A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

by Joshilyn Jackson

  The words are coming back, and she has tried to tel Big, but everything that must be said is a swirl in her mind that boils away to word pairs when she tries to say it out loud: This does that. Bunnies comes. Liza walks.

  Big must come down this road, come with Liza, until Big knows the word that goes with “cup.” Bunnies comes. Liza walks. Big must learn what

  “cup” does.

  Liza lifts and clicks her walker forward, and the wind that blows her is a resistance, a current that sweeps her back even as she moves forward.

  Her good, strong, young legs push against the pedals. She is Liza-then, biking to her best friend’s house, and Liza-now, creeping the same route in her walker, one foot after another. She travels, caught in the ebb and wash of memory.

  Liza-then is faster. The bike soars through the six miles and fifteen years that separate her from Melissa’s house. She is nearing the end of her first trimester. Standing on the pedals to coast down the last hil , she can feel the slight shift the baby is making in her center of gravity. No one knows except Melissa, who has been perfect. Melissa has said and done every right and good thing a girl should say and do when her best friend is pregnant. Until today. This afternoon, at school, Melissa stopped speaking to her. In the hal way after fifth period, Liza was made of air and Melissa puffed right through her, unseeing, unhearing. Liza had stopped existing. She is going to see if Melissa wil speak to her now.

  Liza-now stumps another three inches forward, less than a block from her own house. She knows that when Liza-then arrives, Melissa will speak.

  This is the first of their three final meetings, each a monkey-paw wish of an encounter, with fal out that wil set the troubled courses of her life.

  She pushes herself, trying to catch up, but Liza-then’s bike is already sailing up the wide white drive. Poured concrete, not gravel. The house is white, too, with columns and a wraparound porch, stuffed ful of al kinds of things that don’t belong to Liza: a canopy bed, cable TV, cashmere sweaters. Melissa has her own clunky computer, where they trol the message boards, the only girls online, it feels like sometimes. Even Liza’s e-mail can be accessed by Melissa: flirtybits@HoTMaiL.com. Melissa owns brothers, three of them, and a bitch of a mother who is at least the right age and the right kind of adult stylish. Not like Big, who wears the same brand of jeans Liza wears and who wil take Liza in her arms and then put her head on Liza’s shoulder and cry and cry when Liza tel s her she is pregnant. Melissa’s mom would kil Melissa first and properly cry alone into a pil ow, later.

  This house, the correct mother, and the pack of brothers—these things are only Melissa’s, but Liza is al owed in like a favored pet, no need to knock. Melissa owns her daddy, too, in some ways. He knows how to carve a chicken. He sits at the head of the table, and he has a barrel chest and a swoop of blond hair like a lion mane and a big laugh that Liza feels as a reverb in the floor when he unleashes it.

  She lets herself in, and Mrs. Richardson gives Liza her “I smel poo” smile, the usual, as Liza flies by on her way up the staircase to Melissa’s room. Taking the stairs two at a time is stil easy, but once again she is aware of the shift at her core. She thinks, It won’t be so easy next time, to go up these stairs, with no idea that there wil never be a next time. This is the last time she wil ever set foot in this house.

  Melissa is on her stomach on her big four-poster bed, reading, legs bent at the knees and bare feet waving in the air. As Liza comes in, Melissa looks up from her book and stares, and for the first time Liza can see that Mrs. Richardson is Melissa’s mother. It’s in the ice-blue eyes, the haughty chin lift, the mouth tilting up to a wry and vicious angle at one corner.

  “What happened?” Liza says. “What did I do?”

  Melissa smiles, but it isn’t nice. “I know,” she says. “I heard you talking to him.”

  Liza is about to ask what Melissa knows, but she chokes on the words. She sees that Melissa does know. Melissa knows who the baby’s father is. The world pauses under her feet for a lurching heartbeat, but then it keeps on turning.

  “Does it help to know I love him? I real y, real y love him,” Liza says.

  Melissa laughs, but there’s no mirth in it. “I love him, too,” she says, and it is simple and nakedly true.

  Liza says, “So this is nothing new.” She’s trying to make Melissa laugh, but it’s stil true. They’ve loved the same boys before, and it never mattered between them. They could pass Carter Mac back and forth, take turns owning al three of the Davidson brothers. They made out with a boy named Pete at the same time, one on either side of him, his head turning back and forth, his hands roaming, too gobsmacked by his own great luck to be too pushy. Neither girl would let him get any of her clothes off. Too weird. But this is different.

  “He’s my dad,” Melissa says simply.

  Liza, who has never had a dad, understands anyway. Liza owns Melissa’s father in a way Melissa never would, never wil , never can. Liza thinks it is the reversal that upsets her most, Melissa on the outside, empty-handed, this time.

  “You’l have to accept it at some point. When it al comes out,” Liza says, easing closer, coming al the way to the bed so Melissa can see her face, see how sincerely Liza means it.

  Now Melissa is laughing. “God, you are so stupid. You think my dad is going to let any of this ‘get out’? You’re my age. It’s a freakin’ felony.”

  “You don’t understand,” Liza says. Liza knows she’s young, and that worried him, too. He doesn’t fool around with high-school girls, as a rule. But you aren’t like them, he told her that first time, in his study on a Thursday afternoon when no one else was home. You’re such a grown-up kind of pretty.

  “Do you have any idea how much money my mother has?” Melissa looks back down at her book, like this conversation is over, but her eyes don’t shift back and forth the way they would if she was truly reading. She says, casual y, to the pages, “I so fucking hate you.”

  “It’s not about money.”

  “Yes it is,” Melissa jets back fast. “He won’t leave us, and he’l kil you dead if you say anything. To anyone. If he doesn’t kil you, I wil .” She sounds almost firm and matter-of-fact, but Liza can hear how her voice trembles under that.

  “He loves me,” Liza says, chin lifting. “We’re so in love.”

  Melissa snorts. “Tel that to my old piano teacher. Tel that to our ex-maid and our stupid neighbor’s fake-titty second wife.”

  For a second, Liza doesn’t get what Melissa means, and then she does. “I don’t believe you. He hasn’t been with anyone but me since we started. Not anyone.”

  Melissa drops al pretense of reading and boosts herself up, curling her legs under her and sitting. She’s stil laughing while she does it—a mean, hard sound. Now she is laughing so hard that tears come out her eyes. “You total dumb-ass. You moron. You think my mom is getting fat? You ever seen my mom get fat? She’s pregnant again. Like, due a month or so before you. You dumb-slut moron.”

  That shuts Liza up. Of course Liza noticed; she’s woman grown enough to check her body against the body of her rival. And she has thought it, that Claire is final y getting fat. But she’s loved Coach so long now. And final y, oh, final y, he was miracled into loving her back. She imagined them living in this very house, feeling his boomy laugh shake the floor as he carves chicken and she watches from a permanent place at the table.

  Coach is downstairs. She wheels to go to him, demand he reassure her, and al at once Melissa is up, grabbing her arm so hard she feels the grip like a grind against her bone.

  “Don’t you dare,” Melissa says. “You wil not say a word with my mother in this house.”

  “I have to,” Liza says, and tears her arm away, runs for the door.

  Melissa shrieks, loud as an air-raid siren, and something white flashes in Liza’s peripheral vision. It passes her and smashes into the door Liza is reaching to open. It is the white lamp with its lace shade from beside Melissa’s bed. Melissa keeps screaming.
Throwing more things.

  Screaming like snakes are eating her from the inside out.

  Mrs. Richardson comes running. Coach comes running. The one brother who is home comes running, too.

  Mrs. Richardson shoves past Liza. She grabs Melissa, who is flailing and screaming, tries to hold her, croons, “Oh, no, honey, what? What did she do?”

  Melissa’s scream is words now, over and over. “She took my boyfriend! She took my boyfriend!” And her voice is hysterical, and her face is flushed, but her eyes are icy-cold and doing math.

  “Get her out of here,” Claire Richardson says to her husband.

  Coach puts his hands on Liza’s arms and jerks her away, past the brother who Liza sees now is Davis, with his eyes wide and his mouth swinging open. Coach propels her past his middle son and down the stairs, hands hard on her, pushing her ahead in a way that somehow feels like dragging. Her feet hardly touch the ground.

  He’s had his hands on her plenty, but not like this. Never like this. These hands ruffled her hair a thousand times when she started coming home with Melissa most days after school in sixth grade. This year, for the first time, they’ve been al over her, teaching her the difference between having a boy and having a man. Now they are cold and press hard into her skin like she is a bag of garbage being taken out.

  They reach the foyer, and Liza, through her weeping, manages to say, “There is no boyfriend. She means you.…There is only you.”

  “You told my goddamn daughter?” he hisses, and instead of throwing her out the door, he reverses, then turns right and shoves her ahead of him into his study.

  In six minutes he wil leave this room. He wil go upstairs to soothe his daughter and unruffle the feathers of his suspicious wife.

  By the time Liza leaves, two minutes after he does, a lot of things wil have changed.

  She wil go in weeping and come out dry-eyed.

  She wil go in empty-handed, but she wil emerge carrying the case torn off a throw pil ow, stuffed with everything in the study that both belongs to him and looks valuable enough to pawn.

  When she closes the study door behind her, she wil no longer be in love.

  She wil bike home, weighed down inside by the growing baby, outside by the pil owcase. She’l stop at the tree house to dump the stolen things into the chest there, a thing she used to cal her hope chest. Now it’s a fuck-you chest.

  “We’l be fine,” she wil say to the baby, and feel, for the first time, an inner flutter. Moth wings against the inside wal s of her. She wil take it is as a sign.

  She bikes toward home, leaving Melissa’s house for the last time. She travels in reverse, flies through Liza-now and past her and back home, while Liza-now is stil creeping forward, stil trying to lead Big to the word that goes with “cup.”

  Liza doesn’t even make it out of the neighborhood before a panicked Big finds her. Big doesn’t listen, doesn’t ask the right questions, only cries and yel s and then bundles her into the car. At once Liza understands how little she accomplished. In less than a minute of easy driving, Big wipes away al of Liza’s hard-won steps. Fifty effortless, thoughtless seconds, and Liza is back at the start.

  There has to be another way, but it’s more than a week and six more thwarted attempts to walk to Melissa’s house before Liza realizes that al the words she needs can be found in her own room, boxed up with Bunnies, under her bed.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Mosey

  THE WHOLE NEXT week was a festival of creepy stalking. Roger was the stalkmaster, al up in Liza and Melissa Richardson’s ancient business, barely even answering my texts. He was supposed to help me study math on Tuesday, but he never showed at my house. I texted him, and he was stil at Cal, hanging around the PTA–Student Coalition meeting so he could pounce on Claire Richardson when she came out.

  He blinked his big eyes at her al lamblike and told her he was doing a story on genealogy for the school paper. Claire jumped right at that bait.

  She invited him to her house on Friday to gaze with reverence at her side of the family tree, which apparently went al the way back to Adam, or at least to the world’s first rich, important, white person. Wednesday he ditched me again, so he could actual y join the Cal paper and get permission to do the stupid story. I blew my Algebra I quiz, but hey, I understood. He was very busy, what with al the rummaging around in my mom’s history like it was a garage-sale bin and leaving me out.

  Thursday was Gray Meat Stew day in the Cal caf, and we always met at The Real Pit after school so he could get a late lunch made out of food.

  He didn’t show. I texted him four times before I gave up and cal ed.

  “You didn’t say to meet you,” was his excuse, which was complete BS, because asking if Thursday was Real Pit day would have been like asking him if he planned on breathing oxygen tomorrow. I held the phone to my ear, stony quiet, until he broke and said, “Oh, come on, Mose. We can Real Pit tomorrow, before we go out to the Richardson house for the interview. Okay? Oh, and bring your mom’s digicam. We can say you’re taking the pics for the story.”

  I ignored that and said, “Where are you now anyway?”

  He said, “I’m heading over to the big library in Pascagoula. They have al the old city papers on microfiche. It’s an ass pain, but they’ve never been scanned in, can you believe? I guess they think if they clot up the Internet with the Moss Point Register and the Immita Citizen Times, there won’t be room left for porn.”

  “The Times, are you kidding me?” I said. The Register was almost like an actual paper, but the Immita Citizen Times was a four-page flyer that came out every other week. Its front page had stories about church jumble sales and high-school footbal , and no one would ever even pick it up if it didn’t sometimes have coupons for a dol ar off Blizzards at DQ.

  There was a pause, and then he said, “I want to read up on Melissa Richardson, read al the stories about when she baked her baby sister and blew town.”

  “Drowned,” I said, irked al over again. “And who cares where she went, after?”

  “You know your mom’s old friends are our best shot at finding out where Liza got you. Maybe the papers wil have some guesses about where Melissa went.”

  I snorted. “You mean where the Richardsons stashed her.”

  He ignored that, and his voice got al wheedly. “If you want me to have time for Real Pitting, you could get in on this stalktastic action. Cut my workload.”

  “No way,” I said. Al week, when he’d bothered to answer my texts at al , he’d been after me to cozy up to Coach Creepy McCreeperson. I’d rather be drowned or baked myself.

  “It’s not even out of your way,” Roger protested. “Just hang back after class, like you need to ask him something about Life Skil s.”

  “No one has questions about Life Skil s,” I said. That class was mostly driver’s ed; we watched 1970s films about reckless-driver teenagers who died wearing the most embarrassing pants: Blood on the Highway, Anytime Is Train Time. Right at the start, we’d had a two-week section on

  “Personal Health,” which…ew, I was sure not asking Coach anything about that. He spent the whole vile unit pacing back and forth like he was on the sidelines, hol ering about abstinence and teen pregnancy, which was when everyone turned and looked at me for a second. Meanwhile he was staring at Briony Hutchins’s miracle rack like he wanted to teach her about teen pregnancy up close and naked-style personal. He real y got off showing al the slides of the vile diseases every one of us would absolutely get if we did it, even once. Then on the last day, he showed us how to put a condom on a banana. Just in case.

  “So ask about track. It wil be easy to get him to talk to you,” Roger coaxed, and then he added, al awkward, “You’re cute.”

  I flat lost my temper. “You stood me up at The Real Pit, and now you want me to get into some kind of lure-the-pedo boob competition with Briony Hutchins, who wil completely win, by the way. How humiliating wil that be, considering I hate her forever? Worse, you want me ma
king snuggy bunnies with a gross old guy so you can hunt his attics for letters my mom never sent to his baby-drowning, psycho daughter. The one who ditched Liza just as hard as Briony ditched me. Seriously, Roger? Fricken seriously?”

  He got kind of self-righteous and said, “I’m doing this for you, Mosey.”

  “Wel , who asked you?” I said, and hung up. He didn’t even cal me back. I sat by myself in our usual booth, my thighs sticking to the vinyl, and after a minute I felt the buzz of a text landing in my phone.

  I am, tho, it said, which was hardly an apology. I shut my phone off.

  It didn’t help that I was starving and so flat broke that I had to dig change out of my backpack to pay for the Coke I’d already ordered. I’d missed the school bus, thinking Roger would drive me. I had to walk, and I got home al sweaty, and it was a half a mil ion degrees inside, because Big shut the A/C off in September whether it was cold or hot or both, back and forth, running the fans and keeping the windows open to save money.

  I had my own stalk-related problems at home; Big was making dinner for Liza, wanting me to sit at the table and tel her al about my day while she cooked. Al week she’d been after me, tracking me room to room, trying to make me have talks. She’d turned into this smothering Biggety blanket monster that wanted to wrap around me every second, and it was al fake. That’s the part I couldn’t stand. She had no idea I wasn’t hers.

  The only reason I hadn’t gone flat crazy was Bogo, which was what Liza and me were cal ing the dog now. I thought I should change his name, since I had kidnapped him and put him in Dog Witness Protection. Bogo was close enough to his old name for him to know we meant him, and it had the B from Bunnies, so Liza liked it, too. When Big heard it, though, she made a skeptical face and muttered that no sane person would buy that dog in the hopes of getting another one free. I told her I would, and then I took Liza and Bogo out into the backyard with one of her old dog-training books. I did what the book said, pushing his butt down while Liza made approving clicky noises at him. I wasn’t sure how teaching him to sit was supposed to get him to stop crapping in the house and hiding al the time and eating up Big’s shoes, but it was a start. Anyway, Liza was cal ing him Bogo now, clear as anything, and saying more things real clear, like “Bogo, stay” and “Bogo, sit.”