A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Meantimes I didn’t want to know about whoever Lawrence was or listen to her apply her “Everyone makes mistakes, it’s what you do after that shows your true character” speech to her having gross, old-people sex while I sat al nunned up through Algebra I, right behind Beautiful Jack Owens and never once even sneak-touched the back of his floppy blond hair. I put my fingers in my ears and sang, “Lar lar lar!” super loud until she hol ered, “Okay, Mosey! I get it. But we have to talk sometime.”

  About what? How the queen of Mosey-Keep-Your-Pants-On hadn’t managed it? About how sex was a battlefield and anyone who decided to go on the battlefield could get shot? Especial y Slocumbs, apparently. Big didn’t know I wasn’t one.

  I final y told her I needed her to crawl down out of my butt for five seconds, give me a minute to breathe. She agreed, but she wanted to know when we could talk. I instantly said, “Tuesday night.” Of course, I already had plans with Roger to skip school and head for Montgomery on Tuesday morning, so either I wouldn’t make the appointment or we’d have hel a more to talk about.

  By the time we took our exit off I-65, Roger was vibrating like that weird fork that Mr. Bel bings at assembly before the chorus dorks out on a madrigal. MapQuest said the Fox Street address was less than two miles away. I knew we weren’t in a good place the second I saw the greasy-looking Krispy Kreme with the fritzed-out neon sign flashing H T D NUTS NO .

  “That’s my new deejay name,” Roger said, pointing. “Hot D Nuts No.”

  “There’s no o in the ‘hot,’” I said, and my voice sounded smal and shaky.

  Roger shot me a glance and said, al bucking-up like and hearty, “Wel , I’m adding it. ‘H T D Nuts No’ sounds like VD medication.”

  I didn’t answer. My stomach was starting to feel al puffy and sour, like a pil ow stuffed ful of diseased feathers. The neighborhood only got worse.

  We passed a liquor store and TitleMax, which Big cal ed ThiefleMax, then a pawnshop with heavy-duty jail bars over a window ful of guns and car-stereo parts. A check-cashing place shared a dirty building with something cal ed the Gas-N-Gro, which told me we were in a place where people were too crimey to get a checking account and too stupid to know that “Gro” was not a true abbreviation for “groceries.” Not good.

  There was a mean-eyed drunk guy swaying on the curb. Roger ogled him the way Yel owstone tourists look at bears, so fascinated that he was ready to throw marshmal ows and bologna with no idea he would for sure get his arm pul ed off and chewed. He said, “If some Duckins lived in the city, this would be the part of the city they lived in.”

  I looked at the MapQuest directions he had printed and said, “Take a right at the Gas-N-Gro.” As we swung around the store, I added, “Whoever Liza stole me from, they probably buy their Twinkies and forties there.”

  “To eat together?” Roger said, aghast but total y missing the point.

  This street was ful of trashed, squatty houses, and the next street was Fox, which meant Fox was a real street. I was seeing it. Then I was sitting in a car that was driving down it. There would be a real house with the number 91 on it, and inside, halfcocked57 was listening to music or cooking eggs, maybe petting the cat. I couldn’t make halfcocked57 be my bio mom or dad or, best of al , be somehow in a magic lucky way no relation of mine at al . The person in the house was already who they were, real and separate from me, and I couldn’t change it. Al I got to do was decide if I wanted to see or not.

  I was almost out of time to decide, and the air thicked up into Jel -O. It felt to me like the Volvo had to shove and rev through it. I was trying to say something, but it took a long time.

  What I said was, “Never mind.”

  Roger stopped the car. I blinked. I couldn’t believe he stopped so instantly, like it was that easy. Except not, because there was a rusty mailbox right by my window. It had a nine on it and the shiny shape of a one, like the metal had been protected but recently the one had fal en off. He’d stopped because we were already here.

  The mailbox belonged to a square, pink bungalow made of rotty siding. The paint was peeling away al over, and the house was gray underneath.

  The yard was part overgrown and part dead. It was no different from any other rotty, sag-roofed house on the street. Maybe a little worse off, but not by much. There was a dead azalea and another mostly dead one framing the porch steps, the dead one’s naked branches stretching toward the railing like long, brown, knobby fingers.

  I grabbed my backpack before I got out of the car, carrying it by one strap, like a purse. I had taken al my books out and left them in my locker yesterday, but the pack didn’t feel light. The gun’s box hung low in it, making it feel al weighty and serious.

  Roger got out, too, and came up even with me, jingling his keys. For first time since he’d sliced my freakin’ life open with Occam’s razor, he looked uncertain. It was past eleven in the morning, but the whole narrow street was dead, as if the people who lived here were nocturnal or had al been body-snatched away.

  “Come on,” I said. Me, not him. Part because I was too close now to stop and part because Roger was in his crisp school uniform. I’d put on this flowered skirt and my nicest peach T-shirt. I felt too colory and shining, like we looked as eatable as Hansel and Gretel on a street ful of fal ing-down candy houses.

  I hurried us up to the porch. The steps sagged and squeaked under my feet. I put my hand on the railing, but it wobbled. I let go and went up al five steps with no help, one leg after another.

  I shot Roger’s jingle-jangling keys a glance and said, “You are on my last nerve with that.”

  He gave me a sickly, almost green-faced grin and put them in his pocket.

  We stood in front of the door with our feet together, side by side like we were lining up for preassembly at Cal. It was a plain wooden door, no screen. No peephole. Someone had painted it charcoal gray a mil ion years ago. I started to shake my head, and Roger put a thumb out and ground it into the doorbel . I heard his thumb clicketing against the button, but it didn’t bong inside.

  “It’s broken,” he said, and then stood there like that was his whole big plan al along, to push a doorbel , and now that it hadn’t worked out, he was flat stumped.

  I made a hmf noise at him and pushed it myself. The button rattled in the socket, feeling like whatever it used to press had fal en away into the space between the wal s. I reached out with one hand to knock, soft, and the door swung away from me a couple of inches. My eyes widened. I looked at Roger, and he was looking back at me. It wasn’t latched, even, much less locked.

  Roger got a little less green, and he cocked his head sideways, interested. He put both hands on the door and pushed harder. It swung wide, making a scraw ing noise like a sleepy crow. We froze.

  Nothing happened. No one came.

  We were looking into a den with a ratty sofa running along the back wal . A squatty seventies-style coffee table sat in front of the sofa, every bit of it covered with dirty plates and coffee mugs and fast-food bags and a bong and junk mail stacked three deep. Outside, it was this gorgeous, sunny day, but it was like the blue sky and the crispy clean air couldn’t cross the threshold. A dim slice of sunlight made an arc on the carpet through the open door, but it looked faded and it didn’t seem to have any, like, conviction.

  “Hel o,” I said. I meant to cal it, but it came out scratchy and soft. I found my hand reaching for Roger’s hand, and he took it, and we held on tight with clammy sweat springing up between our palms. I stepped gingerly inside, towing him with me onto that slice of fadey sunlight.

  “Hel o?” I tried again. Stil soft. We stepped farther into the dark of the house. I could see what looked like a kitchen through a doorway on one side and a hal way on my right.

  We took two or three more steps in, angling toward the hal way.

  That was when we heard that sleepy-crow sound again, but louder and harsher, like the crow had woken up pissed. We whirled as the door banged shut behind us. I heard a short, high scre
am, almost a bark. I wasn’t sure if it was Roger or me that made it. We’d lost each other’s hands.

  A man was sitting in this gutted recliner. It pressed against the wal next to the door, and we had walked in right past him. He was huge. He fil ed up the chair and then some. He’d put one saucepan hand on the door and banged it shut, and now he sat with his hand stil on it, like he was holding it closed.

  He smiled at us, a big smile, but not nice. His teeth looked like weird gray moss, growing in spongy squares out of his red gums. He had Riff Raff hair, bald on top and then long side scrabbles.

  “Hey, kittens,” he said.

  “It was open!” I said, and it came out so high and squeaky I sounded like a cartoon mouse. I tried to pul it down as I said, “I’m looking for someone?”

  “I know what you looking for, sugar,” he said. He said it al oiled, like fake nice. His eyes shone and gleamed in a way that was so, so, so not right. He stood up, and he was even huger than I thought. His chest was like a slab, and his arms looked thick and meaty. I backed up one step, not able to help it, and Roger did, too. He said to Roger, “Let’s see the green.”

  “What?” Roger said.

  Then the guy’s face clicked over to anger. It happened so fast. “Cash, asshole,” he said. “I look like I take fuckin’ Visa?”

  Roger blinked, and when he spoke, it was al stutter and not like him, and that scared me more than anything. “No, we were…um, l-looking for a person? From an e-mail address. Halfcocked57. We came to see—”

  In two big strides, the guy’s long legs ate up every bit of good space that had been between us. He stood over us, al loomy and huge, and I was scared most by that shine in his eyes, like that was al the soul he had shining on the surface there, and under his skin it was al worms and black holes. He flicked the logo on Roger’s shirt, and Roger flinched.

  “Dumb-ass little slumming richy kids, can even you be stupid enough to not bring cash?”

  Roger said, “We can go get some. I have my mom’s bank card.” His voice was high, too, like he’d sucked helium, but so not funny.

  That made the guy chuckle, low and mean.

  “Your mom’s bank card,” he repeated, like it had been a punch line in a joke he wanted to remember.

  Then he turned those shiny, weird eyes on me. I’d seen kids stoned at school before, but this wasn’t that. I hadn’t ever seen a person look like this in the eyes. Now, with his face pointed at me, I saw a bunch of scab-spackled sore spots on his face, like he’d picked himself open. He was looking at me, but he was talking to Roger stil , I could tel .

  “Yeah, buddy, you run on out to the AT-fuckin’-M. I’l keep your little friend here company.”

  He smiled at me, and the dim light of the lamp behind me gleamed off his weird gray teeth. I took a step back. He crowded in after, and I took another step and found myself squashed in between the floor lamp and the arm of the sofa, my back against the wal . Al at once I wanted the gun so bad. I couldn’t understand why I had left it inside a box inside a pouch in a zipped-closed backpack. I wanted it free, in my hand, and then I remembered I had never even looked to see if it was loaded. I didn’t know how to check, even.

  The big guy’s hand came at me, and I flinched, but al he did was give the side of my hair a tug, almost friendly, like my hair was a horse’s mane.

  His hand smel ed like that after-match smel . My breath caught.

  I knocked his arm away and said, “Stop it.”

  His shiny eyes stayed on me, but he was stil talking to Roger. “She’s feisty, huh? You like ’em al sassy, yeah?”

  “Stop it,” Roger said, like an echo.

  The gun hung like a huge weight in my backpack. It would take so long to get to it. I should trick him, say I had money in my pack in my pouch in my cash box. But his hand was coming up again, reaching toward me, that burned-match smel , and I couldn’t stand to have it on me. I swung the backpack at him, using the gun’s weight in the bottom, swung as hard as I could.

  He caught it in one massive hand, and he grinned. He ripped the whole bag away from me and tossed it behind him, toward Roger, grinning at me with a weird, shiny confidence, not scared of anything. He stepped closer, and now I couldn’t even see Roger, but I hoped to God he knew to get the gun out, now. The big man blocked out everything.

  I thought, This is drugs. This is what Liza was like. This is what I am not supposed to do or be.

  Part of me was al calm and stepping away out of myself, noticing how al the obvious, boring things Big and Liza said to me a thousand times were so much truer and realer than I ever thought. Drugs were bad. I shouldn’t go to dark places al alone with boys. I wanted to hol er that I had learned al these super-valuable lessons now, and so please someone needed to come and get me and say, See, Mosey? Now you know it is all all so very true, and let’s go home.

  But no one came, and his big hand was coming at me again.

  I ducked under his arm, and I ran. It was the wrong way, toward the hal instead of the front door, but anywhere away from him was good. I heard Roger yel ing, “Stop it, stop it!” but I didn’t know where Roger was.

  I didn’t even make it out of the den. The guy’s long ape arm snagged me and picked me right up off the ground, so my arms were pinned. I kicked and flailed my feet at the air. I could hear myself screaming and Roger screaming, too, behind us. The guy put his other hand over my mouth and nose to stop me, and I couldn’t hardly breathe, and I was too scared of him to bite him.

  Roger hol ered words then. “I wil cal the cops!”

  The guy laughed. He didn’t even turn around, just started walking toward the hal with me kicking helpless at the air.

  “And I wil snap your fuckin’ neck. Shut up and be glad I’l take a piece of this instead of cash.”

  My whole body started jackknifing in his arms like a fish, trying to get away from him. I thought I might be peeing, and I almost laughed because it seemed not real, except his crazy, shiny eyes had already told me he would rape me anyway, pee or no, and I could feel what I thought might be his dick, hard and pressed against my butt. I whipped my whole body with al my strength, fighting so hard, but he held me like al my mightiness was nothing. I was too breathless now to scream, and he shifted his hand from off my mouth, moved it down to rumple at my boob.

  He cal ed to Roger, real casual over his shoulder as he walked away with me, “She ain’t got tits for squat,” like he was complaining. Like Roger could have brought him something better.

  I kicked backward, hard, trying for his shin, but I got nothing, and this was real y happening, and I couldn’t stop it.

  Then I heard Roger say, “You put her down, or I am going to shoot you. I am going to shoot you a lot in your back.”

  That made him stop. He stil had his hand on my boob, like he forgot it was there, though it was burning me like acid eating through my clothes.

  He turned around, so I was a shield hanging between him and the gun. The SIG twitched and wobbled in Roger’s hands, and I was staring into the weaving black hole at the front of it. I got stil then, too.

  There was an endless pause. I looked down that black hole, and everything in me and the room and the world went deadly quiet. Then the guy threw me. He tossed me toward Roger like I was weightless paper. I landed on my hands and knees, and I scrambled away from him, wedging myself against the wal by the lamp again, pressed up against the sofa’s side. He walked slow to Roger, and I could see his crazy drug face and it was fearless. Roger’s hands had gone white on the gun, he was squeezing so hard, and nothing happened and nothing happened. Then the guy reached him, and he ripped the SIG out of Roger’s hands and tossed it away, back behind him near the hal way. He was between both of us and it.

  “Safety, numbnuts,” he said to Roger, and grinned this ugly grin. “Oh, how I love me some dumb-ass rich kids.”

  His big hand swung out hard, and it caught Roger in the face. Roger tumped over backward. I found my voice and started screaming for real
. I grabbed the first thing I found in my hand, and it was the floor lamp. I picked it up like a bat, and I ran at him swinging it and screaming and screaming. I hit him with it twice before he caught it and wrenched at it so hard he tore me off my feet. I went down stil screaming, and I saw something zinging through the air past me. Roger had pul ed himself up on the coffee table and was throwing the plates. The guy ducked, and the first plate shattered into the wal like a bomb going off. The second thunked into the guy’s arm with a meat-slapped sound. Roger was screaming, too, words, but I couldn’t understand them. The guy laughed this awful raging laugh and wading toward me through the glasses that Roger was throwing now, batting them away. I tried to crawl backward away, but he dropped down to al fours and grabbed my ankle and pul ed me across the floor toward him.

  That was when the world blew up. It exploded into this most loudest bang that rang the air and kept on ringing after. It was a noise like the end of the world, and we al just stopped.

  It was the SIG.

  A woman had come up the hal way in al the loudness and gotten the SIG and pointed it up and made it shiver the world with its huge, booming voice.

  No one moved, except the woman. She scrubbed at her eyes with her free hand, al sleepy, and plaster came sifting down from the ceiling in a powdery hail where she’d shot it.

  “Mother fuck, Janel e,” the guy said, letting go of my ankle and pushing himself into a squat. My heart had stuttered, and every hair I had was standing straight up, but the guy, he rose to his feet and turned to her, like, exasperated.

  She took her hand down away from her face, and then he didn’t matter anymore. I could only look at her. I heard Roger, behind me, breathe the words “Holy shit,” and I knew he was looking at her, too.

  She was me. She was me if I was old and awful and a monster. Her thin hair was my color hair, her scabbed-up nose was my shape nose. She wore my own wide mouth pul ed down into my exact mad frown. She was a gray skin sack stretched too tight over my very own shape of bones.