A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “I’m going to get caught. And then I wil puke. And then I wil be dead because Big wil kil me,” I told Roger.

  “Don’t think about it,” he said, total y at ease. He reached for my backpack and unzipped it, pul ing out my civics book. “Here, study while we wait.”

  I opened it and tried to concentrate. Most times I found it real soothey to put facts away in tidy bundles in my brain so I could unpack them al out onto a test and then get it back two days later with an A or at least a B on it, sometimes with a “Good job, Mosey!” note. I was a regular on the dean’s list, but the exclamation point always looked surprised to me.

  I heard a car coming, and I dropped the book and craned out the front window to see if it was the Mighty Un–Butt Crack’s truck.

  “Excel ent studying,” said Roger. “You should eat the relevant pages. Seems like you’d get more of the test material in you that way.”

  It was only the Wheatons’ station wagon with those vile fake oak panels on the sides. If I left now and sprinted the woods track, I could catch the bus on Marlin Street, down farther on its route. Tyler might not show for hours, if he even came today. Big hired him because he worked cheap, he had his own tools, and he knew how to do al the stuff most families had husbands and dads to do. He’d snaked out our clogged toilet, built my tree house from a Home Depot kit, tarred our roof, and put a new battery in Big’s old Malibu, but he came when he came.

  “Chil ,” Roger said. “You are not going to get caught. I already made you this, in case you showed.” He pul ed a sheet of folded paper out of his back pocket. I opened it and read, “Sorry, Jean, about Mosey’s tardy, but she had a doc appointment and so please write her a pass.” He’d already signed it “Virginia Slocumb,” in blue pen. The handwriting was super close to Big’s, but the best part was how it said things exactly like the real Big would.

  I blinked at him. “I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if you ever decided to use your powers for good.”

  Roger shrugged, like real rueful. “It’s a tragedy for Earth, I tel you.”

  That almost made me smile. If he hadn’t been with me, I would have cracked and run for the bus by now. Roger had been my only friend at Calvary. He stil was, even though I was at Pearl River High now. It was like that year in Baptist exile had made me lose my place. The girl who’d been my best friend since kindergarten, Briony Hutchins, had come back from her summer in Nevada twenty pounds lighter, except in the boobs.

  She’d also straightened her hair and found poisonously beautiful cheekbones. She sat between Kel i Gutton and Barbie Macloud now, the two of them turned in toward her like she was the Tome of Gorgeous and they were the prettiest pair of bookends available, whispering about hair-tossing techniques and being way too good for me.

  “Keep studying,” he said. “I’l watch.”

  I shook my head. I put the book and Roger’s note in my backpack and then hesitated. I felt like my lungs were slowly fil ing up with beach sand, so I could only get oxygen in smal er and smal er sips. My palms leaked sweat. I gave in and rummaged down to the bottom until my hand found the two-pack of dol ar-store pregnancy tests tucked under my pink Trapper Keeper. I pul ed them out and waved the box at him. “I need to go pee.”

  “Love a duck,” he said. “Again? Real y?”

  “I need to,” I said, and he rol ed his eyes. He knew that the hawtest sex action I’d ever seen was when Dougie Breck and I touched tongues on a dare in sixth grade. “Whistle if you see Tyler’s truck?”

  “You’re such a ’tard,” he said, but that meant he would.

  I got one of the tests out and tucked it down into my bra. Lord knows my bra didn’t have much else in it to speak of, so it might as wel make itself useful. I peered through the foliage, but I didn’t see any of our neighbors out, and Big and Liza were likely stil in the den, where the windows pointed at the street. I shimmied down the back of the oak and skimmed over the fence to the woods behind our house as fast as I could. Big took me to Girl Scouts when I was little, so I knew to watch for poison oak and ivy when I left the trail. I found a good spot behind some bushes. I got the test out and said a quick thanks heavenward that Roger had beat me to the tree house, so I hadn’t changed into my jeans. The skirt made it so much easier.

  I squatted down over the stick, and even before I started peeing on it, I felt more air getting down into me, like my squeezed-shut insides were untwisting, even though I already knew the test would come out negative. That was kind of the point, to hold this solid piece of plastic proof that I wasn’t going to turn out like Liza and kil Big in the heart. I yanked my underpants back up and sat on a log with the stick beside me. A minute passed, two, three, and I sat watching while the pink line that told me the test was working properly formed, real bright and obvious. Beside it, the window that would get a pink line if I was pregnant stayed blank and white, the way it always did. It was perfect and clear, and the leaves and dirt and trees around me got fuzzy and out of focus, and I looked only at that pure white window.

  I don’t know how long I sat staring at the test stick with the morning air tasting real clean and sweet to me. I sat until I heard a quick, sharp whistle, and then my heart leaped up and started trying to jam itself into my throat, undoing every bit of good the pee had done. Roger’s whistle came again, but I stil took thirty seconds and dug a hole and dropped the test down it and covered it. Big didn’t come out to the woods hardly ever, but if she caught me with a preggo test, she’d crap herself. Then she’d murder me before she even paused to change her pants.

  I hightailed it back to the fence, popped quick as I could over it again, and scrambled up the tree.

  Roger said, “There.”

  I turned to crane out the window. Sure enough, Tyler’s filthy white truck had already pul ed up and parked on the street, paral el with the back gate.

  “Crap, crap, crap!” I said.

  Tyler got out in his mom jeans and a green tee with the sleeves rol ed up to show off his fifty mil ion arm tats. He did his Tyler Baines slouch walk around to the truck bed and pul ed out this enormous chain saw.

  “Should we at least try to stop him?” I whispered.

  Roger shook his head. “That guy looks like he would eat his own children.”

  We shut up then as Tyler passed by us on the way to the wil ow. He yanked at the chain saw’s cord, and it roared to life.

  I should have run down right then and handcuffed my arms around the wil ow. I should have sent Roger to set Tyler’s truck on fire to distract him.

  But I didn’t think of any of those things. I sat, dumb and unmoving, and watched while Tyler swung the saw forward. It bit into the wil ow’s trunk with this vile, harsh grinding, and I sat there, like I couldn’t quite believe it. The saw roared so loud I felt the buzz of it in my teeth. I knew I should do something, but I kept looking at the back door. Part of me thought Liza would rise up and come roaring out herself again, al smitey and alive, magical y cured to save this tree. The back door stayed closed, though. The TV was on so loud that Liza might not realize for days that her wil ow was gone, if her brain wasn’t too effed up to even notice, and I was missing my civics test.

  Tyler’s saw bit at it from one side, then the other, rattling my eyes in my sockets. The old Liza would have known how to make him stop, but I wasn’t like her. I sat there and let it happen. Final y the tree tipped slowly and went over with a crash, and the chain saw stopped.

  It was so quiet then, it felt like the whole world was holding its breath. I blinked, shaking my head in a little “no” shake, back and forth, so smal it was like trembling. Tyler began hacking the wil ow up and carting off the chunks of it, businesslike and fast. It took a couple of hours, and we sat and watched, and Liza didn’t come. Final y Tyler opened the fence gate wide and backed his truck up into the yard to winch out the stump.

  He attached the chains and revved his engines and yoinked the very heart of the wil ow right out of the ground. The sound of those old roots
ripping as it pul ed loose was a tinfoil bite of a noise. It made me and Roger both clap our hands over our ears. The stump came out and got dragged, trailing its torn roots like guts as the truck lurched forward.

  Tyler stopped then and got out and came back to look at the jaggedy hole. The wil ow’s stump lay on the grass like a dead sea creature, wrenched out of its proper home and flopped up on the shore. He started to turn away, then paused and scratched at his head, staring down into the tangly mess of dirt and thready roots. He took two steps closer, then squatted like a caveman. From my perch up high, I could see something gleaming silver from the side wal of the hole, almost at the bottom. Tyler let himself down into the hole and dug at the earth around whatever was lodged there. He pul ed and worked at it until he got it out.

  It was a dirty silver box, like a miniature treasure chest. Some of the dirt fel away as he clambered out with it, and I could see that the back of the box had pink metal hinges shaped like daisies.

  Roger pointed at me, eyebrows lifting, like asking if the little trunk was mine. I shook my head no. He whipped out his iPhone and texted to me, Backyard pirates?

  I texted back, MayB. Weird.

  We both leaned forward, peering down, hoping Tyler would open the box.

  Tyler set it down on the ground, and then he squatted and pried it open. He had to work at it, like the box was latched or stuck shut. He got it, though, and then he pul ed out what looked like a rotty stuffed duck, tiny and deflated, so old that the yel ow of his cloth body had browned out in big patches.

  Tyler gave the duck a shake, and even from al the way up in the tree I heard it chime. The old bel sounded off-key and weirdly sad, like a noise in a movie that tel s you something bad is coming.

  Roger made a bored, blowing noise and whispered, “Some kid’s box,” but I wasn’t bored. I felt al at once hyper and alert, like under my skul a pair of inside ears had pricked up.

  I found myself reaching for Roger’s hand and grabbing it, tight. Roger gave me a WTF look. He had this unspoken rule that I didn’t stuff myself into his same beanbag chair or sling my arms around him and be al snuggy-touchy like I used to with Briony. He didn’t want me that close to him.

  Not unless I meant it in a way I didn’t feel about him.

  When he saw my face, he left his hand in mine, mouthing, What? at me. I was like a dog on point, leaning forward, and Roger craned to look out the window, too, puzzled enough to be interested again.

  Tyler set the duck aside and picked something else out of the box. Something smal and strangely curved, cream-colored under the dirt. He turned it around and around like a raccoon washing something, and as he spun it, the dirt fel away. He reached down and picked up another one just like it. I couldn’t make out what they were, not at al , not until he held the two pieces together. When I saw the way they fit, saw the shape and how they hooked on the ends, I gasped. Roger did, too. Then he clutched my hand back, very hard. We looked at each other, and his big eyes were as round and green as crab apples.

  We looked back down, and Tyler’s mouth had gaped open wide enough to let drool fal out. We knew what he was holding. It was smal , too smal to be a grown-up’s, but I’ve watched about fifty mil ion CSI and Bones reruns with Big. It was a teeny jawbone.

  Roger breathed out, “Is that from a person?”

  Tyler bent down again and picked out a piece of faded pink fabric, streaked with slimy brown. It hung like a rag in his hands, and I saw that it was a ruffly baby dress, and that’s when Roger and I heard the sound, this horrible moaning wail. Tyler dropped the dress, and Roger and I both jumped.

  It sounded like someone tiny and damned had been in the darkness under Liza’s tree, and Tyler had yanked its sleeping ghost into the sun. I screamed a short sound like a bark and clutched at Roger’s hand so hard I felt his own bones grind.

  But the noise wasn’t coming from a ghost. It was coming from my house. The back door slammed open, and my mom came stumping and wailing into the yard on her walker. Big was right with her, saying urgent things no one could hear. My mom unleashed a noise that held every bit of hel she had left in her, and I squeezed Roger’s hand so, so tight, so tight. My mom sucked in a desperate whoop of air, and then a new wail came. I thought it was because of the tree, but she wasn’t looking at the tree.

  The wail changed and became shaped, words made mostly from vowels. My mom was screaming words at Tyler. He stood there staring with that tiny, awful jawbone stil in his hand. My mother said a thing over and over, a thing no one but me and Big, who’d listened to Liza for almost four months now since the stroke, could possibly understand. It was a garble, but after the third time I could make it out, what she was screaming, and it made no sense.

  My mom let go of the walker, like she was trying to run at him, and her bad leg gave out, and she went down stil screaming those crazy words with poor Big trying to catch her.

  “What the what?” Roger asked.

  “She says that it’s her baby. She says the bones are her baby.” I ground Roger’s fingers to paste, and he clamped down, grinding mine right back, because it sounded so unpossible.

  My mom’s good leg kicked at the ground, like she was trying to swim to Tyler and take the little curve of bone away from him. Big fel to her knees, reaching for Liza, white and shocked and weeping. Liza kicked and stretched her arm toward Tyler, straining toward the dress and the bone, demanding her baby, over and over, and it made no sense, no sense at al , because my mom had only ever had one baby, and that baby was me.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Big

  WHEN LIZA DREW her first breath and screamed her first mad scream, it was so loud I could hear her through my headphones. She pierced the cheery pop drumbeat of “Walking on Sunshine” to make herself known. I’d hit the Rewind and Play buttons on my Walkman at least a hundred times by then, letting Katrina and the Waves wail away six hours’ worth of hard, induced labor. Katrina sang, and I pushed and heaved out the baby they told me had already died inside me, probably days ago. I went to live inside that song, disconnected from the body that was busy doing strange and painful things. “And don’t it feel good?” Katrina asked me, over and over, until the words didn’t mean anything.

  I went with Katrina because otherwise I might’ve thought about how the sharp-nosed asshole doctor at the emergency room said it would be easier to slip wires up inside of me and cut it up and take it out in pieces. He was talking to a nurse, but he had that bossy kind of bored, rich-fel ow voice that carried. Then the nurse came and said it to me, but she used nicer words. They both cal ed Liza “it” because it’s easier to cut up an it.

  I said, “No, no, please, God, no,” because back then I was stil praying. I said, “I want to hold my baby even if it’s only one time. I want to see my baby.” I cal ed Liza “my baby” because I didn’t know her sex. I only knew that, dead or living, my baby was not anybody’s it.

  Then I pul ed on my headset and hit Play, cranking up the volume on my Walkman while they wheeled me out of emergency to a different place upstairs. A new nurse shaved my privates and put a drip in my arm that started up labor. Hours later, when I heard Liza’s first enraged miracle shriek, so loud and fierce it reached me through my headphones, I opened my eyes. They were lifting her up, the new doc’s eyes wide with pleasure over his mask. Her squanchy face was al screwed up into a wad with mad, and her round head was sticky-tacky with gore. She kicked her springy frog legs, beautiful y alive and righteously pissed off, but they had told me my baby was dead, so this couldn’t be my baby. And yet a slick cord trailed from her bel y back into me. We were attached.

  I stared at her, unbelieving, while Katrina sang al cheerful about love and sunshine. I looked at Liza: shrieking, tiny, red-faced, enraged, wil ful.

  The first thing I thought was, Beautiful. Then I thought, Mine.

  That entry was a harbinger; Liza was a dreadful baby. Seemed like I spent the better part of her first year walking her up and down and up and down my parents’ hal
through her endless colic. I’d walk her, and she’d scream, and both my parents would come out of their bedroom, dul -eyed from no sleep and stil seeping that gray disappointment that had been oozing out from al their pores since I set my dinner fork down and told them I had, as Daddy decided to cal it, “gotten myself knocked up.” I would have thought it was grammatical y more proper to say Lance Weston had done the knocking, but my parents didn’t see it that way. No one did; Lance Weston didn’t have to leave school.

  One night, after I’d been walking Liza more than four hours, each minute ticking me closer to my breakfast shift at Pancake Castle, my mother came out alone and stood in the hal watching me pace up and down joggling my wad of unhappy baby. Liza made a thin, high, endless noise like a miserable teakettle. In ninety minutes I’d have to bike to work. I’d spend six hours on my feet slinging coffee and corned beef hash, hoping breast milk wouldn’t gush out and wreck another uniform and make me have to do laundry during Liza’s afternoon nap, the only time each day I had to study for my GED.

  My mother looked at me, so sorrowful, and I said, “What, Momma? What?”

  I don’t know what I expected her to say. I’d always been her good girl, a decent student, second chair for flute in band. Something to be moderately proud of. Until I went to the first party anyone had ever invited me to and Lance Weston, a junior from a rich family and co-captain of the basebal team, paid me some attention. I was so blushed and flustered that I took a sip of the zombie punch I’d been holding to be polite, and one sip led to the rest of the cup, which buzzed and heated up inside me and cal ed out for another cup and another and then another to join it in my bel y.

  Next thing I knew, me and Lance Weston were slipping off together. I was pretty sure we were fal ing in love, and he was pretty sure that freshman girls with that much zombie punch in ’em put out. Only one of us was right.