The Kingdom of Kevin Malone (11 page)

Mom watched me thoughtfully. “Amy,” she said, “while in some ways it's rather diverting, and God knows I need diversion these days, I am not very happy seeing you walk around with a rodent-doll on your head. How long are you going to wear it?”

“Just today,” I said. “I have to test people's reactions to it for twenty-four hours.”

“I think I smell baloney,” Mom said dangerously.

“Where did Dad go?” I asked. “He's not due back in Los Angeles until tomorrow, he told me.”

“He went over to Shelly's apartment,” Mom said, her eyes tearing up again. “I left my keys there, and I just couldn't bring myself to go back again—where are
you
going? I'm about to put dinner on the table.”

“I have to go out,” I said, dressing fast. “Rachel is thinking of running for class president. She wants me to help plan her campaign.”

Rachel, in school politics? What a hoot! But my lie brought no response from the moorim. Maybe it had caught pneumonia in the shower and expired? I could feel it sprawled on my scalp like a miniature tigerskin rug. It made a soft humming noise, like purring. I hoped Mom couldn't hear it.

“You just spent all day running around with this Joyce from school instead of being here with us,” Mom said as I sidled past her and headed for the front door. “Friends are important, but at a time like this you have to think of your family, Amy. Can't Rachel's political career wait an evening?”

Mom thought Rachel was snooty and spoiled and fixated on her looks, which was true but not exactly in the way Mom thought. In fact, Rachel lived for the day when she could get her nose fixed because she thought it ruined her looks. We'd argued about all this before. I wasn't in any mood to take up the subject again, so Mom tore on uninterrupted.

“I think you should stay here tonight"—Her eyes focused on my head again and widened. “It moved!”

“Oh, that's the fun part,” I said. “They're plastic. I squeeze a bulb in my pocket and the hamster wiggles.”

The moorim not only wiggled; it nuzzled my ear. I felt triumphant:
Take
that,
Branglemen! You think you're so smart!

Mom's jaw dropped. “That thing,” she said flatly, “is alive. Get rid of it, Amy. I don't care what arcane science project they are doing at that school, you are not going around with a rat on your head.”

“It's not a rat, it's a moorim.” I backed down the hallway away from her. “And I'm stuck with it until I can do something about Kevin and the Fayre Farre. YOW!”

The moorim had given my ear a sharp nip with its needly little teeth, and suddenly—as I zipped out the door of our apartment with Mom yelling something after me—I realized what had happened. I was in a sort of backward pattern here, a mirror effect. In the Fayre Farre the moorim insisted on truth, but in the real world it allowed only lies! Welcome through the looking glass, only it's this side that's backward.

 

Nine

The Plush Jungle

 

 

 

I
HEADED DOWN SECOND AVENUE
toward Rachel's, hoping she'd be home. I should have phoned first, but I hadn't been thinking too clearly. Of course with the moorim on my head, when I found her I wouldn't be able to utter one true sentence unless I was ready to get my poor head chewed to a nubbin.

The moorim tugged on my hair.

“Whaddaya want?” I howled, trying to look up into my own hairline.

The moorim squeaked distressfully and pulled harder. Had it gone crazy? Maybe I should lie down like Daisy, since the creature was riding me like a horse. That was it! The moorim was trying to
steer
me.

Might as well be steered. And so I ended up outside the Plush Jungle, on Lexington Avenue, at about six 
P.M.
on Sunday. The place was always open at weird hours. I guess the owner was a free spirit, like Shell.

I am too old for stuffed animals, even very expensive ones that people give to each other in the throes of infantile love. My own dad bought something there for Mom after his third trip to Los Angeles, as a peace offering I guess. I won't say what it was—it's too embarrassing. There are times when one's parents are unbelievable.

There was an audience outside the store as usual. Two women studied the window display, commenting admiringly in a foreign language I didn't recognize.

What we had here was a beach scene: a large stuffed gorilla lazed in a hammock with a fake drink in its foot among stuffed palm trees that were being climbed and variously nestled into by smaller toys, like a couple of sloths and a goggle-eyed python. Two stuffed dolphins and a shark lolled among crepe-paper waves, cheered on by a crowd of stuffed penguins.

Rachel was inside talking to the owner, a round, short woman who wore a frilly pink housecoat type of dress.

I walked in. Startled, Rachel looked at me with a peculiar, guilty expression. “Oh, hi, Amy. What's that on your head?”

“Brainmuff, I'm cold,” I lied. Then, naturally as could be, I lied some more. “I don't need any help with it, thanks.”

The moorim purred. Clearly I was far gone: I couldn't tell the truth now even if I was willing to pay the moorim's price of lacerated hair.

“No kidding,” Rachel said, grinning a little sickly. What was wrong with her? Warily she added, “How'd you find me, anyhow?”

I shrugged, putting off the next mess of lies my mouth seemed bound to utter. I couldn't tell her about the moorim or the prophecy, not here anyway.

Rachel turned away nervously and picked up a Raggedy Anne doll from a hill of similar horrors. “Ugly thing,” she said scornfully. Appearance was a big thing with Rachel.

The Jungle lady laughed a merry, sales-making laugh and kept on working over her papers with a pencil with a small plastic cow stuck on the eraser end. The cow probably
was
an eraser. She said, “Take one for yourself. If you buy two, I can give you a break on the price.”

“No thanks,” Rachel said, suddenly talking loudly and shooting me a defiant look. “It's not my style, and my friend needs every bit of space for her collection as it is. She doesn't go in for duplicates.”

Collection?
I knew only one person with a stuffed animal collection.

“You're not buying Claudia another stupid stuffed animal?” I protested. “She's drowning in the things already.” The moorim moved restlessly in my hair. I wanted to bash the little beast, and Rachel too. Why was
my
best friend getting a present for
Claudia?

Rachel avoided my eyes. “Yeah, I am, actually. She'd like something small and furry right now because of her Mom and all. She knows these things are pretty babyish, but she likes the comfort.”

I was staggered by the idea of Rachel having heart-to-heart talks with Claudia, as well as—
instead of
—with me. It was more than I could deal with right then, things being as they were, so I decided to change the subject. Surely once Rachel knew about the mess I was in, she would turn back into my good, true, best-in-the-world old friend and let Claudia the Ditz buy her own toys.

But how could I explain if I couldn't talk straight?

I fished a piece of paper out of my bag—an old receipt from Cannibal's, as it happened, which gave me a confusing pang of memory, a flash of Cousin Shelly's bright, expectant face—and tried writing on the back, hiding the words from the moorim with my hand as best I could.

I wrote, “Weird news, but first I need help getting this thing off my head.”

That's what I thought I wrote, anyway.

I held out the note. Rachel took it.

“Well, this is a comical message,” Rachel drawled, holding up the receipt from Cannibal's. “ ‘Don't come around me anymore,' ” she read out loud, slowly and distinctly. “ ‘You have nothing to do with Kevin, so don't try to horn in.' You came here to give me this?” She glared at me.

I shook my head violently. The moorim fastened itself more firmly, using its teeth as well as all four paws.

“Ooog,” I said, and being afflicted with lies I added, “that sure feels good.” I began to panic.

“Excuse me, girls,” the Jungle lady said, staring at my head. “Could you tell me where you got that little stuffed animal? What's it supposed to be, exactly?”

“It's a Cambodian charivari,” I burbled, “from Cuddly Cousins on Madison.”

Rachel tossed her hair and folded her arms, like an impatient palomino pony fretting to gallop away. “Amy,” she said, “you are talking crazy and acting totally weird. What's wrong with you?”

“I'm fine,” I lied. “Anyway I wouldn't come to you for help if something was wrong.” Terrible, terrible, nothing true came out of my mouth. Couldn't Rachel read desperation in my expression or hear it in my voice? Why didn't she want to understand?

Still staring haughtily at me, she said to the Jungle lady, “I'll take an aardvark, in turquoise, gift-wrapped, please.”

I stood there mute and miserable while my ex-best friend watched a blue aardvaark get wrapped. Minutes later she walked out without a backward look, swinging a pink plastic shopping bag printed with pictures of velvet palm trees.

The Jungle lady cleared her throat. “When I was a girl, there was nobody I had such awful fights with as my best friend.”

Tears were sliding down my cheeks.

The lady added, “And I think you should take that stuffy back where you bought it. There isn't nearly enough filling in it. It flops around every time you move.”

She must have been very nearsighted. The moorim had begun drumming all four paws on my skull, like one of Rachel's little brothers having a tantrum. I mumbled something untrue and left the store. Rachel was not in sight. I swallowed my hurt feelings and hurried to where she must be headed: Claudia's.

 

* * *

 

I'd been to Claudia's house twice before. It gave me the creeps. The apartment walls were practically papered with family photos. Even Claudia didn't know who they all were. Some of them still lived in Italy. The pictures turned the apartment into a dark European home brooded over by generations of ancestors.

Claudia's aunt answered the door. She was a thin, nervous lady with dark skin around her eyes as if she never slept. She gave me a once-over you would expect from a sentry at a government installation, then yelled for Claudia, saying her name the Italian way that made it sound like “Cloudia.”

Claudia came padding down the hallway that was lined with faded faces in wooden frames.

“Oh, hi, Amy,” she said in that spacy way of hers. She had on loud bike tights and a huge, tummy-hiding sweatshirt, and she wore her hair down in a dark curtain to her shoulders in an attempt to make her face look thinner, which it didn't. “Want some popcorn? Rachel and me just made a bagful.”

She undulated down the hall ahead of me. Claudia had this gliding walk, with her hips leading and her shoulders sort of hunched and drifting after, which looked weird when she was thin. It was kind of impressive when she carried more weight.

Her aunt yelled something after her about posture. I've heard this before at Claudia's. In Italy girls are taught to walk and sit up straight, instead of slouching or leaning on the furniture. The point seems to be slow torture.

In her room, Claudia flopped down on the floor on her stomach with her head propped on her hands so she could see the TV. The floor was covered in thick, green shag carpeting, and there were travel posters all over the walls. The TV sound was low, continuous bop-and-scream. A messy little vanity table stood by the window, covered with a litter of makeup junk. Lined up against the pillows on her bed was a row of stuffed animals wearing dresses, aprons, overalls—clothes she had made for them, all frilly and silly.

It was a little girl's room.

Rachel sat cross-legged on the floor flipping through a comic book. She didn't look at me.

I sat down at the vanity. “Hi, Rachel,” I said, and stopped. Now what? Stalemate.

Claudia's eyes snapped wide open. “A RAT! There's a
rat
in your hair!”

Suddenly the little weight lifted off my head. The moorim hopped down onto the vanity table, making neat footprints in the face powder Claudia had spilled on the glass top. Claudia screamed again as the moorim scampered across the floor and stood on its hind legs by the bed, whiskers twitching. It seemed to be checking out the glassy-eyed bears, lions, lizards, even a moose, that shared the pillows.

Claudia hugged her knees and stared with bulging eyes. “I—hate—RATS!”

“That's no rat,” Rachel said, frowning at the moorim. “The legs are too long.”

“Like,” Claudia gasped, “like a WEASEL! I HATE WEASELS!”

The moorim sprang up onto the bed, nuzzled itself quickly inside Claudia's PetPurse, and disappeared except for two slim paws hanging out right by the zipper-pull.

“What's it doing?” squealed Claudia. “What's it doing in MY PURSE?”

“It's a moorim, from Kevin's Fayre Farre,” I said, “and I think it's sleeping. I hear snores.”

“In MY PURSE?”

I collapsed onto the floor, wildly relieved to be rid of the warm little weight on my head and free to speak the truth. “Rachel,” I said, “will you listen to me? That wasn't me talking in the Plush Jungle.”

“Funny,” she said, tossing her hair. “It sounded like you and it looked like you, and I could have sworn it was you, Amy. You've been so weird since that funeral—”

“Well, my cousin—”

“I don't want to hear any more about your cousin!” she said. “You can't go around fixated on a dead person forever, you know? I don't know how to talk to you anymore. I thought you'd finally lost it for good right there in that lady's store. It was very embarrassing.”