by Jo Ann Beard
I wave back.
“Hi there,” says a girl.
“Jane!” I say. She looks different somehow, now that her mother is dead. “How are you doing?”
“Fine,” she says nervously, looking around. “Everyone’s over by the fire, sitting on a log.” She seems to be walking around with Mark Johansson, a boy who is very cute but obscure; there’s some reason he isn’t more popular, which nobody can put a finger on.
“Let’s go,” he says.
“We’re looking for the punch,” Jane explains.
“I like your hair,” I say, because that’s what’s different—she has bangs now. They make her look like the picture in the locket her mother was wearing.
“Oh, it’s just these,” she says, touching the bangs, which are sort of short.
“Let’s go,” Mark the Obscure says.
Everyone is over by the fire, sitting on a log. If they see me in this jacket, we’ll all feel terrible. Why didn’t I figure something out, stow another coat behind the pavilion or something, or not come at all? That was the only real solution, and I could have done it—my mother needed me at home. She’s alone there now, at the kitchen window, smoking and waiting for one of us to come back. The sky suddenly feels crowded and awful, too many stars, and now the moon too, which wasn’t there before.
“Hi,” says Freddy Man. “What did he call you?”
“Who?” I ask.
“Tommy—he called you Magnet, or something like that.”
“Oh. Magna Carta. It’s a thing from history,” I say.
“Oh,” Freddy Man says, nodding, and then just stands there.
The party mills around us, but it has a rustling quiet, like being in a field of cattle in the middle of the night. If it’s dark enough, the cattle are just presences, big mounds shifting as you walk through them. Except for the cow pies, it’s magical and strange.
“Did you see where Gretchen went?” Freddy asks.
“Maybe over there?” I point to a knot of people.
“I already looked over there,” Freddy Man says.
“Maybe over there?” I point to the bonfire, and standing beside it, poking a stick into the flames, is the boy Hector. The same farm jacket and black cap, the same eyes.
“Where did you go?” Cindy says. “You were supposed to be following us.” Behind her are Patterson, Kathy, Cathy, and Gretchen.
Where did I go. “I don’t know,” I say. Hector lifts a big piece of firewood and lays it on top of the bonfire, loosening a torrent of sparks. For a moment his face looks bright and hot.
“No boys!” Gretchen cries, running behind me to peek at Freddy Man, who looks horribly miserable all of a sudden, like he might cry.
“Where’d you get that punch?” Cindy asks Kathy.
“Over there,” Kathy says, taking a sip. “By that log where people are sitting.”
“Where Freddy Man?” Gretchen says, looking around.
Hector has disappeared too. There’s the fire going strong, and where he was standing on the other side of it, nothing, just darkness.
“Come on,” says Cindy, and they all turn at once, like a school of shining fish, and follow her.
Banner for a School of Monsters is the name of a Max Ernst painting that shows a creature in a black forest, head cracked open to better reveal its teeth. It’s all sharp claws and primary colors, like a monster from a child’s imagination. You can only wonder what’s happening back at my house right now while I stand here alone.
“Hello,” somebody says, gliding past.
“Hello,” I say.
I wonder what my father does, adrift in the night, after the bars close. Nowhere to sleep but the backseat or a park bench.
And what if the park bench were in this very park, what if my dad came reeling through the crowd, looking for a place to pass out, what would I do? What would I do? My heart lurches in circles, looking for a way out of this thought.
“Hey, Galen’s trying to find you,” someone says.
He is?
“I’ll give you money for that absence slip,” Galen says, wandering up with Patti attached to him.
“I told him you had a slip from the office with no name, date, or time on it,” Patti explains. Her hair is shining, as always, but her lips are sliding sideways on her face. I’m starting to realize people are drunk.
“I pay five dollars if they aren’t folded,” Galen says.
“I didn’t fold it,” I say. “It’s in my health book.”
“Put it in the vent of locker number 1202,” Galen says, taking a bill out of his pocket and giving it to me.
“And drink!” Patti calls over her shoulder.
Drink, drank, drunk.
“Hi,” says Tommy Walton.
“No,” I answer.
He looks at me.
“I mean,” I say, and then stand there. What do I mean?
A girl bumps into Tommy and sprawls on the ground. He helps her up; she’s laughing with her hair across her face, and another girl drags her away. Tommy tips his spilled cup toward me—all gone—then takes my elbow and starts steering me toward the bonfire, the booze, the log.
As we pass the pavilion, he sets his cup on a ledge and pulls me inside. Picnic tables have been stacked in here for the winter, and I sense that kids have climbed them like scaffolding and are necking, though it’s all just shapes in the blackness, faint rustling sounds. The thing about the nighttime cattle is that they always know where you are, even if you can’t see them. Tommy leans against the wall, gathering me against him with one hand and pushing my hair back with the other. I’m shorter than he is, so mostly what’s happening is between me and his coat, a dark wool CPO. My face is pressed against the pocket; I can feel the button on my chin.
“You have beautiful hair,” he whispers. “It just hangs there in history, right in front of me.”
“Thank you,” I whisper back. It’s true, my hair is my one good thing.
He shifts slightly and his hand moves down to the small of my back, pressing me against him. Everything feels very focused all of a sudden, his breath in my ear, the warm starfish shape of the hand on my back, the contours of his leg. All I would have to do now is look up, instead of down, and I’d most likely be necking.
“Hey,” he whispers. “Hey.”
It’s slightly delirious to stand here with his arms around me, my face pressed into his dark plaid, but I’m not going to lift my head. No matter what this feels like right now—the intimate, echoey sounds of feet shuffling on concrete as our bodies arrange themselves closer together, the party just steps away, all those other bodies out there, moving around, trampling the grass, his hands under the cheerleader jacket—Monday is only two days from now. Better to be the plain girl from history class who didn’t kiss him than the plain girl from history class who did.
The Magnet Carta was enacted to limit the powers of the king. I wrench myself free from him. In the arched doorway of the pavilion, Tommy Walton squints at me.
“You’re odd,” he says.
He leaves his cup behind, so I hold it just for something to do with my hand. Someone yells and then someone else, and then a bunch of people make them be quiet. On the river side of the pavilion are two rocks with a bench between them. Sitting there is Petie, Martha Van Dalle’s retarded neighbor. I perch on the bench for a moment, a few feet away, and try to look as though I’m finally getting a rest from the party.
“Where’s Martha?” I ask her.
She kicks at her own shoe with the other shoe. “Kissing a kid,” she answers loudly.
Okay.
“I used to have a bird named Petie,” I mention, just for something to say.
She stares at me, her lips bunched up under her nose. “I used to have a bird named whatever your name is too,” she answers.
It occurs to me that Petie may not be retarded at all; she may be obnoxious.
Someone peeks a head around the corner of the pavilion, and it’s Hector.
; “Oh,” he says, seeing my cup. “You got punch.”
“It’s actually empty,” I say, showing him.
He takes a long drag off a cigarette and flicks it out into the night, like a shooting star. “Because we got your beer over there, what you asked for.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.”
“Where did you get it?”
“All stole,” he admits, grinning.
“Really?”
“From the back door of Walgreens. Me and Galen dragged a wagon over all these goddamned hills.” His voice is softly slurred in its hillbilly cadences, and in the moonlight his face looks sharp and white, like it’s been carved out of soap. Suddenly I feel nervous again. What if someone comes through, saying that there’s a drunk man lurching around, looking for a park bench? It couldn’t happen, but if it did, I guess I would just take off running.
“Hi,” Petie says loudly.
Hector gives her a curious look—she’s big, in a padded coat and a black knit cap, her lips pushed forward in a scowl—and then nods.
“Are you going to kiss him?” she asks me.
It’s cold on the bench, but the boots are warm and the cheerleader jacket is warm. The sleeves are leather and the rest of it is boiled wool with a quilted lining. Nothing warmer than boiled wool, but how do they boil it? Just in water, like an egg?
“Yes,” I say.
Petie the parakeet came from an elderly woman who lived down our street. I saw him for the first time in her house, after she got sick, on a day when my mother looked in on her. The old woman sat me down in her dark living room, had me hold out my finger, and set the bird on it. While my mother straightened up the house and gathered a load of sheets and towels, the old woman puttered around in the kitchen, protesting and making coffee. The whole time it took for them to sit around doing a wash and getting it hung up in the basement, the bird and I sat together on her brocade chair, him walking up and down my forearm and, when I touched the tips of my index fingers to each other, stepping across and walking up the other arm. At the top he sat on my shoulder, sorting through my hair until he came to my ear, which he gave a piercing jab to before crawling along my shirtfront to the other side. He got that ear too and then sat on my shoulder, leaning forward to look at my lips while I whistled. A few months later, he was brought to our house in his cage and given to me, but he pecked my finger every time I put it near him and then, not long after, died.
That was the story of that Petie.
This Petie seems to be crying.
For all I know, maybe my father finds a woman to stay with on the nights he doesn’t come home, or maybe he sleeps on the ground—he and my mother did go camping a lot before they had kids. On their honeymoon, at the Wisconsin Dells, they caught an enormous northern pike that wouldn’t be hauled to shore; in their old-fashioned fishing hats, they rowed in circles, trying to wear it out, but the northern wore them out instead. The photo my mother took on the dock is of my father holding up his finned and bloody hands in defeat.
That’s how I picture it when I think of him out there alone—somehow younger than he is now, and exhausted, whatever he needed eluding him.
“Are you okay?” I ask Petie.
She won’t answer but just keeps wrinkling her nose and grimacing. She’s definitely crying.
“Hey,” Hector says, and crouches in front of her. She looks away from him and shakes her head emphatically.
“Stand up,” Hector says, pulling her to her feet.
She stands obediently, scowling at him, and then he dips his head down and kisses her on the lips.
“Now you’re the one getting kissed,” he tells her.
“No, sir!” she cries, her eyes wide.
“Yes,” he says.
“Not me!” She puts both mittens over her mouth.
“You,” he says.
After Petie runs away to find Martha and tell her the news, Hector tries to get me to go off in the dark with him.
“Come on,” he says, tugging on my sleeve. “I want to show you something.”
“Show me what?” I say, planting my feet.
“Just something.” He puts his hand around my upper arm and tugs.
“But what?”
“Just something.” He tugs harder.
“But something what?” I resist, digging my feet in.
“I’ll show you,” he says and just like that, yanks me down the hill.
I’ve even noticed this with Raymond, who only comes up to my shoulders—boys are strong. You don’t think they are, but suddenly you realize: they are.
My heart is thudding in my chest. I don’t know whether to go along with it and then bolt when he lets go, or whether to keep resisting and possibly wreck my boots. This kid was put in Red Rock for a reason.
The school of monsters, Max Ernst’s dark forests and odd creatures, the cracked jawbone and a row of dinosaur teeth, Loplop perched on his scaly legs, the hubcaps, ponytails, doorbells, outhouses, garden gates, birds in egg baskets, a bottle with a blob in it, a girl holding a rusted blacksmith’s nail. In the painting of two children threatened by a nightingale, one is being carried off by a man as the other screams for help.
Help, Felicia.
We used to be able to get each other’s attention telepathically in class, she and I, by internally bellowing the other person’s name while staring at their back or the side of their head, or even a sleeve, whatever was visible.
Felicia!
Now we’re going downhill and I have to run to keep from falling; we’re in the hollow, where you can’t hear or see the party at all, and where there’s old snow, gleaming in the inky blackness. We’re heading to the overlook, the big rock with all the warning signs.
Help, Felicia!
My grandmother’s house, the chicken shed I used to jump off into a pile of loose dirt, the ankle-turning plummet, and then a mouthful of grit. The stone, the leaf, the unfound door. The old stump with two nails pounded into it, the chicken’s neck stretched between them, the eye that watches the ax come down, what happens afterward, never seen but read about—the body running in circles, terrified to be without its head. Hector pulls me up onto the big rock where no one is supposed to go.
Felicia!
“See?” he says, letting go of my hand.
And there it is, larger and brighter than I’ve ever seen it, floating above the Mississippi like a giant pearl. The moon over Zanesville.
* * *
All those years ago, at my birthday party in the pavilion, I got as my gift a pearl necklace from a jewelry store. The pearl in its filigreed setting rested on a piece of velvet cardboard bent to fit the box, its length of gold chain hidden below. It was from the whole family, minus Raymond, who wasn’t born yet, but it was really from my dad.
“He saw this, and that’s all there was to it,” my mother told everyone as she fastened it around my neck. In the picture of me with all my friends, you can see the pearl against the blue collar of my dress.
“It’s beautiful,” I tell Hector.
From atop the dangerous rock, we gaze down at the inky void and back up at the starry sky until we’re dizzy and then he turns and kisses me. No ceremony, no confusion of legs and arms. Just kisses me more or less like he did Petie.
I know I’m not cute, but I’m still having fun at this party.
“Is that you?” Felicia calls. “Are you okay?”
I step to the edge of the rock and there she is, bent over and panting, looking up through the late-night frizz of her hair. “Hi,” I say.
“I thought you were in trouble,” she says.
“Really?”
“Yes, really,” she says, swiping at her nose. She squints past me, at Hector, who is smoking his cigarette and listening, or not listening. “Why did I think you were dying or something?”
“Mental telepathy,” I confess.
“Out here?” she asks, looking around. “I thought it only worked in class.”
“Me too.�
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“Wait—why did you?” she asks.
I widen my eyes.
“Oh,” she says, nodding.
There’s a long, thoughtful silence, during which a cloud passes over the moon, dimming us for a moment. Then the giant pearl is restored to its spot on the big sky-bosom.
“Anyhoo,” I say.
“Well, I was having a heart attack,” she says.
“I’ve been having one for this whole party,” I admit.
“You have?” she asks.
“Yeah. I feel weird about this, for one thing,” I say, indicating the cheerleader jacket.
“You do?”
“Yeah.”
“I wouldn’t feel weird—it looks cute.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“No,” she says. “I’d feel weird about being an asshole.”
“I think I’ll go back up where the beer is,” Hector says.
At my grandmother’s house, during the era of jumping off sheds, there was a spare room that had a bed with a dark pink tufted bedspread and a doll leaning against the pillow. The doll was a baby with molded hair and a bottle with magic milk inside, which disappeared and reappeared, depending on how you held it. The bottle was kept jammed in the doll’s mouth, jutting straight up in the air as though an imaginary person were holding it there. The magic bottle was highly prized among the girl cousins, and once, during a family gathering, I crept in there and took the bottle, keeping it in a deep, baggy pocket of my overalls all afternoon and into the evening, occasionally stepping into the bathroom to play with it by myself. Eventually I started feeling guilty and pressured by the fact that its disappearance was causing an uproar among the cousins, who had decided the culprit was an older, wry cousin named Deenie, who not only had no interest in dolls but would demonstrate her indifference to them by various means. Like putting them on the floor and stepping on their heads.
“Why would someone who hates dolls take a doll’s bottle?” she continued to ask disgustedly.
“Because you’re robbing a doll, that’s why,” I said nervously at one point, before retiring to the bathroom to tip the bottle back and forth and think about what to do.