The Witch

by Jean Thompson

  They might have gone on fighting, just because they were bored, but right then Richie Cruz and two of his buddies came in. Janice and Marilee agreed that Richie was hot. But really he was cool and smooth, like ice cream, like you could lick him all over. He had a curvy mouth and green eyes and beautiful black hair and all that was just from the neck up.

  Janice’s mother said that under no circumstances was Janice to have anything to do with Puerto Rican boys, who were even worse than any other kind. She said they acted like they owned every woman on the street, those Ricans, them and their wolf whistles. Which Janice thought was completely stupid; who ever heard of a wolf whistling?

  “What are you doing? Don’t look at him,” Marilee ordered.

  “Like he would care what I’m looking at.” Richie was sixteen and they were just little punks that he ignored.

  “You’re looking right at his ass.”

  “Then he can’t see me unless he turns around.”

  Marilee hissed at her to be quiet. One of Richie’s friends was staring straight at them. He laughed and said something to Richie. Janice felt her face going red. Her ears buzzed with shame. “Real suave,” Marilee remarked.

  Janice ducked her chin. “What’s he doing now?”

  “Richie? Nothing. Anyway, I am not looking at him!”

  Maybe Richie had girls checking out his ass all the time and was used to it. She felt so majorly stupid, she wanted to get up and run out of there, but that would be even worse. She stared at her knees and hoped the boys weren’t going to sit down, and then she hoped they would, and Richie would check her out, his amazing green eyes finally turning her way, and she would speak up and say, “See anything you like?”

  Marilee kicked her under the table. Janice looked up to see the boys headed for the door with their food. Richie was already past them, his beautiful head silhouetted against the glass, but his friend, the one who had laughed, turned around and grinned and did something dirty with his tongue, wiggling the tip of it between his teeth. Marilee and Janice both said, “Ugh!”

  “That was nasty,” Janice said.

  “Totally.”

  “What do you think he said to Richie?” She had a sick feeling about that.

  “Oh, probably, ‘There’s a little slut over there who wants to give you a blow job.’”

  “Shut up.”

  “Well you do. You would.”

  “Oh sure, like you wouldn’t, if he wanted you to.”

  “I would not,” Marilee said, and it was her turn to go red in the face, a blotchy red because she had such pale skin. One of their arguments that circled around and around had to do with Janice being a slut and Marilee being a stuck-up prude. There was a lot of stuff she didn’t tell Marilee anymore.

  Janice ate another french fry, even though it was cold and covered in ketchup. What was the point of arguing about Richie? Neither of them was ever going to say two words to him.

  “I have to get to my grandma’s and back home before my mom wets her pants.”

  “Your brother’s outside,” Marilee said, pointing.

  “Oh, perfect.” Her brother Jason was two years younger, and a complete brat. They got up to go and Marilee asked what she was doing tonight and Janice said nothing, maybe they could hang out, text me, and Marilee said she would. They weren’t really mad at each other but Janice thought that someday they might be.

  Jason and two of his little punk friends were riding their bikes down the stairs of the post office, trying to smash their brains in. “Hi freak,” he greeted her.

  “Bye freak.”

  “You’re supposed to be at Nana’s. I’m telling Mom.”

  “Go ahead, asshole.”

  “I’m telling Mom you said asshole.”

  “I am so, so scared.”

  “I’ll tell her you took your shirt off.”

  Janice gave him the finger and walked on. The chicken and noodles were heavy and it was hard to keep the plastic bag from knocking into her bare leg. It was still hotter than sin outside, the kind of aggravating heat that made you want to scratch all your itchy parts into a rash. She looked up and down the street for Richie and his friends, but of course they’d gone. Still it was something to have seen him, like getting close to somebody famous, and if he came into the A&W once, maybe he’d come in again.

  She had a hundred daydreams about how Richie and her would end up together. Sometimes there was a fire or a car crash and he saved her. Sometimes she saved him. There were other versions in which they got to know each other in unexpected and dramatic ways. But sometimes she didn’t bother with any of these, and let Richie put his hands all over her and peel her like an orange, and why couldn’t it be easy like that? Instead of all the stupid teasing and hooting and things you weren’t supposed to do except everybody did.

  Nana lived in an apartment above a used-furniture store. Everything about her neighborhood was weird and depressing: the bakery with the cardboard wedding cake in the window and the dusty bride and groom on top, the lawyer’s office with his name spelled out in English and in Hebrew, the barbershop that was never open, probably because nobody around here had hair anymore. Nana wouldn’t move, even though Janice’s mother kept after her to. She was afraid of ending up in the nursing home. When people got old like Nana, Janice’s mother said, they got very excited about the idea of dying in their own beds.

  Janice rang Nana’s doorbell, then let herself in with her key. “Hi Nana, I brought your dinner,” she called, in case Nana had forgotten she was coming over and thought somebody had broken in, or maybe was having an embarrassing bathroom episode. “Yoo-hoo, Nana?”

  Nana was in her usual chair where she could see the television and look out the window, depending on which way she turned. She was as fat as Janice’s mother, but shorter, like a car or something heavy had landed on her head and squashed her down. She wore one of her dresses that didn’t quite button up over her shelf of bosom, so you saw the big white cotton bra underneath. It didn’t really matter what Nana looked like since she never went anywhere. The television was on loud, some kind of talk show. “Hi Nana, are you hungry? Mom made you chicken and noodles.”

  Nana shifted around in her chair to see Janice better. “Put on some clothes.”

  She’d forgotten. “All right, Nana, it’s just really hot outside. It’s hot in here too, is your air conditioner working?” Janice untied the shirt from around her waist and put her arms through the sleeves. Why couldn’t anybody ever give her a break? “How are you today?”

  “I have bad blood, maybe cancer.”

  “Well I bet you’ll feel better once you have your dinner. Do you want to eat there? Or sit at the table?”

  Nana pushed her way up from her chair and stumped over to the kitchen table. Janice was quick to turn the television down. She helped Nana get herself settled. Nana wore an old-fashioned hairnet, the kind you could use to catch fish, and her white scalp showed through her hair. Nana wasn’t even all that old, seventy-two or -three, but she might as well have been a hundred. It was the same with Janice’s mother, who was only forty, but she’d decided to give up on her looks and be somebody who never shaved her legs.

  Janice dumped the chicken and noodles and some tap water into a pot on the stove. It was a solid, stuck-together mess and she prodded at it with a wooden spoon. Nana said, “Tell your mother, I need soap. Pink soap.”

  “All right.”

  “And rubber bands. It was on the television, about that girl.”

  “What girl?” Janice said, though she pretty much knew already.

  “The one who run off and they couldn’t find. They found her. All cut up.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it, Nana.”

  “All cut up and thrown out like the trash. You know what they do to her first?”

  “No, and don’t tell me. That’s—” There was a
word for her grandmother always telling her the worst, most horrible stories, about girls getting raped and murdered and ending up in landfills or somebody’s freezer, a really good word, but she couldn’t think of it. “—sick.”

  “She was a bad girl.”

  “How do you know that, Nana? Whoever hurt her, he’s the bad one.”

  “She run off.”

  “Well maybe she had a good reason for it.”

  “No good reason. That thing between your legs? You can’t see it but anybody else in the world can if they want to. Remember.”

  “That’s sick,” Janice said again. Sick was the clump of gluey food in the saucepan. It was the hot apartment and the shivery burning that rose up in her. Nana reached out and touched the back of Janice’s bare leg with her fat soft finger, and Janice let out a little shriek. “Don’t touch me!”

  “That’s right. You keep on saying that.”

  Janice walked home fast. It was a long way from being dark, but the sky had lowered another notch and the heat was glassy and she still felt a little sick, throw-up sick. Nobody was out on the streets in Nana’s neighborhood, they never were, but what if somebody was watching her. Was it better to walk slow or fast? She kept her phone up to her ear so that anybody seeing her would think she was talking. She tried to think about Richie Cruz and how he could be the one watching her, following her, but that was no good because then his face blurred into something unrecognizable and mean.

  When she got to the post office, Jason was still there. He’d given up on running his bike on the stairs and was sitting on the bottom step, picking at his mosquito bites. “You have to come home with me,” Janice said.

  “I do not.”

  “It’s dinnertime.”

  “Says who?”

  “Just do it, okay?”

  He gave her a squinting look, then hoisted his bike and walked it along behind her.

  When they got home Janice said she wasn’t hungry, she didn’t feel good, she was going to bed. Her mother said, “What’s the matter with you, are you constipated?”

  “No, leave me alone.”

  “If you don’t eat, you can’t poop. Do you have a fever? Let me feel your forehead.”

  “Leave me alone!” She ran upstairs and locked her door even though she wasn’t supposed to and texted Marilee to say she couldn’t hang out. She turned the fan beside her bed up high so she couldn’t hear anything, put the pillow over her head and fell asleep.

  Her eyes opened up to darkness. She could tell it was late. She went to her bedroom door and looked out. The faintest light came from downstairs, the light over the stove that her mother left on all night. The television was off. Jason’s door was closed and dark.

  Janice used the bathroom down the hall and examined herself in the mirror. She brushed her hair and made her bangs poufier. She used the lipstick and black eyeliner she kept under the stack of towels, turning this way and that to see how she looked from different angles.

  Back in her bedroom she locked the door again. She turned on the computer and the pink-shaded lamp next to her bed. The computer screen blinked and brightened. She typed in the address, then sat back to read. After a minute she typed in:

  Hi, what are you doing?

  He wrote back a minute later: Nothing much. Waiting on u. Turn on yur camera.

  OK.

  It was always sort of a shock when his face came swimming up under her fingers, so close. He grinned at her. Hi beautiful.

  She shook her head like she didn’t believe it. Hi yourself.

  How iz my Candy girl?

  Bored. Today just sucked.

  Aww. How about I find me some candy to suck on?

  She giggled. Candy was the name she used with him, not Janice, which was a stupid name that she imagined had a smell to it, like the inside of her house, which always smelled like cooked carrots. He said that Candy was perfect for her because she was so sweet. He said his name was Geronimo, like the famous Apache war chief. He was kind of bullshit but also kind of cool. An thats what people yell when they jump out of airplanes, Geronimo!

  Why?

  I dont know y they just do. Like here I come mofos ahmo mess you up! He was a little crazy, she liked that.

  Geronimo bent over his keyboard. She had told him they had to type everything so nobody at her house would hear. Tell me what was so bad today.

  Just stuff like my mom. Shes always on my case.

  I bet she iz jealous. She iz not a pretty young thing like u. PYT!

  Geronimo said he was twenty-five, but he was probably older, just like Janice said she was fifteen but she was really younger. He was sort of fat in the face and he combed his hair up into a little blond tuft. If she had met him for real, she might not have thought he was anything special, but this was different. She typed:

  Ha ha ! My mom is so not pretty! I don’t look like my dad either.

  Maybe they adopted u?

  LOL! That makes sense. They just went out and got a kid so they had somebody to boss around. She didn’t really think that. There were pictures of her and her mom in the hospital when she was just a little lump in a blanket, then other pictures of her baby self gradually turning into her now self. But she liked the idea of it. It made a better story.

  Geronimo was somebody new she’d met. There had been these other guys who she didn’t like as much because they weren’t online as much or they were just creepy. Geronimo was always there. He said he had a job with computers, he fixed different people’s computers, he knew how everything worked. Then, for fun, he hung out on the computer! The camera showed part of the room behind him. It looked like an office, with shelves and messy piles of paper. He kept one of those giant-sized soft drink cups on his desk and drank from it through a straw.

  Now he was typing something long. It came up a line at a time:

  Don’t let them. Boss u around. You need to live yur own life. Not be told everything u. Do is wrong. Because they want u under there thumb. Be strong.

  Thanks. I will try to be.

  Do or not do. There is no try!

  Oh please, that is so lame! It was from Star Wars, but he’d had to tell her that. Star Wars was for old people.

  So u have a boyfriend yet, PYT?

  Maybe. She didn’t want to admit to not having one.

  Who iz this maybe boy?

  His name is Richie.

  U like him?

  Of course I do, hes my boyfriend.

  Why isnt he there?

  My mom won’t let him up here. In my room. That was true, sort of. Her mother would chase a boy away with a broom before she would let the two of them be anywhere with a bed.

  Geronimo took a long drink through the straw and wiggled his eyebrows to show that what he was saying was meant to be funny: How about I be yur boyfriend in yur room.

  Oh ha ha.

  You hurtin my feelings. He made a hurt-feelings face, puffing out his cheeks so that his face was even fatter.

  Get over it, she typed, because the idea was, he had to beg her, Oh Candy pleez pleez, because she was so beautiful.

  Girl u killin me.

  Tough.

  Have some mercy.

  She didn’t type anything back, but she fiddled with her hair, then, like it was a casual thing, nothing she really thought about, pulled her top down so her boobs were out.

  Candy girl u are wicked hot.

  She leaned into the screen and made a kiss mouth. She squeezed her arms underneath her boobs so they looked really big.

  Put yur hands on u.

  Pretend it really was Richie Cruz, right there with her. She’d do this for him. Whatever he wanted. This and this and this. Her eyes were closed, seeing him. Then she opened them and it was Geronimo, his big white face filling the screen and his mouth loose and so close she could see the wet pi
nk inside of it and she typed I have to go, and hit the kill button.

  —

  The next day Marilee asked what she did the night before and Janice said nothing, just fell asleep early.

  —

  I’m like a little freaked out, I’m not really old enough to be Talking to me? Geronimo offered, since she didn’t want to say everything straight out.

  Yeah.

  But u want to, dont u?

  I guess so.

  Then sounds to me like ur old enough. I mean its natural. Natural is the way the real world iz, not some pretend story they tell you in church.

  Not that anybody in her family went to church, but she knew what he meant.

  Lie down on yur bed OK?

  Why?

  Becoz I been thinking of you on a bed. Pleez, Miss Sweet Candy, I got this craving for u, u are so beautiful booty full.

  Ha ha.

  Pleez.

  Like this?

  Oh yeah yeah! Now scoot back an wiggle some.

  Janice and Marilee hung out at the food court in the mall, eating pizza slices. The mall was old and the stores kept closing down. After a while a different store would open in the same place, something disappointing like golf equipment or baby clothes. It was the totally boring headquarters of the totally boring summer. Some guys from their school were there but they were jerks, chasing around and throwing drinks on each other.

  Richie Cruz had a girlfriend now. It was horrible but true. The two of them came into the mall a couple times a week, the girlfriend probably dragging him there so he could buy her stuff. They didn’t know the girlfriend’s name but she was Puerto Rican like Richie. Which was so unfair, since no matter how hard Janice tried, she was not ever going to be Puerto Rican!

  Here they were again. Janice and Marilee watched them walk through the squares of glittering light from the glass walls, super slow, like they were a parade, the two of them waving from a float, see how we’re all the way up here and you’re down there. Richie! Easy on his feet, yawning like he just woke up, his green eyes half-slit. His black T-shirt stuck to his shoulder blades, it was so hot outside. Janice wanted to peel that damp shirt off him like the petals of a silk rose, send her cool breath across the muscles of his back.