Crimes of the Sarahs (3 page)

“That was really stupid,” she tells me.

“It was Mr. Trego,” Sarah C explains. “Sarah T has been avoiding him ever since we quit.”

“Big deal,” Sarah A says. “The pay for that job was a joke.”

“But I hadn’t returned my uniform,” I say. I jerk my thumb toward my shirt.

“I doubt he wants it back now,” Sarah A says. “And if he does, he’s a serious pervert.”

“Good point,” I say. My throat feels tight. I sound squeaky.

“We all make mistakes,” Sarah C says.

“Yeah, but not the kind that involve our own bodily fluids,” Sarah A says.

I start the car.

“Sarah C, I have some awful news,” Sarah A says.

“What is it?” Sarah C asks.

“Benny Stowe was inside the store. He saw everything,” Sarah A says.

“He did
not
,” Sarah C says.

“Well, he didn’t see it,” Sarah A says. “But I told him about it.”

“Why?” Sarah C asks. “If he didn’t see one of my best friends pee her pants, why tell him that one of my best friends peed her pants?”

Benny Stowe is Sarah C’s longtime crush. He’s cute and one of the most popular guys in school. She’s always trying to look good in front of him.

“One of the clerks brought out a mop and one of those yellow plastic buckets on wheels,” Sarah A says. “I had to tell Benny something. It’s not like I’m going to lie for no good reason.”

I pull the car onto Milham.

“Did Benny seem grossed out?” I ask. I’m mortified to learn that Benny Stowe knows about my pee issues. But there’s not much I can do about it now. Except hope that in the near future a minor head injury resulting in short-term memory loss befalls Benny Stowe.

“Totally,” Sarah A says. “Even after it got mopped up, he wouldn’t step in that area. He took a long stride over the damp spot to get to the magazines.”

“Maybe he thought the wet tile would be slippery,” I say.

“He was probably more worried about getting pee on his
shoes,” Sarah A says. She flips the visor down to shade her face from the sun. “How can we grow as thieves, and move on to the
next phase
, if we can’t count on one another to steal a simple book?”

“But we didn’t get caught either,” Sarah C says.

“You made a purchase. We spent money in there. And that dumb rag wasn’t even on sale. The only crime we’re guilty of is stupidity.”

“Actually, it’s against the law to urinate in public,” Sarah B says. “I saw a guy get arrested for it at a Tigers game. I think it’s a misdemeanor.”
Pop
.

I glance at Sarah A’s face. It’s bright red. What is Sarah B doing? I want this incident to blow over. I roll my window down to increase the ventilation in the car.

“Real crimes have victims,” Sarah A says. “Remember what I said when we broke out the windows of Davis Garlobo’s Mustang?”

“I remember. After three swings of your baseball bat, you said, ‘Davis Garlobo is a pizza-faced asshole who never should have laughed at me because I didn’t know how to pronounce Hispaniola,’” Sarah B says. “Then you spat on the hood of his car and called him captain crap-ass.”

Sarah A sucks in an angry breath and slowly releases it.

“I meant what I said on the ride home.”

None of us answer. If you can’t remember Sarah A’s words
verbatim, it’s best to wait and let her restate them.

“I said that trespassing isn’t a true crime. Neither is criminal mischief or vagrancy, because there’s no real loss. Nobody suffers. Nobody grieves. But vandalism, that’s a crime. Real crimes have victims. Is it that hard to remember?”

I stop us with a jerk at a red light.

“Do you know what helps me remember things?” Sarah C says. “Acronyms. Like scuba for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus or NASA for National Aeronautics and Space Administration.”

“Real crimes have victims doesn’t make an acronym,” Sarah B says. “It’s RCHV. It doesn’t have a vowel.”

“You’re right,” Sarah C says. “We need an acrostic. Like Kings Play Chess On Fine Grain Sand for the taxonomy of organisms: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.”

“I know. Rod Carew Hates Vaseline,” Sarah B says.

“Rod Carew?” Sarah A asks.

“He’s one of the greatest baseball players of all time. He had over three thousand hits,” Sarah B says.

“Vaseline?” Sarah A asks.

“Vaseline or any balm,” Sarah B says, “is used by some pitchers to juice the ball. There’s all sorts of variations: spitball, scuffball, mudball—”

“Who cares? Am I surrounded by idiots?” Sarah A asks.
She turns around to glare at the backseat Sarahs. “No wonder this town had the largest psychiatric hospital in the state of Michigan. Clearly, mental problems still abound.”

Nobody says anything else as I drive us back toward our Winchell neighborhood.

“Drop me off first,” Sarah A say. “It’s starting to smell.”

I shift my weight on top of the magazine and the moist pages rub against each other releasing a noise that sounds like a wet kiss. I’m nearly to Sarah C’s house, but I pull into a driveway and turn around. What Sarah A wants, Sarah A gets.

At speeds topping forty miles per hour, I proceed to the Marlborough Building. It’s a hoity-toity place where a lot of professional-type people live. It has a slate roof and stained-glass windows and decorative tiles and a swanky recessed entranceway. A lot of really old people live there, too. Mostly the kind who have already started to die.

I think the building is totally overrated. I mean, fix the elevator. Every time we come to visit we’ve got to ascend five whole flights of stairs. Sarah A thinks it’s the best place to live in Kalamazoo. She likes having rich hall neighbors. Sometimes she steals their mail. She takes pride in the fact that she’s the only Sarah who’s committed a federal offense.

“The air is so balmy,” Sarah C says, sticking her arm out the window.

Nobody responds. She pulls her long arm back inside the car.

I speed down Oakland. It used to be a tulip-lined street. Sadly, the tulips lost their heads during a thunderstorm the last week of May. Now, with June in full swing, most of our streets are flanked by rows of decapitated, wilting stems. I turn down South Street and decide not to comment on the condition of our local flora. When I pull up to the Marlborough Building, I slam my car into
PARK
. I try smiling at Sarah A, but she’s already climbing out.

“I’ll call you later,” Sarah A says. “I’m disappointed in everyone. Especially you,” she says, aiming a perfectly manicured index finger at me.

“I understand it wasn’t my best moment,” I say.

“That’s an understatement,” Sarah A says. She flips her hair and licks her lips. “You’re not going crazy, are you? I think this is about the same time your brother started losing it. The summer before his senior year. Liam read that book about Tonto and became a totally different person.”

Liam is my brother. I never knew that Sarah A thought he went crazy. But I do remember him reading a book about Tonto. Our mother is one-half Potawatomi. Liam thinks this is a big deal. In high school, he went on a serious Native American literary jag. But I’m not like him. I’m not interested in myself in a genealogical or political sense. When it comes to my ancestry, it’s not something I think about.

“Liam read
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
,” Sarah C says. “It’s a movie now called
Smoke Signals
. Sherman Alexie wrote both.”

“I didn’t know that,” Sarah B says.
Pop
.

“Well, Sherman whoever’s book made Liam go crazy and become a totally political psycho person. Seriously. Look where he ended up … Stanford,” Sarah A says with disgust.

“Oh, I didn’t wet myself as a political statement,” I say. “I probably have some kind of disorder. A treatable one,” I add.

Sarah A rolls her eyes.

“I don’t think Liam went crazy,” Sarah C says. “And even if he did, Liam is way less crazy than your brother.”

Sarah A shuts the door with a thud.

“Vance is on very effective medication now,” Sarah A says. “And nobody is allowed to call my brother crazy except for me and his therapist. Do not disparage my family.”

“Sorry,” Sarah C says. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

Sarah A raises her eyebrows. “Sing group is off tonight,” she says. “And tomorrow.”

We all watch her practically skip up the carpeted, covered walkway to the building’s front doors. This relieves me. Already, she’s bouncing back from the day’s disappointment.

“We could have sing group at my house,” Sarah C offers. “Midway though ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ we get a little pitchy.”

I’m still stopped in front of the Marlborough. An elderly man waiting behind me in a Cadillac honks.

“I think I’d rather rest my throat,” I say.

The man honks again and I swing onto the road. Couldn’t he wait one minute? What’s with the elderly? Vehicularly speaking, they have no patience and consistently overuse their horns.

I pull into Sarah C’s driveway and she climbs out without saying another word about sing group or the balmy air. Sometimes, she acts like she belongs in a musical. Like
The Sound of Music
. She’s totally the kind of person who would persist against the Nazis, make outfits out of curtains, and then belt out a song about it. A problem-solving personality can be so nauseating. As a Sarah, she should know that.

Sarah B pops her gum at four-second intervals, but doesn’t say anything either. She waits until I pull in front of her house and then she’s gone, taking her tart scent with her. Maybe I should muster some sort of good-bye. Or make a joke out of what happened so I can lighten the mood. But I drive away. There’s no denying it. Right now, sitting atop this magazine, I feel like a substandard, spineless, pee-stained fool. I accelerate into the dusk. This isn’t the first time I’ve failed somebody. And because life is long, I doubt it’ll be the last.

I turn onto Taliesin and drive on automatic pilot toward my driveway. I don’t see the possum until it’s too late. He scampers in
front of me and I’m so disconnected from the present moment, thinking about the Sarahs, that I smack him dead. I slam on the brakes. His white body glows pink in my taillights.

There’s no way that he’s merely injured. I can see a tread mark running down his center. I pull into the carport and look back at the flattened marsupial. Besides a few ants, and a low-flying sparrow in driver’s ed, this is the first animal I’ve ever killed. My first mammal.

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

I walk to it. The possum’s eyes are closed, but its mouth is turned up in surprise. Like maybe it was expecting to have a future. But then it encountered my all-weather radials.

“I won’t let this happen again,” I say, tugging my form-fitting wet pants out of my crotch.

I walk away. I don’t enjoy confronting death either. As soon as my dad gets home, I’ll tell him about the possum. Sooner or later, he’ll dispose of it properly. There’s way too many of these ratlike marsupials in the neighborhood anyway. I think one of them murdered my neighbor’s puffy Pomeranian, Pom-Pom. It was either eaten or stolen. Because one day, that yapping fuzzball was gone. And I doubt anyone in our neighborhood would steal an elderly blind woman’s dog. Even the Sarahs have limits.

Once inside, I head toward my bedroom. My parents are at the movies. They’re watching a documentary about global
warming. Apparently, there’s some startling shots of glaciers melting. I can’t even believe that they’re showing that in a movie theater. Documentaries aren’t movies. Everybody knows that.

I tug at my pants again. They’re clinging to me in a way that emphasizes my female anatomy. I need a shower. I feel filthy.

Standing beneath the shower’s warm flood, I let out a deep breath. I’m filled with this doomed feeling and I can’t shake it. It’s not about what happened at the Barnes & Noble. Or the possum. It’s about the Sarahs. What if Sarah A is planning to dump one of us and downsize our group to three? Am I a dumpee? Shouldn’t there be a vote? Wouldn’t it make more sense to dump Sarah C?

Sarah T, I’m concerned about our group of four
.

I turn off the water and step out of the shower. Looking at myself in my most natural state makes me feel so insignificant. Steam hangs in the air, fogging the mirror’s glass. Slowly, it erases my short, naked body: brown hair, small boobs, pudgy stomach, thick thighs, and my ungroomed patch of hair down there. Soon, I’m barely visible at all. It’s like I’m looking at my own ghosthood.

I grab a towel and wrap it around me. I can feel myself begin to cry. I lift my damp hands and wipe away the tears. I want to be more than who I am, more than just Sarah Trestle. I want to be a part of something bigger than myself. Without the Sarahs, how would I do that?

I’m teetering on the brink of really losing it, of being swallowed by a wave of absolute sadness. I force myself to stop crying, and make the fragile and soft parts of myself, if only for a moment, turn hard. I look back into the mirror hoping to see some of this new resolve, but the glass doesn’t return my reflection. All it gives me is a thick, empty cloud.

Chapter 3

“It’s finally time for the
next thing
. We’re entering the guy phase,” Sarah A says.

Because it’s six o’clock in the morning, everything feels very dreamlike. I know I’m talking on the phone, because my mother just handed me the receiver and said, “You’ve got a phone call.” And I’m aware that the person on the other end is Sarah A, because the first thing out of Sarah A’s mouth was, “It’s me.” And telephonically speaking, that’s what Sarah A always says. But, being the crack of dawn, I feel fuzzy and surprised.

“Are we entering the guy phase right now?” I ask. “Because I haven’t brushed my teeth yet.”

Sarah A sighs dramatically.

“Not right now, right now. But everything is lined up. Come over to my house at four,” Sarah A says.

I roll over onto my back and stare up at my ceiling.

“In the morning?” I ask.

“No. That’s stupid. Come over at four in the afternoon like a normal person.”

“And will guys be at your place?” I ask.