Bleeding Violet (19 page)

Seconds later, his hand reshaped itself and was once again whole and normal. Normal-
looking
, anyway.

“You’re lucky you have me, freak boy,” I told him, sliding my hand over his prickly scalp. “Who else would put up with you?”

“I would.”

Petra stood beside our table, holding a glass bowl of strawberry ice cream too big for her skinny hands. She frowned at me. “
Anybody
would. Don’t let her bad-mouth you, Wyatt.”

Wyatt looked touched. “You sticking up for me, Pet?”

She sat at our table as though she had been invited, making eyes at Wyatt. “Friends look out for each other, right?”

He was sitting with me, with his arm around
me
, and it was like I’d vanished.

Petra noticed my pill bottles on the table and grabbed one. “Lithium?” she read, shocked. “I thought they only gave this stuff to whack jobs.” She peered at me. “Are you a whack job?”

I snatched the bottle from her. “Absolutely.” Since Rosalee and Wyatt didn’t care, I didn’t care what other people thought.

Petra looked at Wyatt. “So that’s what you’re into now? Whack jobs?”

“Pretty much,” he said, and smiled at me. “But I knew she was crazy when she begged me to take her hunting.”

“Shut up.” Petra turned her amazed eyes on me. “You went on a hunt?”

“Last night,” I told her, mollified.

While she gaped at me in wonder, her spoon halfway to her mouth, I noticed the milkworm curled in the bubbling dollop of ice cream. I grabbed the spoon, but she didn’t let go of it as easily as she had my pill bottle, and the contents of the spoon spilled all over her black camisole: the ice cream and the fat, white, finger-length milkworm.

Petra jerked backward and screamed as it slithered over her chest and up her pale throat. It probably would have made it into her open mouth had I not slapped the worm against her neck as if it were a mosquito, not thinking about how gross it would look—the stuff that came out of the milkworm was cheese-colored.

Petra squealed as she scrubbed her neck with paper napkins from the dispenser on the table. I took a few for myself before she used them all.
I
was the one who should have been squealing. My hand felt as though a garden slug had exploded all over it.

“It’s just a milkworm, Pet,” Wyatt said, when her whining didn’t end soon enough for him. “Don’t be so—”

“Cowardly?” she screamed, hurt. “Is that what you think? Is that why you sat there on standby waiting for me to swallow that thing?”

“Pet—”

“Screw you! I don’t even care anymore. I found somebody else. Did you know that? He’s tall and muscular and
he
doesn’t mind taking care of me.”

“The way you took care of Michael?” said Wyatt in a low voice.

Petra stilled, as if his words had killed her.

“I’m trying to help you,” he said.

She slapped him across the face; the sound was loud enough to draw every eye in the diner. “Shit on your help!”

Wyatt reached for her and Petra flinched, as though she thought he was going to return the slap. He didn’t, of course. He lowered his hand and looked so disappointed in her that she ran from him, right out of the diner.

“Who’s Michael?” I asked, when the dust had settled.

“Her younger brother.” Wyatt absently rubbed the red handprint on his face, staring down at his empty plate. “He died while they were walking home from the movies. A cackler bit his legs off, and you know what Pet did? She left him there. Alone on the street, in the dark, with a cackler snacking on him.

“I was patrolling with the Mortmaine when it happened and I was the first one there. I
saw
her run. If the other Mortmaine had seen her run, they’d have put her down the same as they put down that cackler.

“I tried to save Michael, but he’d lost too much blood. I tried to save Pet, too, in a way. I thought maybe she just panicked, and if she had it to do all over, she’d step up. Maybe take an interest in helping other people, since she failed with
Michael. Out of guilt if nothing else. But now, I don’t know. To scream over a
milkworm
?” He gave me a desperate look, as though I could explain Petra to him.

“Maybe she just doesn’t like creepy-crawlies.”

“Then she shouldn’t have moved here,” he said sharply, as though I’d given the wrong answer. “Here, there’s nothing
but
creepy-crawlies.” He spat out the word. “So many, there’s no room for cowards.

“No room at all.”

After the diner drama, I was glad to go home to Rosalee, who was in the kitchen in her red apron and bare feet. I couldn’t believe she was home so early in the afternoon. “Go take your pills,” she said. “I’ll put dinner on.”

I took my pills gladly, because I had a mother who cared whether I was sane, and then went down to the kitchen with my schoolbooks. “What are you making?”

“Tortilla soup. And before you ask, no, it’s not a black thing.”

“Sounds great.” I was still hungry. I hadn’t been eating right the past few days, and my stomach was determined to make up for lost time.

I dropped my books on the table. “There’s about fifty messages on the machine.”

She paused from chopping bright red peppers to look at me. “I know.”

“I bet most of them are from that snake.” I poured myself a glass of milk.

“Which snake? I know several.”

“That Jaguar snake. The one who likes to smack you around.”

She tilted her head to the side, pretending to think about it. “The one whose balls I crushed?”

“Maybe it’s not him,” I conceded, and pulled out the purple chair … and nearly dropped my milk to the floor. “You bought a new chair! For me!”

She shook her head sadly. “Ain’t very observant, are you?”

I’d been so right to go on that hunt. Now that she was over the initial shock of seeing me covered in blood and guts, she understood that I could take care of myself. She had accepted me. The chair proved it.

I sat in the bright purple chair, which almost perfectly matched my dress. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Sitting had never felt so awesome.

“What’s the homework?”

“Geometry,” I said.

“Only thing I was any good at in school was math and languages. There were set rules. You followed them. The end. You never had to give an opinion about quadratic functions.”

“I know. My old English teacher once asked me why it’s important that the character of Iago in
Othello
is motiveless. And I thought, who said it was important? It’s so arbitrary.”

“Joosef loved Shakespeare. Any play. He was a drama freak. I hate all that stuff.”

“Did you have anything in common with Poppa?”

“We were both good-looking.” She munched one of the red peppers thoughtfully. “I thought he was beautiful. I used to take pictures of him. Wanna see?”

“Do you have to ask?”

Rosalee rushed out of the kitchen, then rushed back with a Candies shoe box full of photos. She tossed the box at me and then went back to her post at the chopping block.

I looked at the pictures: Poppa young and skinny and half-naked on a beach, hair bleached almost white by the sun; in a purple sweater with white breath issuing from his laughing mouth; on a ferry, his eyes as gray as the sea.

I stroked my fingertips across the pictures, across Poppa’s face. “Why aren’t there any of you together?”

“We weren’t together,” said Rosalee, so abruptly that for a long moment I was too abashed to speak. But one question wouldn’t be denied, one I’d always wanted to ask.

“Why didn’t you abort me?”

“I knew Joosef would want you. Least I could do for him. He was … nice.”

“He loved you.”

“Many men do,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s a Price thing, this ability to fascinate.”

“Could your mother fascinate?” I asked her as she bewitchingly stirred the soup pot.

“Oh, yeah. Daddy wouldn’t let her outside unless he was with her. I kid you not. Me either, after I hit puberty. I had to sneak out. I wasn’t exactly a model daughter.” She pressed the back of her hand to her lips, as if wanting to press the words back into her mouth.

“That doesn’t mean you won’t be a model mother.” Her unhappiness weighed on me, but I didn’t have the skills to deal with my own problems, let alone hers. “You can be one.”

“It’s nice you think so.” She lowered her hand, her lips red
from the pressure she’d put on them. “Obviously, you won the bet. You can stay. I know you already know that, but it needed to be said.”

It wasn’t ladylike to whoop, so I just bounced in my chair a little.

“You seem like a sweet girl, but sweet turns sour in this town pretty damn fast. Why you wanna be as sour as all the rest of us Porterenes is beyond me, but … what’s funny?”

“When did you decide I was sweet: before or after I hit you with the lamp?”

She grimaced. “Hey, that reminds me—if you’re gone stay here, you need a shrink.”

The bouncing stopped. “Why?”

“Because last time I checked, manic depression don’t just clear up on its own. You need therapy.”

“Therapists don’t know anything. They can’t even decide what flavor of crazy I am. This year it’s manic depression. Next year it’ll probably be senile dementia. The only thing I need is my pills, and I can get those from a regular doctor. I can handle my situation
by myself
.”

“I seen how you handle situations
by yourself
.” She made a big production out of rubbing her head.

“You just want to put me in a hospital like Aunt Ulla. Admit it! I swear to God if you try to put me in a hospital, I’ll …” What? Bash her again? Hamstring her? Nothing seemed bad enough.

“I don’t mean for you go to the hospital,” said Rosalee gently. “I just got back from visiting a woman named Dr. Geller. She works outta her home. It’s nice, and you’ll only have to go on Wednesdays.”

I knew intellectually that I needed a shrink, but Aunt Ulla had always foisted me off on them for every little thing. Much easier than dealing with me herself. What if Rosalee developed the same strategy?

Fucking shrinks.

I hadn’t been in a hurry to revisit downsquare after the Melissa situation and the hunt. It had taken on a horrific cast in my memory: corpses, noxious smells, hardheads. But as Rosalee and I ambled about, I realized that downsquare was just another part of town, not as pretty and historic as the area where I lived—the square, Wyatt called it—but it had its charms.

“It’s divided into two parts,” Rosalee explained, jumping onto the base of a streetlamp. “Come up here.”

I did, feeling like the guy in
Singin’ in the Rain
.

“See that gazebo way in the distance? That’s Portero Park, so this area is the part of downsquare called parkside. Now, see the trees way
way
beyond the gazebo? That’s the dark park. The other side of the dark park is where darkside begins. It’s darkside you have to watch out for—that’s where all the weird shit happens.”

“That flying leech didn’t attack me darkside.”

Rosalee hopped off the lamp. “
Most
of the weird shit.”

She took me to an eatery with no signage on or over the door, but they had the best taquitos ever, crispy and spicy, well worth my scorched tongue.

As we walked the food off, my elbow twanged periodically, as it had since the wishing incident. I ignored it, the way I ignored all the unsettling things that had occurred that night. I ignored it and focused on the joy of being with Rosalee.

Poppa and I had often taken walks together, but walking with Rosalee was different. Whenever Poppa and I had traveled anywhere, people scrutinized our mismatched skin with suspicion or bewilderment, wondering at our relationship. But with Rosalee, the resemblance was so obvious, who could doubt our kinship?

Rosalee pointed out a cool fabric store, and I went inside and bought three yards of green angora to make Wyatt a coat, never mind that it was October and still too hot for even a sweater.

People sat or swung or rocked on porches, watching their kids playing, watching one another. Watching us. No, not
us
. Rosalee.

Several people whipped out their cells to snap her picture as we went by, and not just because of her tight clothes. I felt like I was the only thing keeping them from rushing her, as though she were a rock star and I her matronly aunt. But despite the attention, Rosalee only had eyes for me.

On one street, however, we weren’t quite as welcome, a street with trees marching along either side of it with military precision. People crouched in the shade beneath the trees, watching us with guarded suspicion; walking past them was like walking past poorly leashed Rottweilers.

“What’s their problem?” I asked, moving closer to Rosalee.

“This is Dark Peach Street,” she said, unruffled by the behavior of her fellow Porterenes. “The peaches that grow on these trees are good luck, but they’re jealously guarded. Unless you aim to get stoned with peach pits, don’t ever take any unless offered.”

In honor of Dark Peach Street, we walked to Alcide’s Cajun Market and bought a bag of regular peaches from a strapping white-haired man in suspenders. Rosalee spoke to him in German and he answered back, grinning ear to ear as he flirted with her.

“You did use to live in Germany, didn’t you?” I asked when we’d moved on, the peach warm and sweet and welcome within my taquito-ravaged mouth. “I remember Poppa said you guys met on a plane in Hamburg.”

She didn’t say anything. I hoped she hadn’t gone closemouthed on me again.

“Why did you move to Germany?” I prompted.

“I went to school there, in Heidelberg. It was different, so opposite of what I’d grown up with here. Germany was changing—the Berlin Wall had fallen. Seemed like a good time for change.”

“Did you change?”

“No.” She shrugged fatalistically. “Once a downsquare girl, always a downsquare girl.”

“Is your family still downsquare?”

“Nope. Moved up to Lamartine.”

“They live on our street?”

Before I could get excited about the idea of grandparents and cousins, she said, “Yeah. In the cemetery.”