Julia Watts - Finding H.F.

by Julia Watts

  That’s why the egg dioramas are perfect, as far as Memaw is concerned. They start out tedious. You use a pin to poke two tiny holes in the egg and stir up the yolk inside so it’s all liquidy. Then you put your mouth over one of the tiny holes and blow the yolk out of the other.

  After that you cut a little window in the hollow egg. This part is also tedious, because half the time the egg, which you’ve just spent 15 minutes cleaning out, shatters in your hand. I’ve asked Memaw why she doesn’t cut the window in the egg first and just let the yolk fall out the window, but she says there’s two ways of doing everything: the right way and the lazy way.

  If you manage to cut the egg without breaking it, the creative part comes next—painting the egg inside and out, and after the paint dries, putting together a scene inside the egg, sticking a foam base in the egg’s bottom, and gluing on the tiny figures that Memaw orders from a craft catalog.

  Memaw’s done all kinds of egg dioramas—nativity scenes with a tiny stable and Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus; Easter scenes with little plastic bunnies and plastic eggs glued inside the real egg; even a crucifixion scene with a little bitty Jesus dying on a cross no bigger than a broken toothpick. I think the crucifixion one is kind of gross—who wants to look inside an egg and see a little plastic savior dying for the world’s sins?—but Memaw says that one’s her favorite.

  Usually I get bored helping her with her projects, but tonight I don’t mind. I’m still in a good mood from standing under the waterfall; from Bo and me, after all our months of driving, actually getting somewhere. As I put my lips over the hole in the egg, my mind starts wandering to places I tell it not to go. But my mind has a mind of its own, and I find myself closing my eyes and imagining that instead of pressing my lips to an egg, I’m really pressing my lips against Wendy’s. I try to imagine the softness of her little pink mouth and wonder what it would feel like to kiss and be kissed back.

  “I ain’t even gonna ask you what you’re thinkin’ about,” Memaw says, touching my shoulder.

  I jump, and my hand squeezes without me wanting it to. Slimy yolk runs down my wrist to my elbow. I wipe my arm clean with a paper towel and dump the shattered shell into the trash. With handling eggs and with liking Wendy, I decide, the same rule applies: Proceed with caution.

  “Hey, H.F., how’s it hangin’?” Marijane is sitting on the counter in the girls’ bathroom, smoking a Marlboro red right under the sign that says NO SMOKING.

  I look down at the front of my jeans. “Unless I’m missin’ somethin’, I don’t think it’s hangin’ at all.”

  Marijane laughs and lets out a huge puff of smoke. Marijane or one of her friends is always sitting just inside the bathroom, breathing smoke like some dragon guarding the entrance to a cave full of treasure.

  The thing is, I always like those girls. Memaw would kill me if I ever tried to go out of the house wearing what Marijane has on: sprayed-on jeans, a cut-off Harley-Davidson T-shirt that says BOLD AND FEARLESS, and long chain earrings that hang down to her shoulders. But I like her look. It says the same thing as that flag with the snake on it: Don’t tread on me.

  “Wanna cancer stick?” She flicks the back of the Marlboro pack so that one cigarette sticks out.

  “No, thanks...just came in to pee before study hall.”

  I have to pee because I’m a nervous wreck. Wendy is in study hall with me, and I swore on that waterfall yesterday that I was gonna make myself talk to her. My bladder feels like it’s gonna let go with the force of a waterfall, so I head for a stall.

  “Say...H.F.,” Marijane hollers, “you learn to piss standin’ up yet?”

  “Still practicin’,” I say, as I unzip and squat.

  It probably sounds like Marijane gives me a hard time about being the way I am—and she does but I can’t help liking her, because she’s so good-natured about it. If she calls me a dyke, then she makes sure she calls herself a slut in the same breath, so that’s fine with me. If Marijane is gonna say something about you, she says it to your face, not like the whispering snub queens on the cheerleading squad.

  I think the real reason I like Marijane is because I wonder if she’s like my mom was when she went to Morgan High. In that picture of her in her Van Halen T-shirt with her cigarette and her sneer, she don’t look that different from Marijane. I’m not a thing like Marijane and her friends—I don’t drink beer or smoke pot or run around with foul-mouthed boys—but those girls all seem to like me fine. I hope this means my mom would like me fine too.

  As I’m leaving the bathroom, Marijane throws her cigarette butt into the sink with a hiss. “Hang in there, H.F.,” she says. “Don’t let them bastards get you down.”

  I walk into study hall, where Mr. McNeil is sitting at the teacher’s desk, already deep into his Louis L’Amour novel. He never looks up the whole period, no matter how loud people get. I have a theory that he’s got on earplugs like factory workers wear to protect their eardrums against the noisy machinery. That’s the only way I figure that he could stand the racket.

  I can’t stand it half the time myself, and the idea that you’re supposed to be studying while the paper wads whiz past your head and the football players have farting contests is the biggest joke in this joke of a school. You’d be better off trying to study in a monkey house.

  I take a deep breath and start inching my way between rows so I can get the seat next to Wendy, but I’m stopped dead when Travis Rose, the captain of the football team, grabs my shirttail. “Hey, H.F.,” he says, “where’s your girlfriend?”

  He means Bo. This, of course, is the football team’s idea of some great humor. “Sorry,” I say, “it’s against my religion to answer stupid questions.”

  I look him dead in the eye, but he still won’t let go of my shirt. He’s having too good of a time, and his buddies are laughing like he’s the funniest comedian on earth.

  Travis grins. “Aw, you’re just jealous ‘cause you ain’t got no flute for your little girlfriend to blow on.”

  Memaw says I get mad like my momma. I get real quiet, my spine turns to concrete, and my eyes feel like they shoot out heat rays like Superman’s. When I finally do say something, my voice is quiet and even. “Now, Travis, what would I need a dick of my own for when I can stand here and talk to the biggest dick in the whole school?” I don’t like to use foul language, but you’ve got to talk to people in a way they’ll understand.

  Travis’s buddies sit there, waiting to see what he’s gonna do, ready to play their usual game of follow the leader. Travis’s face is red, and I can almost hear the squeaky wheels turning in his pitiful excuse for a brain.

  He’s mad enough to hit me, but the redneck code of honor says you don’t hit a girl...at least not in public. If you’re in private and she’s your girlfriend, that’s different. Finally, he lets go of my shirttail and mutters, “Fuckin’ dyke.”

  After I’m safely past Travis and his cronies, I sneak a glance back at Mr. McNeil at his desk. He’s lost in L’Amour Land, galloping through the sagebrush instead of supervising study hall.

  One thing I’ll say for Travis and his buddies, they’ve made me forget how nervous I was about talking to Wendy. I plop right down next to her without even thinking about it. She’s wearing this yellow dress covered in tiny green leaves that makes her look like the trees I saw yesterday with the sun shining through them. She’s reading a paperback with a cover that says Nine Stories, which, in my opinion, isn’t much of a title in the attention-grabbing department. It sounds generic, like when you see those white cans in the grocery store that just say DOG FOOD in plain black letters.

  Wendy mutters something under her breath that from where I’m sitting sounds like “fat souls.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I say.

  She sets down her book and looks up, and all of a sudden I can see why people talk about redheads and tempers. “Assholes,” she says. “Those guys are such assholes. If there’s anything the slightest bit different about you, its like it’s th
eir God-given duty to harass you. Like with you...just because you don’t look like one of their cutesy-poo cheerleaders, they’ve got to give you a hard time. And with me and my red hair, they’re always like, ‘Hey, carrot top’ this and ‘Little Orphan Annie’ that. I hate that. I mean, my God, it’s only hair. How trivial can you be?” She sucks in her breath, then lets it out. “Assholes.”

  This is the most I’ve ever heard from Wendy. I think about Marijane in the bathroom. “Well, you know what they say ‘Don’t let them bastards get you down.’ ”

  Wendy’s little pink mouth turns up at the corners. It feels good that she’s smiling at something I said, even if I did just get it off Marijane.

  “Good advice,” Wendy says, “but it’s kind of hard to follow day in and day out. When we lived in Scranton, I thought it sucked, but that was before I saw Morgan. I mean, I didn’t even know towns like this existed.”

  “I guess you wouldn’t...know towns like this existed, I mean.” My nerves are coming back on me. All of a sudden, I can’t stop thinking about Wendy being a college professor’s daughter from up North. She’s too good for this dried-up little coal-mining town, and since I can count on two hands the times I’ve been outside this town, that must mean she’s too good for me.

  “You know,” Wendy says, “when Dad told me we were moving to a little town in Kentucky, I was dumb enough to think it would be easy to make friends here. I thought small towns were supposed to be friendly, and Southerners were supposed to be friendly, so I figured on my first day of school everybody would come up and ask me to...I don’t know, eat fried chicken and biscuits on their front porch or something. And instead I get treated like a...like a...”

  “Redheaded stepchild?” I hate myself as soon as I say it, but thank the lord, Wendy laughs.

  She wraps a strand of fiery hair around her finger. “What is it with red hair anyway? Ever since I hit the Bible Belt, it’s like red hair equals bride of Satan or something. Maybe I should dye it.”

  “No!” I almost shout. “Never do that. It’s the most beautiful hair I’ve seen in my life.” I shut my mouth, but it’s too late. I feel my face heat up like it’s gonna catch fire and burn down the school, like in that movie about that Holiness girl with ESP that I sneaked and watched one night after Memaw was asleep.

  “Thank you,” Wendy says. If she knows I’m embarrassed, she doesn’t show it. “Nah, I’m not really going to dye it. It wouldn’t make any difference anyway. I’d still be the daughter of one of those weirdos over at the college.” She smiles and crinkles her nose. Cute.

  “Well, uh...” I nod in the direction of that generic-looking book on her desk. “I’ll let you get back to your book. I don’t mean to keep pesterin’ you.”

  “You’re not a pest, H.F. It’s nice to have somebody to talk to for a change. Some days I come home from school and realize I haven’t said a word to anybody all day.”

  I think of the words on Marijane’s T-shirt: BOLD AND FEARLESS. “Uh...well, there ain’t no excuse for you to go all day by yourself like that. Like, when we’re in the lunchroom, you don’t have to sit at a table by yourself and read a book.” I have to swallow hard before the next words come out. “You could sit with Bo and me.”

  She smiles like I just made her an offer to do something much more appealing than sit at what gets called the “freak table.”

  “Well, H.F.,” she says, “I think I’m going to have to take you up on that.”

  I can’t believe how easy this is. The girl must be plain starved for friendliness. “Well, you know, it ain’t fried chicken and biscuits on the front porch, but maybe we could set that up sometime too. My memaw makes biscuits so fluffy it’s like bitin’ into a cloud. So...so...maybe you could come over for supper some evenin’. We never eat on the front porch before, but hey, if that’s what you think we’re supposed to do down here, we could give it a try.”

  Shut up, H.F., I’m telling myself even as I talk. You don’t want this college professor’s daughter over at your tacky little house, picking at her pinto beans and staring slack-jawed at all the egg dioramas. But the words keep spilling out, and when I finally stop them and look at Wendy, she’s still grinning.

  When the bell rings, I swagger out of study hall, as proud as one of the cowboys in the book Mr. McNeil has never even looked up from reading.

  Chapter Four

  It’s official. Wendy and me are friends. Well, Wendy and Bo and me. Since that day in study hall, we’ve been as tight as the Three Musketeers, the Three Little Pigs, and the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, although Memaw would probably say I was blaspheming if she heard that.

  Every pretty day after school, except on Mondays when Wendy has her piano lesson, we’ve done the same thing we’re doing right now: sit around Deer Creek, right next to the waterfall. Usually me and Wendy take off our shoes and wade in the creek. Bo still won’t get his feet wet, but he’s taken to bringing his flute with him. While me and Wendy splash around in the water, he’ll sit on a rock and play. The music floats up to the tops of the trees, and the birds chirp right along, probably trying to figure out what strange kind of bird is singing such a long and complicated song. Wendy is holding her skirt up over her knees while she does a splashing dance in the creek. Her legs are china-doll white. “You know, all the bullshit we go through in school is just about worth it for this,” she says, her hair glinting in the sunshine.

  She’s right. Here by the waterfall, Wendy and Bo and me make up our own world. I know nature can be just as nasty as high school, what with big animals eating little animals and strong critters beating up on weak critters. But here at Deer Creek you’d never think nature was anything but peaceful—a place where everybody, no matter how small or weak or different, can be safe from harm.

  Bo sets down his flute. “You know, I’ve never been what you’d call an outdoor type of person. Nature’s just always meant bugs and dirt to me. But this place is different.”

  “It’s like The Secret Garden,” Wendy says. “God, when I was about ten years old I carried that book around like a Bible. Have you read it?”

  Bo and me shake our heads, which shouldn’t surprise Wendy by now. She’s always going on about books Bo and me have never read. The only books I read when I was ten were the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I tried the Bobbsey Twins once, but they were so goody-goody I wanted to smack ‘em.

  “It’s about a little orphan girl,” Wendy says. “She finds this garden that’s been locked up for years, and it totally transforms her life.”

  “Well, I reckon some people like gardenin’ a whole lot,” I say. I help Memaw put out tomatoes every year, but except for the produce, I can’t quite see how having a garden would transform your life.

  “It’s also kind of like Never-Never Land in Peter Pan,” Wendy says, trying for a story us illiterate hicks might have heard of.

  “Well, your name is Wendy,” I say. I may not have read The Secret Garden or anything by that J.D. what’s-his-name she’s always talking about, but by God, I have seen some Disney cartoons.

  “Don’t go lookin’ at me to be no Peter Pan,” Bo says, stretching out on his rock. “I get in enough trouble without prancin’ around in a pair of green tights.”

  Wendy smiles. “H.F. can be Peter Pan.”

  I blush because I’m thinking, wasn’t Wendy, like, Peter Pan’s love interest? “But Peter Pan’s a boy,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Wendy says, “but when I was little Mom and Dad took me to see the play Peter Pan in Philadelphia. A girl played him—this little muscular girl with short hair. I can still see her flying over the stage. Come to think of it, she kind of looked like you.”

  Now I’m blushing to the roots of my hair, and the cat’s run away with my tongue again. “So,” Bo says, filling in the silence, “if you’re Wendy and H.F. is Peter Pan, who am I supposed to be?”

  “John or Michael,” Wendy says. “Take your pick.”

  Bo grins. “At least you didn’t say Tinkerbell.”
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  When Bo is about to drop Wendy off in front of her house, Wendy says, “So, H.F., do you want to come spend the night Friday? Mom’s been pestering me about having friends over.” Wendy gives Bo a squeeze on the shoulder. “I’d invite you too, General Beauregard, but my dad wouldn’t take very kindly to a boy sleeping over.”

  “Even if we was just to giggle and paint each other’s toenails?”

  Wendy laughs. “Even if.” She looks me right in the eye, which turns my stomach into gooey apple butter. “So, H.F., what do you say?”

  “Um...sure. I mean, I’ve got to ask Memaw and everything, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be all right.”

  “Great! See ya.” Wendy half-runs to her front door. It’s a nice house—all brick, probably with at least three bedrooms. Probably not a scrap of cheap paneling or an egg diorama in the whole place.

  “So,” Bo says as he drives us back toward town, “I reckon you’re feelin’ pretty good about yourself, huh?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I looked at that fancy house of hers, and all I could think was, what would I say to somebody who lives in a house like that?”

  “Wendy lives in that house, and you talk to her all the time...when you don’t get tongue-tied, that is.”

  “But what about her parents? Her daddy’s a professor, and her momma’s all educated too. I don’t know how to act in front of people like that. I don’t know which fork to use at supper...or...or how to hold my teacup right. They’re gonna think I’m ignorant, Bo. And you know what? They’re gonna be right.”

  “Lord God, H.F. There’s just no pleasin’ you, is there? You get your panties all in a wad about wantin’ this girl to like you back, and when she finally does, you start pissin’ and moanin’ about meetin’ her parents.”

  “Well, first of all, Bo, she don’t like me back that way. She just wants a girl for a friend, and in this pitiful excuse for a town, I’m the best she can do.”