I arched an eyebrow. “You think we’ll find a body in the next room?”
“Maybe.”
We both took a breath and bolted for the door. Dylan won. He blocked me with his chair, and I couldn’t get around him. I laughed and laughed—that crazy corpsing kind of laughter that actors get when they can’t say a line without convulsing. Eventually I dropped to the floor, and rolled from side to side. “I’m dying,” I groaned. “You’re killing me.”
Dylan pulled his crutch out and jabbed me lightly in the shoulder.
“Die, you crazy bitch! Die, die hence!”
36
Are You Rampant?
Eventually I recovered. I sat up and regarded him seriously. “Why did you get me that notebook when you went to town? Do you think I’m crazy?”
“Hell yeah!” Dylan laughed.
“Why?”
“Well, most people try and avoid trouble. You go for it with open arms. Also, for someone who wears a lot of black, you’re very colorful. You’re like this . . . action feature where there’s so much going on that the audience can’t tell who they’re supposed to be rooting for.”
“You think I’m larger than life,” I cracked, puffing my cheeks out like a cane toad. “Blah.”
“I don’t mean it like that. It’s supposed to be a compliment.”
“Oh.” I was feeling strange flutters in my belly. “Oh.”
Dylan was staring at me, not smiling. I looked down and rearranged my shirt. He nodded at me in the deliberate-casual manner of a high school drug dealer. “So who’s the guy you were talking about?”
“What guy?” I remembered my rant. “Oh. Ben.”
“What’s Ben like?”
I shrugged. With Chloe I’d talk about Ben to distraction, but suddenly I was having trouble identifying what it was I actually liked about him. Ben was a beautiful face, a challenge. He was doing his electrician’s apprenticeship. He was nineteen but still lived with his parents. He put most of his wages into his Monaro. He liked beer and pot. I thought he liked me, but now that I was once removed, I wasn’t sure about that, either.
Dylan was waiting. I said, “Ben’s follically challenged. He bet his friends he’d grow a totally gay moustache for Mo-vember—the charity thing?”
Dylan looked baffled.
“Guys get sponsored to grow mustaches in November. It’s this collective Burt Reynolds fetish. Anyway, Ben tried and he couldn’t grow one. And now he has this”—I giggled again—“this tuft.” I put a finger under my nose. “Here.” I started laughing. “And he won’t shave it off.”
When Dylan was just about to smile his eyes went first, and the skin on his face seemed to lift and lighten. His mouth wiggled. “A tuft?”
“A tuft.”
Dylan and I laughed about the tuft even more than we’d laughed about the body. It was like Fraser’s house ran on nitrous oxide. If ever the wave of hilarity died down, one of us would bleat “Tuft!” and the laughter would start all over again. I put my head between my legs and remembered to breathe. When I finally looked up Dylan was leaning back in his chair, smiling lazily down at me. A lock of hair kept falling across his eye, and I pictured myself crawling over to him, placing my hands on his knees, putting my face close to his, and softly blowing. Where had that come from? My blood sugar levels must have been dipping.
“I touched Fleur’s breast once,” Dylan confessed. “The right one. We were doing a trust exercise where you have to sit opposite each other and ‘read’ each other’s faces with your hands.”
Dylan walked his hand down an imaginary face.
“I put my hand lower and she didn’t say anything. I traveled under her top, over her bra. Her breast felt like an ice pack—that kind of consistency—only it wasn’t cold, it was warm. And her nipple—”
“Stop!”
“What? We’re just talking.”
“Oh—as long as we’re just talking.” I grinned. “Have you touched any other breasts . . . since Fleur?” I liked the way he called them breasts. It seemed politer somehow.
Dylan shook his head.
“You could touch mine.” It was the strangest thing to hear myself saying something I hadn’t thought through. There was no laughing now. I was aware of our breathing, and how hot and clammy the room was. I moved toward Dylan and he moved back; he actually rolled backward in his chair to get away from me. He said, “Are you rampant or what?”
Just as my heart was imploding, a noise exploded from the garage next door.
“What’s that?” Dylan asked.
“Bird. I think.” I couldn’t look at him.
37
Healing Properties
The noise settled down and was now recognizable as a car engine.
“Someone needs a muffler.” Dylan frowned.
I squeezed past him and ran outside, across the porch to the garage. The dune buggy looked shiny and tantalizing. Bird was under the hood.
“Holy spark plugs!” I said. “You did it!”
Bird shuffled backward and turned to smile at me, but his smile died as soon as he saw Dylan in the doorway. He did his fitty thing, brushing his chin into his neck, looking up at me. Dylan wheeled in. He was doing his flash push, where he just jammed his hands down once and let the momentum carry him forward. I guess it was the equivalent of strutting.
“What’s he doing here?” Bird’s voice was brittle. He was holding a wrench—it would have been menacing if it had been anyone other than Bird.
“Neville’s making us clean up the house.”
“What’s he doing with that?” Bird nodded to Fraser’s notebook. He came forward and snatched it from Dylan’s lap. Dylan held his hands up and murmured, “Whoa! White flag.” In that second he sounded like Craig.
Bird climbed into the dune buggy and sat in the driver’s seat. He rested Fraser’s notebook on the steering wheel and started flipping through the pages, occasionally glancing up to shoot Dylan a look that was half contempt and half fear and wholly intriguing.
I nudged Dylan. “Context please.” He didn’t answer. He just rocked a little. I couldn’t read his face. All I knew was that it was getting darker.
Bird kept his head down. He had a protective hand across his binoculars. I flashed to Olive saying they trashed his binoculars and instinctively knew who “they” were. Not “Janey and them,” but Dylan and Craig, the comedy duo.
“You like seeing me in this, don’t you?” Dylan hammered his hands on his chair arms. He was staring at Bird, and his chin was wobbling.
I touched his arm. “Dylan—”
He shook me off. “No, I saw his face at orientation. He was smiling.”
Bird flipped the pages of the notebook harder and faster. And a smile started to grow on his face. Dylan reached for his crutches.
“Oh, shit,” I whispered.
Dylan raised the crutch. Bird and I flinched. But then Dylan brought his crutch down limply to the floor and hung his head. He was silent for a moment and then he started head-banging, slowly. I crouched down to retrieve the crutch and put it back with its mate. Dylan looked up and his eyes were wet. He sighed audibly, and spoke in a heavy voice. “Whatever, whatever. It’s fair enough. I was a shit to him. I was a shit to him camp after camp. I was a shit to the lot of them. Fuck it.” He looked past my shoulder to his old victim. “Just don’t feel like you have to hide it, Bird. You know?”
Then he wheeled around and out. I opened the car door and got in next to Bird.
“He’s not a bad guy,” I said, mostly to myself. “He’s just upset.”
Bird gripped the steering wheel. I closed my eyes and put my head on his shoulder and imagined us driving out of the garage and into the dunes. I saw it like it was the trailer to an action film. But in the final image it wasn’t Bird sitting next to me, it was Dylan.
Bird passed Fraser’s notebook to me.
“Give him this.” I held the notebook loosely. “It shows where the salt lake is.” Bird was nodding meaningfully.
“The salt lake that has healing properties.”
“I thought Trevor said Fraser was loopy-loo.”
“Fraser was a visionary.” Bird got out and resumed fiddling under the hood.
I studied Fraser’s map.
Bird’s head popped to the side. “Can you keep the rest of Fraser’s books for me? Hide them in here somewhere?”
“Sure. You don’t really think—” Bird slammed the hood and beamed at me. Life was not complicated for him. Things were either good or bad. Roslyn said that to be a good person you had to believe in God, and to believe in God you had to be open as a child. You had to be open to believe in anything. I wasn’t open. I was tight as a trap. I smoothed my hand over the notebook’s dusty cover. Five minutes ago “healing” was just a word in Norma’s New Age lexicon. Now it seemed like a good prospect.
38
Yesterday’s Girl
Sarita accosted me at lunchtime. “Riley, you must tell me what you are going to do for the talent show.”
“Are you out of your curry-munching mind?”
Her face fell.
“I was hoping you would help me . . . come into the light.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I no longer wish to be ‘in the wings.’ I wish to be in the light.” She gripped her braids and tugged on them. “I thought you were going to help me metamorphose. You said so in your memory cross.”
“Oh God, I did, didn’t I?” Suddenly I remembered the Hella Hot Oil. I seized Sarita by her shoulders and herded her back to the cabin, the whole time prating like a has-been on an infomercial. “Are you tired of looking like yesterday’s girl? Got fifteen minutes to radically change your appearance?” Sarita trundled along in front of me, delighted and excited.
I stopped at the kitchen for a cup of oats, one egg, a lemon, and two buckets of warm water all courtesy of Olive. Back in the cabin I fixed my sarong around Sarita’s neck and swiveled her chair away from the mirror. I mixed the ingredients up in Fleur’s thermos and applied it to Sarita’s face with a plastic spoon.
Sarita screwed up her nose. “What is that?”
“It’s organic,” I told her. “Don’t speak—it’ll crack.”
I rubbed Vaseline into her eyebrows and began tweezing. Sarita squeaked at first, but by the time I was on to her middle brow she had become beauty’s bitch. She remained stoic throughout the haircut, despite what must have looked like random hacking. Her eyes widened at the growing pile of hair on the floor, but she didn’t speak. When my fingers accidentally lighted on her throat I could feel her pulse going like the clappers.
Haircutting is a meditative act for me. As I worked away I thought about Dylan’s accident, and what Bird had said about the salt lake.
“Sarita,” I said, “do you remember when Trevor was talking about the salt lake?”
She nodded.
“Do you think that it’s true that it has healing properties?”
Sarita toggled her head.
“I wonder if Neville would let us go there. Say, as a special excursion?” I combed some stray hairs and snipped them diagonally. “I bet if enough of us wanted to he’d let us go. What do you think? I think I’ll ask him. It can’t hurt to ask, right?”
Sarita said, “Unnn hs isssian.” Her face mask cracked just a fraction.
“Wait.” I wiped the goo off with a flannel. “What was that?”
“I said you could do a petition.”
Sarita was bobbling her head from side to side. She had that worried look again. “I feel different. I feel like something is missing.”
“Well, you look gorgeous,” I told her. “Good-bye, extracurricular Asian nerd.” I swung her chair around. “Hello, Hindi Honey.”
“Oh, my,” Sarita breathed.
Her hair sat just below her chin. It framed her face and brought her fine features into light. It was almost space age in its shiny, solid perfection. But it was going to necessitate a whole new wardrobe. I trawled through her clothes, making reject-button sound effects the whole while.
“No, no, no.” I fretted. “It’s all so Baptist.”
“I don’t understand,” said Sarita.
“You need a trousseau. That’s French for fuck-clothes.”
“Riley. I said nothing earlier because I didn’t want to alienate you with my intellect, but I parlez-vous,” Sarita said. “The French do not have a word for . . .”
“Go on, say it!” I dared her.
Sarita zipped her lips.
“Every language has its limitations,” I said airily.
I looked at my clothes strewn all over the floor. “It’s a shame you’re so tiny. Unless . . .” I found my peasant blouse and tossed it to her. “Put this on.”
Sarita obeyed. She looked like she’d stepped into a muumuu.
“Wear it with the silver belt,” I suggested. I walked around her in a circle. “Better. Now you just need some tights.” I found my scissors again and cut the sleeves off my goth Lolita dress. Sarita gasped. “What are you doing?”
“Re-fashioning.” I passed the sleeves to her. “Wear these like leggings.”
Sarita stepped into them. I walked around her again, nodding slowly. “That’s good.” I smiled. “No shoes with this outfit—okay?” Sarita was staring in the mirror, swishing her skirt, beaming. I lay back on the bed. “And now, my work is done.”
Fleur waltzed in then with a volleyball under her arm. When she saw Sarita she dropped the ball. “Wow.” She turned to me. “Did you do that?”
I sat up, leaning on my elbows. “Why? You want some work done?”
“No,” Fleur sputtered unconvincingly.
Sarita was experimenting with my eyeliner now, drawing artful curlicues on her temples. She turned to me. “What do you think?”
I heard myself saying, “My friend, my friend, I have taught you well.” A little bell went off somewhere in my head, but I chose to ignore it.
39
Petition
The afternoon was gorgeous, all golden and hazy with a still blue sky that looked like it had been freshly painted. I sat on the smokers’ bench with Fraser’s notebook and watched the Bronzewings’ volleyball match. It almost looked like fun. They were laughing anyhow. Fleur was in the umpire’s chair, her hand never far from the whistle. A couple of times I saw her look my way with a half smile on her face. It crossed my mind that she might be trying to befriend me. The idea wasn’t as repellent as it once might have been. Maybe I had been infected. My hand marked the page with the map to the salt lake. The symbol for the lake was small and red, and shaped like a kidney bean. I touched the spot and felt its pull. I put Fraser’s notebook to one side and took out my own bamboo-covered one. And then I wrote: Petition. In the interests of salvation and personal healing, we, the undersigned Honeyeaters, request permission to visit the salt lake. If not tomorrow, then the day after.
Sarita and Bird were on my side and the twins were malleable, but Fleur, Richard, and Ethan would require craftiness. I tackled Fleur first. She looked from the page to me and frowned.
“What’s this?”
“A petition.”
She read and then pushed the page aside with the back of her hand. “I don’t want to go into the desert. It’s too hot. It makes my hair frizzy.”
“If you sign, I’ll cut your hair and frizz will be your friend.”
Fleur squinted around as if we were being watched. She hesitated, then picked up the pen and signed with a flourish.
Ethan and Richard were playing chess on one of the picnic tables. I approached with my happy camper face on high. “Have you heard?” I bubbled. “Sarita’s getting Live Fresh to film the talent show.”
“What?” Richard and Ethan looked up from their game.
“Yeah. She’s contacted the host and everything. The only thing is . . .” I leaned in with the petition. “She has to get everyone’s permission.”
Ethan rocked excitedly. “Way cool! I love that show. You know that ‘Candid Christians
’ segment? It’s so funny.”
Richard brought his queen home. “Checkmate. Where do we sign?”
I saved Craig until last. I hadn’t spoken to him since the merry-go-round. All my pointed looks seemed to bounce right off him. He was impervious. He galumphed around camp with his big sexy legs and his killer smile, breaking hearts like old people break wind—that is to say , a lot. Every night his voice rose up above the campfire, rich and tremulous and stirring. It was hard to hate him when he sang. He still tried with Dylan, too—every activity, no matter how physical, he would come up to Dylan and encourage him to take part. I was getting sucked in, floundering in the face of his... well, his face. I almost wondered if his shoving Bird was an aberration. But then I’d overhear him talking and know that yes, everything came easily to him, everything except humility.
I cornered him outside the counselors’ annex.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
“Concentrate,” I told myself. I, too, would be impervious.
“Would you sign this petition for me?”
He read it, then looked up at me. “Why?”
“I just thought it would be fun.”
“They won’t be able to swing it. Off-site activities are set months before we even get here.” Craig shrugged, and I could tell he thought he was making a grand gesture. “Sure, I’ll sign it if you want, Riley. Whatevs.”
He signed, but when I tried to get the pen back, he kept hold of it. Tugging ensued. I gave up. “This is corny,” I said. Craig stared at me with his lips pressed together, his eyes dark and sly.
“What?” I snapped.
He trailed a finger down my arm. “I was wondering if you wanted to . . .”
I shook him off. “Been there, done that, according to the rumors.”
“Hey—I didn’t say that. It was Fleur.” He smiled stupidly and did a quick crotch adjustment—re-crotching, Chloe calls it.
I stared at him, unimpressed. “Itchy?”
He laughed again, but something in his eyes had changed and suddenly he didn’t look so alpha dog. He moved his mouth around and tugged on his shorts.
Everything Beautiful Page 12
