“Ha. According to you, maybe.”
“Well, who says otherwise?”
Moira’s laughing now. “I don’t know. Our entire society?”
“Maybe our entire society is totally screwed up. Have you ever considered that?”
Moira doesn’t say anything. Her expression is unreadable.
“And nearly anyone would feel big next to Agnes, by the way. Think about how I feel next to her.”
She doesn’t have a comeback for that, either. We stand there for a while, until it’s time for me to leave. Surprisingly, the silence between us isn’t as uncomfortable as I would have expected.
25
MOIRA
DAY 76: APRIL 10
I stand in front of the mirror in my bathroom and pull my shirt tight around my waist and hips, squinting my eyes to try to see what Boone was talking about. “Real women,” he said.
I’d have a nice waist if it wasn’t for an extra roll or two, but my hips are enormous. Sometimes I wear loose shirts to conceal the matching humongosity of my boobs, but those shirts hang straight down in front, hiding my waist.
Sighing, I let my arms drop back to my sides and turn away from the mirror. No matter what I do, I’m always going to end up looking like the Michelin Man.
26
AGNES
DAY 75: APRIL 11
I hold up a big pair of wool trousers. They’re men’s pants, but rose colored. I can’t imagine who would have worn them. Still, the fabric is so nice. It seems like nobody uses this kind of fine gabardine anymore. “I’m thinking of trying to incorporate these into my dress,” I say. “For the trim, maybe?”
“I wouldn’t,” Moira says, biting off the end of a thread. “It’s a cool idea. But it’ll shrink in the wash like a son of a … gun and throw the whole outfit out of whack.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. I could boil it first, though.”
“I guess. But is it really worth your time?”
I don’t have an answer for this. How am I supposed to know what is and isn’t worth my time? “Ooh, look!” I say.
“What?”
I pull a scarf from the pile of clothes Mrs. Deene dumped on the table at the start of lunch. (“Old stuff from my closet,” she told us. “Do with it whatever you want.”) It’s a pale, bluish gray chiffon wisp of a thing, hardly more substantial than air.
“Hey, I like that,” Moira says, reaching out her hand.
I jerk the scarf away and waggle a finger at her. “Ah, ah, ah. Finders keepers.”
“Okay, just let me check out the rolled edges, then.”
I hand it over.
“Ha!” Moira cackles. “It’s mine now. Bwahahahahahaha!”
“Traitor!”
“Yes, but I’m a traitor with a pretty new scarf.” Moira wraps it around her neck. It’s not very long, so it really only wraps once. It’s so soft, though. Softer than the kinds of things she normally wears.
“Wow,” I tell her. “That looks really pretty on you.”
Moira unwinds it and frowns. “Not my color.”
“What are you talking about? It’s perfect. Sets off your eyes.”
“Nah.” She hands it back.
“Mine!” I cry, victorious. “I used reverse psychology on you, and it worked!”
“Scoundrel,” Moira says.
“Indeed.”
“This isn’t over, you know.”
I make a show of snuggling the scarf close to my heart, and Moira growls. Then she smiles to let me know she’s not serious. She gets up, collects our lunch trash, and walks over to the waste basket on her way toward the door. “I’ll be right back,” she says. “I have to pee.” She draws out the word pee in a singsongy falsetto voice to let me know it’s an emergency. Her head is turned to the side when she says it, and she almost walks right smack into Boone, who’s standing in the doorway of the home ec room with his hands in his pockets.
“Hey,” Moira says. Her neck turns pink. We all know Boone heard her, but his face doesn’t give anything away.
“So, my truck’s broke down,” he tells us.
“Bummer.”
“Yeah. The real bummer is that I need to finish serving my yard work sentence today.” He looks at me when he says it. “Weaver’s going to fry my ass if I don’t have my signed completion slip to him by tomorrow morning.”
“Fried ass,” Moira repeats. “What a lovely image.”
“We can give you a ride,” I tell him. “Can’t we, Em?”
She nods. “My car’s parked behind the gym. It’s the gray El Camino with polka—”
“I know which one it is,” he says.
* * *
Mom isn’t home yet when we pull up to the curb in front of my house. I show Boone to the garage, where we keep the rake and big plastic trash bags.
“I’m not going to shoot you again, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I say as he unspools a bag from its roll.
Boone and Moira exchange a quick glance. “It’s not what I’m thinking,” he assures me.
“I was trying to be funny, but it was wrong, and I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Boone works for a few hours while Moira and I clean off a couple of lawn chairs and try to get some studying done in the late afternoon April sunshine. It’s a glorious day. Boone’s quiet the whole time, like he was in the car on the way over here. Every time I look up, he’s getting rid of dead foliage from last fall, or mulching around new plants that are popping up in random places around the yard. There’s no rhyme or reason to Mom’s gardening style, but the flowers always look pretty come summer anyway. When Boone puts the rake away, I survey the yard. I can’t remember it ever looking so tidy. “How were you planning to get home?” I ask him.
“Beats me. Hitch, I guess.”
Moira laughs. “Out to Beacon Valley? Yeah, right. Who’s going to want to drive all the way out there?”
“I don’t know,” Boone says. There’s a tinge of irritation in his voice. “I’ve hitchhiked plenty. What does it matter?”
“It’s, like, ten miles.”
“Seven, actually.”
As if that makes a difference, I think. In the silence that follows, I nudge Moira.
“You should just let me drive you,” she says, taking the hint.
“Yeah,” I agree.
Boone seems to know better than to argue with the two of us, but he doesn’t look exactly happy.
I know what to do to seal the deal and get him to just accept the stupid ride already. “I’d worry so much less knowing you were getting a ride with Moira rather than with some potential serial killer,” I tell him.
He looks at me.
“I’m serious. Worrying is really bad for my condition. Really bad.” I let out a sad little cough to show how the stress is already making me sicker.
It works. Boone rolls his eyes a little, but then he follows Moira out to El-C and gets in.
27
MOIRA
DAY 74: APRIL 12
I open my eyes, but I don’t get up. Instead, I stay where I am under the covers and allow images from yesterday to scroll through my mind. There’s no way my brain is going to let me think about this stuff once I’m fully awake. It will just confuse me all over again, and I don’t have time for that. I have a day to get through.
I probably should have just let Boone hitchhike home like he wanted to, but I wasn’t able to shake the feeling that I still owed him somehow for saving Agnes. It rankled me, that pressure of an unpaid debt. Then Agnes played the terminally ill kid card, and that was that. The sun was going down as we drove out to his house in the sticks. El-C fishtailed a little whenever we went around turns in the dirt road. Swirls of red dust rose up behind us.
Boone was quiet for most of the drive. At one point, he unlatched the lid of the big cassette case I keep on the floor of the passenger side and looked through the tapes, most of which I found at the used music store in town: Fields of the Nephilim, S
isters of Mercy, Suicidal Tendencies, and so on.
“Wow,” he said. “Dark stuff.”
I considered it a compliment. “What do you listen to?”
Boone shrugged. “I don’t know. I like old stuff, too. Just different old stuff. Social D, Hank Junior, Johnny Cash.”
I thought about this for a minute. “Social Distortion is okay,” I said finally. “And maybe Johnny Cash. I like how he wore black all the time.”
“What do you have against Bocephus?”
When I glanced over at him he was grinning, but I still couldn’t really see his eyes. “Who?”
“That’s Hank Junior’s nickname.”
“Ah,” I said. I tried not to smile back at him, and I succeeded. An awkward silence followed. To break it, I asked, “How do you even drive on this road when it snows?”
“My truck usually works fine. Four-wheel drive.”
“You know, I’ve never been out to your place. Not even back when…” My voice trailed off into Awkwardland once again. God, why couldn’t I just shut up already?
“This road was even worse back when we were in grade school,” Boone answered, saving me from feeling like a complete idiot. “The county didn’t maintain it back then.”
Both of us were quiet after that, as if we’d broken some unspoken rule by bringing up that earlier time when we used to be friends. At the last big turn in the road he shifted in his seat. I turned to say something, to try to break the ice that had formed during the past mile or so, but he looked way more uptight than he had a minute earlier. “My driveway’s the long one coming up on the left,” he said, pointing. “You can just drop me at the end of it here.”
“I don’t mind driving all the—”
“No. I don’t want you getting stuck.” Boone was talking fast all of a sudden.
“Getting stuck? Are you serious? The road’s dry as a—”
“Ruts in the driveway,” he said, cutting me off. “Deep ones.” He grabbed his backpack and jumped out before I’d even brought El-C to a full stop. “Thanks for the ride.”
I didn’t have time to reply before he slammed the door and walked away quickly, toward a little house at the end of another long dirt road.
“Sure,” I said to the windshield, my voice dazed and quiet. “Anytime.”
28
BOONE
DAY 73: APRIL 13
Turns out the Chevy just had some loose battery connections. Once I had time to pop the hood and investigate, it wasn’t at all hard to get her back on the road. This time. Now I park the truck in front of the food bank where I can get a shopping cart full of groceries for just twenty bucks. I’d get everything free if Mom had a food assistance card from the state. She never has enough energy to go to the office where they give out the cards, though, even when I offer to drive her there and stay by her side throughout the whole paperwork process.
Today, the cart is filled with day-old donuts and birthday cupcakes, low-grade ground beef, and prespiced frozen chicken pieces in vacuum-packed plastic. Not a bad haul. I load everything into the back of the truck and throw a tarp over it. Sometimes, if it’s the end of the day and they have lots of perishables left, they’ll let me take two shopping carts. It’s always a crapshoot, though. Some days there’s nothing good left, just bags of carrot ends and boxes of dry rice cereal for babies. That or donated cans of random exotic things like coconut milk and canned lychees.
I know better than to ask Mom how long we can keep this up, how long I can keep spending money, even if I’m excruciatingly careful about how I spend it. The life insurance payout has been our main source of income for two years, but it’s not going to last forever. I don’t have to be a full-fledged adult to know that much. It’s not like I can just pick up more time at the Feed & Seed, either, especially since TJ cut my hours in half. If it was later in the year, I’d probably do okay selling wood out of the back of the pickup when I ran out of skulls and antlers, but even then I’d need a working chainsaw. The Stihl I used to cut the last load has been acting up lately. It could take a hundred dollars or more to fix it.
And then there was the drive out to my place with Moira, the embarrassment I felt as we got closer to the house. From the road, it doesn’t look so bad. A little weathered maybe, a little the worse for wear from having prairie wind, sun, rain, and snow beating down on it regularly, but that’s to be expected out here. It’s only when you get up close that you see the missing roof shingles, the chunks of old wood siding gouged and ripped from the exterior, the bowed front steps and warped window trim held in place by just a few remaining rusty nails. The Christmas lights dangling from hooks driven into the roof fascia. It wouldn’t be so bad if the lights were from the holiday season that wrapped up just a few months ago, but this particular string has been hanging there for three years at least. It hasn’t worked for two of those years. Standing that close to the house, a person would only have to take a few more steps to be able to look in through a window. And what would a person see then? That was easy. She’d see the interior of the House Hope Left Behind. She’d see my mother looking ten years older than she is, haggard from fear and sorrow, stooped over a table working a jigsaw puzzle like her life depended on it, like she was trying to figure out what went wrong, but couldn’t quite piece it together.
When the house came into view and Moira acted like she was going to drive me right up to the front door, it was all I could do to stop myself from jumping out of the El Camino while it was still going thirty. The phrases “over my dead body” and “when hell freezes over” rushed into my mind. Probably because both of those things would have to happen simultaneously before I ever, ever allowed Moira Watkins inside the godforsaken shack that doubles as my home sweet home.
29
MOIRA
DAY 72: APRIL 14
Building Frankenstein’s Monster.
That was the caption beneath the picture of me that circulated at the beginning of freshman year. I’d been reapplying my makeup in the fluorescent light of the locker room after PE when I heard giggling nearby. I hadn’t yet applied lipstick, so my mouth was still open in a wide, pale O as I lowered the tube in time to see the reflection of three girls in the mirror, all of them juniors. Oh God, my hair, I thought. It was still spiky and wet from the shower, pulled back from my face with an old elastic headband. Seconds later, there was a flash from one of their phone cameras. By the next morning, copies of the photo were taped up in the hallways and posted all over social media. People started pointing at me and shouting, “She’s alive!” It was the usual horror, really.
“Just ignore them,” Agnes advised, biting her lower lip.
“I’m trying. Believe me.”
“It could have been worse. You could have been wearing a towel or nothing at—”
“I know.”
The irony was that I’d recently decided to be pretty much done with the whole goth thing. I was just tired of it. The makeup I was applying that day in the locker room was noticeably toned down compared to how I’d been wearing it since eighth grade. I’d even donated some of my edgier clothes back to the thrift store where I bought them. But after the photo went viral, I had no choice but to reembrace a style that screamed Death! and Darkness! It was the only way I knew to not show weakness, to let the bastards know they weren’t going to get me down.
Still, more than a year after the Frankenstein picture got plastered all over the school, it doesn’t help when I feel like a monster yet again. When it becomes abundantly clear, for example, how quickly any guy who manages to spend more than five minutes in my presence wants to get away. Take Boone, for instance, and the way he bolted from El-C before I even got to the end of his driveway. Clearly he was freaked out by my music, my cynicism, my entire existence. The feeling of utter rejection that washed over me as soon as he shut the car door made me want to say, Hey, wait. I think you might be misunderstanding something.
It also made me want to hurt him right back.
It makes
me shudder in self-revulsion.
30
BOONE
DAY 71: APRIL 15
It doesn’t seem like so long ago that we were in sixth grade and I came this close to telling her she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.
At the time, I knew Moira would think I was being a dope. Shut up, she’d say. You’re just trying to make me feel better.
But she would have been wrong. Not that it mattered once she shut me out. Maybe I would have found the courage to tell her she was beautiful later if things had gone differently. Who knows?
These days, it’s pretty obvious Moira thinks I’m a head case. All I need is for her to get an eyeful of my house and my one remaining nonfunctional parent to really make my life complete.
And so it goes and goes and goes. Some days, it’s surprisingly easy to ignore how most guys my age are out shooting hoops or playing in garage bands or hanging with girls at parties every weekend. Other days, not so much. I despise self-pity, hate it most of all in myself. Still, sometimes I can’t help but feel like every other sixteen-year-old guy in the universe is boarding the party plane to some magical land of women and money and fun while I sit by the side of the road, broken down before I even reached the airport.
31
AGNES
DAY 70: APRIL 16
Moira’s family lives in an old, two-story Victorian house that’s in constant disarray. There’s art all over the walls, musical instruments everywhere, and, in the middle of it all, a baby grand piano. When we were girls, Moira and I would sometimes build forts under the piano and huddle there while her dad played jazz melodies or sonatas, filling our world with sound.
The house is one of my favorite places in the world, especially on a Saturday like today, when there’s nothing that has to be done and nowhere that I have to be. It’s the only place where I can really get away from my usual routine, other than school, which isn’t much of a getaway at all.
“B-I-N-G-O!” I sing the tune of the old campfire song as Moira’s dog comes up to me with his tongue lolling and his tail waving back and forth like a metronome. I’ve taken billions of pictures of him over the years, and I take another one now. Then I cup his muzzle in my hands, and he sighs. Back when we were in grade school, I loved throwing a tennis ball for Bingo out in the backyard. He knocked me down once, and Moira just about had a cow. I didn’t hold it against him, though. “He’s just being a dog,” I said.
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