A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

by Joshilyn Jackson

  If I had doubted for a second that this place was Liza’s, I didn’t doubt now. I realized I’d been holding my breath, and I blew it al out and whooped in new air, just as Patti pul ed The Joy of Sex right out of the middle shelf. I turned away, but Patti started flipping through, studying the pictures.

  I began digging gingerly in the bedding, picking up the throw pil ows with two fingers and setting them aside. Under the big one, I found a chest. It was built into the floor and wal of the tree house, so even if someone found this hiding place, they couldn’t steal it. It had one of those super-heavy, expensive combo locks on it where you turn the individual wheels to get it open.

  Behind me Patti said, “There’s a whole gross chapter on toes. Who wants to have sex with toes?” I heard the book smack shut.

  “Look at this,” I said, and she crawled over, her eyebrows rising.

  “There must be something good in there, huh? How are we gonna get that open?”

  I wasn’t worried about that. I knew that my mom’s bank-card number was 7676. Her voice-mail password was 767676. I turned the dials to 7-6-7, and the lock opened up in my hands.

  “Ta-da,” I said. I shoved the lock in my back pocket but hesitated before opening the lid. The pil ows and candles and The Joy of Sex were reminding me exactly what druiding meant.

  My mom’s brain event had taken most of her away, but before I came out here, I’d been feeling closer to her than I ever had. Now, digging through the artifacts of Liza’s secret life like some kind of pervy sex archaeologist, I was seeing plain how little I was like her. The only thing I’d let get in my pants, ever, was Coach Richardson’s framed newspaper story. I’d snuck through the Richardsons’ house, rescued a dog and maybe a girl from Ducktown, and I was even toting a gun that would get me insta-expel ed if anyone had a single clue I was packing. I thought these things made me bold, like her. But I’d wil ful y forgotten that Liza was a whole different kind of bold.

  “Open it!” Patti said.

  Stil , I paused. Before the stroke my mom seemed to drip sex off her fingertips. Everyplace we went, men looked at her like she was made of fudge brownies. I’d always felt like a gangly she-beast looming and lurching along by her. Now I’d stopped peeing on pregnancy sticks and instead become some kind of crazy klepto, but that didn’t make me Liza. The only thing she stole, real y, was other people’s husbands. Nothing I’d done had real y made me more her kid.

  Meanwhile Big was clueless. I mean, hel o, I was taking a huge-ass gun to school every freaking day. She didn’t even suspect, because gun toting wasn’t a thing Mosey Slocumb would ever do. I didn’t belong to either of them, and somehow that thought put a sad, burned taste in my mouth, like I’d licked ashes.

  There was nothing to make this chest mine. I said to Patti, “If Liza stole me, if I don’t belong to her and Big in any real way, what gives me the right to bust into this chest?”

  Patti snorted. “There could be something tel ing where she stole you from. Who’s got more right to that than you?”

  She was Roger-style right. Which meant she sounded right enough for me to throw the lid open.

  “Wel , shit,” Patti said.

  We were looking down at a netbook. It rested by a sleeve and a power cord and a wireless mouse. It was a nice machine, newish-looking.

  Probably expensive. I was positive that Liza couldn’t have afforded it, like she couldn’t have built this tree house on her own. Celia Mason’s dad—or someone else’s dad, or a whole slew of dads—had helped her out, in al kinds of ways, because that’s who she was. If who I was was anywhere, it would be in her files and e-mails. I could feel the truth, buzzing under my fingers as I booted up the machine.

  “She got plugs here?” Patti asked.

  “No, but the battery must stil be charged. These little netbooks, they can last hours. Briony had one.” It finished booting, but the only thing it showed us was a log-in screen with a picture of a beehive and slots for a user name and a password. Al these stupid barriers, each one a place I had to pause and ask myself how much I real y wanted to know.

  I tried the user name “Liza” and put “7676” in the password slot but got rejected. Her password was probably a string of sevens and sixes, but I didn’t know how many. Her user name could be anything.

  Patti voiced what I was already thinking. “We need Roger.”

  “I know, right? But I can’t tel him. He wil be so kil ed I took you here and not him.”

  “No, it’s good. You can’t show a boy your mom’s secret sex place. That’s not cool.” Then she shrugged, real practical, and said, “Tel him we found the computer hidden at your house?”

  I thought about it, then nodded. “Let’s pack this stuff up and go. I don’t have cel signal out here, and I want to text him. I can’t lie to his face. I get al red, and he’l so bust me.”

  My cel phone didn’t get bars until we were almost at my house. Patti and I sat down on the ground and leaned against the back side of the privacy fence that ran around my yard. Liza’s woods looked deep green and closed. I couldn’t even see the start of the winding trail from here.

  While Patti got the netbook out of the sleeve and booted it up again, I flipped my phone open and thumb-typed, OMG. Liza had secret laptop under her floor. How do I bust in???!!!111.

  I read it over. He’d buy that. He knew I kept my stash of pregnancy tests in a similar place in my room. I’d practical y forgotten they were there, expiring and getting al dusty. I hit Send.

  He texted back almost immediately, before the laptop was even done grinding its way to the log-in page. He was back at his cousin’s house, down in the basement rec room while upstairs the adults rehashed the wedding and drank more. After he got done freaking that we had found a super clue without him, he wanted to know al kinds of technology boy crap about the machine. Patti and me, bent over the phone, rol ed our eyes at each other. I texted, Like we know, dufus. It’s a Gateway and we need a login and PW. PS low bat and we are hiding from Big in yard pls hurry.

  So he got down to business. Type the letter A into the login name slot.

  I did it. Now what?

  He texted, If nothing fil ed in, try B. Then C.

  Al at once I got what he was doing. OMG autofil ! GENIUS = U!

  I only had to go to D before the word “Druidess” fil ed itself in in the log-in name space, and the password slot fil ed itself in, too, in a row of unreadable asterisks. I hit Enter, and while Liza’s desktop loaded, I texted to Roger, U R FULL OF WIN!

  The desktop wasn’t cluttered. There were a few icons for Spider Solitaire and Minesweeper, basic Microsoft Office stuff, Paint, and a program that downloaded and stored photos from her digital camera. I popped that open just as my cel phone rang. It was the theme song from Underdog, Roger’s ringtone.

  I passed it to Patti and said, “Put him on speaker.” I hauled the netbook onto my lap.

  “Hey,” Patti said into the phone. “Sec.” She turned it on speaker and held it up so we could both hear.

  Roger sounded smal and very far away. “I can’t tel you how hard this sucks. This sucks goats. How am I missing this? Patti, tel her to open the browser. Tel her she has to go on the Interwebs and check Liza’s browser history.”

  Patti said, “She can hear. We both can.”

  I said, “I’m looking at her stored pics, and this is so weird. There’s lots of her weird-ass shots of leaf piles and cocoons. But there’s also a crap ton of pictures of me that I had no idea she took. Some of them are two or three years old. Like here I am on the old bike Big took to Goodwil .”

  Patti leaned in to look, but Roger was practical y yel ing now.

  “Look at pictures later! You need to check her browser history. I’m tel ing you.”

  “Fine.” I pirated onto our left-side neighbor’s wireless; Roger had learned a long time ago they hadn’t passworded it, when he was skipping school up in my tree house with only his Mac for company. As soon as I connected, I opened up Explorer, wh
ile Roger foamed impatiently and Patti bounced on her knees al big-eyed, just as bad a solve-monster as Roger, now that we were so close. Liza’s home page was Google, and she had bookmarked a bunch of sites, but nothing interesting, mostly stuff like eBay and Etsy and Netflix.

  “Hel o,” I said. “Liza bookmarked Hotmail.”

  “Shazam!” Roger said. I hit the link and used Roger’s autofil trick to get past the log-in. This time I had to go al the way to F before flirtybits@

  hotmail.com appeared, and the password sweetly fol owed in a row of unreadable bul ets.

  “We’re in!” Patti said.

  I could hear Roger crowing. “I love dumb-ass PC users. They al do this. Why have a password if you are going to let your browser put it in for you?”

  Liza hadn’t checked her e-mail since she’d had her stroke. I said, “Oh, my God, her in-box has almost three hundred new mails in it.”

  Roger said, “It has to be mostly spam, because people who know she had a stroke wouldn’t e-mail her. Just scan the titles.”

  Sure enough, the first titles were al Cheap Canadian Pharmacy. Be her Dril osaur! COUPON CODES. And then The Boosterthon Needs You!

  Apparently no one had ever taken her off the Calvary PTA mailing list.

  My breath caught. The title under the PTA e-mail was u goddam whor I am going 2 find u and kil u.

  I pointed at it and was surprised to see how hard my finger was shaking. Patti read it off to Roger. It was from someone cal ed halfcocked57@gmail.com. Roger started hol ering, “Open it! Open it!”—so loud that I shushed him, worried the wedding drunks would hear him caterwauling.

  I clicked it open, Patti and me crowding close, pressing our faces forward toward the screen.

  I read it aloud. “‘U better cal me or at least e me the pictures. Sick here from freaking. Freaking the fuck out. You better be dead. She better not be. You bitch. U better.’”

  Patti and I exchanged mystified glances.

  Roger said, “That’s it? Not even signed? Damn it, go back to the in-box. Does Hotmail let you sort by sender?”

  It did. We found twenty-four more unread e-mails from halfcocked57, starting a couple of weeks after Liza had her stroke. The earliest one had a different tone, but al of them wanted to know where Liza was, when Liza would send the pictures. As the days passed, halfcocked57 got angrier and more abusive. The e-mails didn’t come regular, though. There were three furious ones that came the same day, same hour, one after another, then nothing for ten days, when the worst one of al came. Halfcocked57 cal ed Liza words I had never heard said out loud in my whole life.

  “Sent file!” Roger said. “Go back and see what pics Liza was forwarding?” But I think al three of us already knew it would be the candids of me.

  I clicked into Sent and searched for the last thing Liza had mailed to halfcocked57. It was the top thing, titled, Our girl, May 17th.

  Inside, the text said, We did our summer shopping, and she only wanted shorts. She’s tired of skirts, wants to go al rebel soldier next year with her school’s dress code, demand jeans. It’s cute to see her so righteously indignant, like a school with a dress code is communism. No boyfriend on the horizon, thank God. She may run track this fal , she says. She’s built for it—look at those long legs. Little beauty, she is.

  It took me a second, but I remembered going to the mal with Liza last spring and bitching about how at Cal al the girls had to wear skirts, like women haven’t had the vote for a thousand years now. The attached picture showed me in shorts I was about to outgrow, standing in the backyard by the wil ow that wasn’t there anymore. I was looking to the side, so I was almost in profile. I didn’t look like a beauty on any planet except maybe planet Liza, which we al knew was one crazy-ass place.

  Liza had taken this picture, though. I was sure of it; she was always good at composition, and she understood lighting. I could see how she had set me a little off center and included enough of the wil ow to balance me. She must have been lying in the grass pretending to photograph ants, because the camera had been angled up at me, and I could see I real y did have long legs. I had never noticed them, because in the mirror I always ended up staring at how I had no butt and squat-al to train with my trainer bra, but Liza’s photo showed off pretty legs I never knew I had and caught the sunlight that glowed off my skin and made it look olive and nice.

  I closed out and kept going back in her Sent file. Every month Liza had attached pictures of me and zinged them off to halfcocked57.

  “This person, this halfcocked57, do you think that’s who Liza got me from?” I asked. My voice sounded as tinny and distant as Roger’s did. Patti shrugged, but her face looked like she was thinking, Well, duh. Roger said nothing. I opened the next attachment and saw that Liza had even sent halfcocked57 last year’s goony school pic.

  “Look at that,” Patti said, pointing. The school logo was missing from my Calvary shirt.

  Roger said, “What? What?”

  I explained, “Liza Photoshopped my school picture. Or edited it in Paint anyway. She took my Cal logo off. And al these pics, it’s me in the plain grass or by trees or inside the house. Never by a building. No signs or street names.” Which meant Liza real y, completely, absolutely, total y stole me. Weirder stil , she had been e-mailing updates, but nothing that would let halfcocked57 find me. That meant whoever halfcocked57 was hadn’t handed me to Liza like a present. Maybe they’d been looking for me, hunting Liza this whole time, desperate to get me back. I had this crazy picture in my head, some nice daddy-looking guy with an embarrassing mustache, a plain, smiley lady with eyes like mine wearing ugly mom sandals and baking a nice pie.

  “This is roadkil -humpin’ crazy,” Patti said, and that made me laugh in a short, near-hysterical burst.

  Liza had done something awful enough to impress even a Duckins. The imaginary perfect family washed away. People like that, they didn’t even know the words halfcocked57 had cal ed Liza.

  “It’s al true,” I said when I was done laughing. “It’s al real y real.”

  “Write back!” Roger said.

  I nodded, which he couldn’t see, but Patti said, “She hit Reply already.” I looked at the screen and was surprised to see she was right. I had.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Be Liza,” Roger said. “Say, like, ‘Chil , bitch. My comp died. Gimme your snail addy, I’l print the latest pics out and throw ’em in the mail.’ Then we’l know where halfcocked57 lives.”

  My hands typed it as he spoke. Even though I felt muffled and distant from this, like I’d been wound around in a thousand layers of cotton fluff, I was impressed at how he could make it so real-Liza-sounding, total y off the cuff.

  I sat there with the cursor hovering over Send.

  Patti said, “Are you sure? What would Big say to do?”

  “Leave Big out of it,” I said, sharp. Stil , I moved the cursor up to X the message away.

  “Send it,” Roger said. “It doesn’t mean we have to do anything. Just, we’l know.”

  I hovered the cursor back over the Send as Patti covered the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand and whispered, “You real y think he won’t do anything if an address comes? Just because you say?”

  I stuck there, not doing anything, and then I heard Big yel ing from the house—“Mosey! Mosey!”—and my finger jerked, accidental y, but not al the way an accident.

  The e-mail sent.

  “Oh, my God,” Patti said.

  “Did you send it?” Roger hol ered.

  “I did,” I said, and we both heard him whooping. “Big is cal ing, text you later.” I grabbed the phone from Patti and flipped it closed. “Can you pack the netbook up and bring it to the house? I’l get Big in the kitchen, and you come in the front and run this back to my room. There’s a plug under my bed. You can hide it there while it’s recharging.”

  Patti nodded, and Big hol ered again, sounding real mad, “Mosey!”

  Her voice was coming from the back
door. I didn’t want her to see me hopping the fence and know Patti and me had been out in the woods. I ran around the outside of the fence to the front door. She’d quit cal ing by the time I got there, so I went into the den yel ing, “Big? Big?”

  Almost immediately, she poked her head out from the swinging door to the kitchen and said, “Mosey Wil ow Jane Grace Slocumb, do not yowl at me like I’m your maid. Come in here.”

  Her head disappeared back into the kitchen, but I stood there blinking for a second before I fol owed, because she’d been wearing lip gloss. Not ChapStick either, but shiny cranberry-colored stuff.

  Liza was sitting in her usual place at the table, and Big was pul ing a pan out of the oven. She had on her favorite navy cotton skirt with the silvery threads shot through. She’d blown her hair out straight as it would go, though it was already springing into waves on the ends.

  I asked, “Where are you going?” I couldn’t think of a place Big could go where she would need her lips to be so glossy.

  “Errands,” she said, but she’d already gotten the groceries and stuff this morning. “Can you please stay with Liza? If I run late, I’l need you to help her to bed.”

  My eyes narrowed, and I stepped closer. Sometimes Big got set up on blindies or had a dinner invite, but she always met the guy out. She said she didn’t want me getting attached if it wasn’t going to be serious, which she acted like meant she was thinking marriage, but I thought it was code for sex. Either way, with Big it never turned out to be serious.

  I said, “Big, when you say ‘errands’ like that, al weird, does that mean there’s a guy?”

  Big pushed her hair behind her ears, nervous like. “When I say ‘errands’ al weird like that, I mean errands.”

  I snapped, “God, you can just say if you have a date, you know.”

  Big startled like a horse and said, real y loud, “It’s not a date.” Then she flushed so hard that of course I knew it had to be.

  “Whatever.” I couldn’t believe she was going off to eat at Applebee’s with some balding accountant and talk about whatever boring crap old people talked about on dates, like everything was normal. Like Liza was stil Liza and I was stil me.