A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Next she wil change and go downstairs to take her First Communion, lined up with al the other youth. When her turn comes, Pastor John wil let her break off a piece of a wide, flat cracker. Melissa’s mom wil hand her a plastic shot glass, and she’l toss back a dribble of sour grape juice.

  But she can’t move. She’s stuck in this moment, and now the concrete of the baptismal font under her feet is softening. She is sinking, fal ing below her memories, down into the black depths of dreaming.

  Liza turns to wade up out of the pool, to go to the next part of the memory. Communion, the bread, the cup, but the preacher’s arm on her shoulder has become an iron bar.

  The disapproving face of Mrs. Richardson wavers, and as she sinks, the smiling, wide mouths of the youth-group kids yawp impossibly wider, their faces hinging almost in half to show rows and rows of teeth. They look carnivorous, as though they want to climb up the wal s of the font like sticky-fingered tree frogs, join her in the water, maybe get a piece. She’s sinking, losing her place, going back under.

  Liza strains up, trying to stay in this moment. Trying to keep herself in this smal piece of her past. She should be dressed by now, standing in her jeans in the sanctuary to eat that bit of dry, unsalted cracker. She must take the cup from Melissa’s mother and drink. The memory holds a message that she has to get to Big.

  But there is no floor under her feet, and she sinks deeper and deeper into the darkening water, the smel of chlorine shifting into salt. She is al the way under now, learning what Melissa has known al along: If you don’t go al the way, it doesn’t count.

  Melissa is gone, and her mother is gone, and the youth-group kids. The preacher’s hands are gone. There is only Liza, drifting asleep, alone in the black, deeper than anyplace light can touch, no shore in sight.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Mosey

  I SAT BY LIZA for I don’t know how long, waiting for Mrs. Lynch to come. Every now and again, I’d hear the front door open and then someone else tromping through the house and out to the backyard. I stayed put, whispering, “Liza? Liza?”—but my mom lay limp. She’d curled on her bad side in the cold metal hospital bed that looked like something from space. It didn’t belong by her moss green wal with al her feather dream catchers hanging over it. Final y I tried, “Mom?” even though I never cal ed my mom Mom. I always cal ed her Liza. Stil nothing. “You tel me how is that box of bones out in the yard your baby? Liza?”

  I final y heard Mrs. Lynch coming down the hal , talking. I couldn’t make out the words, but I knew that nostril-honky voice, al right. My fist snaked out toward Liza like it had its own idea clutched tight inside. When it reached her good side, where al her nerves were working, my thumb and my finger unfolded and got themselves a piece of the skin over her ribs. I pinched her as hard as I could.

  She didn’t move, not a squawk or a shiver. I twisted my pinchy fingers, like she used to, back when she’d tweak my ear and say, “Cool it, Mosey,”

  if I was showing out. She didn’t even twitch, and I let go, panting. She was someplace deeper than sleep, and I couldn’t get to her.

  I wanted to grab her arms and make her sit up and look at me and relearn how to talk and tel me something that made sense, but Mrs. Lynch was paused right outside the bedroom door. Now I could understand her.

  “…hide the dead baby is exactly what a kid would do. Remember that Yankee girl who tried to flush hers down the toilet at her senior prom? That child went right back out to dancing.” I found myself standing up and crossing the room fast, while outside the door Mrs. Lynch said, “That was my first thought, too. Apples and trees, but Mosey’s skinnier than a ribbon fish, and where would she hide a pregnancy? In her ear? In her little back pocket? Maybe she…”

  I yanked the door open, my breath coming so hard it felt like I’d sprinted a mile. Mrs. Lynch jumped and whirled around, clutching her cupped hands to her chest like she was sheltering a teeny, secret rabbit in them, but I knew it was a cel phone.

  “Mosey!” she said, her eyes al shifty. “I thought you must be out back with the rest of them.”

  My voice came out louder than I planned. “It’s not a dead baby. It’s old, old bones, older than me, even, so you shut the hel up.”

  Her caught look disappeared, and Mrs. Lynch drew herself up tal , shaking her head at me so the front frizzes of her grayed-out hair trembled.

  “Young lady, you had best watch how you speak to me.” My eyes blazed so hot it seemed weird to me her face didn’t melt and drip away like mean wax. Her mouth set, and she said, “Do you hear me? Because I can turn around and go right home. You best apologize.”

  I blinked, twice, a thousand ugly words rising up al at once and jamming in my throat so hard it hurt. But I worked every word of them down and swal owed. Mrs. Lynch charged Big three dol ars an hour to sit with Liza and watch soaps, while a real home nurse cost more an hour than Big made. Anyway, what could my mom tel me with her few words that she hadn’t already said in the yard?

  “Sorry,” I made myself say, and I pushed out past Mrs. Lynch and ran into our tiny cube of a bathroom and slammed the door loud as I dared. I yanked off my stupid skirt and left it on the floor. I stomped on it for good measure. I dug in the hamper for my favorite jeans, and under them I found a T-shirt of Liza’s from her job’s last Hal oween party. It had a leering, pervy skeleton on it, and it said, I GOT BONED AT THE CROW. It was a girl tee, cut curvy with room for boobs I didn’t have, but I put it on anyway. It smel ed like my mom’s fig-leaf body lotion, and for some reason I busted out crying.

  Only for like thirty seconds, four big whooping sobs, and al these hot tears spil ed out so fast it was like both my eyes streamed. I gulped in a big breath, and then, snap, it stopped.

  I went looking for Big and found her flopped into one of the patio chairs. She had her back to me and her head hung down. She didn’t so much as twitch when I pushed the door open. The yard looked crazy-wrong, with a chunk of blue sky and some slats of the fence where the wil ow should have blocked my view. The side gate was open, with Tyler’s truck stopped halfway through. It was stil trailing the chained-up tree trunk with al its twisty roots dragged out behind it. Tyler stood in his truck’s bed, leaning with his legs crossed and his butt perched on the roof. Our chief of police, Rick Warfield, was standing by the hole and the open silver box, glaring at two men I didn’t know, one an old guy in saggy-butt khakis and a younger fel ow with a scraggly beard and those kind of round black glasses like the Santa at the Moss Point Mal wore. Officer Joel was there, too, and it was so weird to have him in our yard. He’d come to school and done the Drugs Are Bad talk every year since I was in the second grade.

  I saw I’d left my cel phone on the patio table behind Big. I grabbed it and was about to stuff it into my pocket when it buzzed in my hands. I flipped it open and saw I had about fifty mil ion texts from Roger piled up. The first one said, What did ur mom mean, her baby?

  I flipped through the rest of his texts fast, skimming, and they were either asking if I was dedded or trying to puzzle out when my mom could have made another baby without the overinterested folks of the nosiest damn town in Mississippi noticing.

  I had no idea. Liza’d told me a thousand times how she’d lost her virginity in the sandpit with Carter Mac. Only six months later, she’d met my nameless sperm donor at a carnival, so she couldn’t have had another baby before me. A few weeks after I was born, we hit the road. No way a baby she’d had in Texas or Arkansas would end up buried here, in Big’s backyard. Then once we came back home, people would have noticed her being pregnant again. I texted back, Dear U, hi, I am not ded and the bones can’t be mom’s baby. Unpossible.

  His answer came back thirty seconds later:

  Dear U, Also unpossible: I am treed by cops in ur yard. 0.o

  I texted back, quick as I could, Y R U stil here anywai?

  Thirty seconds later he came back with, Duh, I had 2 c what happened. Stuck now. HA!

  Al I needed, on top of baby bo
nes in my yard, was for Big to find out I was skipping to hole up with a boy in the tree house. I could tel her al day long I didn’t think like that about Roger, but technical y speaking, Roger had a wiener. Big didn’t like me to be alone with those things. She acted like I could get pregnant if I so much as stood downwind of one.

  I had to move everyone long enough to get Roger down and away. Looking at Big, though, she didn’t seem like she had any plans to go inside anytime soon, or even stand up. Her legs looked like noodles.

  “Big,” I said. Big’s head lifted, and she turned it toward me real slow. I didn’t know what to say after that to keep her attention away from the tree house. Al I could think was, Hide and seek, Big? Close your eyes and count to a hundred. That would work perfect if I was five. And if Big had been born stupid. So al I said was, “Mrs. Lynch is with Liza. Big, are you okay?”

  She didn’t answer or blink. It was like talking to my mom, how she was now. Big’s lips sagged open, and her eyes looked like no one was home behind them, and that scared me more than anything that had happened yet today.

  I crouched down on my haunches by her and whispered, urgent, “Big? Big? Did you hear what Liza was say—”

  She stayed flopped, but she shushed me with a noise so hard it didn’t seem made of sh sounds—more like a hard t had gotten at the front. She stared at me like she was only just now real y seeing I was there. She flicked her gaze back and forth, like the good blond girls on Days of Our Lives always do when they’re being al sincere and desperate. I tried again, lowering my voice and saying, “Liza was saying, ‘Give—’”

  Big sat up so straight, so fast, it was like God had shot her spine back into her body from space. Her hand darted out, and she pressed it over my lips, her middle finger almost going up my nose.

  “We’l talk about it later. Hush now,” she said, and she was Big again.

  She stood up, moving in her normal quick way, staring al intent across the lawn with her brow furrowing up and her eyes gone squinchy at the corners. Officer Joel was looking at the silver box, one hand rubbing at his mouth. The two guys I didn’t know had their heads bent in toward each other and were talking, while Chief Warfield stil glared at them al toad-throated and indignant.

  I stood up, too, and fol owed Big to the edge of the patio, nervous. “Who are those two guys that Chief Warfield hates?”

  She made angry, thin lips. “Oh, it’s too stupid. That one in the glasses is from that junior col ege over in Barth. He teaches about dinosaurs, and apparently Joel brought him along to say how old the bones were. Which he did not know. However, he was able to confirm that they are not the bones of any kind of dinosaur, so that’s a load off, eh, Mosey? I might have guessed al on my own that brontosauruses weren’t sleeping al snuggled up to stuffed ducks in the Plesiolistic era, but what do I know? I never went to col ege.”

  It seemed to me from her tone that this would be a bad time to point out that she’d kinda melded Pleistocene and Paleolithic and was letting dinos into both to eat up cavemen, but at least it made sense now. Chief Warfield was a deacon at Calvary, where believing in dinosaurs was a sin, but Officer Joel was a Methodist. That was good, because Big got antsy anyplace where, as she put it, there were more Baptists than people.

  Big added, her voice only a jot milder, “The dinosaur guy cal ed in that older one, who is some kind of bone teacher, too. So pretty soon we’l have most of Mississippi’s masters of higher education in our yard to tel us the sky is blue and water’s wet and that is not a T. rex.”

  Chief Warfield headed across the yard toward us. Big watched him coming, her hands flexing into fists and then opening without her knowing.

  Past Chief Warfield I saw two heads pop up, peering over our tal wooden fence. It was Jim Place and his basketbal son, Irvin. They must have cut through the Baxters’ side yard and come up through the woods.

  “The Places are peering over our fence,” I cal ed to the chief, and it came out sounding real whiny. When I was little and complained about another kid in that voice, Big would turn me around and pretend she was searching my heinie for a tattletail.

  The chief glanced over and saw them. “Y’al move along,” he cal ed, but real mild. He didn’t even wait to see if they obeyed, just came straight up to us, so they stayed right where they were.

  “Olive says there’s a dead body in here?” Mr. Place hol ered at his back.

  That made Chief Warfield throw them an irky look over his shoulder. He cal ed, “Go on, then,” instead of answering, but they didn’t.

  “Olive? Mrs. Lynch’s daughter?” Big asked me. “Is she here?”

  I shrugged. “She didn’t come in with Mrs. Lynch.”

  Big wheeled toward the chief, but right then his phone started playing calypso music. He held up one finger and said, “My wife,” and answered it.

  Big stared at him, this WTF look on her face. He turned away and hunched his shoulder up at us. After a minute Big turned her glare at the Places and yel ed, “Jim and Irvin! You get your sorry selves out of my woods before I fetch the shotgun and load it up with salt and shoot your looky eyes out!”

  Jim’s and Irvin’s mouths went al unhinged, and they moved away and then disappeared.

  “And that’s how you do that,” Big muttered at Chief Warfield’s back.

  I said, “How much longer are these people going to be here?”

  She shrugged. “They’re waiting on the state medical examiner.”

  “Why is he taking so long?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Big said. “Probably he’s held up at a real crime instead of whatever mess this is?”

  She said it real dark like, and al at once I got that Chief Warfield and Officer Joel and the two professors were standing around nodding and whispering to each other because they thought the bones meant there had been a crime. Big was worried that they were right, that there was a crime. Maybe even that my mom had done a crime; that’s why she was shushing me. She didn’t want anyone to know what Liza had said about the bones being her baby, and she was so het up over it she was threatening to salt-shoot our neighbors, which was so un-Big-ly that I couldn’t hardly believe I’d heard her say it. Her skin was pale and creased, like she’d been heavily asleep for hours and hours with her face pressed into crisp sheets, dreaming bad things.

  The chief got off the phone, and Big stalked over to him with her legs gone al stiff.

  I knew that Roger had a pretty good view of the back woods from the tree house, so I flipped my phone open and texted him, R the Places stil behind there?

  He answered, Nah, out in front with others.

  That got my attention. Others?

  Dood, 1/2 of Immita is in your front yard.

  The chief was talking to Big now, pointing this way and that, from the wil ow’s remains to the truck to the box, so I slipped inside the house. I hurried through the kitchen to our den. I jumped up on Big’s saggy sofa, and my feet sank up to the ankles into the cushions.

  I lifted one of the blind slats an inch so I could peek through on the sly, and al my breath came whooshing out of me. More than twenty people were standing in clots of three and four on our personal grass, whispering and shrugging and watching our closed front door like any second they expected Oprah to pop out and make concerned eyebrows and narrate.

  Most were from our neighborhood—some Perkinses and Places and Baxters, al the Daughtrys, and even Emily Beaumont with her brand-new baby in a strol er. They must have seen both of Immita’s cop cars parked in front of our house and come down to eyebal us. But I also saw Margee Beechum, who used to work with Big, and the Beechums lived al the way over past Chester Street. I blinked, unsure how the news could have gotten so far already.

  That’s when I saw Mrs. Lynch’s skinny-skank daughter, Olive, wearing a jean skirt cut off so short that if she sat down, I’d have been able to read it was Thursday off her days-of-the-week panties. She was stomping it out from one group to another like a rexed-up Bond girl, face lit up in
a vile grin. No doubt she was spil ing those make-believe gory details I’d heard Mrs. Lynch saying into her cel , about how I’d hid a pregnancy and the bones were my secret murdered baby. And why not? I was Liza’s daughter, just like Liza was Big’s. A baby at fifteen was practical y my destiny. I felt my stomach seizing up, heating and curling, going harder and smal er like a Shrinky Dink.

  I forced my gaze away from Olive and saw we’d even attracted some of the Duckins family: two skinny young-man Duckins with only one shirt between ’em and a haggedy old-woman Duckins, who peeked out like some kind of wild animal between the curtains of her long fuzzy hair. A whole slew of them lived outside Immita on a big piece of trailer-dotted land everyone cal ed Ducktown, and they were al cousins and brothers and aunts with one another so many times over that it was hard to tel who was exactly related and how. Growing up, I’d had six or so in school right around my grade, but I was a sophomore now, and only one was left. Either the rest had failed so many times I’d left them behind by middle school or they had plain dropped out.

  OMG I spy Duckins!!!!11111one!!eleventy, I texted to Roger.

  He texted back, IKR How did they hear?

  I had no idea. It must have been drums or some kind of disaster osmosis, because their phones and power were always getting shut off for not paying and they were so clannish that no one I knew even had a Duckins’s number.

  I texted, They smel ed our blood in the water?

  Next a yeti wil come then, Roger shot back.

  But it was weirder than a Yeti. It was an ice-white Mercedes convertible, and the top was down, so I could see Claire Richardson with a silk scarf over her white-blond pouf of hair. I would have known it was her with the top up; there was only one car like that in Immita. Roger cal ed the whole family the Rich-as-shits, but everyone knew it was her family money; her creeper husband was the footbal coach at Pearl River High, and on that money he couldn’t even pay her shoe bil . They had three boys, and two of them had gone to Pearl River to play for him. Everyone cal ed him Coach and made a big deal because we won al the time, even though we were division two and footbal is stupid anyway.