The Edge Of The Sky

by Drusilla Campbell

  “Where’s Jules?” Beth asked. “She’s supposed to live here, isn’t she?”

  “I told you, she stays at her boyfriend’s over by the college.”

  “Does your mom know that?”

  Kimmie shrugged and opened her eyes as wide as eggs. “You think I’m going to ask her?” She slid open the door overlooking Sixth Street.

  “I can’t hang around forever.”

  “So leave.”

  There must be a convention in town, Beth thought, as the sound of traffic, of honking and brakes and music and laughter, rose from three stories below.

  “Watch this.” Kimmie walked to the railing and yelled down to the street. “Hey, you guys, how do you like this?” She turned around, pulled down her tights, and mooned the sidewalk.

  Beth heard hoots and whistles from the street. “I’m outta here,” she said, and began to gather her jacket and book bag as the doorbell rang.

  “You can’t go now. Don’t be a flake. I was just having some fun. It didn’t mean anything. Jesus, Bethy. Lighten up.”

  She was right, mooning strangers did not mean anything.

  So why not stick around and meet the spawn of the dark angel? It would be wrong to abandon Kimmie when she had promised to stay.

  But her heart sank when she saw Damian. He looked exactly as she had feared he would. Pallid and pierced, he and Strider dressed like twins in black Docs, black Levi’s, black tee shirts, and black leather jackets. Strider’s hair was long and stringy; Damian’s head was shaved except for a cap at the top dyed pure white.

  “What d’you mean, you didn’t get any food?” Kimmie punched Strider in the shoulder. “I gave you forty fucking bucks.”

  “Lay off, bitch.” Strider grinned and held up two plastic grocery bags. He grinned at Beth. “This is Damian.” He upturned one bag, and cheese crackers, Oreo cookies, graham crackers, extra-creamy peanut butter, and a can of chocolate frosting spilled onto the stained carpet. Out of the second bag he took two six-packs of beer and a fifth of Jim Beam.

  Kimmie looked at Beth. “Didn’t I tell you these guys were cool?” She said to Strider. “Beth wants to go home.”

  “I never said that. . . .”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Strider said. “We is gonna party.” He mimed a drumroll and strutted off toward the kitchen, moving his shoulders and hips exaggeratedly. Kimmie followed him, leaving Beth and Damian alone.

  “We got all that for forty dollars.” Damian had a froggy voice, part high, part low as if it had not finished changing. “Not bad, huh?”

  “Okay.” Beth began to braid her hair.

  They were standing in the middle of the living room furnished with an oversized television, CD player, a couch, and a beanbag chair.

  Should I sit down? Beth wondered. If she sat on the couch he might sit next to her, but would it seem mean if she sat in the beanbag? So what? She sat on the chair and felt it envelop her protectively.

  Damian rocked back and forth, bending his knees like he was plugged into some kind of music.

  “You’re Beth.”

  Nope. I’m the Queen of England.

  “Damian,” he said, looking down at her. His legs were skinny as two-by-fours.

  “Yeah. Strider said.” She paused. “How come you chose that name?”

  “You know the movie? With the dogs?” He waited for a response. As if everyone hadn’t seen The Omen about a thousand times. She nodded her head. “I know this guy—he’s called Lucifer.”

  “You’re kidding me. That is so dumb.”

  “Yeah,” Damian said. “You got it.” He sat on the couch, crossed his legs, uncrossed them, and leaned forward. “You go to that girls’ school? Like Kim?”

  Beth nodded. “You?”

  “Hoover,” he said. “What year are you?”

  “Ninth,” she said. “Same as Kimmie.”

  “You’re big.”

  She glared at him.

  “Tall.”

  I wear shoe size nine and a half, and I could beat up your skinny ass and walk away whistling. She remembered the way her friend Madison used to blow on her palms, brush her hands together, and say, “Gotcha!”

  Beth asked, “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “When’s your birthday?”

  “November.”

  “Do you have your license?”

  He took out his wallet—she saw he had three one-dollar bills—and withdrew his driver’s license from its plastic window. In the picture his hair was long and Beth could tell he had tried to look dangerous for the camera.

  “It says you wear glasses.”

  He shrugged.

  From the kitchen came a squeal of delight and Kimmie danced out into the living room, holding her hand outstretched.

  “Honest to God, isn’t he a great provider? Look here what we got.” Three fat joints lay on her palm.

  Strider appeared from the kitchen and walked to the CD player on the floor beside the monster television set. He crouched and examined a stack of discs, chose one, and put it in the player

  A female rapper.

  Beth couldn’t understand the words but the beat got to her immediately.

  “You dance?” Damian asked.

  “Not really,” Beth said.

  “Me neither.”

  Kimmie held the joint between her thumb and forefinger, struck a match, and lighted one twisted end. It flared, illuminating her huge, penciled eyes. She inhaled deeply and passed the joint to Strider. As he toked, she exhaled with a sustained “ahhh” and lay on the floor on her back. “What great shit.”

  Damian was third and Beth almost told him what she had read about soldiers in World War I, how the third man on a match was a dead man.

  The joint came to her. Beth smelled its deserty aroma and knew she must be taking secondhand smoke into her lungs, but not enough to get high. She imagined the newborn pink of her lungs and thought how good it felt to run up court for a basket, but she did not want to be out of the circle, either. So she would pretend. Like the President had. Or maybe she would inhale just a little bit. If she got a little high, maybe she would forget about her father and Eddie French. She didn’t have a father anymore and pretty soon Micki would be gone, too. But grass was a drug. Illegal. On an IQ test it would be sorted into the same column as heroin and cocaine. She thought of Nancy Reagan shaking her finger, like in one of those old Uncle Sam posters, telling her to say no and Lana saying that pot was bad for brains that were still developing.

  “Are you going to smoke it or fuck it?” Strider asked. He sneered as if he knew she was chicken to do it.

  She closed her lips on the joint and pretended to inhale and hold.

  She thought her brain must be pretty well developed already. She was a good student. Her history teacher had practically made love to her World War One project. And everyone knew the shit they taught in drug ed was two-thirds exaggeration. She wanted to stop thinking and remembering and bliss out for a while. Not check out of life completely like Kimmie and her friends. They were losers, she knew that; they were temporary friends until she could get herself on the other side of whatever was making her so miserable now. What was that stuff in the Constitution about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? That’s what she wanted. To pursue a little happiness.

  Kimmie and Strider lay on the floor. They had taken cushions from the couch and rested their heads on them. Kimmie had her arms stretched up and over her head and her eyes were half closed. The inside of her arms was skim-milk white. Strider moved his torso from side to side with the music. On the couch, Damian looked at Beth and grinned. She had a feeling he did not even see her.

  To him it did not matter who she was. None of these people cared if she had played on the county’s traveling basketball team the year before and could again if she wanted. It did not matter to them that her father was dead and Micki’s wasn’t or if she used to have a perfect family, and now she didn’t even want to go home. Strider to
re apart the Oreo package and the cookies spilled out on the carpet like chips at a poker game. Kimmie grabbed one and took it apart. Beth watched, fascinated, as she ran her tongue across the white filling.

  The tongue seemed to be an intensely weird body part. Beth giggled. She sat back down and giggled until her stomach hurt.

  “What?” Kimmie asked.

  Beth shook her head. She could not stop laughing.

  “Happy shit,” Strider said, and tickled Kimmie’s stomach.

  Damian nudged Beth with his foot and held out the joint. So soon? She blinked several times before she took it. Squinting in the smoky room, she held the damp end to her lips, pretending to inhale. Her thoughts wandered off again.

  She and Micki once sat on the stairs eavesdropping on their parents and godparents, Wendy and Michael, who were in the kitchen drinking beer and getting rowdy. They heard Jack talk about Thailand, about being on leave and totally, absolutely wrecked the whole time, having no memory whatsoever of what happened over a space of three days. Beth thought he must have been drunk, but then Michael said something about Thai sticks as thick as his thumb and all bud, and Beth realized her father had been out of it on drugs. For three days.

  That night she could not sleep as she tried to reconcile her father the druggie and her father the man who listened to classical music and read myths and sang old-fashioned love songs to her mother, the man who watched from the audience when she gave her first public speech. “What Democracy Means to Me.” She was eleven and terrified, until her gaze found him sitting in the middle of the fifth row, wearing the striped tie she had given him for Christmas just that year. Not smiling at her—that would have been too embarrassing. He focused on her like a laser beam the way he promised he would so that all the energy in him zapped right into her and she wasn’t afraid at all.

  God, how she hated these memories.

  She passed the joint.

  “You smoke it?” Damian asked.

  “What?”

  She was the loneliest girl in the world, but Kimmie and her friends didn’t care. Her mom was happy as Ms. Pacman and when Micki found out about Eddie French she would be out, gone. All at once Beth wanted not to care, to zone out. Tired of thinking, she reached over and grabbed the joint back from Kimmie and took a long draw, sucking the burn down her throat and deep into her lungs.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “You’re stoned,” Micki said when she walked into Beth’s room that night.

  “Didn’t anybody ever teach you to knock?” Beth lay on her bed and closed her eyes. After a minute she raised her head and looked at Micki. “You’re still here. Why is that?”

  “I’ve got that geometry test tomorrow.”

  “So?”

  “You promised, Beth.” Micki had seen her sister at school and Beth had said she would help her study. “You never break your word.”

  “I said I would. Now I can’t. That’s not the same as a promise.”

  “Does Mom know you’re stoned? She’s gonna be so pissed.”

  Beth sat up, brushing her hair back off her face. “Who’s gonna tell her?”

  “You look awful,” Micki said.

  Beth fell back again. “Jeezus.”

  Micki stared at her sister, the perfect Beth. It crossed her mind to tell on her, but she thought of the hell she’d catch for that and gave away the idea. Still, she felt she ought to do something. Beth was her younger sister.

  “You shouldn’t hang with Kimmie Taylor. You’ve got good friends.” Not like me, said a voice in her head. “How come you don’t go around with Madison and Linda anymore?”

  Beth’s eyes were shut. She made a sound like snoring. On her way out the door, Micki said, “Go ahead, ruin your life, see if I care.”

  Micki left home early the next morning, telling her mother she had to study for a geometry test. She entered Arcadia School by the north entrance, the main entrance that everybody called the kiddie port because students under fourteen were forbidden to enter or exit by any other door. The tenth-grade entrance was on the south side of the school. Every morning of the school year, tenth-graders gathered there on the picnic benches and under the magnolia trees to copy homework and talk about boys, clothes, teachers, and each other. Micki could have used some help on her math but not even the threat of a failing geometry grade would make her use the south entrance. She had done it yesterday, and she still felt the places where girls’ stares burned into her back.

  “Well, Micki, this is a surprise.” The teacher’s aide at the kiddie port had been around Arcadia since Micki started in the sixth grade. She checked the little kids in every morning. “What brings you ’round this way?” Her smile was so chirrupy she had to be putting it on.

  Micki felt her cheeks heat up. The aide probably knew about The Fives. Her shame was probably what the staff and student body talked about every chance they got.

  She mumbled something about convenience and ducked her head as she scurried down the long hall lined with trophy cases and class bulletin boards. There was no one around and her feet rang noisily on the linoleum tiles. Tenth-graders had their lockers in the new wing that was about as far away from the kiddie port as you could get, but she had planned for this and if she hurried she would avoid everyone until class began. Then it would be the same humiliation as yesterday, and she could not even use the bathroom without fearing she might encounter a Five.

  It was no good saying she should put their rejection behind her—her mother’s words; it dug into her dreams and during the day it was like a sponge that absorbed every other thought. When she went to bed the shame of her friends’ dissing sat on her chest like a hundred-pound tomcat with maggoty breath.

  Every day she wished her father were alive, but especially now because she knew he would find a way to help her not care about The Fives anymore. He would tell her honestly what was what and her eyes would open. When he was alive nothing was horrible or scary for very long. Well, one thing had been, but it happened a long time ago.

  A little kid in a red sweater came out of the school office at a run and peeled past her, down the hall. Micki remembered being that young, and when she did she remembered what was even worse than getting dumped by The Fives.

  Fifth grade had been the most horrible year of Micki Porter’s life.

  Probably because it had been the setting for a nightmare, Micki remembered Ms. Winston’s fifth-grade class at Forrester Elementary in almost cinematic detail. The cursive alphabet that ran along the top of the green board, the chart of the Presidents of the United States, and beside it—twice as large—the chart headed “Reading Marathon” on which Ms. Winston kept track of their book reports. Every book was worth one hundred miles and the challenge was to run from San Diego to Washington, D.C., between September and June. Every kid in the class had a drawing of a sneaker with his or her name on it. Micki’s shoe had been around Wichita, way out in front of the rest. She loved to read and it came easily to her. In the fifth grade her favorite books were myths and fairy tales and Agatha Christie.

  In Ms. Winston’s large, public-school classroom, students sat at square tables placed close together, one person on each side so that when they moved their chairs they were always knocking into each other and getting into fights. Under the tabletop was a shelf where she kept her books and the colored pencils she got for Christmas and which someone stole the first week. Things were always getting stolen at Forrester Elementary. At her table there had been two boys, JD and Sebastian. Sebastian was a chunky African-American with a corkscrew laugh. JD was a Jehovah’s Witness; on Halloween and Valentine’s Day and other special holidays, he had to go into the office and read while Ms. Winston’s class ate chocolate chip cookies the room-mother brought. The girl at her table was Tanya Waterman.

  Even now, so many years later, when Micki thought of Tanya she felt a tightness in her throat that would turn into tears if she let it.

  In fifth grade Micki had sometimes felt like a little girl, sometimes an
adolescent. She and Tanya giggled about boys on the phone every night and had sleepovers every weekend. One Saturday they persuaded their parents to let them ride the bus to Fashion Valley, where they tried on clothes and hung out at the food court watching the high school kids and then went home and played Barbies. In school they wrote notes back and forth, and at recess they hid out in the bathroom with the other fifth-grade girls and Lonnie Palmiri showed them the picture she had drawn of a man’s thing.

  One spring afternoon when the wind was blowing hard and the sun was hot, Micki and Tanya lurked on the edge of the school grounds under a pepper tree playing a folding paper game that was supposed to tell you who you would marry and if you would be rich. Tanya told Micki her mother and father were getting a divorce and she might have to live with her grandmother in Colorado. Micki, wanting to share something just as important, told Tanya she was adopted.

  It took a minute for this to sink in.

  Tanya asked, “Who’s your mother? You mean you don’t know your mother?” Tanya’s mouth opened like she was going to bite into an apple.

  The question puzzled Micki. “You know my mom.”

  “Yeah, but she’s not the real one. What about your real mom? What happened? Why didn’t she want you?”

  Micki began to feel prickly all over.

  “What was wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I knew this lady, she used to live on our block, and she had a baby with this big, old foot. You could hardly even see her toes.”

  “But there was nothing wrong with me,” Micki said, raising her voice. She stood up, brushing the peppercorns off her shorts. “Let’s go play tetherball.”

  Tanya followed Micki as she ran off, ran fast. Instead of stopping at the tetherballs, Micki kept running up over the asphalt rise to the top level where the boys in the sixth grade played softball. She heard Tanya far behind, yelling her name. She ran straight through the sixth-grade game; the boys screamed at her and someone threw a ball and it hit her in the back but that did not make her stop. She ran around the flagpole where the school said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, ran down the open halls of the school past the teachers’ room and the office and the janitor’s closet and the supply room and the workroom, and down the alley at the side where the school vans parked and the custodians smoked and around the portable classrooms and back onto the asphalt again. When she stopped, the air burned in her throat and chest, sweat poured off her face, and a bunch of fifth-grade girls were staring at her: Tanya and Lonnie and the nasty little girl who never washed her feet and Jerrianne, whose mother was in jail.