Girl Unmoored (19 page)

At first Rennie didn’t see Mike, or M, or me walking my bike. But when she turned to say something to her mother, her face lit up. “Hey!” she said waving to Mike. “Mike! Mike Weller!” and came running over.

Mike stopped and smiled, keeping a hand on M so she wouldn’t fall over. “Hey, Rennie,” he said.

Her face turned neon pink, you could tell she was flattered he remembered her name.

When Mr. and Mrs. Perry saw the three of us standing there, they started toward us too, dragging Eeebs along.

“Mom and Dad, this is the Jesus, remember?”

Mr. Perry said, “Oh, of course. Pleased to meet you,” and held out his hand. Then he nudged Eeebs to do the same. “This is my son, Ebert.”

“Nice to meet you,” Eeebs grumbled, shaking Mike’s hand.

But Mrs. Perry crossed her arms. “Weren’t you the one who delivered the flowers this morning?”

“Yes,” Mike answered. “That was me.”

“So how do you know Margie and Apron?” she asked through her tight mouth, looking over to me, standing on the other side of M.

“From Scent Appeal,” I answered, staring at Rennie. “That’s how we first became friends.”

“You’re Mike of the
gays
?” M asked, pulling her shoulder away from him. Her top lip was touching her pointy nose now.

Mr. Perry looked down, but Mrs. Perry kept staring at him with her arms crossed, and Eeebs looked horrified. I started to say something, but Mike’s glance told me not to. Then he turned to M and lifted up a smile like it was the heaviest thing in the world. “The very same,” he nodded.

M just stared, but Mrs. Perry uncrossed her arms and raised her eyebrows and said, “Well, I will say, you people certainly know your flowers.” And with that, she steered Eeebs away.

“
And
you have a great voice,” Rennie added, before following her mother.

“Yes,” Mr. Perry agreed. “We enjoyed the play.”

“Thanks,” Mike said. “Glad you could come.”

Mr. Perry lifted his hand in a wave and when he turned away with the rest of his family, we all saw it: Mrs. Perry leaning into Eeebs’s ear to whisper something, and Eeebs quickly wiping his hand on his pants. The one he had used to shake Mike’s hand.

I looked at Mike, still hanging on to that smile, but barely. “I hate those people,” I said through my teeth.

Mike dipped his head at me and said as sad as the bluebird sings, “Then the cycle continues, doesn’t it?”

Shame knocked the wind out of me. Not just for how much I hated the Perrys now, but for how much Mike didn’t.

M broke the moment with a cluck. “Such the waste,” she said, starting on her crutches again, oblivious to what Eeebs and Mrs. Perry had just done. “You are too handsome for the boys.”

Mike grinned for real this time and started walking with her. “Well, if I had met you a little
earlier
things might have turned out differently.”

M looked at him with a big smile as a blush broke out on her face. And for the first time ever, I wanted to hug her.

At the Scent Appeal van, I put my kickstand down and held the crutches while Mike helped M into the front seat, angling her so that she could still keep her foot up.

“You’ll have to sit in the back, Apron,” Mike said after he shut M’s door.

I sat on my knees, my bike on one side of me and twelve bunches of yellow lilies on the other. And then we drove out the school driveway, M and Mike looking straight ahead, and me staring out the back window, watching my school get smaller and smaller, seventh grade gone forever.

Things went back to bad after Mike left. I begged him to take me to Scent Appeal with him.
But he said, no—that I couldn’t leave M all alone up there on my dad’s bed watching TV with a bag of peas on her toe. And he had a lot of work to do. Chad was having a hard day and so far he hadn’t even gotten off the couch. They had one retirement party and two bat mitzvahs to decorate this weekend.

“What about Toby, can he help?” I asked, the two of us walking down the porch stairs together, my feet finally free. I had small red dents across both ankles where my straps had been strangling me.

“He went back to cutting hair,” Mike said jumping off the last stair and turning around to me, still a few steps up. The two of us were the same height now. In the bright afternoon sun you could see tiny wrinkles on his cheeks. “Toby was just helping us out for a while. Money’s kind of tight, with Chad’s medicine costing so much and all. Anyway, you’ll be all right.”

But I must have looked like the inside of my stomach, because Mike said, “Do you really think your dad is going to be that mad?”

I looked into his blueberry eyes and nodded.

“Jeepers,” he said turning away and kicking a pebble under the van. “What does he expect? You’re a kid. Goes with the territory, know what I mean?”

But all I knew was that I was a kid whose territory was about to get a whole lot smaller.

“Look, Apron, I really have to go check on Chad,” he said turning back to me.

“Thanks for coming to get us, Mike.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. Then he leaned into me so close that his hair brushed up against my cheek. “She’s a would-be beauty queen contestant, Apron. If she gets on your case, just tell her she’s never looked better. Kill her with kindness.”

But even Mike didn’t know the M that I knew.

After he climbed into the front seat of the van and closed his door, I jumped off the last stair and stepped up to his window to give him the high-five he was waiting for. But instead of slapping me back, he wrapped his fingers around my hand and held it.

“Was it awful, at the end, with your mom?”

“Yes.”

Mike’s blue eyes started melting. “Thanks,” he said. Then he squeezed my hand and let go.

He started the engine and I stepped back and watched him back out. After the van turned around, he rolled down the passenger window and said, “Hey, I keep forgetting to bring you your report card. We signed for it at the conference. Ms. Frane says you’re a killer writer, you know. She’s entering your poem in some contest, did she tell you? That’s why you didn’t get it back.”

I had noticed my free verse poem wasn’t in my last homework pack, but figured Ms. Frane probably didn’t have time to read them anyway. That’s something only kids with parents who teach know; half the time your homework doesn’t even get read, just graded.

Mike waved one last time and drove off. I waited until every single piece of dirt in our road had settled back down again before I turned and climbed the porch stairs.

I spent the whole afternoon tiptoeing around and cleaning things up. My plan was ruined now. M couldn’t look lazy with a broken toe.

Twice, I brought up frozen peas, lemonade, and Chips Ahoy! and left them all on her bed. Both times when I carried them in, she was on the phone talking all wrong in English with a very bad look on her face. The only word I could figure out was
horrivel
because it was the same in Latin. She never said thank you or no thank you, she only ignored me or rolled her eyes.

But one time, she screamed my name so loudly that even The Boss stopped twitching. Lately, I had been making an obstacle course for him around my room. I liked to figure out where he was going to go before he did, but most of the time he went straight under my bed and pooped. My room had started smelling really bad now, and I knew it was only a matter of time before my dad came in and figured things out.

When M screamed, though, he ran under my dresser. I cornered him, dropped him back inside his cage, and went to go see what M wanted, me twitching as much as The Boss.

“I have to use the bathroom,” she said. “Get those things.” She pointed to her crutches, lying up against the bed, close enough for her to reach.

“
Crutches
,” I said, trying to do her a favor but getting sneered at instead. After she got herself up on one foot, I held my breath and tried to slide my hands under her arms like Mike had. But as soon as my hands hit her big boobs, she whacked them away. “I can do this,” she said sliding the crutches under there herself and then clunking down the hall into the bathroom.

I looked at my mom’s closet. The door was shut tight. If I had broken M’s toe last week, my dad would never have saved her closet for me.

“Aprons!”

“What?”

“Come in to here.”

I told myself not to be scared. But it turned out, I should have been. Because when I got into the bathroom, M was standing in front of the toilet with her pants down, and her big white underpants stretched across her bump.

“Hold these things,” she said handing me the crutches. I must have looked as afraid as I felt because then she added, “Please.”

After I took them from her, she started wiggling down those underpants. I turned around and found my freckled self staring back at me in the mirror. I didn’t even know that kids with freckles could have circles under their eyes, but there they were, sort of greasy, in a deep shade of red.

M’s pee shot out so hard it sounded like a water gun spraying into the toilet. I tried not to breathe. After it went to drip, she sighed and said, “I know that you hates that I am here, Aprons.”

My heart ground to a stop and those eyes of mine bugged back at me.

I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “It’s okay. You have to be here, because of the baby.”

She didn’t say anything for a beat. Then she said, “Well. You know, Aprons, you could go to live with your grandmother.”

Two other eyes were looking back at me in the mirror now, but these ones were mean and M’s. Instead of being afraid this time, something in my brain snapped and I watched my own smile rise up. “I already tried that,” I told her. “She said no.”

She looked away first.

“Give those things now,” she ordered me, nodding to the crutches that were still in my hand. I watched her wiggle the crutches under her arms.

“Hey. Were you ever in a beauty pageant?”

She stopped. I got ready for her to shoot darts out her eyes at me, but she didn’t.

“Because I bet you would have won. You’re pretty enough.”

Her face wanted to lighten up, you could tell. But instead, she hobbled out the door. So I stood there, listening to her peg it back down the hallway. When she got to my dad’s room, I turned back to the mirror and winked at the power of me.

Mike was right. And I had a new m.o.

My dad’s car came down the dirt road right as The Boss found the piece of guinea pig food I planted for him in my shoe.
We were playing on my bed now, listening to the clock radio, but softly in case M screamed my name again.

Downstairs, my dad didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Then he yelled, “Hello? Is anyone home?” and M said, “Up here.”

I waited until my dad had climbed the stairs before I began counting backward, starting at twenty. The Boss was already tucked back away in his cage and I sat on the side of my bed with my back straight and my sneakers touching the floor, ready to go.

On
fifteen
I heard from his bedroom: “What
now
for Christ’s sweet sake?” And by
eleven
I heard: “Why didn’t you tell them to interrupt me?” and by
five
he was calling my name out like a list, louder and louder each time.

When the door opened there I was, already looking at him. His hair was sticking out a little here and there and he kept shaking his head almost as fast as Grandma Bramhall. “What the
hell
happened, Apron?”

I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

“You broke Margie’s toe and you’re not going to explain yourself ?” He was holding my doorknob so tightly his knuckles were turning white.

“It was an accident Dad,” I said finally, choppy. “
Errare humanum est?
”

It didn’t work. “To error is human” doesn’t count when you break someone’s toe, I guess.

My dad pushed his lips out like a duck and kept shaking his head, looking at me up and down, from my sneakers to the top of my head, then back down again.

“I dropped my award on her by
mistake,
Dad. Ask anyone.
Anyone
.”

“I have no idea how to deal with you anymore. I have no idea how to deal with
any
of you anymore.”

“Are you going to send me off to live with Grandma Bramhall?”

“Oh,” he chuckled too hard. “I get it. No, Apron. Sorry. The last thing she needs is a troublemaker living with her.”

I stared at him, my eyes filling with every fun time he and I had ever had together, so long ago now they were nothing but amoebas, ready to slide down my cheeks and drop off to nowhere.

“And what is that smell in here?”

I shrugged but he glanced at my open closet and walked over to it. The Boss smiled up at him with a twitch.