by Maggie Bloom
For the first time, I realize maybe I don’t want it. Maybe offering myself up to any jerkwad horny enough to bite is a way of the past, something the old Bobbi would have done. “I think I’ll pass.”
I ignore the Dart and its occupants, every one of them a former screw, and return to pedaling my way to school. But I don’t get far before…
Thump! Plunk-crunch!
The Dart jumps the curb in front of me and jams to a stop, blocking my path. I squeeze the Schwinn’s brakes just in time. “What are you…?!”
All at once, the Dart empties, Evan Richter, Justin White, Malcolm Gates and Corey Benson swarming me like a tornado of angry bees. “Got a problem, Cotton?” Malcolm demands.
“Me? I…” I scan the vicinity for an easy escape but come up empty. “No.”
“Get in the car,” says Justin.
Corey chuckles under his breath.
All I can think to say is, “My bike.”
“Get in. The fucking. Car,” Justin repeats.
“Now,” says Evan with a twitchy glance at oncoming traffic.
Corey mashes his knuckles. Pop-pop! Pop! Pop!
Screw this, I think. I’d rather be gutted on the sidewalk like a common hog than go anywhere with this quartet of scum. “Okay,” I say. I fake like I’m dismounting the Schwinn but instead lurch forward (well, actually, sort of sideways), pedaling for my life. Evan lands a grab on my arm that feels like it’s going to leave a bruise, but my momentum trumps his wimpy wrist. As I chug away, Malcolm flails in frustration at the Schwinn’s rear tire, never quite connecting with a kick (but throwing himself comically off balance).
Five minutes later, I breeze into the Industry High parking lot, rattled but triumphant.
* * *
Marlowe’s Drugs is closed on Sundays, a fact I discovered yesterday afternoon when I ventured over there again in search of a pregnancy test (it’s about time I put this mystery to rest, since Mother Nature doesn’t seem to be doing the job for me).
Today is Monday, a day of the week Marlowe’s is, in fact, open—or so proclaims the sticky little decal in the shop window. I eye the numbers on the sign one last time (closing time: six o’clock; it’s now quarter to five) before yanking the front door agape.
But I can’t speed right over to the EPTs like I’ve pedaled a mile and a half just to nab one; that would be uncouth and obvious. I should happen upon them, give a little why not? shrug and drop one into my shopping basket, on the off chance someone I know needs one. Oh, and while I’m at it, I should be whistling a carefree tune that conveys the message: I am not a trollop and have no use whatsoever for a pregnancy test.
Of course…first I need a shopping basket. Then I need to learn to whistle.
I spin around and locate a stack of baskets by the door, pluck one off the top and hang it over my arm. We’re out of bandages at home, I think. And, how convenient, I’m standing smack dab at the cusp of the first-aid aisle. I mosey over to the shelf, select a box of the flexible fabric kind and slip it into my basket.
Whew! I feel better already. One step closer to that pregnancy test, the cash register, and my Schwinn.
I dodge a clot of tween girls in shiny sleeveless sports jerseys and matching short-shorts. (Gawd, why are they forced to squeeze into those obnoxious things? Those shorts alone kept me from trying out for softball every year since sixth grade.)
I pass the shampoo and hairspray, circle back around to the pain relievers, which are in the same aisle as the bandages but on the opposite end.
Muscle pain. Since I started training (however sporadically) for the Yo-Yo, my legs and back and even my shoulders have been aching nonstop. (But at least now I know I still have muscles under this suit of blubber.)
I run a finger along the boxes of BENGAY and Aspercreme (I’d rather rub my pain away than choke down a bucketful of pills) but settle for a generic tube of the muscle rub instead, so I can save enough cash for the pregnancy test, which, at last check, cost fourteen ninety-nine.
I’ve been here long enough, I think. Time to snatch a test and vamoose, before anyone catches on. I draw a breath and hold it, saunter up to the family planning section and reach for an EPT, but—egads!—it’s increased in price to nineteen ninety-nine, and Mr. Marlowe’s beady, bifocaled eyes are now drilling holes in my forehead.
I dance my fingers hopefully through the air toward a First Response, until I notice that—double yikes!!—it’s even more expensive: twenty-one ninety-nine. If I weren’t about to vomit (or perhaps faint), I’d check for a generic version, I really would. Instead, I back away and tip my basket out onto the counter.
“That it?” Mr. Marlowe inquires after tallying the muscle rub and the bandages.
“Uh…” I don’t have enough money left for a pregnancy test anyway, so I pinch a pack of watermelon-flavored gum (what can I say? it was good last time) and a Milky Way from the shelf by my knees. “Yup,” I say as I shove the junk toward the pharmacist’s waiting hand. “That’ll do it.”
* * *
Tom and I haven’t officially broken up, but it’s hard to know if someone’s still your boyfriend when they refuse to speak to you.
“Hello?” Tom says noncommittally when he picks up the phone.
I listen to his breathing for a few seconds. “Hi.”
Click.
Why is he bothering to answer my calls if he’s just going to hang up? Doesn’t he have Caller ID?
I poke the redial button with my thumb, and the phone plinks out Tom’s number all on its own. But it just rings and rings. I’ve got to come up with a stealthier way to contact him, catch him off guard, I think. The Internet would be perfect (I could bombard him with messages day and night, refusing to let up until we’ve reached satisfactory communication terms) but Orv, Denise, and I are too cash-strapped for a computer, let alone one of those fancy dialup connections.
Ditto for cell phones and especially texting, which, I’m not ashamed to admit, I find quite exotic. (I mean, all those thoughts and feelings aching to be reduced to clever acronyms and cutesy emoticons? I want to French kiss whoever thought up that idea.)
As usual, the Schwinn is the answer to my problem (that is, if this bout of drizzle would quit and I could sneak out of the house without disturbing Denise, who’s just off the night shift at Welcome Home, and Orv, who has Saturdays off from the toothpick factory and is currently hammering away at something—literally—in the garage).
By the time I grab breakfast and a shower, the first two of my stumbling blocks have vanished: The sun is now aflame, almost to the point of bullying the sky, and Denise is sprawled across the couch, eyes closed, breaths shallow and rhythmic with sleep.
I jangle my house key off the hook by the door and pocket it, ease the door shut behind me as I squint into the sunshine. Orv’s back is to me when I reach the garage, but I’m sure he can still see me out of the corner of his eye. I face the Schwinn toward the street and say, “I’m going for a ride.” As I wheel the bike into the driveway, I add, “Be back later.”
Orv sets the hammer (we own a hammer?) on a shelf above his head. “Aunt Marie’s comin’ at two.”
My parents seem to be taking this shared custody thing pretty seriously. I wrinkle my brow. “Really?”
“Yep.”
Sometimes it’s hard to believe that Orv is only a few years older than me, or that his mother was Marie’s sister (Marie’s big sister and only sibling, who died in a car wreck when Orv was seven). “All right,” I say with a sigh.
Orv runs his palms over his thighs, leaving grease smears on his jeans. “Everything okay, Bobbi-Jo?” he quietly asks.
There is not one particular secret that has me on edge around Orv and Denise lately. It’s more like a combination of secrets (the screwing; the boyfriend; the potential bun in the oven) that’s added up to a clandestine life I’m afraid of exposing. “Sure,” I say. “Not a whole lot going on.”
I check Orv’s eyes, but I can’t tell if he believes me. “Tw
o o’clock,” he repeats. Then he goes back to hammering, and I pedal away.
* * *
When I get to Tom’s, I toss the Schwinn on his golf course-green lawn and parade up the steps, where I jab the bullfrog doorbell—which suddenly appears to be sneering at me—in the gut.
No one answers right away, so I start rapping on the door, my heart jumping to my throat in anticipation of the showdown about to erupt between me and my first-ever boyfriend. I know about heartache from the years I spent missing Marie and Duncan, but not the kind of heartbreak I feel coming now.
I try the bell again (smartass frog!! take that!! and that!!), and finally the door creaks open on Wilma, looking drunk or hung-over or just plain sleep-deprived. “What?” she croaks, one of the old lady curlers she’s done up in dangling loosely about her shoulder.
A wad of saliva clings to my throat. I gulp it down and ask, “Is Tom here?”
Wilma is maybe all of thirty-five, but you’d never guess it by her tanned hide, clownish makeup, and persistent stupor. “What for?” she says, eyeing me suspiciously.
Great. Now I’m going to have to explain this mess to Tom’s stepmother. Or lie. “He borrowed my calculator,” I say, surprising myself. “I need it back.”
“Just a minute,” she mutters as she shuts the door in my face.
One Mississippi…two Mississippi…
…forty-four Mississippi…
...eighty-eight Mississippi…
The door snaps back open and Wilma, appearing somehow brighter than a minute and a half ago, shoves one of those freebie bank calculators (it says Blue Ridge Savings right on the front) at me. “This it?”
“Uh…” I shake my head.
“Then we ain’t got it.”
“What about Tom? Can’t I ask him?”
“I don’t think so.”
Why doesn’t she think so? “But I’ve got homework,” I say.
“Hang on.” Again, the door shuts in my face.
The next thing I know, Wilma’s bony arm darts outside and thrusts a crinkled ten-dollar bill into my hand. “That’s all I got.”
“I don’t want money,” I complain, although I could put the windfall toward a pregnancy test. “I just wanna see Tom.” There. She’s made me say it. I hope she’s happy.
“Tom?” she repeats, as if it’s the first time she’s hearing of him.
I just stand there dumbfounded, the money softening in my sweaty palm.
“Tommy ain’t allowed to date,” she tells me, “’til he’s eighteen.”
I guess I’m not the only one fibbing, since Tom has had two other girlfriends before me. Then again, I can’t be sure if he’s lied to Wilma or she’s lying to me. “Okay…?” I say, confused by the conversation we’re having.
Wilma squeezes out onto the porch, forcing my backside against the wrought iron railing. In the sunlight, she looks like a prisoner emerging from long-term isolation. “Listen, sweetheart,” she says, clapping a brittle hand over my shoulder, “Tommy’s not the boy for you. There must be plenty of other young men out there for you to work your charms on, if you get my meaning.” She shoots me a smirk that exposes her yellowed teeth and suggests she and I are not so dissimilar.
“I just want to talk to Tom,” I say, holding strong against the tears that are pressing into my eyes.
“Forget about it.”
“Does he know you’re doing this?”
She shakes her head in the way folks do when they find something pitiful. “You’re in over your head here, sweetheart,” she says, a bullet of spit nailing me in the neck. “And you ain’t gonna bring Tommy down with you. We’ll see to that.”
I wouldn’t take this smackdown from another kid, but Wilma has me tongue-tied. “Fine,” I mumble as I navigate the steps cockeyed. Wilma crosses her arms over her floral housecoat and watches me scrape the Schwinn off the lawn. “Oh, yeah,” I add, the money feeling heavy and dirty in my hand. “You can keep this.” I crumple the bill further and hurl it to the ground, then hop on my bike and start for the road. When I glance back, Wilma is hobbling after the ten-spot, and Tom is in his bedroom window, the curtains pulled aside, staring after me.
chapter 11
I MAKE it home at five ‘til two, tear-stained and sweaty. Marie is already in our driveway, biding her time listening to fossilized cassette tapes in the dilapidated van. I roll past her into the garage, which Orv has mercifully left open. As I wedge the Schwinn into the corner by a random old door we’ve got lying around, it dawns on me that the Royale’s gone.
“Rober—” my mother says before catching herself. She’s now out in the driveway, the raffia ties of her pumpkin-orange espadrilles wound so tightly around her legs they appear to be impinging her circulation. Or the pregnancy just left her with cankles. “I’ve got something for you.”
I shoot a sideways glance into the back of the van, where I note that the only viable seatbelt is buckled around an infant car seat. But it’s empty. “Where’s Roy?” My sweet baby brother is the only thing that makes these visits with Marie and Duncan bearable.
Marie ignores me, goes arms-first into the open driver’s window and comes out with a flat, square box, which she presents to me as if it’s the Great American Novel. “Your father and I thought you could use one of these,” she declares.
Do I dare look? “Where’s Roy?” I repeat as she presses the box into my uncertain hands.
She flips her hair, which, if you ask me, is much too long and stylish for someone of her age and political persuasion. I mean, shouldn’t her head be shaved (to protest misogyny)? Or her locks be in dreads (to prove she’s a woman of the people, man)? “Roy’s fine,” she says with a dismissive wag of her hand. “He’s napping while your father attends to some work.”
What kind of work? I wonder. That flying-machine contraption thing? Is Duncan preparing to launch a new mode of transportation in Calcutta or Timbuktu? At Marie’s urging, I flip the box over. “A scale?” I should be offended, but I’m not. Actually, I’m sort of curious about my weight, since the digital scale Denise brought with her when she moved in quit working seven or eight months ago.
“That’s right,” Marie says, beaming. “How can you expect to get your…situation under control without the simplest bit of data? Before a problem can be solved, it must first be defined.”
Did I just sprout whiskers and an itty-bitty pink nose? Because I’m starting to feel a whole lot like one of Marie and Duncan’s sacrificial lab rats. I tuck the scale under my arm, fish my key out and head for the door. “I’ll be right back.”
* * *
It pains me to admit it, but I’m actually (gasp!) starting to enjoy my time with Marie, Duncan, and Roy.
“How are the croquettes?” my father inquires as my parents and I huddle around the mahogany island, eating from our designated Pottery Barn plates. “Not too dry, are they?”
I lick one of my fingers, then another. “No,” I say, only too happy to report on the tenderness of the meal my father has prepared (who knew vegetables could taste so good?). I give a little thumbs-up. “They’re perfect.”
Roy lets out a restless gurgle, prompting Duncan to dash over to the basket where my brother is stashed and swoop him up. “There, there,” my father coos, patting Roy on the back.
“We’re taking a shot at attachment parenting this time,” my mother says with a crinkly-eyed smile at Duncan and the baby. “We tried the Ferber method with you,” she tells me, “and it didn’t pan out.”
“The what?”
“Ferberizing,” Duncan chimes in. “Developed by Dr. Richard Ferber, a highly regarded pediatrician of the time. Or a psychologist.” He squints. “I forget which.”
Marie clatters her dinner fork across her plate and swirls a colorful linen napkin over her mouth. “You wouldn’t stop bawling,” she says with a frown in my direction. “Drove us to the doorstep of the funny farm.”
Duncan hands the baby off to Marie, who, once again, flops out a boob. I slip o
ff my stool and linger in the kitchen, fingering the miniature spice jars Duncan has left on the counter. “Why did I cry so much?” I ask.
Duncan chuckles. “It’s not that you fussed, Bobbi. It’s that you wouldn’t quit fussing. And the Ferber method advocated letting you ‘cry it out.’ ” He rolls his eyes at the memory, and Marie mirrors him. “We lasted about seven weeks before we were ready to yank our hair out.”
This Dr. Ferber sounds like a real tool. I suggest renaming his parenting method the lazy/neglectful/why-bother-giving-a-damn? plan.
I open my mouth to voice this sentiment, albeit in a watered-down form, but Duncan’s cell phone suddenly starts skittering across the island, pumping out a rap song (Snoop Dog?) at top volume.
Roy does one of those rigid, startled moves babies sometimes pull for no reason whatsoever. Before I can get my fingers to my ears, Duncan grabs the phone. “Yell-o!” He squints, then scowls. Absently he slinks onto my stool. “Uh-huh…okay, well then…if you’d take a breath, maybe I could…that’s right…the police?...I don’t see any other way…Bobbi?...no, I’ll handle it…all right…try to relax…you’re welcome…bye-bye.”
Duncan stares into the distance for a moment, as if he’s collecting his thoughts. “There’s been some trouble in Industry,” he tells Marie.
“What’s going on?” I demand. “Who was that?”
“There were no injuries,” he reports, as if he’s writing copy for the six o’clock news. “But Denise is pretty shaken up.”
I glance at Marie, who is busily jostling Roy but remains mute on the matter.
“Denise?” I say, panic rising in my voice. “Take me home. Now.”
Marie nods at Duncan, and he simply reaches for his keys.
* * *
There are three police cars stacked on our lawn, their light bars ablaze with blasts of blue and white, when Duncan and I arrive, which explains why I don’t notice the smashed picture window right off. What does draw my eye is the Royale, parked as normally as ever at the front of the driveway with its trunk caved in (I’m picturing baseball bats used, here), its bumper crumpled, and its taillights all but missing.
