Like Mandarin

by Kirsten Hubbard

  Mandarin pried the nails partway out of the wall with the back of a hammer. I dragged a chair out from the table below the head. “I’ll hand it to you,” I said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous! You can’t handle it. I’m bigger than you.”

  “But I’m stronger.”

  Mandarin raised her eyebrows. “Says who?”

  I didn’t know why I’d said it—only that her limbs looked so frail. It had been years since she’d beaten up all those boys. And I’d never seen her eat anything more substantial than a milk shake and a handful of fries.

  As if she’d read my thoughts, she challenged me. “You want to arm wrestle?”

  I shook my head.

  “It probably weighs more than a hundred pounds, y’know.” She flexed her biceps. “We’ll lug it down together.”

  We climbed up on chairs on opposite sides of the table and took hold of the elk’s gritty antlers. I saw dead flies collected in the dip above its hairy neck. Mandarin said, “One, two, three!” and we tugged the thing from the wall.

  She’d been right: it was heavy. And now that we were holding it, we didn’t have anywhere to put it.

  “Crap,” I said. “Now what?”

  “Unless we can jump together, we’ve just got to throw it.”

  My arms burned. “Let’s put it back up for a second.”

  “No! No way. I’m going to throw it. Here goes.…”

  The elk head crashed into the ground face-first. One antler knocked against a table. An empty water glass toppled over, rolled off the table, and shattered on the wood floor. We froze only a moment before we leaped down and grabbed hold of the elk’s antlers.

  Once we were safe in the truck, the elk head piled in with the others, Mandarin began to giggle. Her laughter slowly built until she was nearly hysterical.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “ ‘What’ is right.” She was driving fast, too fast, but I didn’t want to say anything. “As in, now what?”

  I stared at her. Then I started to laugh too.

  “You didn’t plan any further than that, did you?”

  I shook my head.

  “What are we going to do?” she said. “Reattach them to their bodies?”

  “And then sprinkle them with fairy dust, and charm them back to life.” I paused. “Where are their bodies, do you think?”

  “Skinned and eaten. If they were lucky. ’Cause at least they were useful that way. Died for a purpose, even a selfish one. But a lot of ’em probably were left to rot in some empty plain. Buried by the wind.”

  I imagined the elk’s headless body lying out in the badlands, nothing left but old bleached bones, maybe scraps of fur, the dust blown up against it.

  “How lonely,” I said.

  “Burial’s always lonely.” Mandarin looked troubled for a second, her thoughts moving through the dark.

  “What about the people in Pompeii?”

  “What’s Pompeii?”

  “That ancient city in Italy.” I grabbed for my nonexistent seat belt as the truck sped faster. “A volcano erupted and buried the town and everybody in it in ash. Then the ash turned to stone. When their bodies decayed, it preserved the shapes. So archaeologists could see exactly how the people died. Some were embracing.”

  “Maybe they were angry old couples. Stuck together, with nowhere to go.”

  I shook my head. “You’d have to love someone a whole lot to die like that.”

  “Still, I wouldn’t want to be buried.” She kept accelerating, even though we were heading downhill. “Or burned.”

  “Then what? Be, like, frozen in one of those time capsule things?”

  I tried not to shriek as Mandarin slammed on the brakes. We had reached the bridge. She sat silently for a moment, engine still sputtering, headlights fading into the darkness of the river below.

  “I’d want to float away,” she said.

  My back strained as we heaved our second-to-last trophy—the elk head—off the bridge. Splash. It dipped below the surface, then bobbed up again. Unlike the other trophies we’d hurled into the river, it floated.

  We watched it drift into the middle of the water. The slow-moving current brought it against a clump of sticks, and it slowly swiveled around until it was looking back at us. Its milky glass eyes glowed in the moonlight. It reminded me of one of those fairy river horses, kelpies, the ones who dragged people underwater and ate them.

  With a crack, the sticks shifted. The elk head floated into the tunnel of river trees, around the bend, and was gone.

  The wind picked up, sending pebbles clattering across the bridge. I was starting to get this weird, haunted feeling, the same way I felt in the badlands when I lost track of time and it started to grow dark. Thoughts of ravenous kelpies and corpses turning to hill dust didn’t help.

  Mandarin must have felt the same way. She wrapped her arms around her body, hugging herself. From her fingers dangled the jackalope head, the only trophy she’d wanted to save. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  “And go home?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet. Let’s go somewhere. Have you got anyplace to go?”

  “What kind of place? Like the canal?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Someplace magic.”

  Someplace magic? What did that mean? I considered the Tombs, and the Virgin Mary. The place closest to magic I knew. But for some reason, I didn’t feel ready to bring Mandarin there. And what if the cave painting made her think of her dead mother?

  “I can’t think of anywhere,” I said.

  “Let’s get in the truck, at least.”

  We crawled back into the cab. The wind whistled through the edges of the windows. Without warning, Mandarin lay down, resting her head on my thigh. She held the jackalope on her stomach.

  “My birthday’s coming up,” I said.

  I could have slapped my own face. What did I expect—a cupcake?

  “Really,” Mandarin said.

  “It’s not a big deal,” I said hurriedly. “I mean, we never make a big deal out of it. My mother doesn’t like birthdays.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I think it’s because she hates getting older herself. And she hates us getting older too. Especially my sister, Taffeta.”

  “The singing one?”

  “Right,” I replied, slightly amused. I’d never talked about Taffeta. “When it comes to beauty pageants, youth is important. Once Taffeta’s nine or so, she won’t have as many chances. It’s the awkward stage. I screwed up my own chances when I was even younger than that, though. Taffeta’s all she’s got left.”

  “You used to be in beauty pageants?”

  I was glad for the darkness, because I blushed furiously.

  So Mandarin didn’t remember the backstage scolding eight years earlier, at my ill-fated Little Miss Washokey. It was a relief to be spared the shame of her memory, but it was also kind of disappointing. Because—well, I’d never forgotten. Obviously.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Hard to believe that now, huh?”

  And then, because I had to get it in, otherwise I would never have said it, I blurted, “So my mother wants you to come over for a birthday dinner. Next Saturday.”

  She’d mentioned it last night over supper.

  “Oh, sure. Like I’d be allowed inside your house.”

  “Actually, I think my mother’s kind of curious about you.”

  “Her and everybody!” In my lap, Mandarin twisted a piece of her hair around her index finger. “And I don’t know why. When you meet me, I ain’t all that interesting.”

  “It’s really no big deal,” I said again. Even if she wanted to come, it would be too weird. Though of course she didn’t want to, anyway. Like the dance, that was just the way it was when you had friends like Mandarin instead of normal people. “I’ll just tell her you can’t come.”

  After another silence, I wondered out loud, “Do you think the trophies are all going to wash up somewhere random? Like Mon
tana? Or in a beaver dam? It’d be funny if—”

  “Are you really gonna leave town with me?”

  I stared down at Mandarin. She was smiling. But her eyes weren’t.

  That night, we had entered the second stage of our friendship. The weeks before barely counted compared to what we’d just shared. It would take much more than a misunderstanding to break us now. But what she was asking …

  I tried to picture the two of us strolling down some ritzy, palm-lined West Coast avenue in high heels and enormous sunglasses. Paparazzi. Producers. Crowds of would-be actresses with crunchy hair and dogs in plaid suitcases. Men with chest hair and bracelets.

  It would never happen.

  So I felt safe making the promise a second time: “Of course.”

  Mandarin closed her eyes. I lifted my hand to touch her face, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, so my hand just hovered there.

  “You must have seen my father,” she said. I remembered when she’d called him well-meaning, a good guy deep down. But this time, she didn’t say anything to defend him.

  “I did.”

  “I have to get out of here.”

  I allowed my hand to drop to Mandarin’s forehead. It felt cool, as if the night had sucked out all the warmth. I thought about how happy she’d been earlier that night, scampering through the grocery store aisles, drawing faces on the eggs. I could make her that happy. The tricky part was keeping her there.

  “I know,” I replied.

  We could liberate a million trophies. We could fill every river to the brim. But it would never fully substitute for liberating ourselves.

  The liberation had lasted until five-thirty in the morning. As a result, on Friday I was having trouble keeping my eyes open in homeroom. For once, I could sympathize with the boys who fell asleep with their faces in their lettermen’s jackets. I wished I had a jacket for smothering snores.

  I wasn’t the only one out of sorts. Samantha Dent scurried into the classroom after morning announcements, her cheeks ablaze.

  “Samantha?” Ms. Ingle inquired.

  Like me, Samantha was never late. Before she could explain, Alexis stood up.

  “Ms. Ingle, Samantha was robbed last night!”

  “Not me,” she protested softly as she sank into her seat. “The restaurant.”

  The restaurant? Bleary-eyed, I stared at her as if she were a character from some dream I’d had. And then it struck me: the trophies.

  The robbers were us.

  For a moment, I had the awful suspicion Mandarin had taken more than the trophies—that maybe she’d slipped some money from the cash register when I wasn’t paying attention. I felt relieved when Alexis explained, “Somebody stole a hunting trophy off the walls of the Buffalo Grill. And all the ones from the grocery store.”

  But then she added, “They’re worth, like, thousands and thousands of dollars, aren’t they, Samantha?”

  Thousands and thousands of dollars?

  I had never considered that the trophies might be worth something. I’d thought of them more as old belongings, like the flea market rubbish at the junk shop, or my great-grandmother’s old dresses and hope chests stashed in the attic of our house. Never as valuable property.

  “The cops say it had to be a drifter of some sort,” Alexis continued. “Because if it was somebody in town, where’d they put all the heads?”

  My relief came back so intensely I felt dizzy. A drifter. They blamed it on a drifter, just like I had hoped.

  I glanced at Samantha again, trying my best to keep my face expressionless. Her cheeks were more fiery than before. But then, they turned red whenever a teacher called on her.

  “I’m sorry about that, Samantha,” Ms. Ingle said. “I know how much your family values those hunting trophies.”

  Samantha shrugged. “I never liked them anyway.”

  The article didn’t come out in the Washokey Gazette until the following Monday. Mandarin pounced on me as soon as I set foot on the great lawn.

  “I have something to show you. But …” She glanced at Taffeta, who was gazing up at her with eyes like crystal balls.

  “Taffeta, get out of here,” I said.

  My sister scowled. “Make me.”

  “If you don’t go stand with the other kids, I swear I’ll—”

  Mandarin caught my wrist. “Grace, what’s your deal?” She squatted in front of Taffeta. “Listen, girly. I’m gonna tell you how to play the best game ever. It’s called Red Rover.… Do you know it?”

  Taffeta shook her head.

  “I swear, it’ll make you the most popular kid in school.”

  I waited as Mandarin explained the rules of the game with more patience than I’d ever shown my sister. When she finished, Taffeta went skipping off to the other kids. I watched her go, feeling vaguely mystified.

  “Remember to use your elbows,” Mandarin called.

  Then she tugged me behind a cottonwood tree. From her pocket, she withdrew a crumpled piece of newsprint. “Look,” she said, jabbing with her finger.

  Hunting Trophies Stolen from Local Businesses

  by Bill S. Moulton, Staff Writer On

  Thursday night, all the hunting trophies were deviously stolen from the Buffalo Grill and the Washokey Supermarket, both located on Main Street. No other belongings were taken from either business. The shockingly deplorable crime, unprecedented in town, has been attributed to a drifter, probably somebody who swiftly left the state.…

  “They called it ‘shockingly deplorable,’ ” Mandarin said with a grin. “Those idiot cops haven’t got a clue. It’s probably the most action they’ve gotten in years. Maybe they’ll pay a little more attention now. Hey! Looks like we’ve done our service to the community!”

  I handed the article back to Mandarin, smiling weakly. “I’m sure they’re overjoyed,” I said. “But … seriously, have you thought of a service project yet?”

  Laughing, Mandarin threw her arm around me and hauled me toward school.

  On Saturday, the administration opened the school pool to the public for the first time since September.

  The pool was just three years old, still exciting to our town. The school had built it in hopes of training a Washokey High swim team. Because no one wanted the swimmers to tunnel through ice floes in the winter, the school began construction of a gym around the pool. They built the skeleton of one side before they determined they didn’t have enough money to complete it. So instead of putting the remaining money toward something useful, they finished the solitary wall.

  It was a nice wall, as far as walls go, made of textured gray cement with a big window. In the afternoon it cast a shadow, where people crammed their towels.

  That day everybody crowded outside the chain-link fence, waiting for the pool to open at ten. It seemed like half the town had turned up. As usual, my family was kind of weird-looking. Momma wore a flowered poncho over her yellow one-piece. It made her look like a lamp shade with legs. Taffeta’s arm floaties were so big she had to hold her arms out almost horizontally. I wore one of Momma’s straw hats and sunglasses, as if that would disguise the dread I felt.

  The pool was such a comedown. A crash landing. But compared to the past week, anything would have been.

  In geometry, Mandarin passed me notes, tantalizing with curse words and caricatures of other students. When I opened them under my desk, I always made sure somebody was watching—other than Mrs. Cleary, who was too frazzled to notice anyway.

  Mandarin waited for me after my English class, and we left for the cafeteria together. The days had grown warmer, and I’d traded my hooded sweaters and tees for men’s undershirts like the ones Mandarin wore. Much better than my strappy pajama top. For the first time, I felt almost sexy as I navigated the halls at her side. But in a careless way, the best way, unlike the other girls, with their short skirts and wedge heels. When I caught them watching us, I felt intoxicated by their envy.

  Navigating the pool crowd was the complete opposite, especial
ly with Mandarin replaced by Momma and Taffeta in their goofy apparel. Worse, we hadn’t been standing there long when Davey Miller came up and stood beside me.

  “Hello, Grace,” he said. He wore too-short blue swim trunks and had about twelve curly hairs in the center of his pale chest. I recalled how strange he’d acted during our science project. Maybe I was less intimidating standing beside my family.

  “Hey. Sorry, I’m kind of busy.” I scanned the crowd, as if searching for somebody. “What is it, Davey?”

  “Um. Well. I was wondering …” His Adam’s apple wobbled like a horsefly caught in his neck. “The cowboy dance. What do you … Do you think—”

  I cut him off before he could say anything more. “It’s such an idiotic theme, isn’t it? I’m not going, that’s for sure.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “As if our town isn’t one gigantic cowboy dance already.”

  He cleared his throat, and the horsefly jumped. “Yeah. I guess it is kind of dumb.”

  “Right,” I said. “It is.”

  Davey finally got the hint. He rejoined his family as Kate Cunningham and Tyler Worley swung open the gate. Kate and Tyler were this year’s lifeguards, along with Joshua Mickelson. Each year, Mr. Beck hired three seniors for the job, which was coveted by anybody with a passable physique. Lifeguards possessed a kind of seductive authority; we tended to forget they had to do things like clean the pool before they filled it with water. The snowmelt always uncovered a constellation of beer cans. And dead ground squirrels.

  Everybody filed in like orderly first graders. As soon as Momma and I set down our stuff in an empty spot, Taffeta bounced up again, tugging at my hands.

  “Can we go in the water now?” she begged. “Please oh please?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not going in.”

  “I won’t splash your face this time. I promise.”

  There was absolutely no way I was going to wedge myself into the mass of townspeople crowding the pool. “Momma will take you.”

  We both glanced at Momma. She was having trouble unbuttoning her poncho. She’d scrunched it up over her shoulders, like one of those ruffled collars from the nineteenth century.