by Nancy Rue
“I was trying to keep from hitting you,” the kid said.
His “you” came out as “jew.” Yep. It was Gabe Navarra, the biggest kid in sixth grade, Hispanic through and through, like most people in Los Suenos. He used “hate” as a people-verb when it came to J.J. — or anybody else who didn’t speak English as a second language. Until now, he had never so much as spit in Lucy’s direction. Now he narrowed his eyes at her in a way that would have made Mudge run for cover.
“If I killed you, it woulda been your fault,” he said to her.
“So what?” Lucy said.
Gabe blinked. The whites of his eyes were bright against his ruddy skin.
“If I was dead,” she said, “why would I care whose fault it was?”
He blinked again. The he hissed between his teeth and turned to J.J., who was starting to grin.
“What are you laughin’ at?” Gabe said.
“Nothin’,” J.J. said. The grin evaporated.
“You were laughin’ at me.” Gabe came off the seat of the ATV, and J.J. pulled his hands from his armpits, stiff, but at the ready.
“Hello!” Lucy said. “I could be bleeding to death here.”
Gabe tilted his chin up. “You wouldn’t be sitting there talking if you were bleeding to death. Right?”
Lucy kept her arm hugged to her jacket and managed to stand up. Her face burned. The tear in her jacket was turning red. And if she didn’t get J.J. out of there, he was going to look worse than she did.
She glanced at her watch. 3:10. Barely enough time to get home and destroy the evidence before Aunt Karen pulled up.
“I want to go home,” she said. “I might need stitches.”
“It was your fault,” Gabe said again, and spun his wheels to make an exit.
“Do you really need stitches?” J.J. said when he was gone.
“No, brain child,” Lucy said. “I was just trying to get rid of him.”
J.J. pulled his dark eyebrows nearly down to his nose. “I coulda done that.”
“Before or after he tore you into little pieces? Come on, I gotta get home.”
“Take my bike,” J.J. said. “I’ll fix yours before your dad even knows about it.”
Lucy didn’t go there in her mind. Dad would somehow sense with the eyes he seemed to have inside his brain that she’d gotten into trouble.
But he wasn’t the one she was worried about. She looked at her watch again. She still had time to bury her jacket and sweatshirt in the bottom of the dirty clothes basket, put a couple of bandages on her arm — okay, maybe five — and get into a long-sleeved shirt before Aunt Karen —
But that plan slid down her brain pipe when Lucy rounded the corner from Second Street. The silver Toyota Celica with the Texas license plate was already parked in front of the house. Lucy peeled off her jacket and dropped it behind the century plant. Maybe if she slipped in the back door —
“Lucy Elizabeth Rooney,” said a voice-like-a-supervisor. “What have you done to yourself now?”
3
The meow that rose from behind the century plant didn’t sound as disgusted as Aunt Karen’s voice, even though Mudge emerged with Lucy’s jacket draped across him and only his disgruntled head sticking out.
“Thank you, Mudge,” Lucy whispered to him as she snatched him up, jacket and all. “There’s a can of tuna for you later if you’ll hang with me now.”
She snuggled him against her, careful to keep most of his coat-clad bulk over her arm, and whirled to face Aunt Karen. Her aunt had rounded the corner by then and stood by the fence, black-sweatered arms folded, hazel eyes squinting. Lucy hated it when she did that. She reminded herself to add it to the list of reasons Aunt Karen should move to Australia.
“Hi,” Lucy said.
“Don’t ‘hi’ me. What happened to your face?”
Lucy held back a groan. As bad as it was stinging, it must look like someone had thrown a handful of rocks at her. Actually, someone kind of had.
“I fell,” Lucy said. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“You’re not the one looking at it.” Aunt Karen shook her head, sending one chin-length panel of dark hair against her cheek and another across her forehead. She jerked it out of her eyes. “What did you fall on, a box of tacks?”
“Luce? You okay?”
Lucy did groan then. Dad stood in the front doorway, looking frustrated because he couldn’t see what was going on. Everything would have been fine if Aunt Karen had been late like she usually was. And if she didn’t stick her stumpy little nose into other people’s business.
“What’s going on?” Dad said.
“She hurt herself.” Aunt Karen sounded as if she were announcing that Lucy had just robbed a bank. “I don’t know if she’s going to need stitches or not.”
“Stitches?”
Dad’s voice sharpened to a point. Lucy gritted her teeth.
“I’m fine, Dad,” she said between them.
“She is not ‘fine’.” Aunt Karen came to Lucy and hooked her arm around her back, already pushing her toward the front door. “Her face looks like somebody shot her twelve times with a B.B. gun — ”
“It does not!”
“Have you looked in a mirror?”
“Lucy, what happened?” Dad said.
Lucy wrenched herself away from Aunt Karen and took the front walk in two long steps to get to Dad.
“I just fell off my bike, okay?” she said. “I’m fine — it doesn’t even hurt.”
She tried to edge around her father, but he stopped her with his arm and pulled her to stand in front of him. Before he could get his hands to her face, Aunt Karen charged up to them, voice still in supervisor mode.
“First of all, she doesn’t even have a coat on,” she said, “so I suggest we go inside before we add pneumonia to the mix.”
Aunt Karen turned Dad around with one hand and pushed Lucy inside with the other. Lucy kept going, straight through the entryway toward the hall, until Dad said, “Lucy” — in that way that stopped time, forward motion, and Lucy’s heart.
She froze.
“What happened to your jacket? I know you put it on before you left.”
“How would you know?” Aunt Karen said. She clicked the door shut behind her. “I bet you don’t know half the stuff she gets away with.”
At the same instant that Lucy added yet another item to the move-to-Australia list, she remembered something else.
“My jacket is right here,” she said. She crossed the entryway toward her aunt. “I’m carrying it — see?” she said, and she thrust it, Mudge and all, straight into Aunt Karen’s arms.
A gray-striped head popped from the denim folds and pointed its toothy side at Aunt Karen’s face. Mudge let out a yowl that sounded exactly like, “I hate you!” and Lucy vowed to make that two cans of tuna.
Aunt Karen matched him with a yowl of her own. Flinging her arms out in at least two directions, she stepped back, collided with the table by the door, and set a basket sailing. Candy fanned across the floor, which sent Mudge into a frenzy. He turned in frantic circles, sliding on plastic-wrapped canes and finally leaping between Aunt Karen’s legs. She didn’t stop screaming or f lapping Lucy’s jacket until Mudge was behind the totem pole in the corner. Lucy made a dash through the hallway and dove into the bathroom.
But she didn’t quite get the door closed before Aunt Karen was leaning on it.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “Let me in, Lucy.”
Only because Dad echoed with, “Let her look at you, Luce,” did Lucy back away from the door and allow Aunt Karen to fall into the bathroom. She tripped over the basket of towels and stumbled against the sink — and Lucy plastered a hand against her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. When she drew it back, it was speckled in blood that sobered her up like a splash of cold water.
“Yeah,” Aunt Karen said. “Look.”
She took Lucy by the shoulders and turned her to face the tile-framed mirror. Lucy had to admi
t she did look like she’d fallen on a box of tacks — very large tacks.
“I don’t even want to know what happened,” Aunt Karen said.
“I do,” Dad said from outside the door.
Lucy sighed at the bedraggled picture of herself in the mirror.
“I fell on my bike trying to get away from an ATV.” She shrugged for Aunt Karen’s benefit. “When it went past me, it sprayed stuff in my face, that’s all.”
“Did any get in your eyes?” Dad’s voice sounded ready to pinch off in the middle.
“No,” Lucy said at the same time that Aunt Karen grabbed her face with both hands and jerked it close to hers.
“Ow!” Lucy said.
“What? What happened?” Dad said.
Aunt Karen f lipped her hair toward the door. “She’s just whining. I’ve got it handled, Ted.”
“Does she need stitches?”
“No.” She squinted into Lucy’s face. “What she needs is a good smack upside the head.”
Lucy pulled away, wrenched the faucet on, and leaned over the sink.
“I can do it,” she said.
“We’re going to need tweezers . . . hydrogen peroxide . . .”
Lucy could hear her pawing through the basket on the table under the window.
“I can’t believe you don’t have any Neosporin.” Huge sigh. “Yes, I can.”
“What do you need?” Dad said.
Aunt Karen sighed again. “Nothing. We’re fine.”
“That’s right,” Lucy muttered. “We are.”
If Aunt Karen got that, she didn’t let on. “I’m going to need a latte after this,” she said. “Can you make that happen, Ted?”
“Sure,” Dad said.
Lucy heard that thing in his voice — the cut-off sound when somebody found something for him to do because they thought he couldn’t handle what the rest of the grown-ups were doing. She scrubbed at her face and refused to whimper, or even wince.
When she stood up straight, her face was raw-looking, but clean.
“Let me see,” Aunt Karen said, coming at her with a pair of tweezers.
“I got it all,” Lucy said. “Where did you get those?”
“From the bottom of that basket. Nobody around here uses them, obviously.” She lifted her eyebrows, which always reminded Lucy of very long, perfect commas. “I’ll teach you how to use these on your brows at some point.”
“Hello! No!” Lucy said. She pulled her head back, but Aunt Karen just shook hers. “I’m not going to do it now. I just want to see if you got all the rocks out of your face. Come here.”
Lucy let her peer until she finally seemed satisfied that there were no minute particles of dust in Lucy’s pores.
“I don’t think you’ll scar at least,” Aunt Karen said. “I can’t say the same for your sweatshirt — oh my gosh!”
Lucy tried to contract her arm up into her tattered sleeve, but Aunt Karen’s fingernails snagged the cloth so she could gape at Lucy’s cut as if her forearm were half-amputated.
“Don’t make a big deal out of it, okay?” Lucy said between her teeth. “Dad’ll just get upset.”
“As well he should be!”
But Aunt Karen lowered her voice and scoured out the wound and poured what seemed to Lucy to be half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide into it. By the time it was bandaged up with strips from an old, clean pillowcase and Aunt Karen had ranted under her breath about the lack of first-aid items in “this house,” Lucy was in more pain than she’d been in before Aunt Karen started doctoring. She hoped she’d still be able to write, because the first chance she got, she was going to add, “Because she calls OUR home ‘this house,’ ” to that list of reasons.
Just in case Dad should take a full survey of her limbs to make sure nothing was broken, Lucy donned a long sleeved T-shirt and another sweatshirt before she joined him and Aunt Karen in the kitchen. They sat across the table from each other — Dad mug-less, Aunt Karen sipping from the cup with the big butterfly on it that Lucy always drank her hot chocolate from because it had been her mother’s. She hugged her arms around herself to keep from snatching it, latte and all, right out of Aunt Karen’s hand.
“What can I get you, Luce?” Dad said.
His eyes came up to search for her. She scooted a chair close to him and rested her head against his shoulder.
“I’m good,” she said.
“Are they going to start calling you Scarface now?”
“No.” Lucy grinned. “Just ‘Klutz.’ ”
Dad chuckled. Aunt Karen didn’t.
“I don’t see what’s funny about any of this,” she said. She licked her lips. Sometimes Lucy counted how many times her aunt licked her lips in a single visit — and how many times she had to put on new lip gloss.
“She’s a kid,” Dad said. “Accidents happen.”
“Yeah.” Aunt Karen tapped the rim of Mom’s mug. “To girls who go out in the desert and play chicken with ATVs.”
“I wasn’t — ”
Aunt Karen’s hand went up like a stop sign. “You know what — we’ve had this conversation how many times?”
Lucy grunted. Twelve hundred.
“Well, I’m done.”
Good. Me too.
Aunt Karen pushed her latte aside and covered Dad’s hand on the tabletop with both of hers. Her white-tipped, squared-off nails looked dangerous against his wrists. But her eyes went to Lucy.
“Your dad and I have been talking,” she said.
“About what?” Lucy said.
“About the fact that you don’t have a good female influence in your life on a day-to-day basis.”
Lucy blinked. “Mrs. Gomez is a female.” She didn’t add that she and her teacher didn’t talk to each other much beyond, “Lucy, do you have your homework?” and “No, my cat ate it.”
“I said a ‘good’ influence,” Aunt Karen said. “If she were good, she wouldn’t let you stay in that special ed class — ”
Lucy’s neck stiffened. “It’s not special ed. It’s called a support class.”
“It’s a lazy class you are far too smart to be in.”
Aunt Karen didn’t know what she was talking about. Mrs. Gomez didn’t think Lucy was dumb or lazy. She just left her alone.
“I know you’re probably going to pitch a fit,” Aunt Karen said, “but it’s time for you to come to El Paso and live with me.”
Lucy jerked her head up from Dad’s shoulder.
“Now just hear me out,” Aunt Karen said.
“I don’t think so.” Lucy scraped her chair back. “I have stuff to do in my room.”
She didn’t want to hear the rest of it. But she still could, as Aunt Karen said, “You’re growing up — you need a strong woman in your life — ” and Dad said, “Luce, now wait — ” and Marmalade uttered a meek meow and f led from Dad’s lap. Lucy f led too — down the hall and into her bedroom and behind the slammed door. She sank to the floor and buried her face in her arms, and over and over, she just said, “I won’t go. I won’t go. I won’t go.”
A good ten minutes passed before the Dad-tap came on the door. Long enough for Lucy to move to the bed and kick the giant soccer ball off because she didn’t want to be close to anything that reminded her of HIM right now. She was lying on her back, passing her real soccer ball back and forth between the feet she extended above her when he said, “Luce, may I come in?” She had to think about it.
After she didn’t answer, the door creaked open and Dad put his salt-and-pepper head inside. “Is it safe, or should I duck?”
Lucy looked at the stuffed soccer ball, but the urge had passed. “Come in,” she said.
“You okay?”
“Yes.”
“You left in a hurry.”
Lucy rolled over onto her stomach and stuffed the ball under her.
“I was getting bored with that conversation,” she said.
“Really.”
There were no question marks in the lines around his mouth, so sh
e didn’t answer. It wasn’t being rude not to answer if he wasn’t actually asking her anything.
“I just found it kind of interesting,” Dad said. “Is there a clear path?”
Lucy pushed the stuffed ball out of his way with her foot and checked the floor for other debris.
“You’re good to go,” she said.
Dad made his way to the rocking chair, barely touching the wall with the tips of his fingers. When he sat down and rested his hands on his knees, he turned his face square at her, as if he could see her. Lucy was sure somehow he could — and knew she was scrunched into a sitting-up ball with her arms wrapped around her knees.
“You start,” he said, “because I can tell you’re about to crack open like an egg.”
“I’m fine.”
“Champ, I know better.”
She cracked. “How come you talked to her about me going there to live before you said anything to me?”
“Who says I talked to her about it?”
“She did.”
“She said she and I were talking, which, as you know with your Aunt Karen, means she was talking to me.”
Lucy unfolded. “She made it sound like — ”
“I know how she made it sound, and I’ve already spoken to her about that.”
“Is she gone?” Lucy said hopefully.
Dad smiled. “I said I spoke to her. I didn’t say I threw her out.”
“Oh.” Lucy let her air trail away like a tired party balloon. “She always does that.”
“Does what?”
“Tries to make me think you’re on her side.”
“I didn’t know there were sides.” Dad eased the chair back on its rockers.
“There are, and I’m not on the one she’s on, wherever that is.”
“Right now, she’s getting our Christmas presents out of her car.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know what you mean — and no, Lucy — ” Dad tilted his head to the side, eyes wavering. “I’m not going to send you off to live with her.”
Lucy melted back into her pillows like a puddle from ice. “That would be so hideous.”
“Good word,” said Dad, who liked good words. “But I’m not sure it applies here.”
