Stranded (12 page)

“What are you doing in there?” Brent asked.

“Just sleeping,” Kenny said.

“Just jerking off,” Brent jeered.

Kenny smirked—I caught him.

I wondered what time it was. Natalie must have returned from the vigil too, and maybe Nana from her card night, which meant if I screamed, maybe someone would hear me. I had seen Brent play the clown, and when I glanced at the television, I almost expected to see him still on-screen, gamboling about in the background of an episode of
According to Jim.
And yet, he muttered things at Kenny from outside the door that were as nasty as Natalie’s letter to the vampire. I had seen the dents in Brent’s truck, heard about the pansies he urinated on. The truth of who Brent was cut through
even my addled head. Brent was evil, not happy and cute, and I did not have the slightest knowledge of how to protect myself if he came bursting into the room.

Kenny unplugged wires, freed his guitar, and stored it back in its case. He didn’t look at me. With the arrival of his uncle, he turned into a dog kicked one too many times. I had made a mistake, rushing us off into something stupid. Kenny carefully unlocked the door and slipped through, closing it before I could be seen. Brent had wandered down the hall.

“What do you want, man?” Kenny asked his uncle.

I tasted the soap my grandmother would have washed my mouth out with if she could hear what I was calling myself—names that didn’t feel so strong-minded anymore. Kenny’s footsteps followed Brent’s through the house. Then the front door slammed, the two of them off to wholesale some meth or Kenny’s dope. Meanwhile, I wondered if it was any use chasing down the pearl of my youth or if it, too, had rolled away and was forever lost in the mess of Kenny’s floor.

KENNY DIDN’T KISS ME GOOD-BYE OR EVEN TELL
me he enjoyed our time together. For all I knew, the sex hadn’t damaged his brain cells the way they had mine. I opened the drawer in his bedside table, hoping to find something that
wasn’t
criminal. I discovered vials, empty Baggies, two knives, four Sharpie pens, and a heavily paged copy of
Tropic of Capricorn
. I assumed the book was nothing special until I skimmed an underlined paragraph and felt my eyeballs sear. Let’s just say it wasn’t one of Nana’s romance novels. Every lady should have a token, I decided, spilling wet tears from my long black lashes, or whatever. I was puffy-faced and stupid-looking like I was every other time I cried. I stole a lighter, then bobbled around in the dark, forgetting that the switches in Kenny’s room were in all the
same places as in my grandmother’s house.

I groped down the hall into the kitchen and knocked a bleach bottle on the floor. The cap was secure and the container wobbled into a corner without spilling on something else toxic and causing the house to explode. I wasn’t sure whether I felt lucky or if I would have enjoyed bursting into a blaze of fire. Six other bleach containers on the sink suggested that the police might have more than the incident with Baby Grace to make them interested in the Stockhausens. The smells from the sink and melted-cheese-encrusted paper plates meant that the chemicals weren’t used to sanitize or soak toilet brushes but maybe to make bombs.

I didn’t poke around more. I was afraid of Brent busting in and shooting me where I stood. Nana might react to me returning late with more sympathy if I dragged myself through our door on my elbows clutching a bullet wound, but I was willing to forego sympathy if it meant I could live to be sixteen.

I stumbled through the Stockhausens’ garage because that was the door we mostly used for our entrances and exits at Nana’s. Lawn chairs, a second gas grill, and couches that sagged in the middle filled the place normally reserved for cars. I stumbled across more vials. Once outside, I raced through the rain
toward the lights in Nana’s kitchen. Mom’s car was in the driveway and the garage door was unlocked, which was a bad sign—it meant Mom and Nana were both home and probably knew I wasn’t.

I considered donning hospital slippers, but I heard voices and a chair slide back on the other side of the kitchen door as I held the box.

Booties won’t save me now, I thought.

I weaseled in. Nana and Mom rose from their seats.

“I got lost,” I sputtered.

My cover story, at least in the four minutes that I gave myself to think of one, was that I had walked to the vigil to find Natalie but, oops, missed her. Mom didn’t seem convinced by my bad acting. She must have noticed that I wasn’t wet or shivery even though I claimed I had been outside for five hours without a coat. She approached, placed her hand on my head, and silently pulled me to her chest. My hair smelled of Kenny’s dope; one whiff could have sedated the family dog, if we owned one.

Instead of saying anything, Mom stroked my nape.

“Why didn’t you call?” Nana took over. She always took Mom’s hugging for an abomination of child rearing. “Didn’t you know we were worried sick when we came home and you were not in your room? Why
didn’t you leave a note?” she ranted.

Mom shushed Nana.

I expected Mom’s pendulum to swing from relief to anger too, especially since Nana had a point. I wasn’t a child who had run off by accident. I could have been shot. There were a lot of scary things out there. Mom hugged me like I had never deceived her about anything, like we were back in the land of Schmoo. If she did the math—a subject I had gotten a lot better at in the last month—she would have figured out that around the same age, she was getting knocked up (hopefully not by a Stockhausen).

Nana, who had lived through those times, shook her head and padded off in her green surgical slippers to her bedroom. Once we were alone, Mom took my face in her hands and lifted my eyes to hers. I’m sure she noticed they were bloodshot.

“So where have you
really
been?” she asked.

“I told you.”

“And you
lied
,” she said, “which isn’t like you.”

I guess what I had been doing before was called deceiving, but I knew what Mom meant. I had only been fooling around with Katy—being mischievous, flirting with the idea of doing something awful, but mostly staying on a side of the line that wouldn’t kill
me. This time I had stepped over. I was surprised that Mom recognized the difference. Maybe I hadn’t been giving her enough credit. Maybe she had been paying attention, or was starting to notice little things.

“I just went next door to talk to Kenny for a little while,” I said.

I watched Mom translate the word
talk
.

“It’s boring here.” I tried to explain.

Mom stared at me. Usually she started her sentences with “Sweetie” or “Baby” or “Lovey-duck,” but this time she hit me with “Young lady,” which was Nana’s favorite opener. I didn’t have time to say good-bye to my memories of getting away with accidentally using the word
penis
as a predicate, or modeling without a contract, before she pushed me over the threshold into responsible adult territory, a life phase I had been hoping to avoid. I wondered if I could crank time backward, but Mom let loose before I could manage it.

“No television. No phone calls. No internet. No walking home from school. No leaving the house without saying where you are going,” Mom pronounced, a seriously quick learner in the “for your own good” department. Too bad Nana had gone to bed. She would have been impressed.

Mom extended her palm, and I removed my phone
from my sweatshirt pocket. She set it on the counter.

“It’s time you grew up,” she said. “It’s time you thought about your actions.”

She wiped her eye with the cuff of her bathrobe and told me to get to bed immediately.

I obeyed, feeling pretty lousy about the first forty-five minutes of womanhood.

Natalie was under the covers when I skulked into our bedroom. I didn’t really believe she had slept through the scene in the kitchen, because Mom and I hadn’t been whispering. Natalie rolled to the wall when I turned on the light. She had the ability to ignore me longer than I could keep at her, though I tried loudly opening and closing drawers.

She might have thought I had gotten what I deserved when Mom yelled, but I believed being treated like the bad daughter was better than being treated like the good one. Mom was burying Natalie along with her mistake by not punishing her for it. Though the girl could make me insane with her household tips and hair brushing, I felt she deserved more respect than just the business of tiptoeing and pretending. I didn’t think Natalie had acted intelligently. I even thought what she had done was gross, even the Steve Allen part, which had sort of lost its hold on my imagination. Katy would
have made arguments to defend him because his eyelashes were really long, but he hadn’t earned her trust. Natalie should have the chance to fall and be forgiven, not just by us, but by herself and everyone else, even if it was a stupid town, with a stupid church that made it hard to forgive anybody.

Natalie’s hands were flat together under her cheek as if she had fallen asleep while praying. Maybe it was neglect that made it so much easier for her to live with a lie than me, who had cracked under pressure and admitted I had sex with a neighbor boy about four minutes after it happened. She was an orange with skin biologically thickened to allow her to travel long distances by truck without bruising. I was a peach with a big brown spot. People squeezed me and returned me to the bin until I drew fruit flies.

I climbed into my own bed and lay in the half-light and contemplated the swirls in the stucco ceiling. Some of them were waves and others sea horses, part of a world of talking animals that Natalie and I had made up as kids. I had a mermaid identity then. I believed what Barbie said about finding your true spirit under a rainbow. Though it makes me sick to admit it, I once had been really happy about puppy and kitten posters too. I couldn’t tell you exactly when the appreciation
thinned or why my worldview changed to more of a Heath Ledger state of mind.

The kitten, with its blue perky eyes and pink paws, was pretty cute.

I lay awake for hours, and at about three in the morning I heaved out of my lumpy bed and peered through the window toward the Stockhausen house. Three trucks and a motorcycle were parked in the driveway, another truck on the lawn. Kenny’s room was unlit. I wondered where Kenny was—maybe out wandering the streets with his uncle, maybe awake and alone in the dark, thinking of me. I hoped to hear a regretful tap on my window and see him appear clutching wild-flowers tied into a bouquet and a handwritten letter telling me his heart was mine.

The image was pretty idiotic.

KENNY HADN’T EXACTLY STOLEN ANYTHING
from me I hadn’t handed over. What he had taken, I couldn’t explain to my deepest self, who was normally a receptive listener. Kenny had acted as if I showed up in a boy’s room on a regular basis. He hadn’t treated me as a first timer.

Immediately after chugging along on this train of thought, I chugged down a second one so I could waste more gas and pollute more atmosphere. Katy had once told me that women biologically engorge with hormones after sex, which makes them ponder the experience more deeply than boys. I ran a few Katy scenarios through my mainframe and discovered how seriously lame and marshmallow-sticky I was. She would have written a phone number on Kenny’s mirror
in red lipstick or made her exit as soon as the dirty deed had been done, giving him a wink in the doorway instead of falling asleep and possibly drooling all over his chest. She would have made the joke that men are like buses—there’s always another one coming.

Katy might also rise against social pressure and do what was right for Natalie instead of worrying about who she might be betraying. Or Katy would have sexed up Steve Allen the second she rolled into town. That boy was like a fly trap and Katy a very eager fly.

While I brooded, Natalie heaved and sighed and rolled. I tiptoed to the kitchen to see if my cell phone was still on the counter. Mom would have to get better at confiscation if there were going to continue to be consequences to my actions. I dialed 9-1, but before I hit the last 1, I wondered if there was another number, maybe a special line for the person in charge of the Baby Grace investigation, that I should contact.

Then I decided to wait until the weekend was over—maybe police stations aren’t open in the morning on a Sunday, especially in a town with only one sheriff. Maybe I should talk to Kenny and ask him to do the confessing. When I returned to my room, the unicorn collection cast long shadows on the wall and the furnace shook the house. I slipped the headphones
of my iPod over my ears and tuned out scary noises. If the volume bothered Natalie, she didn’t show it, leaving me to wonder if her secret for sleeping unbothered by the creepy fears about Baby Grace’s ghost was earplugs.

The next morning, I avoided the sound of everyone else waking. Natalie flitted to and fro, gathering sundries and heading for the kitchen for what smelled like oatmeal for breakfast. Minus television, my cell phone, the internet, Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, there didn’t seem to be any reason for me to join the living. I snuggled closer to my iPod, loving it in a way I never had before.

Nana and Natalie went to church, and Mom left to have lunch with Harvey. I ransacked drawers in hopes of locating Natalie’s virginity pledge because I thought if I could find it, I could make it turn back time or at least use it to remind me why the past was important. Instead of the pledge, I stumbled on the secret of my identity in Nana’s Bible. Who would have thought Nana would be so devious as to write down my father’s name in her Bible, but there it was: Edgar Cook, which sounded British. Edgar Cook’s number wasn’t listed in the phone book, but in the yearbook I found in Mom’s closet, there he was, with a slightly green tinted mullet. He also played baseball.

What a name—Edgar. No wonder Mom wanted to keep him hidden.

I could track him down. I could picture Edgar and me reuniting. Harvey would probably have to go his separate way and stop taking up all Mom’s time.

She didn’t return from her lunch date to discuss more of our argument from the night before, so I was left giving only Nana the gift of finished homework and towels that mostly stayed on their rods for the rest of the day. I stopped disagreeing with Natalie, even over whether to fold my socks. I set the table before dinner and tied Nana’s newspapers so they would be easier to take to the recycling center. Nana, maybe catching my mood, agreed to drive me there with the bundles.

A familiar
sploink
under my mattress at the end of the day warned me what could happen if I faltered or backslid in my plan to report Natalie. I arose on Monday morning before the alarm, put the journal in my backpack (hoping Natalie wouldn’t want it herself that morning), and slipped into the kitchen. I cracked an egg into a pan. My name was Cook, after all.

Nana shuffled in. She shooed me away and reached for a blue pottery bowl on the shelf and poured some cream into it.

I wasn’t exactly sure of the recipe for scrambled eggs, but Nana’s old hands showed me how to prepare
them, and we assembled a breakfast that was even more edible than my usual Toaster Pops. Mom, who had appeared again, finally, patted my head on her way to the coffeepot. Natalie spooned frozen orange juice concentrate into the blender, and the four of us each talked about what we wanted to do with the afternoon as if it were just another day that would run on into tomorrow and tomorrow, as it had always been, better because we were all moving forward with our lives and the bad times were something to look back on. Natalie would be attending youth group that afternoon. Mom was meeting Harvey.

When the meal was finished, Nana cleared. Mom went to change, and Natalie and I skipped outside to wait for our big smelly bus. The air was thick with dry, dead leaves. The bus’s brakes shrieked as it approached. Ernie clucked at Natalie and me and called us a pretty pair of cousins. To celebrate, she and I sat next to one another. We passed the QuickMart, Pastor Jim’s church, Bonny’s, and fields and fields of stripped land, their soybeans and corn now harvested and some of the fields retilled.

“Stop hogging the seat, Kelly Louise,” Natalie complained.

I moved my backpack to the floor. The wintry
view—the silos, the Quonset huts—they were beautiful. Natalie was a saint—superhuman in how she held everything in but her frustration with me. All anyone could talk about on the bus and later at school was an upcoming party—the last ever at the Quonset huts because they really were going to be leveled soon.

Kenny ditched English class and I didn’t see him until he arrived late for Earth Science at the end of the day. Ms. Duncan sent him to the office to get a pass and he returned empty-handed. She sent him a second time, but because he had more than once proved he had the stamina to keep the failing-to-make-it-to-the-office thing progressing for the rest of the period, Ms. Duncan relented and motioned him to his chair when he appeared without the pass a third time. I had a few plans laid out, some of them unrealistic, like inviting him to watch DVDs at Nana’s house after school. It would mean talking him into wearing the booties, and maybe Kenny sensed booties in the air because as soon as he sat down, he started gouging his desk.

“Quit it.” I poked him in the arm with the back of my pen.

I don’t think anyone at Carrie Nation had ever touched Kenny on purpose before, even with a writing utensil. Kenny observed my hand hovering in the
air behind his shoulder, revolved, and tried to stare it into submission. Five minutes later, I tapped him and presented him with a stack of take-home practice tests. He pretended to receive them and drew away at the last second. As usual, they spilled on the floor.

“Hey,” I yelled.

He seemed to think the joke was funnier because it was the fifteenth time I had fallen for it.

It made him feel so good he started gouging his desk again. I stooped to gather the pages, adding a sigh of weariness that I had learned from Nana when she handled my waywardness. Sherry Wimple whispered to Natalie. Ms. Duncan, too fatigued to cope with Kenny’s tapping and desk vandalizing, released us early. I left the room along with everyone else. I flinched when, halfway to my locker, Kenny’s big leather wristband came arcing toward my head. It was sort of a stretch, but he dropped his arm around my shoulder.

“You look like death, babe.” Kenny professed his love.