneak back after everyone else had gone home. Either way she was stuck with them for now.

  Monique said she didn’t think this was a good idea.

  “So don’t come,” Gretchen said and she opened the gate like she owned the place. Monique came along. Monique was always saying she didn’t like things, or that they were going to get in trouble, but then always going along anyway.

  The white pebble path glowed in the dark; it stretched out in front of them leading up to the back porch. Colin took a couple steps on the path making big crunching sounds with his feet. Josh stopped him and motioned for them all to walk on the grass.

  They tiptoed up to the back door. Gretchen tried to open it, but it was locked.

  “It’s locked?” Josh asked.

  “Of course it’s locked, dumb ass!” Kenny said.

  “You don’t have a key?” Colin asked. “Great plan, Gretchen.”

  “Shut up. Let’s look around.”

  They looked in all the usual places, under the doormat and under the flowerpots, but they didn’t find anything. Monique said that her mom used to hide a key in the dirt. Not under the flowerpot, but inside the dirt, covered up.

  They dug around in a couple of pots.

  “Hey! I found it,” Hugh said holding up the dirt-covered key in his stubby little fingers.

  “Thanks, Toto!” Gretchen said.

  “Hey, yeah. He can be Toto! Good boy!” Kenny said and patted him on the head.

  Gretchen wiped the key off on her Dorothy apron. She put it in the lock and took a deep breath. Then she turned the knob and the door popped open.

  Inside it was dark. Kenny reached over and flipped on the light. Gretchen whipped around and hissed at him. Josh made a face.

  “What?” Kenny asked.

  “Don’t turn on the light, dumb
ass! People are going to know we’re here!” Josh said.

  “Okay, dumb ass, I’ll turn it off!” Kenny turned off the light and shut the door.

  “Don’t shut the door!” Josh said.

  “Oh, what now, dumb ass? You don’t think people are going to know we’re here if they see the door open?”

  “We may need to get out fast.”

  “Oh, so now you’re a dumb ass and a cowardly lion.”

  “Shut up!”

  “SHHHH!” Monique said, raising her Tin Man axe at them.

  They moved through the kitchen and into the living room. The only thing in there was the couch. Other than that it was empty.

  “We should go upstairs,” Gretchen said. “That’s where it happened.”

  No one said anything, but inside they all agreed. They walked around to the front of the house where the stairs stood opposite the front door.

  “Where is everybody?” Hugh asked.

  “They’re not home,” Tammy said.

  “Where are they?”

  “They don’t live here anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, Kirin died, remember? And her mom’s in the crazy hospital and her dad moved away.”

  “So we won’t sleep over here anymore?”

  “Shut up!” Tammy said and pushed him up the stairs.

  Kenny was the last one in line going up the stairs. He kept leaning into Tammy’s ear, flapping his monkey wings, and saying, “Caw!”

  Upstairs in the hallway, everything looked normal. They didn’t see any blood.

  “We should go in her room,” Colin said. “That’s where she got shot. I read it in the newspaper.”

  All the bedroom doors were closed. Everyone looked around to think of which way to go.

  “It’s down that way,” Tammy said.

  “Witchy witch knows! Witchy witch knows which way to go!” Kenny said.

  Tammy turned around and gave him a look, which meant, shut up. He grinned at her and said, “Caw!”