Good Girls

by Glen Hirshberg

  Oh, yes. The Whistler thought he knew whom this boy loved.

  Better and better. More tingly by the moment, these two were making him. Shrinking deeper into the melting shadows at the tree line, the Whistler watched. A logging truck lumbered past, blocked his view, revealed it again. The Asian girl had given up or gotten tired and slid sideways into the crook of her not-lover’s arm. The boy stroked her hair, looked up the road, looked right into the woods—almost right at the Whistler—but saw nothing. His ridiculous dart waggled like an antenna, as though it could sense the lurker in the shadows, even if the boy couldn’t.

  That made the Whistler want to clap his hands and laugh. He checked the road toward town, saw no more trucks coming, no one moving down there, everything shuttered and dull and dumb and quiet. In all the world, there were just these two, in the pink and hot new morning. All alone, with no one to sing for them.

  Surely, he thought, someone should do something about that.

  And without thinking further—knowing it would hurt—he slipped from the shadows and stepped out into the early-morning sunlight.

  10

  “Oh my God, you’re so annoying,” Kaylene said, burrowing closer against Jack’s side, tilting her face to the morning sun so it could start to bake the booze out of her.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sauced,” said Jack.

  “You are the Boy of Annoy. You’re like a Pac-Man ghost.”

  “A sauced Pac-Man ghost.”

  “I move away, and there you come. I move toward you, and there you are. You’re just there. Period. Always. Boy of Annoy.”

  “That’s why you love me.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Kaylene squeezed her eyes shut and let herself feel it. She let Jack hear it, just this one and only time, if he was listening.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw Jack running a hand over his face. He accidentally dislodged the dart off his forehead, and it landed in his lap. “I’m pretty drunk,” he said, and licked the suction end of the dart to reaffix it.

  “Uch. I’m trying to decide if it’s the sight or the thought of what you just did that’s making me want to puke.”

  “It’s drinking while Human Curling. I really have tried to talk to you about that.”

  Kaylene snorted, poked him in his pudgy side, and sat up. She wished, briefly, that she was more drunk. That either of them was.

  “Actually, it’s you and Rebecca.”

  “There is no me and Rebecca.”

  “That’s what’s annoying. That you feel that way, both of you, and yet neither one of you will—”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, dart thrumming as he looked down at his hand, which was now holding her hand. “I really am, you know.”

  “That’s why I love you,” said Kaylene, and let go of him. She put her own palms to the bus-stop bench—wet with dew, warming to the morning—started to stand, glanced toward town, and froze.

  It wasn’t so much the guy standing there, but the fact that she knew instantly, could tell from the way he stood, that he’d been there some time. He was right in the middle of the road, not twenty feet away. There’d been no car, no bus. Where had he even come from?

  “Um. Jack?” she said.

  The man in the road pushed the sombrero back on his head, took a step forward, and smiled.

  Everything went wrong at once. Sound, for one; suddenly, Kaylene realized she couldn’t hear the woods; she couldn’t even seem to hear herself breathing. She was pretty sure she’d gasped. But she hadn’t heard any gasp.

  Also, her mouth had pursed, as if her lips were mirroring the Sombrero-Guy’s, which had also pursed. It was as though they were kissing, from fifteen feet away.

  But he wasn’t making kissing noises, or motions. Even when his tongue snuck from his mouth, he wasn’t suggesting. He was wetting his lips. He started to whistle. That, she could hear.

  And the sensations that caused …

  As though her nerves had erupted through her skin. If she looked down, she thought, she would see them all breaking into the air, shimmering and seething on the surface of her like mackerel.

  As though everything inside her was dancing, swaying. Except her. Unless this was her?

  As though everything she’d felt in the past twelve hours—her crush on Jack, her love for her friends, her guilt, her exhaustion, the sheer glee of being here, being her, being—had been sucked into that sound, that melody he was making, which was one she knew and couldn’t name, had never actually heard. But no, she had heard it, knew it well, and it was ridiculous, certainly not a melody that had ever done this to her before. The words just coming out wrong. So he’d have to say he loves me … in a song …

  And now, she was crying—crying!—as the Sombrero-Man started forward. Swaggered, really, though he did keep tugging his shirtsleeves down, almost seemed to be trying to stuff his hands inside them, and he was doing something awkward and not swaggery with his head, scrunching it down in his collar, tipping and re-tipping that ridiculous hat like a sun umbrella. Still, he whistled, came forward. Kaylene felt one of her legs draw up on the bench in front of her, felt her arms encircle it and hold on, as though it were the post of a pier in a hurricane. Also, her lower lip was pulsing, right in the center; she half-imagined she could see the exact spot beating, blinking, like the little light on top of a buoy. Most of all, she heard that whistle in her ears, burrowing into her brain like a siren or a baby’s cry, pushing her away, pulling her to it.

  He’ll have to say he loves me …

  She was vaguely aware, as the Sombrero-Man reached her, that Jack was squirming, bouncing up and down like the little boy he was, forehead-dart quivering. He was making some sort of sound, too, definitely a complaint, a protest, though it didn’t seem to have words, and it didn’t amount to much.

  Good, she thought. You squirm for once. Then she thought maybe Jack should get off this bench and get out of here, for his own sake. She thought he should run.

  Then she thought she should.

  Somehow, one of Jack’s hands had found its way to her shoulder. For one moment, Kaylene was impressed by this. Then the Sombrero-Man was before her, blocking the sun. Gently, as though brushing away a seedpod, he flicked Jack’s hand off, bent forward, and slid his own fingers over the front of Kaylene’s T-shirt, up her breasts to her throat.

  Briefly—or maybe for a while, she had no idea—he just stayed like that. She could feel her pulse against the webbing of his thumb. I’m so warm, she thought. And it really was amazing, remarkable, feeling her own life beating. Not soft, either. Punching.

  He was leaning in, now, the Sombrero-Man, his lips spreading. With no particular emotion, just a sort of interest, Kaylene wondered if he was going to kiss her, bite her, or whistle into the hollow of her neck.

  But he did none of those things. He froze instead, his lips inches from her skin, her seething, surging skin. His shadowed eyes were open, glittering, right in front of hers. But he wasn’t looking at hers.

  Because he was locked on Jack?

  From her unique vantage point—at once in the moment and beside it, in her own skin and in these others’—Kaylene watched it happen, to both of them. Jack had finally gone still, and now he just stared in dumb, useless panic—unless that was a challenge?—out of the blue of his irises. Several seconds passed before he blinked, lowered his head. Poor, pathetic little wolf, bowing to the better wolf.

  That was interesting, Kaylene supposed. But not nearly as interesting as what was happening to the Sombrero-Man. His hand had slid farther up Kaylene’s neck, closed over the beating part. Every time Jack glanced at that hand, the Sombrero-Man tightened his grip, just a little. Just enough so that Kaylene could feel it, and Jack could see it. Also, the guy’s ridiculous mouth kept spreading wider.

  Was that a grin? Kaylene wondered, listening to herself rasp. She also wondered, with the exact same detachment, if she was going to die. But she was thinking more about the Sombrero-Man’s grin at the moment he finally close
d her windpipe shut, slid sideways across her, and kissed Jack full on the mouth.

  Even as she strangled, started to twitch in the monster’s hands, Kaylene couldn’t get her eyes off his face. It was the way his eyes widened, glancing back and forth between Jack and her, drinking them in. Marveling. Discovering.

  Like a scientist or a surgeon, the Sombrero-Man poked his tongue into Jack’s mouth, which opened to meet it. Kaylene could see that Jack was screaming—in his eyes; he wasn’t making any sound—and she could also feel him flowering, right there beside her, unfolding against the Sombrero-Man’s other hand, which had slid into his crotch.

  Maybe that wasn’t screaming at all, Kaylene thought. Maybe that was yearning. Kaylene thought she could have told him a thing or two about yearning.

  And that thought woke her up. She started to kick, tried to scream, but nothing came out. She tried to pummel Jack in his ribs, wake him, too, except he was already awake. Maybe. He seemed to know full well what was happening, what the Sombrero-Man was doing to Kaylene. And yet Jack went right on kissing him anyway.

  It was her kicking, she thought, that brought the Sombrero-Man’s attention back to her face. And then she suspected it wasn’t.

  He’s watching me watch, she realized, as the road and the trees and Starkey’s Pizza and the morning sun winked in her vision, went dark, went light, and her fingernails scrabbled wildly at the world she was leaving, did not want to leave. He wants me to see.

  His lips had come off Jack’s, but just far enough so that Kaylene could see Jack strain forward, try to reclaim them. The Sombrero-Man watched her watch that, too.

  The last thing she saw before consciousness fled her was the electrified smile on the monster’s face, and the last thing she heard was his whistling.

  11

  Rebecca awoke sticky and sweating, her threadbare sheets clinging to her legs like bits of cobweb. She glanced toward the clock, through the shafts of dusty sunlight diving down into her basement room, and blinked in surprise: 11:42.

  Actual sleep. Hours of it.

  Peeling back the sheet, she sat up into the hot air streaming like blown breath from her clanking window fan. For a few moments, she stayed put, staring into the fan’s face with its bent blades lurching around and around, its gray, scratched frame with Kenmore #1 Summer etched into the brow.

  “My number-one fan,” Rebecca murmured for the first time in a while, leaned forward, kissed the on-off switch, and stopped, abruptly. Air buffeted her chest, pushed past her. She held still and listened.

  But all she heard was what she always heard: the fan clanking; the Rudzinskis’ baby whimpering out its colic upstairs. No one had whispered. Even the whispering in her head had gone.

  And no one had died. No one had jumped, as least as far as she knew. No one was coming to turn her out of this room for her failures, send her off to her next not-home. Last night, she had made mistakes, the way people do, every day. And she’d admitted them, done what she could about them, and then come back to her bed and gotten some sleep, so she could get up and get on. The way she did.

  She’d spent the afternoon fulfilling her duties at Halfmoon House. For the first couple hours, Amanda set her sweeping out the pantry and cleaning the upstairs bathroom. Rebecca suspected that that was indeed intended as punishment, not so much for last night’s crisis call as for obsessing too much over it. For showing up here afterward instead of going straight home—to her own home, the one she’d made by herself—to sleep. Around 3:00, having finished with the toilet and the floor, she came out of the bathroom with her bucket and sponges and caught Danni, the older and more vicious of the two current residents, crouching in the hall outside little Trudi’s door.

  Poor Danni, was Rebecca’s thought, watching the teenager lean closer to the keyhole, her waist-length blond hair spilling all over her back, hiding her face. Too smart for her own good. Lonelier than most people imagined it was possible to be.

  And, most days, nasty as fuck.

  Which was very likely why Amanda and Joel had held off filling the other two beds, Rebecca realized. Danni needed too much minding. They would never, ever send her back to whatever orphanage they’d found her in. But they would also never let her hurt anyone else in their care.

  For a few months this past spring, Rebecca had actually felt like she was forming a connection with Danni. She’d introduced her to Smackdown online, Danni had shown her Minecraft, and they’d secret shared eye rolls and sighs about Amanda. But then Trudi had arrived and given Danni a target.

  Even from the bathroom doorway, Rebecca could hear the little girl in her room, murmuring and chirping away to herself, though less loudly than she used to; at least she’d listened to Rebecca about that. She was saying something about leaves, about leaping into leaves. Then came a high-pitched, half-whispered “Waaaaahhhh…”

  Snorting into her hands, Danni stood, started slowly turning the doorknob.

  “Get away from there,” Rebecca snapped. She’d meant to say it lightly. Danni still needed her, too, or needed someone, anyway. But right now, Rebecca’s own priorities were absolutely clear.

  Danni didn’t flinch or even seem surprised, and she didn’t step away from the door. Instead, she turned. Under the cascading hair, she was grinning. “The Loon’s at it again,” she mouthed, pointed at the door, and pulled her too-small pink T-shirt down, glancing at her own breasts as she did. The gesture was still self-conscious, at least, and would probably stay that way a little longer.

  Laying her bucket against the wall and her sponges in the bucket, Rebecca edged forward. She kept her voice low and tried to warm it up. “She’s playing, you mean? Putting on a play to entertain herself? Being creative, the way brilliant girls like her do? Like you probably did?”

  “She’s talking to her socks.”

  Trudi’s door burst open so hard that even Danni flinched back, stepped sideways. And there Trudi was, kinked hair pulled back, Amanda-style, into hard braids at either ear, so that the part along her scalp looked like a half-open lid, something you could pry up and climb into. She had her hands—encased in yellow socks—on the hips of her thrift-store jeans, the ones Amanda bought in bulk and kept in clean, tight stacks, separated by size, on shelves in the basement coat closet. The pants had too many pockets for a nine-year-old, or anyone, and too much torso; they made whoever wore them look—and feel—like a cartoon character. Sponge-orphan Square-butt.

  “Better than talking to you,” Trudi spat.

  Rebecca burst into applause. To her surprise, Danni did, too. In that instant, she was once more what every kid who’d ever come here had been: just another kid who’d never been a kid, no one’s daughter, maybe no one’s friend. Rebecca stopped clapping. She wanted to gather both these girls to her.

  But she was no one’s mom. Not even anyone’s caretaker.

  “Come on, Rebecca,” Trudi barked, marching past her down the hall toward Amanda, who had just come up the stairs. “We’re going out.”

  Rebecca watched the little girl’s receding back. The white scratches Trudi still gave herself in her sleep slanted through her black skin like leftover scrawl on a badly erased chalkboard. Amanda didn’t touch or say anything to the little girl as she marched past. She just stepped out of the way.

  “Well?” Amanda said to Rebecca. “You heard her.”

  “I’m coming, too,” Danni said, generating an impressively defiant tone as she faced Amanda’s folded arms, even though she knew what that stance meant as well as Rebecca did.

  “In a couple hours, maybe,” Amanda said. “When you’re done with the work I’d have Rebecca doing if I could trust you to take care of other people, yet.”

  Danni opened her mouth, actually gathered breath for a response, before Amanda lifted a warning finger. The finger waggled in the air between them.

  “Ah-ah,” Amanda said.

  In her day—which, Rebecca supposed, was still this day, since she was still here—she would never have dared test that
finger, despite the fact that she actually considered herself tougher than Danni. She still wouldn’t.

  And so it startled her when Danni erupted into a stutter. “Luh-luh-luh … LOVE ME!”

  Only after she’d snatched up the sponge bucket and sauntered down the hall did Rebecca realize she wasn’t quite talking back, and she certainly wasn’t pleading. No. She was, in fact, singing. Not only that, but Rebecca knew whose voice she was imitating, and where Danni must have learned that particular annoying tone.

  Amanda had recognized it, too. “I hate that radio show,” she murmured to Rebecca. “I honestly hate it, I don’t know where Joel finds these fucking things, or why he likes them.”

  If Danni’s stuttering was startling, Amanda’s swearing was positively alarming. Even with Trudi already downstairs and headed for the front door, Rebecca stayed rooted, trying to remember if she had ever once heard Amanda curse before.

  “It … really is really weird,” she said eventually, remembering the voice Danni had just mimicked pouring out of Joel’s speaker, lurching up- and down-register: teenager, temptress, babbling baby, sometimes all those things in the space of a single word. Buh—… cat-dah … TONGUE!

  And now, the memory of that voice stirred her memory of that other’s: her caller, from last night. The whistler from Lonely Street. “I better go after Trudi,” she said, more loudly than she needed to, just to fill her ears with sound.

  “Don’t let her go by those trailers. I don’t know why she keeps going down there.”

  But of course, by the time Rebecca got outside, Trudi was already halfway across the lot, pointed exactly that way. She stomped past the barn where Joel probably was if he was out here right now, headed straight for the trail that cut through the heart of the woods, right past the campground where those tipping, collapsing trailers hunkered in the same spots they’d occupied since Rebecca had first come here more than a decade ago. Probably, they’d been there long before that.