Stranded (8 page)

“What are you
doing
?” Natalie yelled through the window.

I didn’t answer. I decided to leave her to figure out the big mystery herself.

The inside of Boog’s car was a mess. I found an old Earth Science test, two Quarter Pounder wrappers, and a black banana peel wadded between the seat and the stick shift. Because I was being nosy, I also discovered a wrinkled copy of
Playboy
and two suspiciously ancient condom packets in Boog’s glove compartment, the sort fathers pass along to sons when they reach a certain age. As far as I could tell, glove compartments, medicine cabinets, and desk drawers were invented for people with a natural human curiosity like me to paw through.

I knew I might be caught, and I asked myself the psychological question Natalie had asked: What are you doing? In Des Moines, people behaved in ways I could understand, but now there were secrets I couldn’t unravel. When the boys didn’t return right away, Natalie opened the rear passenger-side door of the Gran Torino and climbed inside behind me.

“One day you are going to stumble on something you don’t want to know.” She saw me flipping through the
Playboy
.

I wondered if Natalie meant Baby Grace.

“Like about you and Steve?” I asked. I took a condom packet from the glove compartment and held it between my thumb and forefinger.

It was Boog’s condom, but still, it seemed to implicate Natalie somehow.

“Put that stuff back,” Natalie insisted.

“You don’t need to pretend,” I told her.

She ran her hand through her hair, flustered.

I searched her face for hints that she knew that Mom had told me what she had done. Natalie had been the one to raise the subject of secrets. I wanted her to know I’d given up coffee on her behalf, as well as my
Bolero
ring tone and my poster of dead Heath Ledger. She had been through a terrible crisis, but seeing her next to
Steve made me think her life hadn’t been all that horrible, whereas mine had been a series of sacrifices that she didn’t appreciate.

“They’re coming.” Natalie glanced out the rear window, relieved, I’m guessing, that she didn’t have to answer my questions.

I shoved the condoms and the magazine into the glove compartment but couldn’t get the latch to close. The magazine unfurled and reopened the door. I shoved and hoped for the best until Boog eased into the driver’s side of the car and Steve sidled into the backseat. They didn’t notice or think it strange that my knees were pressed against the dashboard.

“How are you girls?” Boog asked.

“Fine,” Natalie said, looking like she had spent the last fifteen minutes staring serenely at the parking lot.

I should have been happy for her, how she made everything in her life so right, so perfect after once having been in a terrible mess, but the ease of her escape seemed wrong on some kind of scale I didn’t understand. Steve sat next to her in the backseat and stretched his arm above her shoulder. Boog turned the key in the ignition. After a fourth twist, the exhaust pipe farted and emitted a cloud of pollution powerful
enough to sicken birds for a four-mile radius. The heavy bass of 2 Live Crew jounced from the speakers. Meanwhile, the door of the glove compartment opened and Miss October escaped onto the floor.

“Oops.” I retrieved her.

“Kelly Louise was peeking at your stuff,” Natalie told Boog before there was even time to invent a story for why the latch was loose.

I accidentally kicked it, climbing in.

In response to the fib, Natalie told Steve that I had a best friend who was a juvenile delinquent in Des Moines. She meant Katy, who was not a delinquent but had also been caught modeling without a contract.

“It doesn’t matter about the glove compartment,” Boog said, trying to keep peace in his car.

On the drive from Carrie Nation, we passed a number of people leaving the school, including Kenny. He flipped the four of us in the Gran Torino the finger. Or maybe Kenny was just saluting me, since I was the only one looking at him and I was the one two-timing on the nonexistent relationship Natalie had predicted we would have. Everyone at Carrie Nation seemed to hate or fear Kenny. He was too passionate about some things—who should go fuck themselves, green highlights, passing out test papers—but he didn’t give a
damn about others. His biggest sin, as far as I could tell, was being himself, a thing he probably couldn’t control, because who would be Kenny Stockhausen on purpose?

Steve asked me if he could see the
Playboy
I held.

“Here.” I handed the magazine to him.

He flipped the pages to the middle. A few minutes later, he read Miss October’s vital statistics to Boog. She liked puppies and long walks in the rain. She had a separate career as a Christian singer in California. Steve nodded his head in appreciation. Green-eyed boys are supposed to be remote and mysterious and have an unlikableness that turns out to be caused by shyness and a repressed love too deep for them to exhibit in front of other people.

He wasn’t being very mysterious about his love for Miss October. He whistled.

We cruised Main Street, driving by brick buildings and the center of town, the QuickMart, a deflated palm tree in front of the Paradise Lounge, and Bonny’s Hair Hut with the giant pink pair of scissors in the window. Outside, the clouds darkened, though stray bands of light drifted between them. Boog shifted gears, and we turned onto a side street and then pulled into his driveway. We parked behind a police cruiser.

“Maybe we should include Ms. Duncan in our time line,” I said to be charming.

“Hmm?” Boog asked, paying attention to the cruiser.

“You know—the Paleozoic era?”

Boog chuckled.

“That’s not funny,” Natalie scolded. She poked her head between the front seats.

“Boog thought so,” I argued.

“Boog laughs just in case,” she stated as we climbed out of the car.

Neither Boog nor Steve denied the accusation, which meant all the jokes I had been making all afternoon were probably flops and I didn’t know it.

Boog led the way toward his front door and held open a gate along a fence threaded on one side with weeds that had not been pulled at the end of summer. A cement jockey perched on the stoop with a ring in his hand. Boog stopped to pat the jockey on the head, and he and Steve and Natalie patted the jockey again. An old swing set and plastic climbers littered the yard. They were so dented out of shape I knew the Boogmans had been the neighborhood fun zone once upon a day. I pictured Natalie, Sherry, Steve, and Boog as eight-year-olds sliding, climbing, swinging, and giving each other cooties on hot summer
days. I pictured everyone getting each other’s jokes.

Boog waited for me while I decided whether I should touch the little stone man. I thought if I did, I might be allowed to join the gang, but if I didn’t my hand would not pick up any of the slime that coated his head. I looked at Steve and thought about the risks a person takes for love, the distance a girl travels to meet a boy as good-looking as him. Just as I was about to touch the jockey, an animal came lunging toward us from the other side of Boog’s front door. It was so big my head could fit in its mouth, though I wasn’t going to try it for fear of my being swallowed up whole.

ALTHOUGH THE DOG (OR WHATEVER IT WAS)
was wagging its tail, it also seemed to be snarling an insane whining noise. A girl I had seen in the hallways of Carrie Nation, a senior with long dark hair and plucked brows, nabbed its collar and yanked it backward.

“This is Loogy,” Boog said, giving his pal a pat. “And this,” he said, extending his arm in the girl’s direction, “is my sister Lenore.” Boog led us around Lenore and the dog into the kitchen.

“Nice to meet you.” I folded my hands under my armpits instead of greeting Lenore. I was afraid the dog might remove an extended part, and instead of Kenny calling me Greeny Locks, I’d be forever known as Lefty.

“You two are cousins?” Lenore asked Natalie.

“Mostly,” Natalie said.

A small television on the kitchen table aired an episode of
All My Children,
which I hoped Lenore might want to get back to watching. Under other circumstances, I might have tried befriending Lenore, but now, because of the dog and the jockey, I wasn’t going to take the risk.

Lenore asked, “You two live next to the Stockhausens?”

Natalie frowned.

I said yes.

Lenore lifted the still hysterical dog off its front feet. He wiggled until his collar slipped. He bounded toward me, whining and panting, pinning me against a row of coats, trying to express just how much joy I brought him. Normally, I didn’t believe in discouraging the male species, but I didn’t want to shove Loogy in front of Boog, who seemed fond of him, or in front of Lenore, who I’d only just met but who might hate me for another secret-inside-Heaven reason I didn’t understand. Boog grabbed Loogy around the middle. They flailed together in an embrace that made Boog’s pants slip below the band of his underwear.

I tried not to look. Loogy licked at Boog’s mouth
and Boog gave Loogy squishy kisses.

“Are you my sick sick Loogy Doogy?” he asked.

The dog didn’t answer. Instead, Loogy rolled and exposed his belly in the hopes Boog might scratch it. If Miss October really did yearn for a man who shared her love of puppies, then Boog might be the One. Natalie, seemingly impatient with the time it was taking for the loving reunion between boy and dog, scooted through a door at the other end of the kitchen. She looked as if she knew where it led.

I hurried with her to the bottom of a set of stairs. The area below was tricked out with a padded bar, a forty-inch flat-screen television, and a game console. The walls were decorated with framed posters of the “legendary” coach Gene Chizik of the Iowa State Cyclones. (I had never heard of him, but there was a caption.)

“Are you OK?” I asked Natalie when I reached her.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” She looked at me.

She didn’t seem afraid of the dog. As angry as I was at her about her not fixing me up with Steve, I didn’t want to leave her side.

Steve bounced off the last step of the stairs and continued a conversation he had been having with Boog and Lenore upstairs.

“So who do you think would do it with Stockhausen?” he asked. If Sherry was obsessed with the devil-worshipper angle, Steve had his own Baby Grace ax to grind.

Boog’s bookcase, I noticed, contained most of a set of encyclopedias, including the letter
P
. Though I didn’t feel excited, I did a “letter P” cheer, letting Boog know I was fine with sticking with the Paleozoic era as our project topic because it was simple and near at hand, and why make life too complex. Loogy barked. Boog hitched his pants. Steve socked Boog on the arm and asked about Kenny Stockhausen again, completely ignoring my attempts to change the topic of discussion.

“Maybe he knows someone from out of town,” Boog surmised.

The phrase
out of town
made Steve smirk. Steve still had pretty eyes, though.

“Don’t we have a report to do?” I asked.

No one answered.

I settled on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, the only place I could see to work.

I opened the
P
encyclopedia that Boog had given me and flipped to the entry we needed. Usually when I cheated on an assignment I used the internet, but I
guessed the
World Book
would function for Paleozoic purposes.

“Kenny drew a heart in Kelly Louise’s notebook,” Natalie remarked.

The only way she could have known about Kenny’s defacement of my property was if she had been reading my letters to Katy or watching me like I watched her.

“Stockhausen has a crush on you?” Steve stretched into the couch.

Icy sweat ran down my back.

“No,” I said, though I thought of admitting that Kenny and I belonged to the same baby-killing cult—why not? It seemed as if Steve believed it anyway.

Natalie opened her notebook and flipped through articles she must have photocopied at the school library—evidence against the dangers of the greenhouse effect. With a shaky hand, I wrote a sentence of our report and read it to Boog to see what he thought of the wording. Boog suggested that I add the phrase
one can see
to extend the length of the statement and keep myself from word-for-word plagiarizing. Teachers seemed to care about certain kinds of cheating in Heaven.

“Thanks,” I responded.

But “one” could not see, or at least I couldn’t. The
information in the
World Book
made no sense. It was gibberish used to explain gibberish, and I knew that when we handed it in, Ms. Duncan would sigh and ask why we had not tried to present our ideas in our own words. The
World Book
’s reference to the Paleozoic era as a “critical period from which most of today’s boundless quantities of fossil fuels were derived” seemed like it belonged in Natalie and Steve’s project.

I wrote the words
seemingly
abundant quantities of fossil fuels
into our report, but even that felt wrong. Loogy padded around the room, less animated than he had been when we arrived. He waddled close to me and sniffed my leg. The intensity of his reaction to the information he gathered—he snuffled more strongly at the rim of my sock, and a patch of hair stood up along his back—made me wish I had stood longer in the shower that morning.

Natalie, suddenly weirdly chatty, started talking about how the Stockhausens never rolled their garbage to the curb.

“It just piles up in their garage,” she revealed.

I found myself wondering if Kenny had covered for Natalie and how he would respond if he found out she was telling the world about his garbage cans. She was
playing him for a sap, exactly the same way that the
World Book
was playing me for one.

“Are you OK?” Boog asked me. I must have been frowning. Someday I’m going to have ugly lines on my face from hanging out with my fake cousin.

Natalie put her hand on Steve’s arm and told him that the Stockhausens had their truck repossessed.

“Do you have to tell
him
that?” I slammed the
World Book
closed and pointed at Steve. “Is that why he likes you?”

Natalie blinked.

“Have you ever noticed the way Kenny smells, Kelly Louise?” Natalie asked.

“He once removed all of our footballs from the utility room,” Boog added.

Kenny wasn’t the most courteous boy I’d ever met, but he didn’t deserve to have everyone hate him just because he stole sporting equipment and vandalized a few desks. Boog called his dog to his side. He sensed tension and so did Loogy, whose hackles along his back had not settled into place after sniffing my socks.

“There is a good possibility that Kelly Louise and Kenny are related.” Natalie gave her explanation for why I had attacked her.

Maybe she was trying to defend me, keep Steve from thinking I was Kenny’s girlfriend by implying that I was his sister, or she thought that if she talked enough about Kenny and his faults, and me and my faults, no one would suspect
her
of doing anything wrong. Either way, I’d had enough of the pretending. Nana and Grandpa had had their whole farm repossessed, not just a truck. We weren’t better than the Stockhausens. We might have been worse, especially Natalie. In a burst of emotion, I grabbed Natalie’s shoe from her foot and flung it.

“Kelly Louise!” Natalie yelled.

I don’t think I would have attacked her apparel so ruthlessly before Baby Grace. The pressure of watching her live so scot-free with a misaligned reality was getting to me. Loogy jolted from Boog’s side, chased Natalie’s shoe down, rolled with it on the carpet, and mashed it with his slathery teeth. Watching the dog eat Natalie’s Croc relieved two weeks of stress, loosened my bolts, and made me feel free in a way I hadn’t since leaving Des Moines.

Natalie tried to explain to Boog and Steve that I sometimes threw fits. (I could see
that
on my centerfold statistics one day, under “only likes puppies when they attack cousin’s shoes.”) Before she was midway into a
story about how I had broken a window playing indoor tennis in Nana’s living room when I was twelve, I seized Natalie’s other shoe and flung it, too. The heel hit the legendary Gene Chizik, who came off the wall and shattered.

Natalie put her hand to her mouth. Boog gasped. Loogy barked, and Steve rubbed an itch in his ear and watched as my cousin threw herself at me and pinched my shoulder.

“What’s got into you, Kelly Louise?” she screeched.

“Girl fight!” Boog hopped out of the way.

Girl fights were something that obviously had been discussed in Heaven but had not yet necessarily made their way into the popular rural culture. Natalie and I were definitely engaging in something the boys only got to witness on late-night cable. If I had hopes that the activity would direct Steve’s love and admiration my way, they were dashed when he cheered Natalie on and told her to go for my hair.

“Yank the green part, Li,” he coached.

Mrs. Boogman heard the ruckus and descended the stairs.

“It’s time for the two of you to go home,” she said.

The altercation was more along the lines of something Katy and I would have gotten into—we knew
how to captivate an audience. As Natalie helped Mrs. Boogman sweep the glass and Boog retrieved what was left of Natalie’s Crocs, I adjusted the socks in my bra. One of them had been shoved out of alignment.