Stranded (7 page)

I hadn’t written anything about Baby Grace. I had done as Mom asked and hadn’t mentioned her to anybody and had even stopped talking to God, since he had never returned my church call. Maybe Kenny’s arrest would be like the argument the fat character Hurley has with the bald guy on the television show
Lost
. Their verbal exchanges always distracted me from the Kate-Sawyer-Jack love triangle, which seemed like the more important story. Talk about a
saga that has so many twists you forget where you left off. I still watch it, though, which just goes to show you people will get caught up in anything rather than face another boring evening.

WHEN THE MEN WHO KIDNAPPED KENNY LEFT
and the door closed behind Ms. Duncan, Steve shifted his current Bart Simpson drawing to the corner of his desk.

“What’s the word, Boog?” Steve asked the heavyset boy who, along with Kenny, had egged on my wrestling match with Sherry.

Boog didn’t seem like the sort of person who possessed insider information, yet everyone turned to him and gave him their attention. He leaned forward and glanced out the door to make sure all fifteen of us were alone. Natalie, I noticed, copied Ms. Duncan’s diagram from the board. She sat with her back to the rest of us with even better posture than she had at home. I should be following her example, I thought,
but I wanted the dish and was hoping to hear it from Boog if he was the man to supply it. I hadn’t known Kenny more than forty-eight hours, but I was as curious as everyone else about what kind of crime he had committed that the police wanted to drag him away almost in handcuffs. Heaven was turning out to be quite a shifty place.

“I’m not supposed to know,” Boog explained.

“Did they take Kenny because of Baby Grace?” Sherry seemed rabid with excitement.

Boog tried not to confirm or deny Sherry’s suspicions.

Steve thumped Boog on the arm. “What’s that fucking meth dealer scumbag done now?”

Boog hesitated. “I don’t think he really sells the stuff.”

“Don’t defend that asshole, Boogman.” Steve walloped his friend on the arm again.

I was sorry that Steve hadn’t yet noticed my beret. He seemed impatient for a boy who was supposed to be awash in desire for a mysterious stranger. When I first arrived in the room, I had done what I could to capture his attention, curling my hand under my chin, tilting my head in his direction, trying to sit myself next to him, but since the arrival of the police,
I held the edges of my desk so hard my knuckles turned white. Not exactly sexy, but sometimes it is easy to forget yourself when you think you are about to be arrested.

“You know how Stockhausen spends all his time out at the Quonset huts?” Boog asked the entire room.

“To deal meth,” Steve said.

Boog didn’t contradict him a second time.

“Do they think he knows something about that baby they found?” Sherry asked.

“He might,” Boog confirmed.

People immediately began to speculate and even broke into discussion groups.

“He’s a Satan worshipper,” Sherry exclaimed to her foursome, which included Boog, Steve, and Natalie. “I bet he kidnapped the baby to sacrifice it!” She turned to Steve in a fit of what seemed like panic and touched his arm.

Steve didn’t acknowledge her hand. I hate to say it, but Steve didn’t seem to be easily seduced. He was a match for Natalie, who was taking only a small interest in the conversation and not seeming like she would go mad unless she heard every detail. Like Steve, she revealed a faint look of irritation at Sherry’s excitement.

I wondered how Boog had learned his facts, and
then he explained, because
he
had noticed the beret and me raising my eyebrows like I might have sex with him if I could only hear more. He said that his dad was the local sheriff. When I thought about it, I realized that one of the two men who had come with Mr. Gruber resembled Boog.

Sherry told a story about how Kenny had once broken a water fountain. No question, Kenny had the dangerous, isolated quality of somebody you might assume carried a gun to school. Hearing what people wanted to believe about him made me wonder if I should be grateful I had only been abandoned by him in a parking lot.

“So what do you think the police are going to find in Stockhausen’s locker?” Steve asked.

“I don’t know exactly,” Boog said. “But they were asking about the knife that was used to cut the baby’s umbilical cord.”

“He always carries a knife,” Sherry yipped. “I’ve seen him with one. He used one to ruin that desk,” she said, and pointed at the place Kenny had vacated.

We all turned to examine the desk that Kenny had hacked, scribbled on, and kicked out of alignment.

“It might be that he saw something.” Boog made an effort to be neutral.

“I have to give that asshole credit,” Steve remarked.

“What do you mean?” A furrow creased Sherry’s brow.

Boog ceded leadership of the conversation to his friend, who seemed a more natural quarterback and authority.

“Good for the faggot for ditching the biological evidence.” Steve tipped in his chair forty-five degrees and ran a hand through his beautiful golden hair.

“You think it might be
his
baby?” Sherry asked, shocked.

“A man does what a man has to do.” Steve shrugged. “Most of us are smart enough to keep things from going too far, but Stockhomo is an amateur.”

Sherry blinked her eyes more rapidly than normal.

“Kenny painted over the cross on the rock on County Road Fourteen.” She tried to make a case for her Kenny-as-devil-worshipper theory one more time. I could see it meant something to her to be right about the nature of Kenny’s evilness.

“The football rock?” Boog suddenly pounded a hand on his desk.

If Boog were a judge, Kenny would be hung from the asbestos tiles by sunset. I didn’t realize you could be proprietary about rocks, but Boog apparently loved the one Sherry was talking about.

“It’s the youth group’s rock,” Sherry corrected.

“It was for football first,” Boog argued.

What I could understand from this part of the conversation was that there was a rock near or around the school that people painted when they had an inspired idea. Sherry and the youth group had written “Jesus Loves Baby Grace” over a picture of a Fighting Soybean peeing on the mascot from the next town, a Cornhusker. Kenny had come along and spray-painted “Fuck You” over both masterpieces. It was the sort of thing that didn’t happen in Des Moines.

“OK, who thinks Ms. Duncan would look good in leather pants?” I asked.

I expected people to laugh or at least snicker the way they had at Steve’s comments. I was hoping I could move us away from discussing the overwhelming unsolvable crisis. Besides, the leather pants discussion was one that had kept Katy and me rolling for hours.

Steve glanced at me, and, sadly, I don’t think it was because of the eye-catching beret.

“What is
wrong
with you?” Sherry asked.

Natalie silently drew her echinoderm. I could see shimmering movement in the strands of her hair. She was trembling.

Before I could think of something more normal to say, Ms. Duncan returned to the room. She dropped
her hands to her sides. I could tell she had been expecting to clap, but because we were silent already, she returned us once again to the safe and sober subject of echinoderms. Never in my whole life had I been gladder to discuss an old fossil.

THE REST OF THE DAY, EVERYONE AT CARRIE
Nation steered their conversations with me to safe topics like the weather, and the Amish girl slid her lunch tray to the far side of the table I occupied. She was tense, the way anyone might be if they had heard that mild-mannered “new girl” transformed into “leather pants girl.” Natalie was furious at me for, as she put it, “my selfish need to hog attention.” She stopped speaking to me, except to remind me I had forgotten to squeegee the water droplets off the tiles when I showered that evening. It was no use explaining that I had been trying to help her by getting us away from the subject of Baby Grace. She said Ms. Duncan was a very nice older woman who everyone respected, and describing her in leather pants was mean.

But if I thought I was treated to weirdness, Kenny returned to school the next day, shocking nearly everyone in class into silence. During study hall, Steve Allen scribbled a picture of Bart Simpson peeing on Kenny’s likeness on the blackboard. Someone smeared Kenny’s locker with hair gel. I overheard the Amish girl saying that the police hadn’t found anything suspicious in Kenny’s locker when they searched his things. Other gossip suggested he was part of a cult and maybe had an accomplice.

Sherry’s theory that Kenny was a devil worshipper took root maybe because there wasn’t a better explanation for why the police suspected him of being involved in the Baby Grace case. Kenny wouldn’t have covered for Natalie, because he didn’t like Natalie. I asked, and he nearly spit at me. He didn’t like me, even though I was just trying to be nice. I was grateful he was arrested (or nearly arrested) instead of me.

I sat behind Kenny in almost every class and developed rituals for keeping my notebook out of his hands. I had to pass him a stack of papers every once in a while, and he dropped everything to the floor instead of taking them.

Getting along with Kenny wasn’t the only challenge I faced living in Heaven. For a couple of days, just to
make Natalie forgive me, I wore Crocs. In the evening, I lapsed into less controversial television-watching habits to keep Nana happy, rooting for Cloris Leachman to outshimmy Susan Lucci to win a title spot on
Dancing with the Stars
. (Nana drank her gin alone when I was around.) I had two long talks with Mr. Gruber in the hallway. He always seemed lonely. I hoped our conversations, which ranged from discussions of paper products to whether or not he thought it was going to rain, cheered him.

One night, I ransacked Natalie’s dresser in search of her diary, thinking maybe if I knew more about Bearded Boyfriend, I could also be supportive and neat when I used her school supplies. Natalie, who had always dangled her journal before me, must have begun hiding it. Maybe Bearded Boyfriend had seduced other young girls. It was a creepy idea but less crazy than Sherry’s fantasies about Kenny. Prying in Natalie’s things became a habit-forming replacement for having only one friend—Mr. Gruber.

Inside Natalie’s top drawer one night, I discovered a calculator, a comb, a few dollars, and a photo that must have been taken over the summer. Natalie looked bloated in the picture, like an oversized gold-and-black beach ball in her University of Iowa Hawkeyes
sweatshirt. I studied it and convinced myself that she appeared no more suspicious or misshapen than any other college football fan, and that was why nobody ever had reason to suspect her.

I borrowed her calculator to total the number of days I had survived in Heaven and determine the ones I had left before Mom fulfilled her promise to return to Des Moines. The calculations, which I figured to the week, hour, minute, and second, reminded me of the life I had waiting for me only a hundred miles and a few hours away. I had it in my head that if Mom and I got Natalie through the next few weeks, the police investigation would slow down, people would stop talking, Nana would run out of household surfaces to sanitize, Kenny would commit a real crime, and Natalie would be in the clear. Natalie acted like she would be happier with me in Des Moines because of the attention I attracted. I had about forty-two days left. It was the only time in my whole life I was so anxious I resorted to math.

I delivered meaningful glances at Steve in English and Earth Science, but he must have had a vision problem on his right side because he never gazed at me with any more interest than he gave Atticus Finch or echinoderms. When I eavesdropped on his conversations with
Boog, he spoke of who he had done and who he would like to do, so I knew he wasn’t a sworn abstainer like Sherry, or even a momentarily lapsed one like Natalie, but a normal American boy who got laid like crazy. Or maybe he had taken a pledge too but was having a terrible time keeping it. I was actually considering taking a vow myself because it seemed to increase the sexual traffic of the people who had signed one. My life had become a barren landscape of boylessness.

On day fourteen, hour nine, minute twenty-two, Ms. Duncan interrupted what had seemed like her usual pattern of lumping me with Kenny and assigned me Boog as a partner for an Earth Science report. She matched Kenny with Sherry. Deep in her backpack, Sherry probably had a wooden stake to take to study sessions so she could stick it through Kenny’s heart if he became demonic on her.

I hoped she had good aim. If she were a character in a horror movie, let’s face it, she’d be the first of the little klatch of high school friends to go.

I called home after school to ask Mom for permission to study with Boog at his house. I promised myself that I would stuff my outsiderness inside the whole time Boog and I were together. I wouldn’t bring up the rock on County Road 14 and I’d pretend I knew everything
about Fighting Soybeans. Calling and explaining my whereabouts was something I did to please Nana more than Mom, who was probably at Bonny’s Hair Hut, working an afternoon shift. Mom had spent more time out of the house lately, and we hadn’t had one of our talks since she had first told me about Natalie. I felt like even she might be avoiding my questions. I asked her one night before bed if she thought Pastor Jim had guessed that our family life was troubled, and she told me that I should use some cold cream on my earlobes because they looked dry.

Nana answered the phone on the third ring.

“Hi, Nana,” I chirped.

“What is it, Kelly Louise?” she responded.

She acted as if I had interrupted her while cleaning. Nana knew of my encounter with Brent Stockhausen (a neighbor had seen the two of us chatting) and had started policing my whereabouts, my lipstick, my foundation, and my eyeliner.

I explained that I wanted to go to Boog’s house.

“Millie and Sheriff Boogman’s boy?” she asked.

“Boog,” I said.

In the background, I heard scrubbing and water running. Nana had even cleaned the brackets that held her curtains. She had such an obsession with detail, I worried it was a sign of mental deterioration. Katy said
problems came in threes. I had a terrible secret, a Nana who was becoming obsessive, and oily earlobes, thanks to my mother’s unhelpful moisturizing advice.

“His real name is Tom,” I said, using Boog’s first name, even though in the weeks I’d known him, he’d come across more Boog-like than Tom-like.

“The Boogmans are active at church,” Nana conceded.

“So can I go?”

She called Mom into the kitchen to make the final decision. I was surprised Mom was home. I heard Mom ask Nana who was on the line. Lately, Mom jumped for ringing phones, which meant something was stirring in her love life in a big way. I’d have to advise Nana what that might mean to her breakfast food supply.

“Kelly Louise?” Mom asked.

I revealed my plans to study at the Boogmans’.

“Millie was a senior when I was a freshman,” Mom recalled.

I waited for more, but Mom drifted into thoughtfulness.

Maybe she didn’t want me making friends in Heaven because she thought my need for attention would jeopardize Natalie. Or she was thinking of a story to tell me about Mrs. Boogman that connected to a high school memory. High schools aren’t always
such terrific places, though my mom was quite delusional on the topic on the way into town. Along with having to sit in uncomfortable desks and eat horrible cafeteria food, I had had to reach into a garbage can that day and retrieve a tray I had dropped.

“Please, Mom.” I begged her to let me go to Boog’s. Except for school, I hadn’t been out of the house for ten days.

Mom asked if I thought I could behave myself.

“Um. I swear to be home by five.” I did the best I could.

“Have a good time,” she relented. Then, because Nana was standing near, she added, “Stay out of trouble.”

I got her drift. Mom hadn’t been too pleased when I had been caught modeling a prom dress at the mall a week before we left Des Moines, borrowing it and providing the store with extra advertising by wearing it on an escalator. Apparently, you can’t model unless you have some sort of contract, which seems unfair somehow and another example of how government can interfere with our lives.

I promised Mom I’d have a halo over my head the whole time I was with Boog. My mother is pretty hip. I practically skipped to his locker after I got off the phone.

“I can go,” I told Boog.

We walked to his car together, discussing topics for our assignment and making jokes about the Fighting Soybeans and the stupidity of the Cornhuskers. Boog laughed at everything I said, though he voted for the Paleozoic era over my first choice of a report, the erosion of marshland in the Mississippi River Delta.

“We could discuss nitrates,” I suggested.

“Who?” he asked.

Boog was uninformed about the problem of fertilizer runoff from farm states like Iowa and didn’t know that farm chemicals were killing protective barrier ocean grasses. I only knew because math wasn’t the only subject I resorted to as a means of getting through boring afternoons at Nana’s. If my life became any more isolated, any more sleepless, I risked a bump in my GPA that would make Katy give me the “Smart girls don’t get laid” lecture again. I explained my theories to Boog about the flooding of New Orleans while he shuffled his feet.

After a while of me lecturing and him fiddling with the zipper on his jacket, he interrupted me.

“I think, because we don’t have much time, and because Ms. Duncan likes it, we should stick to the Paleozoic era.”

“Really?”

He told me that he had most of a set of encyclopedias at his house, including the letter
P
.

“The letter
P
?”

Boog and I arrived at his car, a Gran Torino, and a cow mooed from somewhere across the parking lot. In rural Iowa, it is possible to see and hear livestock anywhere, but the animal in question turned out to be Steve cupping his hand around his mouth and lowing Boog’s name.

Steve was unbelievably handsome, even as a cow.

I decided my first words to him when he caught up would be “Hello, wonderful,” something we could reminisce about years later at our wedding, both of us naked on a mountaintop. I probably had to wait until Steve and I were alone, though, because a girl who I at first took to be a senior trailed at his side, absorbing his attention.

Imagine my shock when I realized she was Natalie.

“What are
you
doing here?” I asked when she and Steve arrived at Boog’s car.

“Steve and I are partners,” Natalie stated.

The idea that they were sex partners crossed my mind. They stood a half inch closer to each other than most project-assigned classmates do, three-quarters of
an inch closer than Boog was to me, and I am a believer in closing personal distances when athletic boys are involved. Steve and Natalie reflected each other like a Princess and Prince Charming on the Disney Channel. Steve cleared his throat, not denying the news that he and my cousin were linked. Why had I not paid attention to all of Ms. Duncan’s assigning? I had been so happy not to get Kenny, I forgot to care who scored Steve.

Steve said he needed his jacket, and he and Boog left for Steve’s car together.

“They are wondering if they can do us,” I told Natalie, testing her to see if I had imagined her connection to Steve.

“Shame on you, Kelly Louise,” Natalie said.

She and Steve sat near each other in every class. I had assumed that their proximity had something to do with how teachers interpreted the alphabet, but maybe they were together by choice.

“Do you think you could fix Steve and me up?” I asked.

Katy would have been appalled that I had not been able to make him my love slave by using my wiles alone.

Natalie scratched an itch on her cheek and watched the boys.

“I don’t think he would be interested,” she said.

“How would you know?”

“I’ve been friends with him forever,” she snorted.

I remembered how close her name had been to Steve’s on the desk Kenny and I had carried. Steve and Boog glanced in our direction. I waved to them and felt a zing of chemistry in the way Steve wagged his hand in response, but he may not have been aiming for me. Just as I was about to follow with something bold like a hula wiggle to see how he responded, Kenny Stockhausen shot around a corner of the small white building I had taken for a janitor’s office. The building really functioned as a place to hide behind while you smoked cigarettes. I think Kenny might have built it himself, or Mr. Gruber had, exhausted from always having to be vigilant about apprehending smokers.

Kenny was riding a skateboard.

“Look out!” Boog warned Steve a second before Kenny collided with him and nearly knocked him to the ground.

Steve, in response to being bumped by a high-speed satanist not looking where he was going, launched Kenny like a missile into the dirt and butts surrounding the janitor’s hut. I didn’t hear how Kenny reacted, but Steve rounded his hand into a C, stroked the air several times in the region of his groin, and called Kenny something
connected to his penis. It was so awful, I felt a twinge of pity for Kenny as he limped away from the accident, skateboard tucked under his arm.

Afraid that my empathy for Kenny might lead to the social expulsion I felt when he made me laugh, I tried the handle on the Gran Torino. I needed a minute to think, out of the way of abused devil worshippers, godlike boys who had a mean streak and loved my cousin better than me, and Natalie, who was a pest. I expected the car to be locked. Instead, I found it open and ready for an unsavory pitier of devil boys to come along and inspect the contents.