by Ruth Lehrer
“That plan sounds overly complicated,” I said. “How about we just run? Now?”
“Complicated is good,” said Duck-Duck. “If she thinks you’re still alive, she’ll follow us, and she could try to kidnap you again. So how would you like to die? Stabbing?”
Duck-Duck’s golden hair made me think of Yodels. Her red mittens reminded me of Molly’s baked chicken. Her blue, blue eyes spoke of lemon cupcakes.
“How’d you find me?” I asked as Duck-Duck started unzipping her backpack.
“It was easy. The police were supposedly doing their Amber Alert thing, and Mom was making phone calls to everyone under the sun. I think she even called our senator. But after two weeks, it was obvious no one was logical enough to find you. The cops thought she was far away. I tried to tell them that they should try thinking like Olivia Benson from Law and Order SVU; there’s no way that truck would make it to Arizona, but no one listened to me. So I Googled the closest Auga-L supply location and staked it out. It was just some lady’s house. You can mail-order the shakes, but that would take having a mailbox or an address, and Keely wouldn’t want to be found. Besides, she wouldn’t be able to read the order form. I figured if I checked out the lady’s house enough, Keely would have to stock up at some point. I got lucky. When she showed up this morning, I hopped in the back of the pickup while she was inside the house. I covered up me and my bike with her tarp, and she drove almost straight here. She left footprints from the truck to the shack. I skipped school to track you down,” she added.
“But how will we get back? How far are we from Salt Run?” I could see Keely being so out of it that she didn’t notice a girl and a bike in the back of her truck, but I never would have been brave enough to test it. Only Duck-Duck would have done that.
“We’re downriver from Birge Hill,” said Duck-Duck, rummaging in her backpack. “About five miles into the woods. We can go home on my bike.”
The death scene, Duck-Duck said, had to be highly visual, since Keely couldn’t read a suicide note. “It’s too bad. You could have written a real good one saying you were dying of loneliness and life wasn’t worth living anymore. Lots of blood is key to a good murder scene,” she explained. “If I had had more prior notice, I could have made totally realistic fake blood. But this will have to do,” she said, and she fished a can of tomato juice from her backpack. “If they test for DNA, it wouldn’t pass, but Keely won’t tell the cops, so she’ll never know. We want Keely to feel real guilty and, tortured by her role in your death, cross state lines as fast as she can.”
First we broke a window from the inside. We poured fake blood on the ragged glass edges and tore one of my T-shirts into shreds and draped it along the sill as if I had cut myself, dragging my body across the shattered glass.
“You sever an artery on the window glass,” explained Duck-Duck. “Blood gushing from your neck, you stagger to the river to end your life.”
I made deep, staggering footprints to the river, as if I were having trouble walking. Duck-Duck walked behind me in my footprints so there would be only one set of prints leaving the shack. She dripped the last drops of tomato juice along the frosty footprint path and the edge of the river. “Here, put your handprint down near the edge of the water and drag it in like you changed your mind at the last minute but it was too late.”
She picked hairs off my sweater and rounded off the number with a few pulled from my head. “We’ll stick a few here and there so it’s more realistic.” Duck-Duck stepped back to cast an artistic eye on the death scene.
To avoid footprints leaving the river, we waded upstream, breaking through thin ice, to find where Duck-Duck had stashed her bicycle. The water was bitterly cold, but somehow didn’t feel as bad as spending a whole winter in a lonely shack.
“Nice work,” she said as we sloshed along, clinging to bushes to keep from slipping on icy rocks. “Keely will feel totally guilty and never tell a soul. She could be up for involuntary manslaughter if she told anyone. Oh, and I found your backpack in the pickup. I stole it back for you. It’s with my bike.”
Suddenly I felt awkward. We hadn’t seen each other for weeks. I knew where I had been. What had Duck-Duck been doing all this time?
“How’s soccer?” I asked, shivering. I wondered if sports discipline included breaks for missing-person searches and what Darsa thought of that.
“Oh,” said Duck-Duck without looking at me. She kept trudging through the ice and water. “I quit.”
“Why? Weren’t you going to be a division something?”
“I wasn’t any good anyway.” Suddenly Duck-Duck sounded like someone I didn’t know. Like she was unsure or scared or just plain ashamed. It reminded me of something, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what.
“Darsa made you quit, didn’t she?” I said.
“No,” said Duck-Duck, “I just quit.”
Now I knew what her shame reminded me of. Keely.
“Was she mean to you?” I had just been a prisoner for weeks. I felt like I hadn’t really talked in months. I definitely didn’t have the patience to talk around stuff.
“Yeah, kinda,” said Duck-Duck. “But I wasn’t really dedicated enough.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said. I knew I was being snotty, probably from weeks of eating nothing but serene shakes. “Whatever she did to you, it’s because she’s a bitch. I’m an expert on mean people, and I can tell you for sure, it had nothing to do with practicing or soccer, or anything you did or didn’t do, or anything else logical.”
Duck-Duck trudged along. “At first it was little stuff. She told the soccer club coach I lied about how many practice runs I made. He believed her. Then she and Sheila took my training time slot at the gym and left chewed-up gum in my lock.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t exactly sorry, because if you took up with someone like Darsa, what could you expect? But I couldn’t say that, even as grumpy as I was after being a shake prisoner for weeks.
“It’s okay,” said Duck-Duck. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Did you tell your mother?”
Duck-Duck climbed up the bank, out of the river, and I followed her. We were both shivering now. My toes felt like they belonged to someone else.
“No,” she said really quietly.
I knew why. “You thought it would have made everything worse,” I said. “But then it got worse anyway, right?”
Duck-Duck clutched her arms around herself. She was almost whispering. I had to catch up to her to hear.
“You were right, you know. About Darsa,” she said. “Darsa texted the whole team that my mother was a fag and I was one too. I didn’t find out until a week later. Everyone was laughing behind my back and acting like they shouldn’t get too close to me in the locker room because they’d get contaminated. They burned my socks in the sink because they said I was contagious. I couldn’t tell my mother that.”
She was crying, or I thought she was crying. We were totally soaked, so maybe it was just loose river on her face.
I thought about Molly with her spiky hair and her big shoulders. She probably wouldn’t be bothered by little girls calling her a fag, but still I knew why Duck-Duck didn’t tell. Molly would have been upset that who she was had caused Duck-Duck pain.
“You’re right. I wouldn’t have told her either,” I said. “But next time, punch Darsa in those big boobs and don’t quit soccer unless you want to.”
Duck-Duck sniffed, but she gave a little giggle too.
“Can we get out of here now?” I asked.
“My bike is just on the other side of that rock,” she said, pointing ahead. Then she said, “I’m sorry I was mean. You know, at school that last day. I was going to apologize when we got home, but you were gone. I was afraid I’d never see you again.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re good. After all, you rescued me, right?”
My feet were wet, shaky icicles, but I held on tight while Duck-Duck pumped us back home.
“Mo
m!” she called when we got to Cherry Road. “Look who I found!”
When we opened the front door, Molly looked like she was going to cry. Then she hugged me until my face felt flat, and then she started making phone calls to everyone under the sun. I went upstairs to the lion tub and lay in the hot water until my fingers shriveled into warm raisins.
Molly still looked on the verge of tears, but she pulled it together and made us Black Moon Chili for dinner. It was called Black Moon because it had black beans and black olives, but all I cared about was that it wasn’t a vanilla shake. Molly and Duck-Duck and I had dinner, the first nonshake food I’d eaten in weeks. How many weeks? I had to ask because I’d lost count. It was only three and a half weeks, but it felt like months, or maybe even a small year.
And then I went to bed in the pink pop-up bed with pillows and blankets and clean sheets underneath. I thought I would fall asleep quick, I was so tired from the icy river and the bike ride, but I didn’t. I lay there and thought about Duck-Duck. She had said sorry. Sorry I was mean.
Teachers would tell us, “Say you’re sorry,” and then they’d want the other kid to act like he wasn’t still pissed off that Pepsi had been poured into his chicken-noodle soup. This was called accepting an apology. Sometimes the apologizer would say, “I’m sorry . . . but you were asking for it,” or “I’m sorry you’re a crybaby.” Then the teacher would get mad, and they’d all be back where they started.
Real apologies left you open to attack, because then you couldn’t do it again without everyone knowing you knew it was wrong and you were still doing it anyway.
Real apologies were like what Duck-Duck meant: she knew she messed up and she wasn’t going to do it again.
And then I started getting confused, thinking about real apologies, and how once you pour Pepsi into soup, it can’t be un-poured, but really I was already asleep.
The next day, I gave my statement to Officer Sam and Officer Greg. The Social Service ladies descended on us too, but after we convinced them that Keely hadn’t maimed or starved me to death, they retreated. Molly came with me special to the school, to make sure there weren’t any problems.
“Including the times she was out sick, she’s missed more than a month of classes,” said the counselor, as if it had been my fault, “and she was struggling as it was. We’ll probably have to hold her back a year.”
I could see Molly’s back get stiff.
“It’s only March, and you’re deciding already she’s a grade behind without any proof?” she asked. “I’d like to have some testing done before you decide she’s behind.”
Keely would never have said that. Keely wouldn’t have shown up for the meeting in the first place.
“I don’t think we have any testing accommodations available just now,” said the counselor, but then she looked at Molly, who was giving her the same blue-lightning stare she gave Duck-Duck, and the lady changed her mind. “But I’m sure we can work something out.”
“I’m sure you can,” said Molly.
At the time, I was happy, but then the next week, I had to take tests for hours. I did reading and math, and science too. I kept looking out the classroom window, where it was sunny and bright, and I kept thinking this was almost as bad as being stuck in a dark shack all day.
They didn’t tell me the next day, or even the next week, how I did. The counselor said I had to come back with Molly, and they would talk to both of us.
“That’s not good news,” I said to Molly. “I mean, if the tests were fine, they would just say everything’s fine and not need to talk. They must want to hold me back.”
“Don’t borrow trouble,” said Molly. “We’ll just go in and talk to them. If need be, we’ll make them pay for a tutor. It wasn’t your fault you missed school.”
And then I realized there was a little part of me that thought it was my fault, that if I had good enough genes, I never would have been caught by Keely in the first place. If I had been good enough in math, I would have figured out a way to escape. But when Molly said that, out loud, I realized she was right. It wasn’t my fault. Why punish me for Keely’s crime?
When we went to school to find out how I did on the tests, I got nervous and had to hold Molly’s hand. But the funny thing was, the counselor, Miss Treadway, and the testing teacher were all sitting there looking nervous too. One of the Social Service ladies was there, I guess to make sure I was doing school like I was supposed to. I must have been gripping Molly too hard, because she stretched her fingers a little, like they were losing blood.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Do you have the results?” said Molly. “I’d like to take a look.”
Miss Treadway didn’t look too happy. She looked twitchy, like Molly was making her itch. “Well, we have the results,” she said, handing the paper to Molly. “Here, you can see the breakdown.”
I looked over her shoulder and saw a bunch of graphs and numbers and percentiles. I nodded like I understood.
“She’s in the ninety-ninth percentile for math and reading,” said Molly. “And eighty-fifth percentile in science.” She squeezed my hand quick, like she knew it all along. Maybe she did; I sure didn’t. “You still think she should be held back?”
“We think perhaps we underestimated her abilities,” said the testing teacher. She wasn’t looking up at Molly. She was looking at the paper, as if what she had to say were there, written in code. “Fishkill really should be in the upper-level English class and at least grade-level math.” She was mumbling now.
“I thought so,” said Molly. “Could you write up that evaluation for me and make sure it goes in her file? And can we switch her classes now instead of waiting until next year?”
They argued a little about that, but since I had been gone for three and a half weeks and going back to the old classes was almost like going back to a new class, I got bumped up to Duck-Duck’s math class. For English, I would get special extra assignments. Next year I would be in top classes for both.
After the meeting, I went to gym, and Molly went back to work. When I got home, Molly gave me a little card with a picture of a tiger with green eyes and a swimming pool. Inside she had written, “To my green-eyed girl. Keep up the great work. Love, Molly.”
I didn’t know how to say thank you. Duck-Duck would have hugged and kissed her, but I didn’t know how to do that really. I put the swimming tiger card in my backpack and carried it with me every day, next to my emergency Yodel.
Something else that was different when I came back was that Duck-Duck had breasts. Not big boobs like Darsa, but little ones, like shells. They were pink. I kind of saw them through her shirt, but then at night, we took off our clothes to go to bed. I saw her looking at my chest. I didn’t have any boobs, not even little ones. Maybe I wasn’t going to get any. That would be okay with me.
“Mom promised she’d buy me a real bra,” said Duck-Duck, “but we haven’t gone to the mall yet.”
I giggled. “Your mom hates the mall.”
“Yup.” Duck-Duck put her hands on the sides of her little breasts. “Maybe if I get a bra, it will look like this.” She squeezed her tits together, making them stand out, almost like Darsa’s.
“No, more like this,” I said, putting my hands beneath her boobs, pushing them up so they were standing out and up, both at the same time. Now they really looked like Darsa’s.
Duck-Duck suddenly turned pink, the same pink as her nipples, which got a little pointy. I didn’t take my push-up hands away, but I touched the nipples with my thumbs to see if they were soft or hard.
“Do they hurt?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Can we kiss like in the movies again?” She looked a little sad, like she had lost something but didn’t know what.
I liked that she wanted to kiss again. So before bed, we French-kissed, Duck-Duck with her little boobs, and me with none.
I was back at Cherry Road and I was back in school, but somehow everything felt off, as if while I was away, so
mehow the school building had shrunk and the library had gotten smaller. The pictures on the wall near the gym entrance, of jumping jacks and toe touches, now looked yellowed and old, like they had been put up a century ago. I could have sworn the milk cartons in the cafeteria had less milk. When I told Molly these things, she said sometimes we grow up in spurts. She said that because we are different, everything around us looks different.
I wasn’t so sure how this applied to Duck-Duck, though. Duck-Duck wasn’t the same either, and she hadn’t gotten locked in a shack. At school she had become timid, like she was afraid someone would jump her or call her a bad name. At home she acted pretty normal, but then we would go to school, and she would get un-Duck-Ducked again. I watched carefully to see if she was puking in the bathroom or banging her head against lockers.
“When they’re not pretending I’m invisible, they still call me names,” she said one afternoon. “Stupid things like slut and dyke-wad. I try to pretend I only speak sign language and can’t understand what they’re saying, but it doesn’t really work.” She looked a little like she did in the river.
“Names aren’t so bad,” I tried to tell her. “At least they’re not hitting you or filling your notebook with glue or stealing your lunch. If they’re just calling you a freak or a fag and not stealing your underwear during gym, then just stay away from stairways and walk quick in the halls. Just keep your eyes open.”
“At lunch, if I put down my sandwich for a second, they drop gross used napkins on it. My mother would say I should just ignore Darsa and go about my business. She would say, what goes around comes around, but meanwhile I’m only eating granola bars for lunch.” Duck-Duck started slicing her cinnamon toast into quarters instead of just in half. I watched the buttered quarters become buttered eighths become buttered slivers and then buttered crumbs. Maybe she needed more than just advice. Maybe action was required.