by N. Griffin
“Besides”—Aunt Jeanette always took up for her sister—“you never wear makeup anymore yourself, Bett. And you looked damn good in it, too.”
“Not really,” Bett mumbled, and always managed to get away before a conversation could start about her and makeup and looking good.
Anyway, with her mother clearly gone for a while, rollerblading like a superhero from thirty years ago, Bett turned the other way on the ridge and looked down at the river. The clouds were thickening and the wind was turning the leaves up and over so their silver undersides were exposed.
Bett stood and looked down at the river’s edge for a while, knowing it was filled with stones and caddis houses. Then she bent over (cross-legged toe touches!) and picked up a tube-shaped stone that, even though it was way up here, looked like a little patchwork caddis house itself, but Bett wasn’t sure it really was one. She slipped it into her pocket anyway and as she did, she knew she was being looked at by someone, someone to the left. It was an odd feeling to know that she was being watched. She turned and there, long down the river, was the man in waders from the other day. She wondered if he had seen her bend over to take the caddis house, but then she figured he was far enough away not to see her rear. Or to care, even. This thought was heartening, and Bett waved at him, hearing her mother’s voice railing in her head about stranger danger and safety. The man waved back.
Oh!
Now Bett got it. She knew who the man was. He wasn’t that saw-lending neighbor. Like Eddie, he also worked in the Vet Services Center with her dad. She didn’t remember his name, but she remembered him. He was some kind of therapist for the vets and had always been very nice to her when she was little, smiling at her with those dark, kind eyes. Always looking at her like he was really listening, like he really cared.
She wished she could remember the man’s name. She knew she’d known it once.
Bett shook herself. Her father and people to do with his life were the last things she wanted to think about right now.
But still. Bett held on to the caddis house in her pocket, staring after the man.
Then she started back to the house. She already had her plans to undo the Pluses of the day that night. It was the one good thing about the SIM card house. There were plenty of places to hide emergency food, mostly behind the stacks of books that lined the walls. Bett could hide individual snack cakes there and then pull all the books in the row forward and even them up so nobody would ever know there were Ho Hos lurking behind the books. Or, if her mother was around and Bett couldn’t access her inside stash, she could climb out her bedroom window easy as pie, walk to one of her outdoor reserves, binge, come back, and climb back in, making no noise, without her mother even knowing. Easier here than in their old house, the one they sold, the one they lived in when her father was still around, which he was decidedly not anymore, the weakass.
Damn. Her left ear was out again. Why? Bett didn’t know. But not even the river sound was loud enough to permeate the numbness there.
23
TWO YEARS AGO . . . Stephanie is dead.
Bett sat up. All around her was white and chaos and she could hear not one bit of it, not the motion and not her mother talking and bending over her to put her arms around Bett with Bett shoving those arms away, frantic, because Stephanie was dead.
“She’s dead!” Bett screamed. “She’s dead! I killed her!”
Bett screamed and screamed even though she couldn’t hear herself or her mother trying to shout at her.
What had she done what had she done what had she done? Oh God, help me! Please! Please, help me!
The hospital was too white and too bright and terrifying. All that motion and action and Bett heard not one bit of it, not one.
Her mother grabbed a little pad of Post-its from the nurses’ station and wrote as fast as she could and held Bett as tight as she could to help her stop screaming. Eventually, the screaming stopped and settled into sobbing, which went on and on and on, until Bett could finally read the Post-its.
* * *
Stephanie wasn’t dead. She had lost her right eye, but she wasn’t dead. She was in another part of the hospital, and Bett couldn’t stop picturing what Stephanie must look like and oh my God OH MY GOD I DID THAT and the screams started again, even though Bett hardly knew it because she couldn’t hear them.
* * *
Bett had some burns and she couldn’t hear, but she was okay. After a few days she could stand up like normal and Bett was okay.
* * *
Where was her dad? He had been in her room when she first woke up, she knew, because she had seen him over her mother’s shoulder in those screaming moments, his lips moving, too. But where was he now? They wouldn’t let Bett go home yet and she couldn’t hear and where was her dad?
* * *
Gone. He didn’t tell her. Bett’s mother had to do it. She still had the little stack of Post-its and she wrote Bett a terrible note about how her father was gone. He had left them. He had left Bett and her mother for Stephanie and hers. The disgusting, weak goat of a man didn’t even have the guts to tell her himself. He made her mother do it. Bett was going home and Stephanie was staying in the hospital and Bett couldn’t hear and her dad, in the middle of all this, decided it was the right time to leave them. Bett was never going to talk to him again.
* * *
If she thought about it, though, if she thought about it, even her father’s leaving was as much Bett’s fault as Stephanie’s losing her eye was. Because if Bett hadn’t done so many Fizzicle Feets that Stephanie wanted to try and if Bett hadn’t jumped on that hose and there hadn’t been that explosion, Bett’s father wouldn’t have come over there and seen Stephanie’s beautiful, tiny mother, delicate even without wings, and fallen in love with her on the spot. It wouldn’t have happened. But no. Bett had to go and explode, destroy all the world.
* * *
Bett dashed out of the too-sterile room and down the hall, hospital gown flapping, nurses and her mother calling after her, running after her, but Bett couldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop. It was glorious, this running, this making a break for it. It felt like everything. It felt like the world.
Bett stopped on a dime.
Felt glorious? Like the world?
Since when did she deserve to feel like that?
No. No more. Too good.
Too Plus.
She would never move again. Not a Fizzicle Feet, not a step, not an inch.
* * *
Her mother caught up with her and stood beside her as a nurse came at them with a wheelchair. Bett’s brain was in a roil, terror and hell washing over her whole body until it felt like she was made of nothing but those feelings and that roil.
“Mom,” Bett whispered. “Can I order some stuff to eat?”
24
Tuesday, Eleventh Grade, After School
HER FATHER WAS ALWAYS TRYING to contact her, even now, two years after the explosion, but the hell with that. What kind of ass of a dad picked checking on someone else’s daughter over his own after something like that?
He called probably every other day even now, texted her all the time, but Bett’s mom was right. He was like a thirteen-year-old, and even Bett knew she didn’t mean a thirteen-year-old like Bett had been. She meant a snappy, selfish thirteen-year-old who got crushes on tiny red-haired women with gorgeous eyes and delicate hands, and who didn’t care who he hurt and didn’t even come back for his clothes. Bett’s mom had put them in garbage bags on the side of the road, and the next morning they were gone, but who knew who had gotten them, her dad or the garbage truck or some other person. Who cared? All that mattered was that Bett’s stupid Fizzicle Feets had made her a people destroyer.
The hospital therapist Bett only agreed to talk to one time and her mother herself, incessantly, always saying things like:
“It could have happened at any time, Bett! That gas pump system was so old, a bird’s breath could have made it blow!”
Her mother and
Aunt Jeanette for months on end after Bett got home from the hospital. But Bett said nothing. That had been the good part of the deafness. She could pretend. And who cared? Their pastor always said the same thing, too, but nothing mattered when the truth was the truth. Bett had felt that hose under her feet.
“Talk to Stephanie,” her mother begged, but the very thought made Bett want to run, until she caught the Plus in the wish and stopped herself. Completely. She could never face Stephanie again. There was no apology big enough in the world. Nothing that could make that empty right eye socket whole and seeing again. Nothing that would absolve Bett from the life she had ruined.
And seeing Stephanie would mean seeing her skinny goat of a father, and Bett was never going to do that again, either.
Now Bett palmed the caddis house in her pocket and gazed at the river, half hoping to see the man. She thought of Pluses and Ho Hos and this one girl in school who everybody knew cut herself, all the time, with scars running up her arms to the elbow.
The river was so calm and smooth in its motion today that Bett wanted to punch it, punch it so hard that waves would ripple and race to the shore, but she couldn’t. Wouldn’t let herself. She could only stand here with a stone in her hand, the hand in her pocket, and know that she still had a lifetime to pay for that jump on the hose.
25
Tuesday Evening After the Fourth Day of Eleventh Grade
THIS HOUSE WAS SO DAMN small. Bett was up in her tiny room, but she could hear every word of the conversation between her mother and Aunt Jeanette, who was here for dinner, which was going to happen in a minute, but this was the gossip hour, when her mother and Aunt Jeanette talked about everyone and everything, in the same way with the same gestures, and Bett usually enjoyed it but not today. She held the stone in her hand and wished for quiet.
“I saw the Floozy today,” said Aunt Jeanette. Aunt Jeanette saw her sometimes because she worked near the insurance agency.
Bett’s mother sucked her teeth.
“She looked bloated,” said Aunt Jeanette.
“Cut the shit, Jeanette,” said Bett’s mother. “I don’t care. BETT!” she roared unnecessarily. “COME DOWN AND EAT!”
Eat.
* * *
Bett had come in the house, anxiety and terror sloshing all over her from the running, and started in her first hiding place with the Ho Hos, and then she’d moved to the second hiding place behind the stereo in the living room and eaten the cookies, but even that hadn’t been enough to take away the Pluses and to X out all the hell that was storming in her mind so she’d gone to her third hiding place and eaten the potato chips and then some corn chips from the actual pantry with cheese on them, three rounds done in the microwave, and finally that was enough and now she was in her room, stuffed and lying on her bed, finally thinking of nothing.
But she went down anyway.
“How was your day, kid?” asked Aunt Jeanette. Dinner was lasagna. Bett was repulsed by the smell of melty cheese, but she worked through her square in spite of that.
“It was a day,” she said to Aunt Jeanette. “How was yours?”
“You would not believe,” said Aunt Jeanette, who ran the office of a construction company. “This jagweed came in today and wanted to change an order that was already paid for and out on the truck. I told him are you kidding me? and he said does it look like I am? You people should have told me I was getting the wrong wood, and I was like, yeah, because we’re all psychic here and know what your plans are without you even telling us. And then he was like, I’m gonna call your boss and I said you’re looking at her and he swore and stormed out. Tripped on the doorjamb, too, which I enjoyed.”
“Jagweed down!” said Bett’s mom, and despite her nauseated, too-full stomach, Bett laughed. Aunt Jeanette could tell a story, that was for sure.
“How was cross-country, Bett?” her mother asked.
Bett looked at her plate.
“What?” said her mom, looking at her with concern. “Did something happen after school?”
Bett shook her head. “No,” she answered. “No psycho stuff. Just running.” Then, quickly, to distract her mother before she could start going on about how great it was that Bett had exercised, Bett looked up and blurted: “But what is going on with that dillhole who destroyed all the art, Mom? Do you guys have any, like, leads?”
“You know I can’t talk about an active investigation,” said her mother. “Just know that we’re working on it.”
“It sucks,” said Bett.
“It does,” said Aunt Jeannette.
“It more than sucks,” said her mother.
“Do you have to come talk to people up at school?” said Bett plaintively. “Can’t you interview them at the station?”
“Not without cause,” said Bett’s mother. “What, am I harshing your cool, being up at your school?”
Harshing my cool. Bett couldn’t bear the outdated slang. But outdated or not, it was the truth. Bett’s cool was definitely being harshed. She needed to keep her mouth shut about the psycho devil pictures even though she knew her mom would be investigating that, too, and spending even more time up at Salt River K–12.
“No,” said Bett. “It’s just that I’m sure it’s all nothing. Just someone borderline crazycakes.”
Ranger was catching.
“Borderline?!” Aunt Jeanette sang-screamed, and she and Bett’s mom were off, singing Madonna, while Bett groaned and tipped her head back until her throat poked up into the air in agony. But any amount of Madonna was worth it if her mother was distracted from thoughts of the vandalism case.
“I brought you something, Bett,” said Aunt Jeanette, stopping her terrible singing at last. “It’s a flat iron. My hair’s too curly for it to work, but I thought it would be perfect for yours because you have that soft wave. You could try it on your bangs.”
“No, thanks,” said Bett automatically.
“Well, I’ll just leave it here in case you change your mind,” said Aunt Jeanette. “No point in it going to waste at my house when maybe you can use it.”
26
Autumn, Tuesday Night, Late Late Late
BETT PRESSED PLAY.
“This one is going to be a sprite,” said the girl’s voice. “I want to make her delicate and winged. But not corny. I want it to be like her flying really matters.”
The girl’s hands took up the scissors and started to cut into some tulle. It wisped and wafted as she worked it with each cut.
“Ugh,” said the girl. “The hell with that. I’ll layer it over metal instead.”
27
Autumn, Wednesday, the Fifth Day of Eleventh Grade, in the Morning
THE NEXT MORNING, BETT GOT up and showered and stared at the flat iron Aunt Jeanette had brought. She held it in her hand and thought of the caddis house and the river at the bottom of the slope and then the leaves that had turned silver-side up.
Why not, she thought. So she dried her bangs and flat ironed them, and then trimmed their raggedy edges with the sharp bathroom scissors. Then she scooped the rest of her hair up in its customary messy topknot and went down the slope to the bus.
Bett was surprised to see Dan with a rolled-up poster tube on the bus. It didn’t seem like him to bring in a picture from home. Ranger, maybe, but not Dan. Maybe it was a map or a poster for one of the classrooms or something. Anything, for example, had to be better than “The Rocks in Our Rivers Make Our Waters Sing” type of posters weakass Ms. Peters had had up in that English room for a million years.
When they got off the bus, Eddie yelling at them to throw away their shit the next time he dropped them off because he liked a clean bus, dammit, and Bett was leaving wrappers all over the place, Bett saw that Dan was not the only one carrying something. There were ten or twelve other kids with things in their hands, all clustered around Anna at the entrance of the school. Anna was there in an outfit she had clearly made herself, patched pieces of what Bett recognized as Anna’s old clothes, sewn together
and hanging drapily in triangles over her bones. Dan and Mutt eyed each other again, in that yak-chesty way that boys did sometimes, and then each of them turned his attention to Anna, who clearly was the ringleader here.
What was going on? Bett hung back at the outskirts of the group.
“We’re not letting the ass beat us,” Anna was saying firmly. “Here’s tape and Super Tack, you all.” There were at least fifteen kids around her now, all with something in their hands. Bett and Mutt were the only ones standing on the fringe. “GO!”
And they went. Opposite Anna’s wings, on the glass case that held the school’s athletic trophies, Hester put up a picture done in pastel of her mother, her mother caught in a moment of looking tired and spent after a day of work.
Why do all the bitchy ones get to have a talent? Bett wondered.
Other kids attached shadow boxes to the wall with Super Tack, boxes full of tiny, cherished items like rune stones and wee china teacups. When they ran out of room in the foyer, the kids hung their art on the wall down the hall toward the art room itself, which was large and open and had a beautiful glass cherub’s head set high in a transom above the door. Anna herself had drawn another picture, this time of the statue outside of the school, the one with the man supporting the two other soldiers. There were little hatch marks in the man’s coat, and up close you could see that Anna had tried, in small pen-and-ink letters, to write the names of the soldiers that were engraved on the statue itself. She hung the picture now beside the art room door.
Anna really was talented, thought Bett grudgingly. Who’d’ve thought she’d even pay attention to that kind of thing?
“You guys,” Anna was telling her friends as she trimmed the paper around her piece with an X-Acto knife, “I found the best YouTube channel.” But Bett was focused on Mutt, who was looking closely at Anna’s picture.
