A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Liza starts walking away.

  The year she met Melissa, at Rich People VBS, Claire Richardson used the felt board to tel the story of that wise king, the two mothers, the baby who died in the night. Solomon offers to cut the remaining baby into halves. One mother says, No, no, let her have it. Just leave that baby whole.

  The king gives the baby to that woman. He doesn’t actual y care who gave birth to it. He gives it to the one who wil lose everything to save it.

  That’s what real mothers do. They save the baby.

  Liza can stand to lose her friendship with Melissa. It’s already soured in her mouth. She can give up the remains of her childhood, too. She never much wanted it. What she can’t release is the thin shel that is her. The un-mother. The cool girl everyone watches, wants, the rebel girl who gets away with everything. That’s the thing that she decides to keep.

  Every time she washes up here, she has to watch herself walk away. Every time, she knows that when she leaves that baby behind, she ceases to deserve her own.

  Then Big’s hands grab her, pul her away, yanking her out of the waves of photographs, off the beach, settling her into her own chair in her room.

  Big’s mouth moves. She is asking something, but al Liza hears is the sound of waves rol ing in. Over Big’s shoulder she can stil see Melissa, putting the joint to her lips now. She doesn’t know the “present for the pretty girl” is laced with PCP.

  “Melissa!” Liza says, cal ing to her, trying to stop her. But Liza is in Noveen’s car now, they are leaving. Melissa is lighting the joint that wil take her brain away, steal hours, send her careening into the dunes with no idea of time and tides and little sisters.

  Liza cal s again, “Melissa,” but Noveen is turning up the radio and Big is grabbing at her shoulders, pul ing Liza toward the now. She won’t see Melissa again, not for years.

  Not until the day they have their final conversation.

  On the beach Melissa breathes deep. Holds the smoke.

  The ocean takes the one baby. God takes the other. Melissa and Liza have nothing left to divide between them.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Mosey

  I WAS PRETTY sure I could find Liza’s tree house in my sleep, because I already was finding it there. Almost every night I dreamed about the day last year when I’d fol owed my mom down that crooked path. I’d wake up motion sick, like my bed had been sloshing me back and forth while I was sleeping.

  When I was awake, I didn’t go there, not even in my thinking. It was like I was scared that Roger would read the words “Secret Tree House” off the worry creases in my forehead. Having Patti around made it less likely that Roger would smel the stink of me keeping something from him, so I invited her along al the time now. She always said yes, and she never even had to cal home and check if she could. I knew she didn’t have much money, so mostly we hung at me or Roger’s house. On Thursday, instead of Real Pitting, I got Roger to pick up a huge bag of Taco Bel , and the three of us took it back to my house and let Mrs. Lynch go early. We sat in the den watching court shows with Liza, eating Meximelts, and passing around a two-liter of Big’s gross generic soda that Roger cal ed Diet Brown.

  Patti got me and Roger’s weirdo humor, and she had a high-pitched cackly laugh I liked. She fit with us fine, but seemed more comfortable when it was only her and me. Like, in Life Skil s, Patti talked my ear off. We literal y did not stop talking, because Coach was out Friday, and he didn’t come back at al the whole next week either. The Life Skil s sub put on films and then sat studying for the MCAT, ignoring us as long as we didn’t yel .

  The only time Patti shut up was when Briony Hutchins found out Coach wasn’t coming back at al , and she came mooping into class al pink-eyed.

  Patti and I eavesdropped while Briony wailed to her whole entourage.

  “His wife is making him take early retirement! Both her kids who were any good at sports have graduated, so I guess she’s going to screw over our whole footbal team. And right here at the start of the season! Cheer is so going to suck now.”

  When Roger was around, though, Patti got sidekick quiet, especial y at his house.

  I understood it. At Roger’s house the cushions on the sofa matched the print of the easy chair. His dad was his real dad and lived with them. They had a cat with white feet named Socks. If me and Patti went over, his mom kept coming at us with snacks, asking, “What are you kids up to?” with this big, white smile. It was like she thought if she left us alone too long, Patti and I would leap at him and ravish him or stuff him ful of drugs.

  Between the matchy cushions and his helicopter parents, Roger’s life freaked Patti right the hel out.

  That next weekend Roger had to go to Biloxi and watch his bulimic cousin final y get married. Patti and me biked to the Great Clips, and I klepto’d like a total pro from al my practice, lifting a whole stack of ancient gossip magazines while Patti distracted the girl at the front. Then we holed up in my tree house to look at pictures of the hottest celebrity couples from three years ago. Roger texted us every fifteen minutes to tel us wedding stuff, like how the bride was spitting al the chewed bites of her lunch into a napkin and how the old people were bombed by 2:00 P.M. and doing the most embarrassing dancing in the history of time to “Louie Louie.”

  I read the texts out loud to Patti, and then she started tel ing me about the last wedding party she’d been to, in Ducktown, after her uncle took his common-law lady to the justice of the peace. It was hard to fol ow, because everyone was related to everyone else in al these weird ways, but the gist was, Patti’s diabetic second cousin got super drunk and passed out in the yard. Her uncle stole her cousin’s prosthetic leg and drove down the highway to a roadhouse bar and beat this guy half to death with it, because the guy used to sleep with the bride. Then the uncle came back to his reception and stuck the leg back on the passed-out cousin to try and frame him. It didn’t work, for one because Rick Warfield was too smart to buy that the guy who actual y needed the leg to walk would pul it off and hop around a bar parking lot, banging someone’s head in. Also, her uncle left bloody fingerprints al over the ankle.

  She told it al casual, lying on her bel y and swinging her feet back and forth, flipping through a tattered People magazine. For her that wedding reception was normal. I’d never had a friend I could play “Whose Family Is Weirder?” with and not win before.

  I think that’s why I told her about how the bones in our yard had belonged to the other Mosey Slocumb. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I told her about Liza’s years on the road, where she stole me as some kind of baby replacement, and how Roger figured it out with Occam’s razor and then turned into the Unstoppable Supersleuth. When I got to the part where we came out to Ducktown, to her house, Patti closed the magazine and sat up to real y listen, but not like shocked or freaking the way Briony Hutchins would have. I even confessed that Bogo was a stolen Duckins dog, and al she said was, “I knew that was him. It’s okay. She’s a mean bitch, that one you stole him from, anyway.”

  So then I told her about how I broke into Claire Richardson’s place. The only thing I didn’t mention was the gun. It was stil boxed up in my backpack, nestled between my history and math books. I took it with me everywhere, spooky heavy in my backpack, stil not sure what I should do with it.

  When I was done, we sat there looking at each other, and I asked, “I have a whole ’nother mom and maybe even a dad wandering around out in the world. How weird is that?”

  “Not that weird,” she said. She scooted a little closer, her voice gone soft, like she was worried the blue jays yel ing in the yard next door might overhear. “That lady you met? That I live with? That’s my auntie. I never knew my dad, and my real mom fel in love with a drummer and went ‘total Yoko.’”

  “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  “I dunno,” Patti said. “They kicked him out of the band for it, though. Him and my mom made a suicide pact. He jumped off the Bryer Street overpass and smashed his legs and alm
ost got run over. My mom wussed out. She stayed clunged up to the railing. So, soon as he got out of traction, he left town, going after his band. My mom asked my auntie to watch me for a couple days, and she went after him. I was, like, five? But my auntie stil says shit like I need to get my math grade up before my mom comes back.”

  I scooched a little closer and asked, “Do you remember her?”

  “Kinda,” Patti said. “She smoked these long, long, skinny cigarettes, and she had real y soft hair that went in curls, like Big has.”

  This wasn’t a funny story to her, like the uncle and the leg. This was her real y tel ing me a true thing, same as I had about the bones. So I took a deep breath and told her the thing that was eating me up. The thing I couldn’t tel Roger.

  “My mom? She has a secret tree house in the woods behind our house. She was a druid, or she said she was anyway, so she’d go off alone on these camping trips to be one with trees or whatever.” I paused, gulping. “I fol owed her one time. Last year. I wanted to see what druids did.” I’d never told anyone. I’d tried not to even tel myself.

  Patti said, sort of encouraging me, “Real druids, back in olden times, they did human sacrifice. They pul ed out people’s hearts and baked them and ate them.”

  “I think that was Aztecs,” I said, but at the same time I didn’t feel so squeezed and worried. It was like she was saying that even if I’d seen my mom doing cannibalism, it was okay. And real y, what I saw wasn’t as evil as cannibalism, just maybe a little grosser.

  “What did it turn out to be? What druids do?” Patti asked.

  But I started talking just after she did, before she could finish asking. “You want to come help me find her tree house?”

  Patti said, “Shah!” which was a weird Ducktown word I’d learned meant “hel zya.” I was wil ing to bet that no matter what we found—nothing, or a journal, or letters from my real mom, or baby pictures of me before I got stolen—Patti would have seen weirder. Also, she wouldn’t fol ow leads like a crazed bloodhound, dragging me to places I might not want to go. She’d let me decide.

  We shimmied down out of the oak tree. Patti wanted me to go tel Big we were going for a walk, so Big wouldn’t worry if she cal ed for us. Patti could walk out of her house at 1:00 A.M. and bike to the mini-mart for Pop Rocks without anyone even asking where she was heading, so she thought the total y enraging way Big had to know where I was every second was sweet.

  “Let’s just hurry,” I said. “Big knows we’re outside, and we aren’t actual y going anyplace but deeper into outside.”

  Once Patti and me were in the woods, it took barely two minutes to find the start of that twisty trail I’d fol owed Liza down last year. If I hadn’t known it was there, we wouldn’t have found it. It petered out and picked up again fifteen times, winding back on itself. It was so slight a trail, the woods so thick, it had been easy to fol ow Liza without her seeing me. Now I went along it so fast, remembering it perfectly, that Patti started puffing. She was real skinny but not in great shape.

  “It’s not that far,” I told her.

  “Are you going to tel me what druids do, though?” Patti asked. “I told you my worst thing.”

  I said, defensive, “You don’t think the bones and being stolen is my worst thing?”

  She shook her head. “Roger knew al that already. I mean a secret for us, like you have on me now.”

  I chewed at my lip, because I’d wanted to tel someone. Not Roger, because that was unpossible, and Big would have crapped herself and then kil ed Liza. But Patti, I thought I could tel . I said, “Okay. But keep moving,” because it was easier with no one looking at me. I grabbed her hand and towed her along, but slower.

  “I fol owed Liza to this clearing where we’re going now. Where I think the tree house is. I could hear her rustling around, starting a fire, I guess. I was about to go home when Liza started talking, I thought maybe to the foster dog she’d brought along, or even starting some kind of mystical chant. But a man’s voice answered. He must have come in another way.”

  I heard Liza laughing, too, loud and throaty-sounding, but I didn’t say that.

  “I crept closer, not on the trail. Through the brush. I peeked into the clearing. Liza’d made a bonfire under a big oak at the back of the clearing.

  She was in front of it with a guy.”

  I could see the scene perfect in my head, like it was yesterday instead of months ago. She had one bare leg poked out of her sheet sari and wrapped around this big, shirtless guy with a hairy chest, her spine bent back and both his hands kneading her ass. She had an apple jammed in her mouth, and he wolfed and gnawed at the other side, like he was trying to eat his way right through the core and get at her.

  He had apple juices running down his chin. His throat was slick with it. He shifted his hands off my mom’s butt, trying to unwind her from her homemade sari, and I saw his face.

  I said, “It was Celia Mason’s dad, from Calvary, and he is stil total y married to Celia Mason’s mom. My mom had her hands on his belt buckle, and I realized I could never, never, never sit through world history with Celia, not ever again, if I saw her dad’s junk.”

  But then I did. My mom pul ed his pants down to just under his ass, and this big purple-headed thing bounced out, al probey-looking and angry.

  I’d never seen one, and then I did see, and it was attached to someone’s gross old father. My mom reached up under him, her hand going down in his pants in a digging way, and she lifted more out as the pants slid farther down. His bal s, I guess, but not how I thought bal s would look or even how they were in the drawings I’d seen. It looked like a hairy sack of plums she was hefting in her palm, like she was checking the weight.

  “That’s where I was hiding,” I told Patti as we came around the trail’s last little twist. I pointed to a thatch of bushes, just off the trail. I stopped walking, and now I could look at her, and she wasn’t shocked or even much surprised. “She got down on…He had this…She put…Anyway. I turned and ran, crashing and banging as loud as I could.” I’d wanted them to hear me. Wanted to interrupt them and ruin them and make them quit and be sorry. I wanted Liza to come after me and apologize for being vile, and also an enormous hypocrite. I’d felt this huge, ragey scream building in me, and I had to hold my breath to keep it in. I sprinted off, airless, until I was so dizzy that I had to stop and puke.

  “Did they hear you?” Patti asked.

  I shook my head. “I guess she was too distracted. I was so mad, because she acts like if I so much as French a guy it’l be like getting a Gremlin wet. Fifty babies wil come popping out of me. And yet there she is…Oh, never mind. It made me puke, is the point. No it isn’t. The point is, this is the clearing. That’s the oak tree. See that fire pit? The dog was lying right by it, watching them with his eyebrows twitching, one up, one down, then swapping, like he didn’t know what was going on but he hoped he’d get some apple. That was Rufus, and he was a weird dog. He would eat anything he saw a person eating. Which just made me feel worried.”

  Patti said, “My auntie’s cousin’s ex-boyfriend used to press his junk against the front picture window of her house every time I walked past coming home from the bus. Like, here’s my wiener, hel o, al squashed. First time I was so surprised I had to stop walking and just ogle at it.”

  “Ew!” I said, but inside I felt al washed out with clean relief, because she knew. She got it without me saying clear that I hadn’t been able to make myself leave. Not immediately. Not quick enough. “Anyway, this is the tree.” It was the right kind, a good, big oak, older than mine at home, even.

  We walked directly under it and looked up. The leaves were starting to color but stil mostly on. Hidden in them I could make out the bottom of Liza’s tree house perched way high above us. It looked very old, so old it had gone gray, like beach wood.

  “Holy crap,” I said, surprised to be right, to find it so real.

  “How do we get up there?” Patti asked.

  We circl
ed the trunk. There was a creeping vine running up one side of it. I made a face; vines like that always look roachy to me. But I made myself feel around in it, and once I touched it, I stopped worrying. The vine was made of plastic. I found a board nailed to the trunk, hidden in the leaves, the first in a series that acted as a ladder.

  “Smart!” I said, and started to climb. Patti fol owed me. The ladder ended when the branches began, and after that we had to go up the old-fashioned way, clambering branch to branch and wedging our feet in the forks.

  “Shit, we’re up tal ,” Patti said, nervous.

  I could see a hatch in the tree house’s underside. I shoved it open, and it moved easy and quiet. I clambered into it, then got out of the way so Patti could fol ow me. Inside, Liza’s tree house was made of pale, varnished hardwood. Sometime pretty recent, someone had built a solid Home Depot kit house with a roof and cutout windows over the bones of the gray wood platform we’d seen from the ground. Patti whistled, low and impressed.

  I said, “This is new, and Liza can’t hardly change a lightbulb. Someone helped her rebuild her old tree house.” A man, for sure. Maybe more than one. I started crawling around, looking for a way to make it brighter. Near the front I saw an aquarium with three big scented candles inside. There were cigarette lighters in the aquarium, too, but I didn’t like the idea of live fire up here, even inside the glass. I turned back and saw Patti holding my old Girl Scouts camp lantern. It was shaped like a kerosene lamp, but real y it ran on batteries. She found the switch at the bottom and flipped it on.

  We saw a couple of rol ed sleeping bags and some big throw pil ows by the trunk, far from the cutout windows. They were up against a couple of cheap plywood bookcases. I crept over to read the titles. It was mostly the dark, twisty kind of novels my mom liked, but Liza also had al my old Moomin books up here, too, which was kind of sweet. I saw the snowflakes I’d drawn in Magic Marker down the spine of Moominland in Midwinter.