Mockingbird

by Chuck Wendig

  As everybody stares, Miriam darts between tables.

  A younger 'tween in pigtails crosses in front of her with a tray. Stops, stares, a deer in headlights.

  Miriam moves right, ducking away from Roidhead's swiping hand as she hops up onto one of the tables and runs straight across it. Her foot lands on someone's plate and she almost loses her balance and busts her head but her arms pinwheel and her legs catch up with her body and somehow she recovers.

  She jumps to the ground. Flits past one girl just standing there like a dummy, past another loading books into her bag.

  The guards don't cross the tables. Mario (or is it Ron Jeremy?) is falling behind.

  Oh, what a week's worth of porn will do for your POV.

  Roidhead, though, this guy's a bull in a China shop. His elbows are knocking past girls left and right. Tables bump. Drinks spill. Girls shriek. He's got a vein sticking out on his bald head that looks big enough to grab onto with both hands – like the handlebars on a Huffy bike.

  Miriam grabs food off a plate, hurls it at his head. A chicken leg thuds dully between his eyes, then plops to the floor.

  She turns, slaps her chest. "What? What? You want a piece?"

  As he closes in, she kicks a chair in front of him.

  Need an out, she thinks.

  The exit is behind her. Red glowing sign. Emergency door.

  There.

  She turns again, bolts for the door, pulls a rack of trays – all with old food spackled to them – behind her, and it collapses with a clatter.

  He leaps over it like a beefy, grunting gazelle.

  She turns to run toward the door.

  Just as a young girl is coming out of the cafeteria restroom–

  A black girl. Hole in her nose where a nose-ring once went. Her hair frizzy and wild, like she dipped her toe in a cup of water and then stuck it in a light socket.

  Her face pulses. The image of a skull, ochreous and watery as though bobbing in a jar of formaldehyde, floats over her face.

  As though projected there from afar.

  Miriam tries to avoid her, but the girl zigs when Miriam zigs, and she holds up her hands and Miriam holds up hers and–

  Burning flowers. Orange oil. This time in a rusted husk of a burned-out school bus. The girl lies on the doctor's table. Same girl. Older by two years.

  "She wrung her hands and groaned and cried

  And gnawed her tongue before she died.

  Her nails turned black, her voice did fail

  She died and left this lower vale."

  The song, sung. The man in the bird mask, the man with the swallow tattoo, here he is, axe in hand. He thrusts his foot down and locks the table brake to stop the table from rolling because the bus sits on a slight lean.

  Barbed wire gag. Slashed Xs in the palms and the feet. All her hair's been cut off, clipped off into ragged puffs as though by an eyeless barber.

  She screams as the man steps up onto the ruined bus seats to get into position.

  He stands over her. Singing. Voice up and down. A man's voice. A woman's. A child's. Back again, warbling between them

  "May this a warning be to those

  That love the ways that Polly chose

  Turn from your sins, lest you despair

  The Devil take you without care."

  The axe falls heavy.

  Her head hits the aisle between the bus seats, tumbles under the legs of the table toward the front of the vehicle. The man chases after it like a bird after a worm, giggling as though it's a game. The axe is no longer in hand but now a hooked blade. For cutting out tongues.

  –the two bodies come together and pull apart and Miriam feels like she's just been on an out-of-control carousel ride that's been going around and around and now she's dizzy and sick and doesn't know what way is up, down, left, right.

  She turns, woozy, and sees the EXIT door.

  Roidhead is on her like stink on spoiled meat.

  Bam. They crash through the exit. The door swings wide. Pigeons take flight as both bodies tumble out onto a concrete platform. They'd keep going and fall to the parking lot ten feet below if it wasn't for the green metal railing.

  It catches them like a net.

  Which gives Miriam all the opportunity she needs.

  She grabs for his head–

  He's gone fat. His gut isn't just a spare tire, it's a tractor tire packed in forgotten mushy muscle and lumpy lipomas. He's forty-five now – it's over a decade since he worked at the school – and he pops the collar of his shirt and waddles down into the basement and there he sees his old friend: the weight bench. He regards it for a time like he's not sure, scratching his neck under the collar, but then he gives a what-the-hell shrug. With a grunt he shimmies himself under the bar, but it's no easy fit – like shoving a tomato under a closed door. Still, he manages. Gets those slick mitts under the bar. Lifts. The bar rattles, doesn't move. More sweat pops out on his brow like so many Whack-a-moles. He starts making a sound like he's trying to squeeze a baby out of his ass, and suddenly his eyes go wide, bulging like googly cartoon eyes, and the heart attack rips through him the way a grizzly bear would rip through a screen door–

  –and whong slams his skull hard into the metal railing.

  Roidhead makes a moosey sound, a bugling cry of inchoate rage, and wraps his big arms around her in a crushing grip. Her head pulses like a balloon filled with blood and getting bigger and bigger.

  She's got no wiggle room. It won't be long before Ron Jeremy, Italian Plumber, joins the fray. Probably with pepper spray or a stun gun. And then it's over.

  Roidhead's face leers into her own. He shows his teeth like an animal.

  Miriam cranks her head backward and smashes her forehead into his nose. It elicits a gurgling cry from her grappler – but, even better, earns her enough slack to wiggle free.

  As she clambers up over him, she leaps over the railing and breaks for the woods, churning on a heady rocket-fueled broth of adrenalin and nausea.

  Roidhead still back there, bent over, holding his face.

  Nobody behind her.

  Nobody but two dead girls. Headless. Tongueless. Feels like their ghosts are harrying her forward – the ghosts of two girls who aren't even dead yet.

  But she feels like she's being chased by a ghost. The ghost of not one girl, but two. Each headless. Each carrying their own tongueless heads.

  By the time she makes it to the guard gate, she's panting and hacking and wheezing – she tells herself it's all this awful clean air and not lungs shellacked with hardened tar and nicotine. By the time she makes it to the guard gate, she's panting and hacking and wheezing – she tells herself it's all this awful clean air and not lungs shellacked with hardened tar and nicotine. She lights a cigarette. The smoke fills her lungs. Clears her head.

  Homer looks out of the booth, watching her like she's some kind of funny squirrel or monkey escaped from the zoo.

  "You don't look so good," he says.

  "I feel great. Top of the pops. Total tits." She looks down beyond the gate, finally sees Roidhead galloping down the drive. She coughs again, blows a two-pronged swallow's tail of smoke from her nose. "Can I, uhh–"

  She gesticulates toward the gate. He nods, hits the button.

  They start to swing open.

  "Good seeing you again, Homer."

  "You too, Miss Black. Will I see you again?"

  A voice inside tells her: You don't ever want to come back here again. But then the faces of two living dead girls swim in the dark wet hollows of her mind.

  "Yeah. You probably will."

  He gives her a wave.

  And like that, Miriam is gone.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Drinks with a Dead Woman

  Miriam's in a mood. Were she a cartoon character, above her head would float an angry scribble of dark lines. Inked by a black pen that pushed too hard and left dents in the paper.

  She's in a booth at America's Most Mediocre Restaurant, nursing a g
lass of vodka. Todd – on duty again tonight, the innocent pizza-faced lamb that he is – went through their catalog of whiskies, and none of them were worth a shit.

  So, vodka. Clean. Nearly flavorless. Kicks like an ostrich.

  A shadow falls across the table.

  Miriam closes her eyes. Expects the waitress to appear except she'll probably have a bird head and from the bird's nose will drift curls of velvet smoke and the birdface will squawk something about dead girls and work to do.

  But it's Katey instead.

  The teacher sits.

  She's beaming. There's an energy about her. A flush to her cheeks.

  Miriam scowls over her vodka. "You look…" She blinks. "Pregnant. Like, they always say pregnant women get a glow. You look pregnant."

  Katey waves her off. "I'm not pregnant."

  "Yeah. I know. I'm just saying, that's how you look."

  "Well. You're in a bit of a mood."

  Miriam shows her teeth, bites the rim of her glass. Stares over the vodka like a feral dog guarding his bone.

  "Listen," Katey says, "if I have my math right, I've got 268 days of life left in me and I don't want to spend them unpleasantly."

  "Nngh. Fair enough. So, Teach, tell me. How do you plan to spend them?"

  Katey smiles. Not a fake smile. Maybe tinged with sadness but a smile just the same. "I don't really know yet."

  "Well, don't think on it too long." Miriam polishes off the vodka. Slides the empty glass to the edge of the table. "You're buying my vodka tonight. I don't actually have any money."

  Katey shrugs. "Okay. I'll buy you a meal too, if you want it."

  Miriam's stomach gurgles. She still feels unsettled, her gut a shallow pool of acid. Food might help. Or she might throw it up, but hell with it, it's not her money. She mumbles thanks.

  "Answer me something," Katey says. "You say I'm sitting there talking to someone when I die?"

  "Mm-hm. Big fella. Name of Steve."

  "I don't know any Steves. Well. There's my cousin Stevie, but he's a few years younger than me and not much bigger than a cricket."

  "I dunno. It's a future vision, and at some point in the future you meet some dude named Steve. And he's there when you… you know, take the great big cosmic dirt-nap."

  "Huh." Katey nests on that for a while. "Do I get chemo?"

  "What?"

  "You know. Chemo. Does it look like I get chemo?"

  Miriam scrunches up her nose, the skin between her brows forming a crumpled V. "No, I don't think so. No hair loss. Not too much weight loss, either."

  "Aw, heck. I could've used the weight loss. Still. I think you're right. I don't think I will get chemo. Quality of life and all that. I want to keep things the way they are for as long as I can."

  "You going to keep teaching?"

  "I am."

  "Why? Why not… quit, escape, fuck off to an island somewhere, go get rub-downs and happy endings by some cabana boy named Manuel?"

  "I'll do some of that. I have some time off. But I can't leave my girls."

  "You're just a teacher."

  "Just a teacher? You know how to make a girl feel real good about her life choices." Katey laughs. "I see the look in your eye. You never had one of those teachers, did you? A teacher who inspired you to learn more, to be better?"

  "I never had a teacher get up on a table and read me poetry, if that's what you're asking. None of them ever took a bullet for me or sent me roses or tried to fuck me." She drums her fingers and closes them suddenly into a fist, wishing she could smoke in here. "Okay. I did have one teacher. English teacher. Introduced me to Poe and Plath and Dickinson."

  She thinks, And Keats and Donne and Yeats and all those lovelorn assholes who made me want to go out and get goofy on Crème de Menthe in the woods with Ben Hodge, Ben whose brains were blown out of his head, Ben whose baby ended up dead.

  "I hope I'm the kind of teacher my girls remember. Maybe that's why I'm here. To leave something behind." The waitress comes, and Katey orders some tropical drink for her, another vodka for Miriam, telling the woman to cut it with a little cranberry juice (to Miriam's sour-faced chagrin). "These girls need help. Some of them are just a little lost in the fog, but others are deep in the dark. Girls who were abused by parents. Or molested. Some of them were substance abusers or are bipolar or they cut themselves. Their families – heck, the whole world – have in many cases left them behind. Abandoned them to the wolves and lions of the plains and jungles. They need our help. Because we're the only ones giving it to them and not asking for anything in return. Which means I've still got work to do."

  You've got work to do, Miriam.

  The waitress shows. No bird-head. No scar marks on her neck. A banner night.

  She gives Miriam a vodka-cranberry. Then she drops a drink in front of Katey that looks like a fishbowl full of Windex that's been garnished with orange slices and cherries and not one but two little paper umbrellas.

  It's a drink so girly Miriam can feel her uterus twinge.

  "I gotta tell you," Miriam says, "that school doesn't feel like a school for damaged goods. It feels like a rich girls' school. Hoity-fucking-toity. Like these are all chicks who fought tooth-and-claw to be there, whose parents pay out the bunghole to ensure their kids a spot. These are girls with a guaranteed shot at a big school with Greek columns and a heraldry crest and ivy crawling up the walls."

  "That's the idea. We're not trying to give these girls the bare minimum. We're trying to give them everything. A full-access pass to a real life." Katey sips her drink from a little red straw so narrow it looks like a petrified human capillary. Her eyelids flutter with delight. "Mm. Mm! Mm. So good. You want a little taste?"

  "I don't drink hull cleaner."

  Katey waves her off. "Your loss. Anyway. Some parents do pay out the wazoo. Rich girls can be troubled, too. Sometimes rich girls have the worst problems, believe you me. Anorexia. Oxycontin."

  "Shopping addictions!" Miriam exclaims in fauxhorror.

  "Be nice."

  "It's not my strong suit."

  "They have problems same as the rest of us. And their parents help – perhaps unknowingly – to fund the tuitions and room and board of the girls who cannot afford it. We also get donations and state subsidies. All to help these poor girls not just get through, not just survive, but excel."

  "But not boys."

  "Girls are targets. They're assumed to be weak. The world treats them as though they're inferior, a secondclass citizen to men. We've had to fight longer and harder–"

  Miriam's cell rings.

  Louis.

  She holds up a finger to Katey, and then she holds the phone between thumb and forefinger like she's picking up a jizzy tissue.

  Plunk. She drops her phone in a glass of water.

  "See?" Miriam says. "I refuse to be a second-class citizen to men. Totally on board with what you're saying. Um. What were you saying again?"

  "Uh. Well." Katey can't help but look at the phone sunken inside the water glass. "I'm just saying we need to fight to keep our place at the table. A man gets killed, nobody asks whether he deserved it. A woman gets raped, they ask, well, what was she wearing? Did she come onto him, lead him on? Did she say no loudly and clearly enough? As though those loopholes make rape okay. Young women have it even worse. They don't have a voice. They don't have advocates. That's what we do. We give them a voice. We give them power."

  To this, Miriam says nothing. Her inclination is to call bullshit, but she knows it's true. She's been out there for almost ten years now, floating and drifting, and few have ever treated her like a beautiful leaf on a stream. Most acted like she was a piece of trash bobbling on a tide of sewer run-off. Like she's nothing but an empty McDonald's bag filled with dirty syringes.

  Louis was one of the rare few who treated her like something special.

  Louis.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  The two of them order food and Miriam tries for a hamburger and it's about the most
mediocre hamburger she's ever had, but it's not bad, not exactly, and she figures that since they burned it to a hockeypuck consistency it certainly won't make her sick with e.coli – "e.coli" just being code for "somebody's poop germs" – and the vodka will help ensure that any such germs are bathed in a scathing wash of antiseptic alcohol.

  Katey talks while Miriam eats.

  At the end of the meal, Miriam's picking pieces off her leftover bun and sopping them in leftover ketchup before popping them in her mouth.