Just Wreck It All

by N. Griffin

  But that didn’t stop the murmur of fear and worry from the kids in the homeroom, or quiet the scared pit in Bett’s own stomach. What kind of whackjob does something like that? And boldly, right in the middle of the school day? Bett’s heart beat faster, and she tried to force herself to take deep breaths to slow it.

  But the panic grew anyway, even though the fluid in Bett’s left ear had settled a bit and she could hear pretty okay again.

  Oh, why couldn’t today have been like the first day of second grade, she thought, when you couldn’t wait to use the unopened crayons, and everything had an added polish of newness? Eleventh grade, everybody knew, was the hard grade, the one that mattered most if you were going to go to college. All the Twinklers would go, and a handful of Stays, with some of the Stays going to the ag college in Rayfen for the two-year farming program. But, instead of plans and academic stress, here was the year starting off with fear and flames.

  The bell rang. Bett jumped a mile.

  * * *

  When she got on the bus after school, Mutt and Dan were already on.

  “That Mutt is a good-looking kid,” Bett’s mother had said to her more than once. “That whole family is, cousins and uncles, with those wide-set eyes. Too bad so many of them are messes.”

  “Ugh,” Bett had responded. “You always talk about their wide-set eyes. You make them sound like a family of haddocks.”

  “Well, they’re sexy haddocks, then,” Bett’s mom had said.

  “Mom! Gross! Mutt is sixteen! And an ass!”

  “Jesus, Bett calm down. I didn’t mean him.” There was a pause. “I didn’t know he was an ass. But he is a good-looking haddock. You have to admit.”

  “I do not,” Bett had said, and she still agreed with herself now that she was on the bus.

  “Hi, Bett, I’m Dan,” said Dan loudly now, in his seat across the aisle from Bett on the bus. It was clearly for Eddie’s benefit.

  “You shut up,” said Eddie. “I was just trying to see that you got manners. Jesus Christ.”

  Dan rolled his eyes.

  Ranger clattered onto the bus now, his backpack unzipping itself, papers and new books coming out in terrible hanks.

  “Ranger, you can’t see with that hat,” said Dan.

  “Yes, I can,” said Ranger. “I got, like, a slit of space underneathcakes.”

  “Ugh!” Dan shrank down in his seat.

  But Ranger was already babbling on. “What do you guys think of the fire-slashing psycho?”

  “Don’t worry about the psycho,” said Bett, startling herself by talking. But she didn’t want a little kid like that to be scared, did she? “Here, let me help you.”

  She got up and stuffed papers back into Ranger’s backpack, tipped his hat back on his head, and squared him away in the row in front of his brother, even though it left her rear end exposed to Mutt. But Mutt was so self-absorbed he was just looking at his own reflection in the window anyway.

  “But for realcakes, what do you guys think about those ruined pictures?” asked Ranger to the bus at large.

  “Totally sucks,” said Dan. “And what the hell?” Or at least Bett thought that’s what he’d said. Her left ear was going out again from all the din of the day, and that always meant she misheard things. Like once she was convinced the security guy in the airport was asking everybody to put their poetry in the bins. “I don’t have any poetry,” she had said to him, bewildered. “Toi-let-tries,” the man sighed at her. But that mishearing had scarcely mattered. It sucked more in moments like now, when she couldn’t follow the conversation around her and had to just wait and wait for her ear to settle down.

  “Pointless,” said Mutt, or so she guessed. He wasn’t facing her, so she couldn’t be sure. He surprised her, though, by joining the talk.

  “Plus, who would, like, take the time to do that?” Dan asked.

  “You kids don’t know from psycho,” Eddie said loudly enough for even Bett to be sure of what he was saying. “Go to Nam back in the day and I’ll show you some psychos.”

  Bett didn’t know what to think about that. She thought of the morning, and she remembered Eddie’s strange volatility from when she was small as well and still bothered to visit her dad at the vet center. One time, for example, Eddie had hung up the phone after a difficult call at the desk and cleared the entire wall of pamphlets in two great bear-paw swoops, shouting all the while.

  Salt River’s Veteran Services Center was depressing as hell. Bett remembered that, too. Fake-wood-paneled walls lined with peeling posters hung too high and all those pamphlets, faded and curling at the corners. Still, Bett assumed Eddie liked the center and the people there, even if her father was a twiddly little shit. There were other people who worked at the Veteran Services Center who were not asses. But some of the old, little-kid fear from that pamphlet-flinging day licked at Bett’s mind now, and her nervousness about Eddie mixed with the day’s fears about the fire and knifing.

  Eddie threw the bus into gear now and they were off, the bus tracing the other semicircle of its route toward Bett’s house. That was the deal in Salt River. You might get to sleep later and be one of the last ones on the bus, but that meant you were also one of the last ones off the long, long route in the afternoon, which was a drag. Still, Bett would rather sleep later than get home early, especially to her weird, teeny house, where her mother was everywhere. At least there were no Catholic kids on this bus to make the route longer—

  No. Bett cut herself off. Don’t think about that.

  At last, Mutt dropped off on Field Road and Dan and Ranger at the corner of Kunst Street and Bett the last one on the bus, Eddie pulled up to the slope leading to her house and she gathered up her own things and climbed down the three steps to the ground.

  “How’d it go?” Eddie looked down at her, his fist on the bus door lever. “You worried about this stupid nut with the fire, too? Don’t be. You twerps will be fine.”

  Eddie paused, waiting for her to respond. But Bett could not. Eddie stared at her.

  Then, Plus or not, Bett couldn’t take it and she had to turn and run up the slope, away from Eddie’s gaze, the backpack on her back making the weight on each foot about a trillion too-Plus pounds.

  Behind her, Eddie finally pulled away.

  9

  TWO YEARS AGO . . . Stephanie Roan, which turned out to be the name of that ninth-grader girl from the Catholic school on the bus with Bett, was something else. She was good at art and wild in her hopes and ways of talking. “I want to do makeup for the movies,” she told Bett as they careened toward their separate schools on the bus in the morning. “I have a ton of it. And I am going to practice on you.”

  “I think you could do better,” said Bett, taking her second soda swig as the bus started to jounce its way along that last part of the ride that particular January day. The town was full of snow now, which was glorious because it meant flying across that snow and ice, sheening or playing ice hockey or cross-country skiing.

  “Snobface,” said Stephanie, and she really looked hurt.

  “No!” said Bett. “I meant you could pick a better face to practice on.”

  “No way,” said Stephanie, and stuck one arm deep in her knapsack. “You have this thing where you’re pretty and you don’t know it. I’m getting out my makeup bag.”

  But in the end it didn’t matter because the bus bounced and the eyeliner Stephanie was using on Bett’s eye slid down Bett’s cheek like an ancient Egyptian tear, and once again she and Stephanie were laughing so hard they banged back and forth in their seats until the laughing was too much for sound and went quiet.

  * * *

  Every other Wednesday was a half day at both schools for teacher meetings, and one Wednesday, one of the few when Bett didn’t have to stay after for some kind of sports practice, Stephanie grabbed Bett’s arm when she sat down on the bus and said, “Get off with me at my house. We can hang out and then your mom or dad can pick you up on their way home from work.”

/>   Bett hesitated. She knew she should call her mom for permission, but somehow she didn’t want to do that in front of Stephanie. Wasn’t she fourteen and old enough to live her own life?

  “Okay,” she said. “Fine.” And when the bus stopped at Stephanie’s house, Bett flew off with her, Pat the bus driver not even demanding a note.

  * * *

  “I have to ask you something, Steph,” said Bett. She was hesitant, because although Stephanie lived on a farm, if Bett was honest, the private school and the movie makeup thing made Stephanie a potential Twinkler, and Bett didn’t want to make a Stay–Twinkler divide between them when they were such good friends, even if only on the bus. Which was a little weird, when you thought of it. Bett and Stephanie had so much fun together on those rides, but neither had been to the other’s house or invited the other to any parties or hangouts with friends from their respective schools. It just hadn’t seemed right. Or maybe Bett and Stephanie both liked that it was just the two of them with nothing outside to mess anything up. They were uncomplicated bus friends, and here was Bett, about to fly through that Venn diagram of their bus and non-bus lives and maybe land in Stephanie’s yard and sort of wreck it all, and this question was going to be the first step toward that destruction.

  “Okay,” said Stephanie. Bett saw she was clearly braced for something awful, like did Stephanie know she had a zit on her nose or what was up with all her freckles.

  “It’s nothing big,” Bett hastened to say. “I just want to know about the gas pumps.”

  Stephanie looked puzzled. “What about them?” she asked.

  “Well, like, why do you have them?”

  Stephanie looked at Bett like Bett was daft. “We have a lot of tractors and backhoes and stuff on this farm,” she said. “Easier to have the gas here than to have to drive into town all the time.”

  Bett was so happy that the pumps weren’t a sculpture that she laughed. She laughed until Stephanie kicked her in the foot.

  “Are you laughing because I live on a Christmas tree farm?” Stephanie was ready to be pissed.

  “No,” said Bett, laughing again. “I just thought they were . . . I thought they were an—” She laughed until Stephanie kicked her on the shoe again.

  “What?” Stephanie asked. “Tell me, moron.”

  “An art project,” Bett said at last, wiping tears from her eyes.

  Stephanie stared at her. “You mean like that naked woman made out of metal in that pervy guy’s front lawn down by the hair place? Or all those green shapes that lady welded together in front of the library and named Love’s Mercy?”

  Now Bett was laughing so hard she couldn’t talk, but Stephanie kept on, her voice threaded through the laugh that was about to come. “You thought maybe my family got together over lattes and decided that we’d do our own sculpture and it would be three ancient gas pumps? Do you not get us at all, Bett?” But by the time she got to “get,” Bett couldn’t even understand the rest of the sentence because they were both laughing so hard, real laughing, like on the bus, only they weren’t on the bus and that was wonderful because the burst Venn diagram hadn’t wrecked their world after all.

  Their laughing hadn’t fully calmed down until they had dumped their backpacks in Stephanie’s kitchen and come back outside into the cold January air.

  “Let’s go into Fancy Jim’s for a soda,” said Stephanie. “You had one on the bus, but I’m thirsty.”

  “I offered to share,” Bett protested. It was true. The ride home described the same half circle made by the morning route and Bett had a soda for that one, too, every day, and always offered some to Stephanie.

  “Well, you drank it all, and now I want one. From Fancy Jim’s.”

  “Stephanie, we cannot go into Fancy Jim’s.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s FANCY JIM’S!” Bett’s mother the cop had warned her more times than she could count to stay away from that place.

  “Full of troubled people,” her mom had told her.

  “I thought you said most troubled people were more sad than scary,” Bett had pointed out.

  “That’s right. Most. But not all. And God knows what else happens in that store.”

  It was easy enough to avoid Fancy Jim’s because, although she passed the place every day on the bus, Bett had rarely been directly outside of it in person, with its flaking paint and slanted door.

  But here she was now, in the Fancy Jim’s parking lot that had just one blue truck braked in front of the door. Then she was actually inside the store, her feet stuck to the floor as Stephanie moved easily across it.

  I can’t leave her alone in here, thought Bett. Look at that guy over there. She couldn’t quite place him, but he was familiar-looking and as sketch as sketch could be.

  “Come on, Steph,” she said, grabbing a soda for her friend and then Stephanie herself by the elbow. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Wait,” said Stephanie. “I want to get some lip gloss, too.”

  “From here?” hissed Bett. The sketch guy moved up to the counter with two six-packs of beer.

  “Yes, from here,” Stephanie said. “Given that here is where we are.” And she went over into the ancient cabinet that held tampons and pain relievers and, on the bottom shelf, a selection of lip glosses that were so dusty they looked like they had been sitting there since before Stephanie and Bett had ever even been alive.

  “Stephanie, gross,” said Bett.

  “Don’t you talk me out of it, you spineless crow,” said Stephanie. “Who knows? Maybe they work better with age.”

  “Or maybe they melt your lips off,” said Bett. She had her eye on the sketch guy, just in case. The door to the store banged open and a little girl about six years old came in and ran up to him.

  “Daddy!” cried the little girl. “You came!”

  “Sure did, honey munchkin,” said the guy, glancing at Bett. “Pick what you want for a snack.”

  “A cider doughnut,” said the little girl immediately.

  “One cider doughnut for my little lady,” said the sketch guy to the girl behind the counter, “and twelve liquid dreams for me.”

  The girl behind the counter laughed a little. “Okay, sir.”

  “I’m getting the Passion Petal,” said Stephanie from her crouch over the lip glosses.

  “I’ll be ready to call 911 when you use it,” Bett said back, her eyes still on the man.

  He took up his paper bag. “All right, here we go!”

  Bett panicked. Should she call her mom and tell her that a man who was clearly a drunk was going to get in his truck and drive with a little girl who was armed only with a cider doughnut? Maybe she could call her own dad, and he could call her mom. Bett knew she was being a candyass, but she didn’t want to face her mother’s anger over her not getting permission to get off the bus at Stephanie’s house in the first place.

  But before she could decide, Stephanie had her by the elbow and they were at the counter themselves, beside the jar of beef jerky sticks and the lottery tickets in their plastic case, Stephanie holding the soda now along with her little jar of ancient lip gloss and the man and the girl already out the flapping door and gone, only the icy outdoor air proof that they’d been inside the store at all.

  I should have called, thought Bett as Stephanie paid cheerfully and led them out of the store.

  * * *

  When they went back inside at Stephanie’s, her older brother, Bill, clattered down the stairs from the second floor and stopped short when he saw the bag in Stephanie’s hand. Bill was three years older than Stephanie, a senior, who drove himself to school but refused to drive Stephanie because “no one drives around with a little sister,” as Stephanie had reported him saying. Seeing him now, up close, he seemed almost like a man to Bett. It was clear he had to shave sometimes and everything.

  “You did not go into Fancy Jim’s,” Bill said to his sister. “As dumb as even you are, you did not go in there.”

  �
�As dumb as even you are, you don’t see that the ‘Fancy Jim’s’ written on my bag means yes, I did go in there?”

  “Who was in there?” asked Bill. “Who?”

  “Relax,” said Stephanie. “It was me, Bett here”—Bill tipped his chin up to Bett, who gave him a little wave, which she was immediately embarrassed about—“the counter girl, and some guy and his daughter.”

  “Was the guy kind of long-haired and super tan? Was he in a blue pickup?”

  “I don’t know about the pickup,” said Stephanie, “but yeah about the hair, I guess.”

  “He had a blue pickup,” said Bett. “Commercial plates.” Both Stephanie and Bill looked at her in surprise. “What? My mom’s a cop.”

  “She’s a cop?” asked Bill, and immediately geeked. “Are you kidding me? Can I go in the cop car sometime? I want to do a ride along!”

  “Probably not,” Bett admitted. “But my mom always says that ninety-five percent of the work is service calls anyway. Not, like, murders.”

  “What do you mean, ‘service calls’?” asked Bill. Bett saw that Stephanie was taking advantage of the conversation to sneak the soda out of her little bag.

  “Like, helping old people. Getting people to go to the hospital when they need it. That kind of thing. They only investigate crimes pretty rarely.”

  “Now, she,” said Bill, jabbing his finger toward Bett and addressing his sister, “is the kind of friend who’s good to have around. She’s got good stories, and better taste than you.” He turned to Bett. “You didn’t get a soda in that botulism pit, did you?” Bett shook her head. “Well, you both had a near escape. That motherflicking guy with the hair is bad news.”

  “I have to call my mom,” Bett said abruptly. Both Bill and Stephanie looked surprised. “He stunk like alcohol and was about to drive with his daughter in the truck.”

  “Oh,” said Bill. “Well. He only lives just up from us about a hundred yards. I think we would have heard a crash by now. I think you’re off the hook.”

  Bett didn’t know what to say. She didn’t all the way agree about the off-the-hook thing. Should she call? But, once again, she’d get into a whole thing about not having gotten permission to get off at Stephanie’s, and then there would be grounding and Bett spent enough time grounded as it was, getting in trouble for running inside at school.