Spelldown (2 page)

“Come on, Karly, give me a kiss for good luck.” She lifts my face, holds it between her soft hands, and kisses me on the nose. The smell of Tabu reminds me of every orange I’ve ever eaten and every cedar tree I’ve ever smelled.

“Gloria Jean, are you ready to go?” Wendell takes her arm and pulls her toward the front door.

Daddy walks over and taps Wendell on the shoulder. “Excuse me, son, I need to talk with my daughter.” Wendell steps aside and Daddy places his hands on Gloria Jean’s shoulders. “You look beautiful,” he says, like he’s all choked up, then nods toward the groom. “Are you sure you love this man enough to marry him?”

My sister takes a deep breath and lets out a long, dull sigh as if she’s been pondering that question for two hundred years.

“It’s kind of late to be asking, if you ask me,” I say.

Mama gives me a double shot of the evil eye, but I flip my hair. Ever since Gloria Jean got engaged last month, Daddy hasn’t had a drop to drink, but I know better than to get my hopes activated. Any day now, he’s liable to land up in Drunk City again.

“Yes sir, I believe I love him enough,” she says.

“Well then, I hope you’ll be happy.” Daddy steps aside.

I can’t believe this is happening.

Wendell shakes Daddy’s hand. “I’ll take good care of
her, Mr. Bridges, I promise.” He escorts Gloria Jean out the door.

Daddy walks over to me. “Hey, Chipmunk, here’s some M&M’s for you and the boys.”

Speechless, I stuff the packs of candy into the pockets of my raggedy cutoffs. My parents’ shoes crunch on gravel as they cross the threshold and the screen door slams behind them. I trudge into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, and drink some dill pickle juice from the jar. It’s delicious—cold and sour. Then I grab the broom and go to the living room and sweep the stupid dirt out onto the front porch and then onto the ground. Both of their cars are gone. Noah races up and down the driveway, pulling Josh in their rickety red wagon.

I climb into the porch swing. My feet feel itchy. My arms feel wingy. I’m thirteen and a half years old—my heart aches for some damn freedom! When Jesus turned twelve, he just went lickety-split to the synagogue without asking permission. When his parents finally found him studying with his elders, Jesus acted a little haughty, as if they should have known he had to be about his father’s business. Poor Joseph probably felt like a loser, pretending to be Jesus’ father all those years, but I admire how Jesus stepped out on his own like that at such a young age. It’s ridiculous to think I could have as much freedom as the Lord, but that’s exactly what I intend to get. God knows I’d rather be tumbling down Niagara Falls in a big, stinking barrel than stuck in Red Clover for the rest of my damn life.

The dumb ironing can wait. I need to study the “Dd” chapter.

Last night, while studying in bed, I came upon the word
death
, and a vision popped into my head of me and Gloria Jean sleeping in a double coffin. That’s when I realized that we would never sleep in the same bed ever again. Gloria Jean was asleep, so I snuggled up close to her and hummed “Kumbaya” to myself until I fell asleep.

I grab the
A-K
volume from the floor and turn to the bookmark.
Death
with a capital
D
has its own separate entry:
the Power that destroys Life, often represented as a skeleton with a scythe
. Here’s an interesting one about a
death angel
named Azrael who is forever writing names in the Book of Life and erasing them. Sounds like a punishing kind of job to me. Enough of death. I skim a few pages until I get to
debauchery
, which means excessive indulgence in sensual pleasure.

“Kaw—leen!” Josh screams. Then Noah. “Kaw—leen!”

If they don’t learn to pronounce Karlene soon, I’m going to chew their big freckled heads off their skinny necks. I ignore their screams and keep plowing through the dictionary until I come upon two entries that are synonyms for beheading. The first is
decapitate: to cut off one’s head
, and the second is
decollate: to cut off one’s neck
, which amounts to the same thing.

“Kaw—leen!” they scream in unison.

“Holy Mother of Jesus!” I hop off the porch and run to the backyard.

Josh is on the ground, curled into a ball, trying to protect
himself. Noah is standing over him, his face streaked with tears, holding the hammer above his head with both hands. I wrestle the hammer away from him and he just stands there, trembling and crying like a nincompoop. There’s no use for me to play referee—the fight has gone way too far. Joshua’s what you call a womb-hogger. At birth he was two pounds heavier and three inches longer than Noah. So when Joshua tries to boss him around, Noah froths at the mouth with revenge for what happened
in utero
.

At this point, candy is the only cure. I pull a pack of M&M’s from my pocket and dangle it in front of them. Noah quits sobbing and wipes his face with his T-shirt, and Josh jumps up. “You two better get along or ELSE.” I run a pretend knife across my neck.

“We will, we will,” they say.

“Cross your heart and hope to die?”

They cross their hearts and hope to die. “Go climb a tree and don’t come down until I call you.” I give them each a pack of candy and they run away, squealing like piglets.

I walk across the street to our mailbox. Inside is a crisp white envelope with my name and address written in fancy handwriting. The
K
is huge and has curls on all four ends. I tear it open. It’s from a new teacher who’s teaching a Latin class for advanced eighth graders this year.
Superintendent Calhoun has been very cooperative
, blah, blah, blah.
She looks forward to meeting me
, blah, blah, blah.
It’s time Shirley County tackled the classics
, blah, blah, blah.

Enough of that scholarly stuff. It’s Cinderella Time.

I walk to our bedroom to get the ironing board out of the closet. Gloria Jean’s fancy collector doll is sitting on top of the big laundry basket, wearing her purple velvet gown and rhinestone tiara. When they got engaged, Wendell gave the doll to Gloria Jean. Her real name is Marguerite, but I christened her Princess Samantha, orphan daughter of Czar Humperdink. What the dumb-ass gift
means
is beyond me. The fact that Gloria Jean gave up her dream of going to Bauder Fashion College in Miama, Florida, to get married to a man who gave her a doll crucifies me.

My calves ache when I think about having to iron on my sister’s matrimony day, but Mama’s been in such a twitchy mood, I don’t want to aggravate her into a migraine. I drag the ironing board onto the porch so I can keep an eye on the twins, and then get the iron and fill up the sprinkle bottle with water. I go back to the closet and bring Princess Samantha and the clothes basket outside.

Maybe some music will help. I turn on the radio, and, as usual, Mama has it tuned to WGCM, which stands for “World’s Greatest Cotton Mill.” I twirl the dial away from the hog-calling song to Big Ways 61 radio in Charlotte. Ringo’s band is singing that song about that lucky girl with a ticket to ride somewhere or another. I sing along, yelling out, “I think I’m going to be sad—I think it’s today, yeah!”

I pick up one of the rugged cotton wraparound skirts Mama wears to work. Might as well start with the hard stuff. The skirt is so stiff, I have to sprinkle it twice with the water
bottle. Mama’s a firm believer in starch. She starches almost everything, and then hangs it on the clothesline until it petrifies. I press down hard with the iron as Wilson Pickett sings in a hot, soulful voice, telling Mustang Sally she better slow that Mustang
dow—ow—ow—n
. If I had a Mustang, I’d ride it all over town too, fast as I damn well pleased.

After I iron two pair of Daddy’s dungarees, I sprinkle down the yellow checkered tablecloth and spread it out flat on the ironing board. Smoochy Lips Jagger is singing that doomy song about how his mind paints everything black, even the red door of his heart. Then they play another Rolling Stones record. Mick sings, “Here it comes, here it comes”—warning a girl that her nineteenth nervous breakdown is right around the corner. Mick sounds like he hates the poor girl as much as he loves her, saying she wasn’t brought up right. Then he teases her about how her mama owes a million dollars in taxes and her daddy is trying to perfect a formula for ceiling wax. The joke, I guess, is that ceilings don’t need to be waxed. So damn funny, I forget to laugh.

Before I know it, I’ve ironed three of Mama’s work skirts, the twins’ yellow button-down shirts and navy blue pants, and four white pillowcases made out of scrap material from the mill. After Mama finished sewing them, she embroidered them with a blue rose and a
B
monogram.

The basket is almost empty. Princess Samantha’s head is sticking out above the rim. Her big blue eyes are staring at me in a real evil way, and I get that drainy, hypnotized feeling I get before one of those damn visions comes into my head.
I close my eyes and see a girl writhing on an old, splintery cross. Her head is bowed, so I can’t see her face, but she’s wearing that yellow polka-dot bikini Mama wouldn’t let me buy at the Fourth of July sale. That pale yellow color really shows off her gorgeous tan. She stops trying to wiggle her way off the cross and slowly lifts her head.

Holy moly. The girl is me.

Immediately, I’m transported to that cross. Nails tear at my flesh and thorns stab me in the temples. Drops of blood trickle down my Frankenstein forehead onto my cheeks. I stick out my tongue and lick them. They taste like rusty lemonade. For miles and miles, I can see everything. Tumbleweeds whisking across the desert. Cacti of all sizes and shapes. Thousands of snakes slithering across sizzling hot sand. And way in the distance, I see Gloria Jean in her blue linen suit tromping behind Wendell Whetstone up a giant sand dune.

All of a sudden, I feel a sharp pain in my side.

My eyes pop open and settle on Princess Samantha. I yank that little mesmerizer out of the clothes basket and sling her as hard as I can out into the front yard. She lands on her back with a thud and a crack.

There’s only one piece of laundry left in the basket: Gloria Jean’s pale lavender blouse with the Peter Pan collar. I smooth it out on the ironing board, sprinkle it lightly with water, and press the iron across the clean cotton fabric. One of my favorite dance songs is playing on the radio, the one about a girl named Sloopy letting her hair hang down. God, I
wish I had a cool nickname like that. “Shake it, shake it, shake it,” I sing along with the McCoys. Suddenly, I am Sloopy Bridges, a sexy California girl sizzling under the fiery sun, my butt swinging in a pale yellow bikini, driving the surfers wild.

1: a model of excellence or perfection

2: a perfect embodiment of a concept

Thank you, wounded Jesus. The longest summer of my life is almost over. It’s the first day of eighth grade and I’m sitting in my sixth-period classroom with seven other wonder students, waiting to meet our new Latin teacher. Alan Ryan Smith, the handsomest, tallest, and friendliest boy at Red Clover Junior High, sits two rows away, sketching something in his notebook. He looks over at me and flashes his heart-melting smile. I ignore him and flip my hair.

“Does anybody know anything about the new teacher?” I ask.

“I do,” says Desi Sistare, a.k.a. Mr. World Book, as he files his nails. Desi is an extremely well-groomed reporter for the school newspaper, and he interviews a dullard of one kind or another every month, mostly teachers.

“So?” Andrea says.

“She got her master’s degree last spring. Her husband is the plant manager at High Cotton Mills. She has two small children, a boy and a girl. That’s all I know. I tried to get an interview with her last week, but she didn’t have the time.”

The moment the bell stops ringing, a woman appears in
the doorway wearing a white toga that hangs to right below her knees. She stands there looking at us, her head cocked, one eyebrow raised. Then her face breaks into a huge grin, her white teeth dazzling against scarlet lips. Her shoulder-length hair is black and glossy. She sashays into the room, wearing brown leather thongs on her cute, chubby feet. Her toenails are as red as her lips.

As she swirls in and out between our desks, she looks amused with herself. Then she stops at the front of the room. “Welcome to my world.” She bows. “My name is Mrs. Harrison, and what I’m about to say is very important. A smart person would probably write it down.”

Everybody scrambles around, looking for pencils and opening their spiral notebooks.

“I, Amanda Harrison, am an extraordinary individual who fully intends to transform each and every one of you knuckleheads into a scholar of Latin by the end of the year, no matter how much suffering it causes.”

A few students giggle, but I’m in awe of this woman. Everyone hunches over, writing furiously. I write down
Amanda Harrison, extraordinary individual, transform, knuckleheads, scholar, Latin, and no matter how much suffering
, with spaces between them for the words I can’t exactly remember.

After everyone finishes writing, we sit there staring at her round face.

She continues. “Listening is a fine art you’ll have to learn this year,” she says. “But since you’re new at this, I’ll repeat
the Amanda Harrison Proclamation.” And she repeats the sentence real slow, emphasizing
no matter how much suffering it causes
.

I go back and fill in the missing words, feeling happy to meet a teacher who knows exactly what she intends to do with me.

“Okay, now that you know who I am and what I’m up to, please introduce yourselves and tell me the most important thing I should know about you. And don’t worry—I’m easy to impress. Who wants to go first?” She pulls out an unopened bag of jelly beans and cuts it across the top with a pair of scissors.

Desi raises his hand.

“No need to raise your hand in this class. Proceed.”

“My name is Desi Sistare. I have a twin sister named Deidre and she drives me nuts.”