Stranded (6 page)

IN A CHOICE BETWEEN TRUTH OR DARE, KATY
always picked Dare and avoided Truth whenever possible. Honesty forces you into the past and makes you talk about wetting the bed when you were in grade school. Even if it’s an easy Truth, like “Would you go down on Mr. Sears the math teacher?” you limit yourself with a direct answer, because no matter what you say, someone is going to shriek, “Ewww.”

Responding to a dare, though, opens all kinds of possibilities. You don’t have to think; you just have to do. Even if the action you take is gross, nobody blames you because you were following orders. I asked a nun in the mall for a tampon once because Katy challenged me. After I committed the deed, I felt braver and stronger, more capable because my nerves didn’t keep
me from taking a bold action.

Kenny battered my confidence by luring me to the parking lot. (I sat alone at lunch, never talked to Steve Allen, and had a long conversation with Mr. Gruber about how difficult it can be attending a new school that would have been considered pure dorkiness if Katy had heard it.) He was my first and only friend in Heaven. And yet, I reminded myself, I had successful daring exploits under my belt and I could soldier on.

After my last class of the day at Carrie Nation, I walked home rather than ride the smelly bus. I familiarized myself with the six brick buildings surrounding a square that were Heaven’s town center. I took note of the QuickMart and wondered if I might see Natalie’s pervert loitering nearby. I lingered near the Paradise Lounge, the place Aunt Denise used to spend afternoons when she should have been at work. While I peeked in the window at the inside of the bar, a drunk staggered along the sidewalk toward me, reeling as if he had wheels on his feet.

“Hey there, pretty lady,” he slurred, “you must be that little girlie who moved in next door.”

“Am I?” I asked. Even inebriated, the drunk seemed to know more about me than I did.

“You are.” He leered. He put a paw on my fluffy pink coat.

I read the name “Brent” on the front of his stained Carhartt jacket. I remembered Natalie saying that Kenny lived with his uncle Brent and I remembered Nana claiming that a Brent had urinated on her pansy bed once. Despite his poor bathroom habits, Brent had sex appeal—think Johnny Depp in
Pirates of the Caribbean.
He earned high numbers on the Maximum Man scale even though he smelled like he had eaten fried skunk for breakfast. Brent smiled and tugged his baseball cap and told me how much he hated President Bush.

“Oh.” I tilted my head and giggled.

“You remind me of a Chia Pet.” He leered.

He was too smelly to make out with, but I was flattered that he hadn’t ignored me or found a way to make a fool of me the way his nephew had. I appreciated his maturity. He said he needed to take a piss and stumbled into the Paradise Lounge while I walked home wondering if he would call the fake phone number I had given him.

I felt uplifted by the encounter.

If Natalie, the ultimate ice queen, could lose
her
virginity in Heaven, who knew what thrills or
dangers awaited me. I could leap through the threshold into womanhood any second, and Natalie seemed a shining example of how prepared I needed to be. Baby Grace kept trying to cast a shadow on my Aphrodite confidence, but my neon lights flashed just the same.

Thank goodness Katy had given me some sexual insight before I moved to Heaven.

When I reached Nana’s, I ate an apple and searched Mom’s closets for something sophisticated yet not too flashy to wear to school in the morning. My worries about Natalie made me think I needed a less skin-baring style for the next few days so as not to get in too much trouble too soon. I rummaged in Mom’s closet and found a blue beret that might hide some of my tinted hair issues. I wondered if Mr. Green Eyes would love me in it. I pictured us having a heart-to-heart in the loft of some barn, the sun setting on the horizon behind us—country boy meets city girl. I pictured our Teen Romance book jacket and wished I could dive right into the intertwining and skip all the misadventure that preceded it, because even if he was wholeheartedly accepting, as all heroes naturally are, I would have trouble confiding everything about my mixed-up family just to have sex.

I placed Mom’s hat on my head and posed in the
mirror, slipping my fabulous new accessory to the side in a very French devil-may-care manner. It was like wearing a wink.

Natalie, pale and worn, appeared behind me as I arranged the beret forward over one ear. Because she had ridden the bus, she must have arrived home before me and had been in our room sleeping or doing homework—one of those activities a person does when they have a terrible secret and would rather not thrust themselves into the social world. I firmly believed enough “The Ants Go Marching” could kill when combined with automotive exhaust, and I felt terrible that I hadn’t invited Natalie to walk with me. Maybe she saw riding the bus as penance.

She inspected the beret.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Do you like it?”

She reached and rearranged the beret so that it draped over the other ear.

“It looks better this way,” she said.

I checked the mirror and gave her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe my left ear was sexier. I tried to hug her to say thank you. I would have embraced my lesbian friend Katy, but Natalie slunk out of reach. Even before Grace, Natalie could be a little freezer pop sometimes.
I hoped I really was doing her a favor by listening to Mom and pretending nothing had happened to her. Natalie and I hadn’t had a fight in two days, but she had also surrounded herself with Little Blondie, a girl who seemed like a terrible influence, with all her talk about Pastor Jim and Bible readings.

The next morning, I woke up after Natalie and avoided riding the bus a second time by getting Mom to drive me to Carrie Nation. Mom had taken a job at Bonny’s Hair Hut, which seemed strange since we were only staying a short while, but Nana didn’t have much money and neither did we. On my way to my first class, the Amish girl with the fresh coloring stopped me in the hall. At first I worried she had bad news, had seen more police trucks in the field, but instead she told me she loved my beret, she really really loved it. She was a very eager Amish person. I was grateful to her for reassuring me that I had made a spectacular choice. I stuck a mental Post-it on my forehead to remind me to ask how she came to have such beautiful skin.

Everyone seemed much friendlier than they had the day before. Ms. Duncan, my Earth Science teacher, laid her bony hand over mine when I entered her classroom.

“Hello, dear,” she said. “How are you settling in?”

“Pretty well,” I answered.

She held my hand, seemingly to apologize for any suffering I might have experienced. I wouldn’t have fallen for Kenny’s trick the day before if I had been paying attention, reading signs that he wasn’t the healthiest egg in the basket. Natalie hadn’t tipped me off to how devious he could be, but instead she had implied he and I had things in common, which was pretty terrifying when I looked at him in the corner of the room, hacking at a desk with a pen.

At French High, boys like Kenny were assigned to shop classes, but either Carrie Nation was too small to divide or he had worked his way into general studies as a result of some administrative error or breakdown in the state testing system. I scanned the room for Steve Allen and discovered him lounging handsomely next to a heavyset boy and behind Natalie in relatively the same alignment that he had been in during English the day before. The seat diagonal from his position was empty, so I closed in on it.

“You can’t sit there.” Natalie spread her arms over the desk’s surface. “That’s Sherry’s seat.”

I was relieved to see that Natalie looked much less wrung-out than she had when we discussed the beret,
but I was irritated that her hands were in my way.

“Time for a change,” I said.

“No.” Natalie glanced at her friend, who’d arrived after me.

“That’s my seat,” Sherry informed me.

I started to explain that it wasn’t hers unless she was in it.

“It’s mine,” Sherry insisted.

“Kelly Louise, stop making a scene,” Natalie scolded.

Sherry folded her arms. Sherry was like a porcelain doll with springy blonde hair and dimples, and I had a feeling she worked hard to not sound squeaky when she said that she had the spot for the entire year. I told her there was an empty space behind Kenny that she could use. Ms. Duncan lifted a piece of chalk from a plastic cup on her desk and began drawing a diagram on the blackboard.

“Girl fight!” the boy next to Steve announced. His face was aglow with excitement. Even though it was warm in the classroom, he wore a letterman’s jacket.

Kenny laid down his pen.

“We are not going to have a girl fight,” Sherry stated.

“Jesus,” Kenny whined. “Why not?”

“Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain,” Sherry snipped
at him instead of continuing her conversation with me.

Sherry’s main weapon for insinuating herself between Natalie and me was pretending I didn’t exist.

“Jesus Christ.” Kenny asked Sherry, “Is that better?”

“Shut up.” Sherry tried to make him quit.

“Shut up.” Kenny curled his hands into fists and copied Sherry’s hand gestures.

“Shut up! Shut—” she stamped her boot and then stopped herself.

It was too late. Kenny had reduced her to idiocy too. She didn’t look happy standing in her metaphorical parking lot.

“You know, I sometimes pray for your soul, Kenneth Stockhausen,” Sherry told him. She placed her fists on her hips so they wouldn’t pop up and down.

“You can’t pray in school, idiot,” Kenny reminded her.

An embarrassing trumpetlike blurt rose from my throat, like a bathtub toy when you squeeze it under water. People stared at me because they realized I was laughing at Kenny. I thought he was funny even though I couldn’t afford to take another journey to the outskirts of the school with him. Steve frowned at Kenny as if he wanted to punch him later.

“Everyone, please.” Ms. Duncan shifted from the
board. She clapped her hands.

“Just leave and go where you are supposed to go, please,” Natalie pleaded.

The look on her face suggested that she was six seconds away from losing the composure I admired her for and exploding like a tomato in a microwave. I probably wouldn’t have backed down from Sherry in Des Moines, or needed to be so close to Natalie if I wasn’t keeping an eye on her. I wasn’t sure why I wanted the seat so much. I retreated behind Kenny and pulled my notebook from my backpack. From this angle, Steve could get a better view of my profile.

Kenny, when I settled in behind him, stared at me as if I had committed a capital crime.

“You are just going to give up?” he asked about the girl fight.

Ms. Duncan clapped her hands again.

Boys like when girls pull each other’s hair and grapple on the floor, and Kenny was obviously disappointed about not getting a show. Without asking, and after Ms. Duncan had turned to the board, he snatched my notebook. He opened to the middle and inspected the doodles I had drawn on the cover and the heart I had drawn over my
i
. I had abbreviated Kelly Louise to Kelli,
to match the Frenchness of the beret. I was proud of the
i
. I’m sure Tina Louise probably included a heart over her
i
too because it was like a little blown kiss to her many admirers.

“So, Greeny Locks,” he asked, “LiLi is your cousin, or whatever?”

“Yes.” I hoped the news would frighten him away.

“What the hell is this?” Kenny tapped the little pink organ decorating the end of my name.

He didn’t bother to whisper. Apparently the rule was that if Ms. Duncan was writing on the board, you could talk away.

“It’s a heart,” I stated.

“Jesus.” He kept the notebook and swung around to his desk.

He wasn’t the first person in Heaven to react negatively to my flourishes. Ernie, the bus driver, hadn’t liked my wink. My beret wasn’t yet wowing Steve Allen into glancing longingly my way. Kenny pulled a Sharpie from his pocket and scrawled his name under mine on my page of doodles:
Kenni Robert Stockhausen
. He added a black heart over his
i
.

I tried to retrieve my property, but Kenny held on to my notebook with both hands and wouldn’t let go. We were tussling when Mr. Gruber knocked on the
door, accompanied by two men in police uniforms. Thankfully, they remained near the entry because otherwise they would have noticed guilt blazing like an unnatural pimple from my forehead. I tasted metal in my mouth, sure that they had found evidence to implicate Natalie. Everyone in class settled into the silence.

“I need to borrow Mr. Stockhausen,” Mr. Gruber said to Ms. Duncan.

Ms. Duncan abandoned her echinoderm, dropped her piece of chalk in a cup by her desk, and shook the dust off her fingers.

“We were just going to start discussing the Paleozoic era,” she told Mr. Gruber.

“I see,” Mr. Gruber said.

“Can it wait?” Ms. Duncan asked hopefully.

“These gentlemen need to inspect Mr. Stockhausen’s locker.” Mr. Gruber employed a principal voice.

Ms. Duncan fiddled with her hands.

“Fuck you.” Kenny used his asshole voice.

Mr. Gruber took him by the elbow and, after a brief struggle, was able to lead Kenny from the room. Nothing as dramatic had ever happened in my classes at French High School, even though the stereotype is that cities have more crime.

“Could you please collect Mr. Stockhausen’s things and bring them to us?” Mr. Gruber asked Ms. Duncan from the hallway.

The two men in uniform closed like parentheses around Mr. Gruber and Kenny.

Ms. Duncan flitted to the gouged desk, assembled Kenny’s coat, my notebook, and his pen. I almost told her that the notebook she was taking was mine but felt weirdly shy about interrupting her and calling attention to myself in case Natalie and I weren’t out of the woods yet and this was to be a double or maybe a triple arrest. I had written some very private letters to Katy. I had scribbled that I loved Heath Ledger. The police were also going to discover how concerned I had been all along about the chemical reaction that led Kenny to call me Greeny Locks.