Pretty Bad Things

by C. J. Skuse

  The handle was black, the barrel was silver, and I couldn’t resist taking it out, molding my fingers around it. Eclipse Target II, the barrel read. I’d seen one in a movie, but it didn’t look as beautiful as this one. This one shone. I touched it, held it against my cheek.

  I’d heard her, the Skankmother, talking about getting a gun once when her circle of poolside bitches had come around for afternoon gin and sympathy. How the crime wave was getting worse, how she didn’t feel safe walking in LA. How it was her right as an American to “bear arms and defend herself.”

  I didn’t think twice. I tucked it in my skirt at the back and pulled my T-shirt down over it. Done. The cold metal against my skin made me shiver momentarily, but then it was warm and it stayed put against me as though it had always been there.

  I closed the drawer and took the snow globe from the bed, holding it up to the window. The diamonds twinkled around the base.

  I felt a presence behind me. Like a crack in the window letting in a chill.

  “I see you’re home, then,” came the greeting. I turned. There she was, a cougar on two legs, almond-eyed. Expressionless. She’d had a boob job since I last saw her, and yet more Botox shoved in her face. The outer corners of her eyes made her look like someone was working her with strings from behind. Her silk robe was open to reveal part of her white bikini underneath.

  “My my, Grandmother. What big tits you’ve got,” I smirked.

  She gave me the thinnest, coldest smile and closed the door behind her. “I got the phone call from your principal. What was it this time? Drugs, sex, or violence?”

  “What can I say? I learned from the best.”

  I held the snow globe tight and headed for the door. She barred the way.

  “Move!” I hollered. She just looked at me, clearly trying to frown, but the Botox wouldn’t let her. She looked at the snow globe, then back at me. Then at her empty shelves.

  “Oh, is that the game we’re playing? You were stealing my car and my things and then running away, were you? Is that how I raised you, Jane?”

  “Wrong, wrong, and wrong,” I told her, brandishing the snow globe in my fist like I was about to smash her over the head with it. “Number one, that’s our car. You bought it just after we got you on Montel, remember? Number two, these are our things. And three, you never raised me or Beau. You just paid somebody ELSE to.”

  She sighed. “Is it any wonder? Your own mother couldn’t bear to look at you. Your father went to jail to get away from you.”

  I moved in close to her and grabbed the door handle. The door opened, but she slammed it shut again. “You disgust everybody,” she spat.

  She always played the “absent parent” card in shit-uations like these. I’d never exactly gotten used to it, but we argued so often that I’d come to expect it.

  “I’m disgusting?” I laughed. “At least I’m not some chronic slut who fucks her handymen.” Come to think of it, actually I was. But I wasn’t telling her that.

  “Vile. My ears are not garbage cans, Jane.”

  “No, but your ass is. Get outta my way.”

  “No, you will damn well stay here and face up to what you’ve done.”

  “You think I’m gonna stay here for all eternity? You can’t lock me up like a fuckin’ prisoner. I’m not Beau.”

  She smiled, hands on her hips. “Where will you go, hmm? You don’t have any other family, do you? You’re sixteen. Face it. I’m all you’ve got.”

  “No, you’re not. We’re going to Dad’s. We found his letters. Connie kept—”

  “Dad’s?” she repeated. She stared at me, wide-eyed like some weird bird. “Dad’s what? Dad’s flophouse? Dad’s homeless shelter? They don’t send ex-offenders straight to luxury mansions, you know, honey.”

  “Whatever. It’ll be a palace compared to this shithole. Get outta my way.”

  “He hasn’t even called you,” she cackled. “What’s wrong with this picture, Jane? Yeah, he wrote, but that was in jail. He had nothing else to do.”

  I gripped the snow globe so tight the diamonds pressed into my palm; I thought my fingers were gonna crush right through the glass. Don’t cry, goddammit, I thought. Fuckin’ pussy. Think of Dad.

  Her words were like knives, but I just swallowed them down. “He came to see us as soon as he was paroled. You drove him away.”

  “And he never came back. The End. When he knew he couldn’t get his little fingers on your money, he skedaddled out of here faster than you can say gold digger.”

  “Liar,” I said, going for the door handle again. Her face tensed and she slammed herself back against the door. We were so close I could feel her hot breath on my face. It stank like kerosene.

  “You’re in for a big disappointment if you think he’s going to scoop you up in his arms like he used to. You’re not his cutesy-wootsy babe in the woods anymore.”

  “Move your ass—”

  “Think about it.” She grinned, her eyes wide and black. “He didn’t care about you enough to stay out of prison. And that’s when you were children. Why would he give a damn about you now? Some monstrous little teenage … maniac?”

  “Because he loves us. Remember love? It’s in the dictionary, next to lush.”

  She pressed herself harder against the door, all dramatic like a freakin’ drag queen.

  “All right, you can go. I’ll allow you to go. But you’re not taking your brother with you. You can go, Jane, but he stays. And that“—she said, clasping the top of the snow globe—“is mine.”

  I snatched it back. “My fucking name is PAISLEY.” I turned to the window and pitched the snow globe, sending it smashing through the glass. There was a pause and a tinkling of glass, then it boomfed on the driveway below.

  I turned back to her. She drew a full breath and glared, the way vampires always look at their victims right before they suck the shit out of their necks. She grabbed hold of my shoulders and shoved me backward against her closet. I grabbed her chin and forced it upward, then pushed her back onto the bed and bolted for the door, but she caught my foot with her freezing hands and held on.

  “Get off me. Get the fuck off me!” I yelled, kicking, hoping to catch her face with my boot. She let go, only to tackle me to the floor and grab my head at the sides, slamming it down into the carpet. I wrenched away from her and stumbled to my feet. She got up, helped by the bed, her hair even more of a mess and one sleeve of her silk robe torn. I laughed, catching my breath before she lunged at me one final time and with one supreme push shoved me backward into her bathroom. She grabbed the door handle and pulled it shut.

  I could hear her on the other side, propping a chair under the handle, panting.

  “I’ve had it with you!” she shouted, all breathless and squeaky. “I don’t know what to do with you. Now you stay in there until you damn well cool off!”

  I lay half-slumped and all crazy-breathing against the tiled wall under the towel rack. I remember Mom saying the exact same thing the time she locked me and Beau in the basement. Now you stay in there until you damn well cool off! She couldn’t handle us, either. The only light in Skank’s bathroom came from the candles burning around the full bathtub. My mouth stung and throbbed like it had a little heartbeat. I touched my bottom lip. Blood. I yanked down some toilet paper from the roll to hold against it as I stood up and looked in the mirror. A cut. My right cheek was cut, too. She had caught me with one of her diamond rings.

  “It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s nothing,” I whispered, stamping my foot on the tile floor, my whole face throbbing. “Stop-it-stop-it-stop-it-stop-it.” I dampened the tissue under the faucet. My hand was shaking. I turned off the water and dropped the soggy wad in the basin. I sucked my lip and checked the mirrored cabinet above the sink again. I was gonna have a cool bruise. I could always guarantee a good scrap with old Skank. Most grandmothers taught their granddaughters to bake or sew buttons. Mine taught me how to fistfight. The girls at school were so weak. They always went for the
hair or clothes. I never got hit by them like I did with her.

  The cabinet was ajar. I opened it. I saw all the little pill bottles lined up on the shelf. Oxycodone. Vicodin. Fluoxetine. Hydrocodone. Tylenol. Ativan.

  Ativan. I remembered one of the doctors overdosing on it on ER. Anxiety problems. I pocketed it.

  I tried the door handle. Jammed solid. I sniffed, wiping my nose with my bare arm, expecting a trail of snot but seeing red. I wiped it on one of her pristine white bath towels and began kicking at the door, lightly at first, and then fuck-it fast. Faster and faster and harder and harder, until it started to weaken, buckling and chipping at the latch. Then it swung right out before me, knocking the chair into the center of the the empty room. Skank was gone.

  I took two of the lit candles from around the tub and held them up to the Japanese silk drapes from Fukuoka.

  “Fuk-u, Grandmother,” I laughed. Damn right I’m a maniac.

  Conducting my own little orchestra of fire up both drapes, I swung the candles back and forth, watching the orange flames flick higher up the fabric, smelling the burning silk, the heat fanning my sweaty face. Ecstasy prickled through my body, making my hairs stand on end.

  “Oh, you need locking up, Paisley Argent,” I said, throwing the candles onto the bed and striding across the room, slamming the door behind me.

  There was no sign of the Skank. Outside, the Fiero was running. All our stuff was in the car, but Beau was nowhere near it.

  “Fuck,” I said, reaching through the driver’s window to turn the engine off. As I looked back at the house, I saw Beau coming out, the gardener right behind him, his huge ham forearm clamped around my brother’s neck.

  “You must be Paisley,” the brute said.

  “And you must be Matt,” I replied.

  I looked up. I don’t know what made me look up. A flickering. The fire had gotten as far as my bedroom.

  “Can’t let you do it. Can’t let you take off with your grandmother’s things.”

  The Skankmother appeared behind them in the doorway. She walked straight out, right up to me, and threw down a bundle of money at my feet.

  “One thousand. That enough to get you gone?”

  “That and my brother,” I said, picking up the wad of bills. Thanks to Matt’s headlock, Beau’s feet barely touched the ground. He was trying to pry it away, but Matt’s arm was big, wrestler big. He looked like Thor, only with girlier hair. The tendons flexed under his skin. My brother looked at me with his desperate brown eyes.

  “I get it. You need Beau so you can still claim the money.” It was all screaming back to me now. She needed one of us, and who was easier to control? “If I’m not coming back, he won’t stick around.”

  “Oh, he’ll stay.” She glared back at me. “If I have to keep him under lock and key, he’ll stay. Beau’s a good boy.” Matt tightened his grip. Beau closed his eyes.

  “How much she paying you to do this, Matt? Or did she promise you a slice of our trust fund?”

  Skank’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Beau stays. You go,” she said.

  “You know there probably isn’t that much left now, Matt,” I warned him. “She creamed off most of it paying to send me away, and then there’s the new furniture, the new tits….”

  “You better scram, girly,” said Matt, tightening his grip on Beau’s neck. Beau’s face was getting redder and redder.

  “She’s blown through three million already. Probably more.” I waited, looking from Skank to Matt and back again.

  “Go,” Matt told me. The Skank folded her arms across her big fake boobs.

  “Beau, get in the car,” I said.

  “Mmugh?” he garbled.

  “I don’t think you heard me, Jane. Beau is staying here. But you can go. Be free.” She ushered me away with a flap of her hands, like I was some little fly that wouldn’t take the hint. “You don’t have to wait until you’re eighteen. I’m giving you your freedom right now. Take it. Go on. It’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?”

  “No. What I wanted was my dad back, you evil bitch.”

  She smiled at me, one of her huge stretched smiles with her big red trannylicious lips that looked like she’d been injected with Joker venom.

  “Okay.” I turned on my heel. I walked to the car. “Good luck putting the fire out,” I called over my shoulder, getting in the driver’s seat and slamming the door.

  I started the engine and stepped on the pedal. Skreeee! I looked in the rearview mirror. The Skankmother was scurrying inside on her own screams and Matt had loosened his grip enough on my brother so he could wriggle free and run to the car.

  I was rolling out of the driveway when the passenger door flew open and in scrambled Beau, breathless and gasping theatrically.

  “My God, Paisley,” he panted, reaching out to shut the swinging door and turning to look through the rear window. I shifted into gear and stepped on the gas.

  “She should have known not to leave me in a room full of lit candles.”

  In the mirror, I could see the flames licking out of my bedroom window, lapping up at the milky afternoon sky like tongues. Splashes and sparks and debris flew out. It looked kinda pretty.

  “Shit, Pais. You set it on fire?” Beau wheezed. “Oh shit, this isn’t happening. This just isn’t happening….”

  “Then let’s pinch each other and wake up,” I said, looking over at him. His hands were at his temples, like he was trying to massage away the last few hours.

  “That’s her home. She’s gonna be pissed, she’s gonna be so pissed!” he kept saying.

  I kinda wanted to stick around and watch the old woman melt under the weight of her plastic skin, but we couldn’t. I put my foot down and kept my head forward, leaving the whole sorry mess in the rearview.

  BEAU

  EIGHT

  SOMEWHERE IN THE MOJAVE DESERT,

  INTERSTATE 15

  “Why do you call us the Wonder Twins, Dad?” I once asked him. I must have been around five, I guess.

  “Because that’s what you are. You and Paisley are my Wonder Twins. You took a long time to, well, come along.” “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind. Point is, when we finally got you, we were real happy.”

  “Was Mom happy?”

  “Yeah, Beau, she was. You know, there are these superheroes called the Wonder Twins, too. They’re a brother and sister. To get their powers, they have to touch hands and say, ‘Wonder Twin powers: Activate!’ When you and Paisley were babies, your cribs used to be next to one another and when one of you would wake up, you’d stretch your arm through the bars to reach for the other one. Like if you touched hands, you’d activate your powers, too. It was the cutest thing.”

  “Do me and Paisley have superpowers?”

  “You’re both pretty super to me.”

  “Who cried most, me or Paisley?”

  “You,” said Dad, without even thinking. “But all we had to do was put you in the crib with your sister and you’d shut right up, every time. Like magic.”

  So that was us as babies. The Wonder Twins. Better together. When we were found in the woods after we’d been missing for days, the news anchor who broke our story to the nation called us the same thing. Wondrous. Wonderful. Wonder Kids. They said we had kept each other alive. I didn’t get what was so amazing about us until I read all the news reports years later. There was a spate of child murders around the time we got lost. Kids would vanish for a couple of nights and then their bodies would show up somewhere. Near the swings in a park in Elizabeth. Floating on a pond in South Orange. On the roadside near our elementary school. But we were found alive. Everybody just went nuts. And what with it being March and us being out in the open for three nights, alone. And us being six. We were little wonders. America loved us.

  Now we were thieves. Arsonists. America wouldn’t think us quite so wonderful now, that was for sure.

  I folded Dad’s letter and placed it back in its envelope in the shoe box at my fee
t. The Fiero thundered along the endless desert road, an hour and a half into our journey. It seemed to take forever to get to Paradise, just like tomorrow seems like next year when you’re a little kid. I’d been biting my nails the whole way from Virginia’s house, or rather Virginia’s ruin. Because that’s what it would be by now. Like Thornfield in Jane Eyre. Just charred remains. I still couldn’t believe what had happened. We were on the run now, whether we found Dad or not. Virginia would have the cops onto us for this, make no mistake. My bitten fingertips were red raw, and throbbing like each one had its own little heartbeat.

  “Such a boring road,” said Paisley, switching radio channels. She had all the windows down and the warm gritty wind was whipping my hair up around my face. The whole ride out of LA, her white-knuckled fists had gripped the wheel and her jaw was tight and twitchy. When we got out on the open highway, she started to relax. Her hands slipped down, and she sang along to the mullet rock blaring out of the radio.

  “It’s a beautiful road,” I told her. All right, it was still a running buffet of desert, but the sky was brightly blue in every direction as far as the eye could see, broken only by mini explosions of clouds. I looked at Paisley. The corner of her mouth glistened. It was cut and swollen. I reached out and placed a fingertip on it. She jolted away.

  “What?” she frowned.

  “It’s bleeding again.”

  “Leave it. It’ll scab over.”

  Pretty soon I felt a nudge on my arm. She handed me half a pack of peanut M&M’s. I don’t know where she got them from. I took them and popped a green one in my mouth.

  “Wonder what those mountains are?”

  “Who cares?” she said, scraping her hair away from her face.

  I glanced toward the speedometer.

  “I’m within the speed limit, Gramps,” she informed me.

  “What will we do for money when our money runs out?”

  “Sell the antiques. Dad’ll know some prison dudes who can fence the stuff for us. He’s sure to. And he’ll have gotten work at Caesars Palace and, I don’t know, maybe we can get jobs there, too, as pool hands or something. I heard they got, like, five pools.”