Little Miss Strange

by Joanna Rose

  He was tanned dark. His long hair was blond almost to white, and so were his eyebrows.

  “So, some excitement,” he said.

  “You mean Elle?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think she really fucked up this time.”

  “How do you know?” I said. “What do you mean?”

  “Hanging out at the café,” he said. “You can learn a lot if you hang out and just act like a goofy kid who isn’t listening.”

  “Like a creepy little weasel?” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  He sat down on the applebox table and started to pick carefully at a scab on his knee.

  “That’s gross,” I said. “Go do that somewhere else. What did you hear them say?”

  “Well, there’s lots of people looking for her this time,” he said. “Her dad was dealing, and I don’t think it was marijuana either. ’Cause there’s guys in suits involved.”

  “What’s that mean, ‘guys in suits’?” I said.

  “Well, actually that’s just a saying, ‘guys in suits,’” he said. “The one guy was wearing a pretty nice suede jacket, though.”

  “So what’s that supposed to mean,” I said.

  “It means coke,” he said.

  “Why does it mean coke?” I said.

  “It means a lot of dollars,” he said.

  “A fucking mess,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Got any marijuana?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well,” he said. “Ta-dum.”

  He held up a wrapped up piece of tinfoil.

  “What did you do?” I said. “Rip off your mom?”

  He looked like I hurt his feelings.

  “I don’t rip off my mom,” he said. “I just borrow it. I always put some back in her stash when I get some of my own.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  “In fact,” he said. “Sometimes, when she doesn’t have any, I plant some in her stash spots where she’ll find it and think she forgot about it.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Nope, not kidding,” I said. “She has stashes all over the place, so I know she can’t remember them all. Plus people that smoke marijuana forget things a lot.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  “Hey, I’m a nice guy,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “For a creepy little weasel.”

  Nancy called up the stairs that they were going to Celestial Tea Palace.

  “I’ll meet you there in a while,” JFK yelled back.

  The doors downstairs opened and shut and opened and shut and then everybody was gone and the house was quiet, just me and JFK. He unwrapped the tinfoil and he pinched some marijuana into the pipe. I took it and went over by the window, and sat on the open windowsill under the boarded-up top half. A light was on in Lady Jane’s, a square of light on the skinny sidewalk.

  JFK said, “So, you want to walk over to the café with me?”

  “No,” I said, handing the pipe out to him.

  “Come on,” he said. “I don’t want to walk over there by myself.”

  “Why not?” I said. “Scared?”

  “High,” he said.

  He smoked on the pipe and blew the smoke out the window.

  “Yeah, well, me too,” I said. “And I like being home by myself when I’m high.”

  “Walk over there with me and I’ll give you some of this bud to keep for when you get back,” he said.

  “Oh, man,” I said. “I don’t feel like it.”

  “Come on,” he said. “Wear that goofy hat.”

  GARAGE DOORS next to the sidewalk, and big places with big closed-up doors. Boarded-up walls with spray paint FUCK YOU and KILL FOR JESUS and FOR SALE/FOR LEASE. A weedy empty place behind a tall wire fence, all grown high with Queen Anne’s lace, and we walked fast, not talking, crunching on broken-out streetlight glass. It was apartments again after Nineteenth Avenue, small buildings, front doors open to hallways and some lightbulbs in there. There were some streetlights. Then Celestial Tea Palace, all colors from the painted sign and lights inside and people in the windows and we walked faster to the open door.

  “Powwow,” JFK said.

  I said, “Huh?”

  “Over in the corner,” he said. “Be mellow.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Don’t stare,” he said.

  Jimmy Henry leaned against the wall by the round corner table. His arms were crossed over his front, and he stared down at his feet. Margo and Cassandra Wiggins were in the chairs there, along the wall, and Elle’s daddy sat back in a chair, tipping it back on its two back legs.

  Nancy came up from behind us. She kissed JFK on his cheek. He was taller then Nancy. I was taller than Nancy.

  “Can I have a chocolate shake?” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “You want it with chocolate ice cream?”

  “Yes, please,” he said. “Sarajean wants one too.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “Yes, you do,” he said, looking at me for a quick look.

  “Yes, she does,” he said back to Nancy.

  Nancy went back behind the counter.

  “Why do I want a chocolate shake?” I said.

  JFK moved down the row of seats along the counter.

  “The shake machine is down here,” he said.

  Toward the round table in the corner.

  He said, “The chocolate ice cream is just past the shake machine.”

  He went to an empty seat, three empty seats in a row, toward the end of the counter, not all the way to the end. There were empty seats at the very end.

  “What about those seats?” I said, talking into the back of his shoulder, talking down low.

  “Not cool,” he said. “Too obvious. You would not make a successful espionage agent.”

  Nancy was at the shake machine.

  “I’m making these kids some shakes,” she said to the lady working back there, the other waitress. She got busy, scooping out chocolate ice cream from the freezer. JFK put his finger to his lips and tipped his head toward the round table.

  “That truck won’t make it across the desert again,” Jimmy Henry was saying.

  Margo was sniffing and all teary.

  Cassandra Wiggins said, “What about Sasha’s car? Will that make it?”

  “Probably have to,” Elle’s daddy said. “Might have to borrow the keys though. She says her and the kid are leaving for Ohio next week.”

  Cassandra Wiggins said, “She wouldn’t call the pigs about her car getting ripped off, would she?”

  “I doubt it,” he said.

  The shake machine turned on a high buzzy whine.

  “Last time Elle took off,” I said, leaning closer to JFK, talking from under my hat. “They drove Blackbird to go get her. She got busted shoplifting, and Margo and Cassandra Wiggins had to go get her out of Juvie.”

  The shake machine whined on and on, high and low and whining. I sneaked a look back to the round table. Cassandra Wiggins was talking. She tapped her pointer finger on the table, talking to Elle’s daddy. Margo sat all soft and slumped looking into her tea.

  Then Lady Jane got there. She had Queen Anne’s lace in a glass of water. She set the glass on the table in front of Margo, and Margo looked up, pink face all teary. Cassandra Wiggins got up, standing up straight, tall, and she hugged Lady Jane, taller and straighter than Lady Jane, short dark hair, long blond soft hair, for a second. Then Cassandra Wiggins went back to the phone hanging on the wall by the end of the counter.

  The shake machine went quiet. Nancy took the metal cup of chocolate shake and she poured the shake into two glasses.

  “Want anything else?” she said.

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “Cinnamon toast,” JFK said.

  He kicked my leg under the counter.

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  I kicked him back.

  “Okay,” Nancy said.
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  She went back through the doors into the kitchen.

  “Cinnamon toast?” I said.

  “It’s not on the menu,” JFK said. “She has to go make the cinnamon sugar stuff, and then come out and make the toast. It takes her forever.”

  Cassandra Wiggins hung up the phone. She took a paper napkin out of the holder on the counter, and she took a short pencil from her T-shirt pocket, and she wrote down the number from the phone. Then she went back to the round table, and she stood there, her cowboy boot feet wide apart, her hands in her back pockets.

  “Don’t look,” JFK whispered. “Just listen.”

  I couldn’t hear Cassandra Wiggins talking. I heard her leave. Cowboy boots going behind us, and Margo with her, Margo not making any noise at all.

  “Cassandra Wiggins hates Lalena’s dad,” JFK said. “And he says she needs, well. He hates her too. I think.”

  Elle’s daddy. Dragon lady.

  “I hope they never find her,” I said.

  DARK LOW sky and wet fog made everything dark wet and quiet. Jimmy Henry’s alarm clock rang in his room, and then his belt buckle hit the floor. His bare feet slapped into the kitchen. He knocked on my door.

  Who’s in there sleeping.

  Little Miss Strange.

  “First day of school,” he said.

  The white fog, lying down still and heavy below my bedroom window, the pink glow of it in the parking lot of the Safeway store getting lighter and thinner since earlier, six o’clock maybe, since I had been leaning at the bedroom window.

  I opened the door.

  “You’re up,” he said. “All dressed.”

  “So are you,” I said.

  He said, “Want some toast?”

  “No,” I said. “No thanks.”

  “Foggy,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He filled the coffee pot up with water and set it on the stove. I went back to the window of my room and pulled the window shut, the sounds of coffee behind me in the kitchen. The fog clouded the inside of the window, and I drew a ticktacktoe game, XOXOX, and I lost. I wiped the ticktacktoe game away and the fog slowly clouded the window again. The warm smell of toast.

  Jimmy Henry was buttering two pieces of toast when I went back out there.

  “Real butter,” he said, “Not margarine.”

  The stick of butter was cold, on a cold blue plate right out of the refrigerator. Jimmy Henry tore holes in the toast trying to spread the hard cold butter.

  “Look,” I said.

  I took another knife out of the drawer, and I scraped along the top of the stick of butter. Thin yellow curls peeled up.

  “Like that,” I said, dropping the curls of butter onto the toast.

  “Pretty smart,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s me, pretty smart.”

  “Here, take this one,” he said.

  He gave me the piece of toast that didn’t have butter holes. I leaned against the table, eating, looking at my toast between bites. Jimmy Henry put two more pieces of bread in the toaster, humming a little bit of a song, and wrapping the bread wrapper back up with a little twist of his fingers.

  “So,” he said. “What classes do you have?”

  His voice was pretty awake. The coffee wasn’t even perked.

  I said, “Spanish. English. Algebra. Civics, which is the eighth-grade name for social studies.”

  “Algebra, huh?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And something else. That’s only four.”

  He said, “Your hair looks nice. Pretty short huh?”

  I had trimmed it myself, snipping away at the ends. I closed my eyes to cut the back. Elle closing her eyes to reach around in her shoulder strap purse. It was a short choppy shag haircut, uneven didn’t matter.

  The other toasts popped up, and Jimmy Henry tried to butter them. He didn’t tear holes in the toast. He pretty much dented up the butter. I took the other piece of toast when he handed it to me and I went back in my room. Jimmy Henry messed around with the coffee pot, and the coffee pot gurgled and perked, taking up the quiet space made by me leaving the kitchen.

  Jimmy Henry was singing the song now. He knew all the words.

  It was too early to leave for school, but when Jimmy Henry went into the bathroom, I went out the front door, and when I got outside to the sidewalk I walked away fast, into the thin white fog, down Ogden Street toward Sixth Avenue. I was the only person out there, the only person out in the fog. Fog in Denver was weird, and I walked along the sidewalk like a secret.

  Sixth Avenue was busy, the little grocery store was lit up. A sign on the door said OPEN. A sign in the window said COFFEE TO GO. The cement floor was sticky, and there were flies stuck to a paper strip hanging from the ceiling over the counter. The old lady behind the counter had an apron that was so clean it looked silly, pulled white and tight across her big stomach. She had little glasses on a big nose.

  When she gave me my coffee, she said, “There ya go, kid. Quarter.”

  “Got any milk?” I said. “Got any sugar?”

  She wagged her hand at a corner of the counter, and there were some napkins piled up, and a box of sugar, and a thing of powder creamer. I made the coffee thick and sweet and white.

  I said, “Thanks.”

  She said, “Yeah.”

  She sat back down on a chair back there, groaning, sitting hard, and she opened up a Rocky Mountain News.

  “Can I get a pack of Kools?” I said.

  “Nope,” she said. “Ya not old enough.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay. ’Bye.”

  The coffee tasted mostly like the cup. The gray of day was brighter, and the fog was fading away. Fog hung at the corner, and when I got to the corner, the fog had moved back to the door of the grocery store, and up to the other corner. Fading away.

  The tall windows of Mountain View Junior High were lit up, square and yellow, and the building sat in the middle of an empty parking lot. Some cars were parked in the teachers’ lot.

  My ring. In my inside jacket pocket. I set my coffee on a newspaper box, and I put the ring on my finger, cold and silver, and I folded the sleeves of my green corduroy jacket up to the elbows. The cuffs were getting short and ragged. The maroon lining was shredded inside the sleeves. My green corduroy jacket. Tears stung at my eyes, stinging there, and then fading back into my brain, wherever tears went.

  FIRST ASSEMBLY was in the gym. Mr. Withers made his same speech about becoming good Americans, and having goals and dreams, and being equal, and not doing drugs or else you get kicked out for good. He introduced Miss Purcell and Mr. Sherett again.

  Seventh-grade kids watched. The eighth-grade kids and the ninth-grade kids didn’t watch so much. I sat near a bunch of eighth-grade girls who kept squirting perfume on each other. They wore skirts and blouses and nylons, all of them.

  I looked for red hair. I looked for JFK.

  The marching band came in behind Mr. Withers and marched around the gym behind him, all in blue and white marching band uniforms, playing marching band music so loud that the seats of the bleachers shook. Kids started stomping and yelling, except the Mexican kids, and then the football team, every boy wearing a white shirt and a tie, went out there by Mr. Withers, and the cheerleaders in their pleated cheerleader skirts and blue underpants.

  The bleachers shook. I burped powder creamer up into the back of my throat. I held onto the wooden edge of the bleacher and looked down through all the kids in front of me, rows of kids between me and the hallway door to the hallway where the bathroom was. My throat filled up, and I covered my mouth with my sleeve and tried to swallow back down and my eyes got all watery.

  Then I shivered, from my butt all the way to the back of my head, and then I was okay. There was a nasty burning at the back of my throat and in my nose. I wiped my mouth with my sleeve. The kids around me were standing and clapping and cheering and squirting perfume, and the football players were running in a wide circle around Mr. With
ers. He stood there at the microphone with both his arms raised for victory, and the cheerleaders bounced onto each other’s shoulders until they made a triangle of blue and white little skirts right behind him.

  When the football team stopped running and Mr. Withers put his arms back down, the gym got quiet right away, and the triangle of cheerleaders stayed balanced up three cheerleaders high. Mr. Withers talked some more. Little gobs of puke smeared the inside of my sleeve, and I folded my arms across my chest, across the sharp pukey smell all mixed in with the taste of perfume.

  Mr. Withers said, “Go forth and learn.”

  THE SECOND morning of school was already warm and blue when I left. Jimmy Henry’s door stayed shut. I didn’t wear my jacket, and partway to Sixth Avenue I remembered my ring, wishing for it, and wishing for wet white fog.

  My new English teacher was Mrs. Shore. She was a short old lady with thick tie-up shoes. She assigned us to read Heart of Darkness, writing Heart of Darkness on the chalkboard with short quick letters, turning around and slapping chalk off her hands and staring at us in our seats.

  By the end of the day I still didn’t know who my locker partner was. Maybe I would get a locker to myself. Or Elle would come back and she could be my locker partner. Hand, Henry, alphabetical.

  I got home and the front door was open wide, the door at the top of the stairs wide open too. I went up the stairs, tired, homework books, and Lady Jane was sitting on the arm of the couch, her face all in her hands.

  I said, “What the fuck.”

  Lady Jane jumped up.

  “Oh, God,” she said.

  The records from the shelf were all over the floor, and the pillows from the couch were on the floor, and the applebox table was on its side, everything was on the floor. The kitchen drawers were pulled out and stuff was on the floor in there, spoons and forks, the dishtowels from the second drawer, the stuff from the third drawer. Jimmy Henry’s bedroom door was open and the drawers were pulled out of his dresser, his clothes were pulled out of his dresser, his green army bag lying in the middle of his bed zipped open.

  Lady Jane said, “Oh, God.”

  “What happened?” I said. “Where is he?”

  “They took him away,” she said, choking with crying. “Busted.”

  “Busted?” I said. “For what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It was undercover cops.”