Footer Davis Probably Is Crazy

by Susan Vaught

  99. I will treat my teachers with respect and follow instructions, unless the instructions involve walruses.

  100. I will treat my teachers with respect and follow instructions, unless the instructions involve walruses (or serial killers).

  CHAPTER

  10

  Still Thirteen Days After the Fire

  Captain Armstrong: Who are you, and why is Footer in your car?

  Stephanie Bridges: I’m Stephanie Bridges. I’m with DCFS, and I offered to drive her home because Ms. Jones needed to meet with Angel’s teacher and I have to do a home visit.

  Captain Armstrong: You got some ID? Stephanie Bridges: This is my name tag. Here, take a look.

  Captain Armstrong: Lady, this world has gone totally [censored] insane. Anyone can have that kind of crap made. I want to see something official.

  Stephanie Bridges: All right. Let me get my wallet. Here we go. My official identification card.

  Captain Armstrong: Guess you’re legit. You okay in there, kid?

  Me: Yes, sir.

  Captain Armstrong: I’ll let your father know she’s here and that I checked her out.

  Me: Thanks, Captain Armstrong.

  Captain Armstrong: You know, Ms. Bridges, these people have enough problems without you making everything worse.

  “You with me there, Footer?”

  I wound my way back from the numb conversation snapshots and made myself look at how the afternoon sunlight twinkled off Stephanie Bridges’s blond hair as she got out of her car in my driveway. Keeping her eyes on Captain Armstrong as he ambled back up the street, she came around and opened my door for me, since she had me child-locked inside.

  As I climbed out, she asked, “Is that man okay?”

  My heart bounced against my ribs because she seemed genuinely worried, which worried me and made me hate her a little less and made me hate her a little more. “He’s a veteran like my dad,” I told her. My gaze drifted to Captain Armstrong as he got to his own yard, and I couldn’t help smiling. He looked all big and scary, but he was so nice to me, and to everybody. So he had a pair of black serial-killer stalker-creep tennis shoes. That didn’t make him guilty.

  Did it?

  “He put his number in my phone so I can call him whenever I want,” I added so Stephanie Bridges would understand how he helped me and anybody who needed him. “He’s great, so you just leave him alone. I don’t want him disappearing like Dad’s guns.”

  She leaned against her purple car and frowned at me as I sat down on one of Mom’s stone landscape walls. “I can tell you’re angry with me. It’s because of the guns, right?”

  “Captain Armstrong even took my BB gun, and Dad says we can’t go get it right now.” I folded my arms and tried to look as mean as the police who questioned the guy in plaid. “Dad and I won’t be able to go shooting this weekend, Stephanie Bridges. Are you happy?”

  She sighed. “You can call me Steph. That’ll be easier than saying my whole name every time you talk—and surely you and your dad can find safer activities than target shooting?”

  “Like what, soccer? I broke my arm playing soccer two years ago.” How was I supposed to call her Steph? She was older than me. People older than me were Mr. or Ms. Besides, I didn’t like her enough to call her Steph.

  “Dad can’t play soccer with me because he has bad knees,” I went on, not having to work at looking mad. “I like football, but I can’t play it. I suck at baseball, I’ve never gotten a basketball through a hoop in my life, ever, and I hate NASCAR. That pretty much leaves target shooting as stuff I can do with a dad in Mississippi, and you took that away. Thanks. Why do you hate guns so much, anyway?”

  She looked at the ground near my feet. “I—well. It’s not that I hate them, exactly. It’s just, even when I was just a student learning to be a social worker I saw guns do a lot of bad things.”

  “Bad people do bad things,” I said. “Not guns.”

  “Guns make it a lot easier for bad people to be bad.”

  I knew I wasn’t going to win this argument, so I quit trying, which made her look worried.

  “You could go hiking, maybe?” she asked. “Or canoeing?”

  “I’m clumsy when I’m learning new stuff, and you’ll put me in foster care if I turn up with a bruise.”

  Stephanie Bridges—Steph?—said, “So, you’re scared I’ll take you away from your mom and dad.”

  I unfolded my arms. “Well, yeah. Isn’t that what you people do?”

  “Sometimes.” She seemed to shrink into the car. “We have some very good foster parents, but that’s never our first choice. Usually we just help families who are having problems.”

  “By taking away BB guns?”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Don’t lie to me.” I got off the wall and stalked toward the front door. “Lying brings bad luck, and I hate it when people lie to me.”

  “Okay, I’m not sorry.” Stephanie Bridges hurried after me, her voice getting closer with each word. “My very first case with DCFS, the father shot the mother right after I left from a visit. Guns make me nervous. All guns.”

  I fished my key out of my pocket, crammed it in the lock, then shoved open the front door. “That’s stupid. He was a bad man. It wasn’t the gun’s fault.”

  “You’re entitled to your opinion.” She followed me into the house.

  “Your opinion is the only one that counts.”

  “It counts some, but your father’s opinion counts more. He chose to give the guns to your neighbor rather than take any chances with your safety.”

  I went all the way to the kitchen before I stopped and turned on her again, glaring up into her wide brown eyes. “So what are we supposed to do about the next poisonous snake? Hack it to bits with a rake or something? That’ll be soooo much safer.”

  She looked miserable, but she didn’t say anything.

  I walked away from her and headed for my afternoon snack.

  “Why did you write a paper about serial killers, Footer?” she asked as I opened the pantry, her words so quiet, I barely heard her.

  I wanted to bang my head on the top shelf, I really did. I also wanted her to finish her inspection and go away. “Why do I always have to answer questions? Why don’t you answer a few, like what’s the real color of your hair?”

  “It’s brown, lighter than my eyes, kind of like a field mouse,” she said without any hesitation at all. “I never liked it.”

  Great. Now I felt like a butthead. I really needed not to be mean to Stephanie Bridges. And where were my drinks? My brownies? I pawed through the pantry’s few boxes and cans of soup. Dad and I bought a bunch of stuff at the store yesterday. Where was it? No way I sleep-ate that much in a single night.

  Did I?

  “Do you like being blond?” I mumbled, thinking more about the food that had gone into hiding than what I was saying.

  “Blond isn’t bad. I may try redhead next. You and your mom have beautiful hair.”

  I stopped pawing and turned around to face her. “You talked to Mom?”

  “I tried.” She gave me a rueful smile. “She kept grabbing my hands and telling me she had a piano.”

  “The one in her wrist.” My stomach felt funny. “Yeah. I got to hear about that too.”

  “She asked me to feed the mice in the basement.”

  “Me too.”

  Stephanie Bridges didn’t seem to know what to say to any of that, and I didn’t either. When Mom got sick, she talked out of her head, but sometimes she tried to tell me stuff that was important to her. The words couldn’t swim through her brain fog, and I wasn’t always smart enough to put the meaning together. I wished that I could. Maybe if I could understand what her crazy talk meant to her, I could help her get better faster. Mice and pianos—I just had no idea.

  Stephanie Bridges came toward me, close enough to make me back up into the pantry. “Did I upset you just now, talking about your mom?”

  Yes. I hate talking about M
om being sick, especially to people I don’t know.

  But I didn’t know her well enough, so out loud I said, “No. I was just trying to figure out the mice and the piano thing. Usually Mom’s obsessed with snakes. It might all mean something, or it might not.”

  “Like you and your serial killers?”

  I rolled my eyes better than Peavine ever thought about doing. “Ms. Perry hates me. I wrote about serial killers just to freak her out because she makes me mad, and you can’t tell teachers off any other way.”

  This made Stephanie Bridges go quiet for a minute. Finally, she came out with “Fair enough.”

  “And don’t go investigating Ms. Perry or anything,” I said as I edged out of the pantry. “She’s not abusive. She’s just a—well, a not-nice person most of the time.”

  “Do you ever think about hurting yourself or other people?”

  “No.” I slammed the pantry door behind me. “You creep me out when you ask stuff like that.”

  “Stuff about how you feel?”

  “No, stuff like the doctors ask my mother. I’m not mentally ill, even if Ms. Perry would get a kick out of me going nuts.”

  “I can see why those questions would make you angry, then,” Steph said. “Thanks for telling me.”

  Steph. Yeah, I was giving up.

  “I’m sorry,” Steph said. “I won’t ask that kind of stuff anymore, if you’ll promise to tell me if you ever do start having thoughts like that.”

  “Fine. I promise. And for the record, I don’t lie very much.”

  “Y’all don’t have much food, do you?”

  No, because we have dinosaur mice in the basement. That, or I’ve been hallucinating, sleepwalking, and sleep-eating. Yay? “We’re going to the store soon.” That wasn’t a lie, because we’d have to make a run to restock. Dad was going to kill me—unless he was sleep-eating too.

  “Want to see the rest of the house?” I walked out of the kitchen, into the living room. My eyes darted all around, making sure I didn’t see any bullets or knives or food wrappers or dangerous stuff a DCFS worker might write down in her notebook.

  Steph followed me into the living room, glanced around, then waited, like I was supposed to take her somewhere else. I walked out of the living room, back through the kitchen, and into the main hallway. First stop was my room. I had never been so glad that I’d stuffed my dirty clothes in the closet.

  The pillow and blanket under the bed, though . . .

  I bit my nails as Steph asked, “Why are your blinds taped to the windowsill?”

  My face flushed. “Um . . . to keep them from blowing when I turn on the fan.”

  A little-bitty lie. Not enough to send me to hell or foster care. At least, I didn’t think so. I might be calling her Steph, but admitting I was a baby and scared of the dark—no.

  The house phone rang. I almost ran to my bedside table and snatched it from the cradle. “Hello?”

  Nobody answered.

  “Hello?”

  I heard breathing but no answer. For some stupid reason, I imagined the creep from the store wearing his plaid shirt and munching a hot dog and smiling, holding the phone to his ear and listening to me. It freaked me out. I looked at the caller ID. OUT OF AREA.

  Steph took the phone from me and listened. She said, “Hello?” then checked the caller ID herself and hung up. “Just somebody breathing. Does that happen a lot?”

  “No. First time.”

  A car pulled into the drive, a red Toyota. It was Peavine, Angel, and Ms. Jones. They got out, and Ms. Jones opened the trunk and started handing out cloth grocery bags. She had been to the store. Bless her. And blessing somebody is different from blessing their heart. I would never bless Ms. Jones’s heart, because she never did anything dumb except when she rooted for Ole Miss to win college football games against my team, Tennessee, where Dad and Mom went to school.

  “Food,” I said as brightly as I could, given that I was pretty sure a serial killer had just called my house and breathed through my phone.

  Steph smiled when she saw Ms. Jones lugging the groceries toward the door, with Angel just as loaded down and Peavine swinging one bag against each crutch. “Come on,” she told me. “Let me see the rest of the place so I can get out of the way and let y’all cook dinner.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  Thirteen and One-Half Days After the Fire

  Steph and I rushed through Dad and Mom’s room and the guest room and my bathroom and theirs, and the guest bathroom. Dad and I kept house pretty well, so stuff seemed clean to me, and nothing looked hazardous, in my opinion. Steph said she liked Mom’s taste in decorating and the way Mom used light greens and golds and mirrors to brighten even the dark corners.

  I hadn’t ever thought about that. Who knew my mom was a good decorator? All I knew was, there was stuff I could touch and stuff I was supposed to leave alone. For the most part, I kept to my bedroom and my parents’ room, my bathroom, and the kitchen. Other than that, I went outside, but I didn’t say that to Steph. What if she thought outside without grown-ups was too dangerous?

  When I took her to the basement, she poked her head in the little bedroom with no windows but didn’t turn on the light. After that, she looked at Dad’s weights and then the pool table. I winced when I saw brownie wrappers poking out of one of the pool table pockets. A half-eaten peanut-butter sandwich rested on a napkin on the table under the wall rack, and the trash can beside the table was stuffed with juice cartons.

  My face went from flush to burn as Steph hunted around the basement, revealing two more of our little trash cans crammed with food wrappers, like Dad and I never took out the garbage. Why had I brought the food down here to eat it in my sleep? My hands went to my stomach. I expected it to be double-size, but it wasn’t.

  My fingers twitched because I wanted to start cleaning up, but then I might have had to explain why the mess was there, and I couldn’t, and I didn’t want to say anything about sleepwalking and sleep-eating, because then I might say something about brain tumors and hallucinating and going crazy. I felt dizzy and realized I was breathing shallow and fast, way high in my throat. I relaxed, like the YouTube video had taught me.

  Steph didn’t mention the mess. She went to the back door instead, unlocked it, opened it, and looked out through the glass storm door. “There’s a snake on the pond. Yuck.”

  “The muddy water draws them,” I said, a little squeaky, like an overstuffed mouse. “Snakes love it when you can’t see them coming.” I walked over and stood beside her long enough to be sure I wasn’t lying when I said, “Yep, it’s a copperhead. Sorry you took the guns yet?”

  “No.” She stepped back from the storm door and pushed the main door closed, so we couldn’t see the snake. “Do you still have my card?”

  “Yes.” Whoops. I just added a lie to my list.

  “Let me see your phone.”

  Guilty, I took my phone out of my pocket and handed it to her.

  She punched buttons, then handed it back. “There. Now I’m on your contact list. You can call me if you need me, just like Captain Armstrong.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and felt surprised, because I actually meant that.

  Upstairs, Peavine and Angel and Ms. Jones started clattering around in the kitchen. I wanted to go upstairs with them, but Steph stopped me by holding up one finger.

  “Just a sec. I have one more question, Footer. Please try to be honest, and please try not to get mad, okay?”

  I didn’t say anything, because every time in my life that a grown-up had told me not to get mad, I hadn’t gotten mad. I’d gotten furious. All my muscles tensed before she said a word, and I couldn’t stop myself from already feeling a little ticked off.

  Steph’s expression stayed neutral, and she kept her voice low as she asked, “Do you think your mother had anything to do with the fire at the Abrams farm?”

  Panic flooded me so fast, I almost whimpered. I don’t know how I managed to stand still with my hear
t thundering and my guts twitching, but I did. I even kept looking Steph in the eyes without blinking. I focused on her fake hair and worked hard to remember how much I hadn’t liked her when I met her at school. I definitely didn’t hate her now, not as much, so that made lying to her more of a problem. But she didn’t know anything. She couldn’t know anything about the barrette or my hallucinations, because I hadn’t told her, and Peavine wouldn’t tell my secrets, and nobody else knew, except maybe Angel, and Angel didn’t speak to strangers at all, except to quote the Constitution and books about alien mutant rock eaters.

  Stay steady. Sound calm. “No. I don’t think my mom had anything to do with that fire.”

  I thought about throwing a fit about how people always assumed Mom did bad stuff because she was mentally ill, but that would have been pushing it.

  Because she might have done something.

  No.

  But . . .

  Stop.

  I bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t start talking to myself out loud in front of Steph, even though I really wanted to.

  She studied me without moving while I counted. One, two, three, four.

  Her brown eyes narrowed.

  Five, six, seven, eight, nine.

  “Footer, would you tell me if you thought your mother did have something to do with the fire?”

  No. “Sure.” I didn’t even breathe after I told that whopper, and I absolutely wouldn’t let myself think about how much bad luck I had piled on my head since Steph walked through the front door today.

  “Okay,” she said at last, but her sad expression said something completely different.

  Bless your heart, Footer Davis. I don’t believe you for a minute.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Thirteen and Three-Quarters Days After the Fire

  My definition of “best friend”: The person who understands that some things just have to be done and does them with you, without arguing, even if you’re scared of the dark and might be going crazy, and even if he doesn’t know if you’re a flower or a rock.