Tortall (39 page)

But this one came from nowhere, as far as I could tell. Those that hit without warning had been when I lived with my dad. Not while Mom was alive, not even when it was just me and him—no, wait. The first one came when I was maybe six. We had moved into a trailer home, our fourth house since Mom died. When I got off the bus, I couldn’t remember which trailer was ours. I’d had to sit by the mailboxes, sweating and trying to breathe, till Dad came home from work.

I didn’t have another until he divorced his second wife and brought a new girlfriend home a week later. She bent down and grinned at me, showing big teeth stained brown. That night I woke up trying to breathe after a dream where she ate me. She was gone a month later. This time only two days passed before Dad introduced me to his new girlfriend.

That was when the attacks came all the time, whenever we moved and whenever he moved in a new girlfriend or a new wife. Aunts and moms, he made me call them, each one seriously bent somehow. What kind of regular woman would decide she was in love with somebody enough to move in with them after a night at a bar? Some took drugs, some made me do all the housework, some knocked me around, some had relatives or even other boyfriends who shared their bad habits and added a few of their own. It wasn’t until I ran away that first time that I got a night’s sleep, in someone’s tree house, with no panic attacks.

But for eight months at the Smithton Home, nothing had changed. Renee was there one week, Shoshana the next. The same faces, the same house. The same teachers, the same rules. The attacks slacked off, then stopped. Dr. M took me off tranquilizers. And now I’d had an attack, over the newest housemother. The newest new face.

Maybe she’ll stay, I thought as I washed up. Please let her stay.

Doreen was sweet, really, tiny, pretty, and bashful. She survived all the tricks we played on her during her first week and only lost her temper a couple of times. We wanted her to
stay, but that was when Lydia Carmody still lived at the home. Lydia had what the workers called “rage reaction.” She would motor along quietly for about five weeks, then in the sixth week, boom! She would blow up and try to kill anyone who got in her way. She had her second explosion all over Doreen, who left with a broken arm and a broken nose. Lydia went to the state hospital. We were relieved about that but sad about Doreen, and I had two mild panic attacks.

Jalapeño didn’t stay either. She had a temper, and she hated to be sassed. We got her to lose her grip twice in front of Dr. M, and she went to work someplace else. Mrs. Bertoldi didn’t survive her week of probation. She said that raising teenage girls when she was thirty and raising them when she was fifty were two completely different things. Now I was waking up a couple of times a week, unable to breathe.

Penny was cool,
I
thought, but Elsie saw her sneak her boyfriend in through a downstairs window. That made Maria, Janice, and Alouette crazy, because if the housemother could have her boyfriend over, why couldn’t we? They called Dr. M, and Penny was gone in a day.

The next one … The next one. We called her X-ray, for the way she seemed to look right through you with her pale eyes. She was medium in almost everything, medium height, medium skin, medium chubby measurements. She spoke just loudly enough to be heard by the people around her, no louder. The only thing that would make people look twice at her was her hair. Even its color was medium, somewhere between blond and brown, but it fell all the way to her waist. When she wasn’t dressed up for the interviews or for
meeting the board of directors, she wore pants and shirts in colors no one would ever remember. We thought she maybe came from a planet of invisible people.

During her observation week, when she followed Renee around to see how things were done, we kept an eye on her. She seemed okay. When we sang in the van—we sang a lot when Renee drove us—it turned out she knew some interesting songs we’d never heard before. She didn’t even mind writing five copies of the lyrics out by hand, since the house computer was for house business or homework help, period. She didn’t freak when Alouette sneaked up behind her and screamed in her ear, like Jalapeño did. On the coordination scale she rated about a minus fifty: even with Renee to help, we couldn’t teach her to dance.

Keisha and I voted to leave her alone the night before she spent her first week on duty with us. I was so tired of the attacks, and I knew sooner or later somebody would notice I was showering sweat off in the middle of the night again. They’d tell Dr. M, who’d put me back on tranquilizers. I
hated
those things. At school our first tests were coming up. Torturing the housemother took a lot of work we could have used to study instead—and I wanted things to calm down. I wanted boring, excitement-less days back.

“No way,” said Maria. “She can’t walk in here like them others and expect us to love her because she’s, you know, taken an
interest
.” Maria was the hardest of us and maybe the smartest. Her mom was a drunk, so she had looked after her brothers. That stopped when Children’s Services put the kids in foster homes. The boys’ family was okay, but Maria got a string of creeps, the same as Keisha and Elsie. I guess
without her brothers to take care of, Maria ran a little wild, met her boyfriend, stole some cars, and got pregnant. “We can’t fall for that I-love-you-cuz-I-just-
do
crap,” she added.

“Why don’t you just go and put a two-cent price tag on us?” demanded Ana, checking her hair for split ends. “Tell ’em we’re
easy
?” Ana thought she was such a hardcase. All she ever did was sell pot at school until her folks got her busted.

“She gets tested the same as Renee got tested,” Elsie said.

Testing X-ray won the vote. Keisha and I went to do homework while the others decided on a plan. The staff would be sure to warn X-ray of everything that was done to the other housemothers, particularly since we were all on restrictions for it. That meant no walking home from school: staff picked us up. That meant no TV during the week and no mall trips till after Christmas. Of course, restrictions meant we had more time to work on the newest housemother. You’d think they would have figured that out.

Finally it was the day of X-ray’s first duty shift. The rest of the staff had gone home. “Let the game begin,” Janice whispered in my ear as we walked into the house after a cigarette break. I rolled my eyes, but there was no way I wouldn’t do my bit, panic attacks or no. I had to live with these guys.

There were snacks and juice on the dining room table, so we all grabbed chairs and sat. Alouette dropped into the chair across the table from X-ray. “Where are you from?” She challenged X-ray in the way she said it; she wanted X-ray not to answer the question and to say Lou was rude. “You’re not from around here.”

“I moved here two months ago,” said X-ray, peeling an orange.

“Where from?” asked Lou.

“College,” said X-ray, getting orange-skin oil on her face.

“And where was college?” That was Maria. She spoke in that bright, slow, hyper-interested tone that grown-ups who don’t know better use on little kids.

I was sitting beside X-ray. Maybe I was the only one who saw the corner of her mouth quiver, as if she hid a smile. In the same understanding tone as Maria’s, X-ray replied, “Philadelphia.”

“Where were you from before that?” Elsie had a heap of Oreos in front of her. She was opening them, eating all the filling, and putting the cookies aside. She’d only eat the cookies when she’d sucked up all the filling.

“It depends,” said X-ray. Keisha and Janice rolled their eyes. I saw X-ray glance at them, and there went that quiver at the corner of her mouth. “Right before college I lived in Singapore.”

We all looked at each other. Who ever heard of someone living in Singapore? Who ever heard of a medium person like X-ray living anywhere cool?

“How’d you get there?” Janice asked. That wasn’t part of the testing; she really wanted to know.

“My parents were in the State Department,” replied X-ray. “We moved around a lot.”

“So where were you born?” asked Keisha.

X-ray frowned, as if she had to think hard to remember. “Guam, but we went to Peru right after that. We lived there till I was four, and then again when I was in high school.”

“Peru!” Janice leaned closer. “What was that like?” Now X-ray did smile. “It was all right, except for the volcano.”

Everybody began to yell, wanting to know about the volcano and Peru. I thought maybe she was lying when she talked about walking all day with an umbrella to keep the ash off and a scarf tied over her mouth and nose, but she showed us a picture in her wallet. It was definitely her; definitely she had the umbrella and the scarf. From the waist down she was covered in ashes. By the time she got done telling us about how nice it was before the volcano erupted, it was time to start supper.

Now Keisha and I weren’t the only ones who didn’t want to test X-ray. Janice wanted to know about the places she had lived; she didn’t want X-ray leaving until she’d heard it all. Janice was always writing stories in notebooks and reading about far-off countries with goofy names, telling us she’d go to them when she got out of the home and became a rich writer. She thought she could get ideas from X-ray. Maria was determined to test, though, and when Maria was set on a thing, Ana, Lou, and Elsie would back her up.

“No warning her,” Ana told us while we finished cleanup in the kitchen. At the home, the girls cooked and cleaned while the housemothers supervised. “We never warned nobody else.”

Maria excused herself from homework at the dining room table later and went into the kitchen. When she came back, she had an open-faced sandwich made of peanut butter and marshmallow fluff. I watched as she squeezed behind X-ray’s chair and stumbled. She brought the fluff-and-butter
side straight down on that long, long hair, then dragged it all the way from X-ray’s neck to the ends.

She immediately began to apologize, saying she was sorry over and over. Maria was the best actress in the home, though we were all pretty good.

We held our breaths, waiting to see what X-ray would do. First she pulled her hair around in front of her and inspected it, a strange look in her eyes. “Oh, ick,” she said finally. I could see she was breathing hard, and the corners of her mouth were tucked really tight, but she didn’t blow up. Did Dr. M and Rowena warn her that blowing up got you a failing grade on the test?

She went to the big mirror in the entry hall, using it to look at her hair in back. “I know I need styling gel, but isn’t this kind of extreme?” she finally asked.

We stared at her. What an odd thing to say!

“Aren’t you mad?” asked Janice, wide-eyed.

“I’m not
happy,
” X-ray replied, twisting to get a better look at the back of her head. “But I’ve had worse.”

“Oh yeah?” demanded Maria coldly. We all nodded. Who could believe that? “Like what?”

X-ray backed closer to the mirror, to see if she could improve her view. “Well, the girls in this tribe in Africa told me I wouldn’t be cool till I did my hair like they did. They rubbed this orange clay all over my head and braided my hair. I couldn’t even wash it out before we left the village, because it would have hurt their feelings.”

We stared at each other, horrified. “For real?” Elsie wanted to know.

“I have pictures,” said X-ray.

After a moment of respectful silence, Keisha asked, “So how can you ever get this junk out? You’ll have to wash and wash and wash, and it’ll be all gummy.”

X-ray gave herself one last look in the mirror, sighed, and walked back into the dining room. “I just let it grow in college—I hate fussing with my hair. It begins to occur to me”—she looked at us, and something in her eyes made me wonder if she wasn’t pretty sure Maria’s stumble wasn’t an accident—“maybe my hair is a liability in a job like this. I’ll end up using time I should spend on the job keeping it out of my face.” She sighed again. “I’ll tuck it up and tie a scarf over it for now, and get it cut tomorrow.”

We all traded looks. The plan was that she run upstairs and jump right in the shower. We could stay up late and she’d never know, while she tried to get that gunk out of her hair. Now we were stuck and she hadn’t even yelled at us.

“I cut hair good,” Lou commented suddenly. “I used to cut my sisters’ hair at home.” Maybe she even had. Lou never talked about her real family.

X-ray bit her lip and touched the back of her neck lightly. A hank of white-and-gold-streaked hair stuck to her fingers. She tugged them free. “You sure?”

“Absolutely positive,” Lou told her.

We scattered, some of us to find newspapers, Janice to get the tall stool, and others to fetch a towel and comb and to giggle in the bathroom. X-ray brought the good scissors from the office.

“Of course, it was a really long time ago when I cut hair
last,” said Lou as she chopped a big chunk right out of the middle of the mess. I saw X-ray’s shoulders droop. Still, she didn’t stop the party. Instead she told us about the photo safari that ended in that African village while Lou cut and Maria and I took turns wiping goo off the scissors. When Lou finished, we were all quiet. Poor old X-ray looked as if somebody had cut her hair with hedge clippers.

What she did when she saw herself in the mirror was important; we all knew that. It was like the moment when Maria smeared that mess over her hair: If she did a Jalapeño, we had her. If she started to cry, we had her. Particularly if she walked straight out the door, we had her. If she did the sweet silly thing and said it was a great cut, we’d know she was just another lying social worker pretending to be a friend. By the time we got to the Smithton Home, we had all had it up to here with people like that.

X-ray inspected the cut in Elsie’s hand mirror, then went back out to the entry hall mirror. We followed her. Lou kept her hands over her mouth, trying not to crack up; Ana and Elsie were snorting. X-ray took her time viewing the damage. Again I saw the corners of her mouth tuck, first down and then, weirdly, up; her breath came faster for a while, then slowed. At last she said to Lou, “It could be worse—but not by much.”