I see the damage in Daddy, too. He gets work as a handyman some days by standing outside in a parking lot with a bunch of mostly Mexican guys and waiting to see if someone will come by and choose him. On the days he works, he comes home, pops a beer, and sits on the couch flipping the channels of that big, big TV. He is lost, as lost as Bayou Perdu.
But Mama. She is different here. She’s happier. She likes putting on a skirt and stockings to go to work. She likes wearing heels. She could never have done that at the diner. She likes sitting at a desk and answering the phone. She probably likes going to the break room and making microwave popcorn for herself. She’s not hot and dirty, and there’s no one making demands of her every minute. She doesn’t burn her fingers or have to explain that she’s run out of the special. Most of all, I thinks she likes that she’s not the one making all the decisions — having to fire people or beg for credit from the bank. She shows up, does her job, and leaves. Sometimes on the way home, she stops and goes shopping because she can and buys another pair of shoes or a set of place mats that were on sale. You can tell, she feels like she’s really moving up in the world.
Mandy, though, is moving in the opposite direction. She got right to work making sure everyone knew that she was someone important where she came from. But the truth is, she’s not going to cut it with the popular crowd here. She may have been the biggest thing at Bayou Perdu High School, but the cheerleaders here are out of her league. She’s “country come to town,” as Mamere would say. I can see her trying and missing the mark. Since the football cheerleading squad has been in place since last spring, she tries out for basketball cheerleading. On the day the announcement is made, I find her in our bedroom crying hard, mascara running down her face.
I sit down next to her on the bed in the dark. “Sorry,” I say without asking what happened. I know.
“It’s pathetic,” she chokes out. “I can’t even make basketball cheerleading.” She says the word basketball like it’s chess or something. Like it’s the most pitiful thing anyone could ever cheer about.
I’ve always found her cheerleading obsession shallow and stupid, but I get it. I put my arm around her.
She sobs harder. “I wasn’t good enough.”
Mamere says that there’s always going to be people with more than you and those with less. You can’t spend your time looking around for things you don’t have. But so much of what Mandy had, what she was, was dependent on having more than others: prettier, more popular, the most boyfriends. Without it, I don’t think she knows who she is anymore.
“Mandy.” I put my hand under her chin to lift her face so she’ll look at me, like a little kid who fell on the playground. “You’re good at everything you do. You always have been. Remember the Mandy on homecoming court every single year? And in the state softball championship? This is a setback. You can get past it.”
“No,” she says fiercely. “I’m not her anymore. She’s gone.”
As if to underscore her point, she makes this new friend called Lacy. She’s one of those girls who wear way too much makeup and talk with that fake ghetto accent. She’s what Mamere would call “common.” People always say that when you go to a new school, the good kids already have their friends and the only ones who are looking for more are the bad ones. I’m a little surprised that Mandy would fall for that, but then again, she has an air of desperation around her here and like attracts like, I guess.
I’m not sure what that says about me, though, because I seem to be attracting Tate. I don’t know what he could possibly see in me. A girl with a possibly-dead best friend who’s dead inside herself. I’m wearing other people’s clothes and living in someone else’s house. But on the trip to the lake, he seemed taken with the fact that I know how to fish and operate an outboard. He laughs at my jokes as if I’m wildly amusing. I catch him looking and smiling at me during class. It’s sweet, I guess. It’s something. I wish I could talk about it with Danielle. But I’m still a little surprised when he asks me to the homecoming dance. “I mean, just as friends, of course,” he adds hastily in response to the look on my face. “Never been to one of these things before. Thought it might be good people-watching.”
“Sure. Sounds fun,” I lie. Sixteen years in Bayou Perdu and no date. Two weeks at Brookdale High and I’ve got a date to homecoming.
“You’ve got a date to homecoming? Seriously? Now I’ve heard everything,” sneers Mandy, who does not have a date to homecoming.
“The world’s gone mad,” I deadpan to her.
I get ready at Aunt Cel’s. Mamere fixes up an old dress of Ami’s from the ’90s so I can wear it in public. “Oh, so now you’ll wear a dress,” Mandy says, shaking her head.
For the second time in as many months and in our lives, Mandy is trying to get me ready for a moment that should have been hers. “Here,” she says, bringing out a little jeweled headband that she must have found in Ami’s bedroom. “You need something for your hair. Just come on. No one from home is here to see you.”
It looks suspiciously like a crown. Without a shrimp. I roll my eyes. “Fine.” I am playing a role. A normal girl going to a homecoming dance. This is what she would wear.
Tate comes to pick me up at Aunt Cel’s and has a corsage and everything. He is polite to my family. We get into his nice car. “You look really pretty,” he says.
“Thanks,” I say.
“What kind of music do you like?” he asks.
“Lots of different kinds. Most kinds. You?”
“Me too, I guess.”
Then silence.
“So, do you have brothers or sisters?” Boy, I’m really scraping the bottom of the getting-to-know-you question barrel here, but he’s not doing a lot to keep the conversation going.
We get to school and people are stepping out of limos in dresses like you’d see on the red carpet on TV. In fact, there is a red carpet leading into the gym. I feel painfully unsophisticated. No plunging neckline or four-inch heels. No professional makeup job and updo.
This dance is catered. There are waiters in white shirts and black pants walking around with trays of hors d’oeuvres. There’s a DJ and a light show. In Bayou Perdu, we would have a band and a crawfish boil under the boatshed. I’ve felt out of place here before, every minute of every day. But this is like another planet to me. I wish Danielle were here so we could talk about it.
Tate finds his friends, who, to my great relief, also look unsophisticated and out of place. They’re not jocks, not stoners. There’s nothing obviously academic or high-achieving about them. They’re just normal. I make small talk with one of the other girls, Mary Katherine.
“I like your dress,” she says.
“Oh, it’s from the nineties,” I say. Why can’t I accept a compliment? “I like yours, too,” I add quickly.
“Thanks!” she says. “Are you and Tate dating?”
“No, just friends. I just moved here. He’s being nice.”
She nods. “He’s like that. So sweet.”
Our conversation fades away because it’s hard to hear over the throbbing hip-hop. The DJ switches to more clubby dance music, and a few people get up to dance. I’m terrified that Tate will ask me to dance to this, but he doesn’t. The minutes feel like hours. They finally play some mainstream country music like we would have had at home. I’m desperate for something, anything to happen. “Do you know how to two-step?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
“Want to learn?”
He shrugs.
We’re off to the side of the dance floor. There are groups and couples out there, some who really know how to dance, others just goofing around because they think country music is so uncool it will be funny to try to dance to it. I show him a few steps, and then we join in with the lines. My heartbeat gets going a little. I find myself smiling, laughing a little. I’m almost having fun. When the song’s over, we sit back down.
“That was fun,” he says. “You’re good at that.”
“Reall
y, not,” I say. But things feel a little more comfortable with him. Maybe this is not so bad. Maybe. Maybe if I give it time.
I excuse myself for the bathroom, then wait in line with a bunch of girls who have obviously been sneaking in booze or came drunk already. There’s a girl in front of me in sky-high heels, and when she exits the bathroom, she trips and goes splat before I can grab her.
“Are you OK?” I rush to her side to help her up. A guy coming out of the men’s room gets her other arm. After she’s on her feet, she looks at me with annoyance rather than gratitude and then hobbles away, smoothing out her dress. When she moves, I see the guy who was holding up her other side. It takes a second for his face to register, but when it does, my brain pretty much explodes. It’s the guy with the boat from Bayou Valse d’Oiseau. It’s Tru.
We stare at each other for what feels like forever. And it really is like a teen movie, where our eyes lock and music and noise around us recedes and there is only this intense shock of staring into each other’s eyes in disbelief. I’m sure my mouth is hanging open. His definitely is.
“Gumbo Girl. Evangeline,” he says in wonderment. “Every time I see you, you’re saving someone. And wearing a crown.”
Without saying a word, I reach up and rip the stupid headband off my head, my hair falling all around. But I still can’t say anything. I can’t reconcile everything that’s happening. Me. Him. Here. Me. Him. Here.
“This is . . . wow,” he says. “This is incredible.”
“This is incredible,” I manage to repeat stupidly. “Do you —? What —?” I can’t finish a sentence. “What are you doing here?” I finally get out. “Do you actually go here now? This actual school?”
“This actual school,” he says. “For, like, a month. Do you?”
“Yes. Also for, like, a month.”
“Bayou Perdu,” he says in a way that I take as shell-shocked shorthand for I heard. It’s gone. I’m sorry.
“Yeah,” I say, nodding. “St. Bernard,” meaning the exact same thing.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Is your family OK? And the Trans?”
“OK, yeah,” he says. “Relatively speaking. We lost everything. But, you know, we’re still alive, so . . .”
“Yeah, I know.” I feel like something passes silently between us.
“How is Kaye?” I blurt out. “She’s not here, too, is she?”
He looks confused. “Who?”
“Kaye Pham. From Bayou Perdu. I thought you guys were dating.”
“What?” He looks genuinely surprised. “No. What made you think that?”
Relief washes over me. “She was talking about you at school.”
“What? No. No.” He shakes his head. “She’s nice, but my cousin was just trying to set us up. Unsuccessfully. What did she say, exactly?”
“I don’t remember, exactly.”
“No, we never even went out. My cousin was just trying to set us up because . . . well, it’s a long story,” he says. “Not a particularly interesting one.”
Just talking about someone from home, something familiar, feels so comforting. Even if we are talking about someone I thought he was dating.
“And you?” he asks. “You’re here with someone?”
“Just a friend. Sympathy date. For a Katrina victim. You know how it is.” If there was a way for me to downplay this date any further, I don’t know what it could be.
He laughs. “I doubt very much that it’s a sympathy date. But yes, I know how that is. Refugee status.”
“Are you? Here with someone?”
He tugs at his T-shirt, which he’s wearing over jeans. “I’m the hired help tonight. The music teacher recruited me. I’m helping with the sound setup.” He smiles. Laughs that laugh I remember from that hour or so we spent together back in Bird’s Waltz Bayou in another lifetime. A laugh that invites you in somehow. “So you go to this actual school?” he asks, as if he’s talking to himself out loud. “And we haven’t seen each other?”
“Until now,” I say.
“Until now,” he repeats.
We talk about our schedules. We’re never really near the same place at the same time. My lunch is during his music class, and the music teacher is cool. Since the classroom opens to the back of the soccer field, the teacher lets them go out and practice on the hill near it. Some people take their lunches out there, so maybe we could meet there sometime.
“Sorry, I don’t have a phone,” he says. “You know how it is. Every penny goes toward buying a new boat.”
I nod. “I hear ya. If my dad doesn’t get some work soon, mine will probably be gone, too.”
“I better get back to work now,” he says. “You better get back out there. There may be some people who need help on the dance floor.”
“There are definitely people out there who need some serious help,” I say. “Gumbo Girl to the rescue.”
He turns down the hall toward the back entrance to the gym. And I feel like one of those cartoon characters whose eyes turn into hearts and little birds tweet and float around their heads. I open the door to the gym — to the pop music, the heat, and the purple lights — and I can’t stop myself from bopping my head along to the stupid dance song, all the way back to the table. I am bursting. All those SAT words that mean ecstatic. Ebullient. Elated.
“You must really like this song,” says Tate when I get back to the table, beaming and flush for the first time since we got here with this feeling of possibility, of hope.
I just giggle a stupid, Mandy-ish giggle. “This song rocks,” I say. “Wanna dance?”
He gets up and dances with me, looking a little awkward and embarrassed. We dance goofily through a few more songs before his friends start to leave.
“Tonight was really fun,” he says as he drops me off.
“It was really fun,” I say.
“Well, see you at school,” he says. To my relief, he doesn’t try to kiss me.
“Thanks for everything,” I say, and I rocket into the house, tolerating everyone’s questions until I can get up to my room to be by myself with my thoughts, with this thing that is only mine. I take it out and hold it for a moment. He is here. Tru is here. He’s not with Kaye. I get to see him again. The only thing that could make it better would be sharing this moment with Danielle.
I remember Mandy telling me one time that men like the chase. For them, dating is the same as fishing. It’s all about anticipation. Imagining what will happen. You have to make them work for it. I remember thinking it was ironic that my sister, who really doesn’t like fishing, was using fishing analogies to describe dating. But that really is the way it is for her. String the bait and reel them in, keep them hooked or throw them back.
This may indeed be solid advice. I probably should wait at least a few days before wandering out to the soccer field during lunch to try to find him. But lunch has been pure torture for me ever since I got here, and I really can’t wait to see him again. I take my paper-bag lunch and head around the side of the building toward the back, past the clusters of people with friends, past the sketchy-looking loners who follow me with their eyes, toward the open back door of the music room. When I turn the corner, I see him sitting on a sunny patch of the hill with two other people. My heart seizes up. My feet carry me forward. Getting closer, I can see that he’s got his guitar and the guy to the right has a trombone. The guy on the other side has a bright-pink Mohawk. I walk toward Tru and his friend working out a song on a guitar. I approach, take a deep breath, step out of the shade, and stand in front of them. He stands up immediately, looking a little surprised, but also, to my relief, pleased.
“Hey!” I say, as if getting here took absolutely no emotional effort on my part.
“Hey! You came,” he says. “And you brought food.”
Now, at least, I feel like I did the right thing. It’s good to have the lunch as a prop. “Yep,” I say. “Muffaletta and some chips.”
The guy with the trombone looks up at me. “
Girl, I know you ain’t say you got a muffaletta in that bag.” While he’s obviously exaggerating it, his accent gives him away. He’s from New Orleans. And while that’s a world away from Bayou Perdu, here that distance is nothing. He’s my people.
“Evangeline, this is Derek,” Tru says, gesturing to the trombone player. “And Chase.” The pink-Mohawk guy. Chase has an open laptop instead of an instrument. “Evangeline’s another one of us Katrina refugees.”
“I’m surrounded,” says Chase. “Welcome to my hometown, such as it is.” His voice is a lot higher and his disposition is a lot sunnier than I thought they would be based on his hair.
I pull out the sandwich. “We can split it, if you want,” I say.
“In that case, you can visit our music class anytime,” says Chase.
Tru smiles and gestures for me to sit down. “After you, mam’zelle,” he says. I sit.
“You got real olive spread on that muffaletta?” Derek asks suspiciously.
“I make it myself from Mamere’s recipe.” I break the muffaletta into four pieces and give one to each of them, keeping the smallest part for myself. I’m focused on Tru, but now I really want Derek’s approval of my olive spread. I watch both of them eating it. Tru closes his eyes in a rhapsodic expression. “Oh, yeah, this tastes like home,” he says.
Derek nods and gives me a thumbs-up. Chase tilts his head and mumbles, “S’good” through bites. I feel glad that I came.
“You people are really into your food, aren’t you?” Chase asks when he finishes swallowing.
“Yes, we people are,” says Tru. “How could we not be?”
“The food’s probably the thing I miss the most,” says Derek. “Along with the music. The stuff they try to pass off as ‘Cajun food’ up here. It’s a joke.”
“Zatarain’s is in the international section of the grocery store here,” I say.
“Zata-what? What is that?” Chase asks.
“It’s a Louisiana secret. If we told you, we’d have to kill you,” says Tru.
“You don’t know what Zatarain’s is?” says Derek. “He probably doesn’t know what jambalaya is, either.”
Between Two Skies Page 7