by Marta Acosta
She smiled innocently, and my heart broke. She was like someone lost on the highway who keeps taking the wrong turns and getting farther and farther away from her destination. I remembered Claire Mason’s phrase, a map of pain, and I thought that’s what Wilde’s life had been. “Thanks, Wilde, but I want to be legit and finish school.”
“Yeah, I know how you are. I was just throwing that out there.” She paused before saying, “If it was up to me, you could stay here as long as you like, but my man won’t have that. You have to be in the life, or…” She pressed her lips together. “Junior will want you in the life.”
My blood chilled because she was warning me that if I stayed too long, I wouldn’t have a choice. “I could use a few days to find a room share and some kind of job.”
“No problem. You’re a minor, so you can go on welfare and go back to school.”
“I’d rather work.” I made some quick calculations in my head about how far my stash would carry me. I couldn’t withdraw money now, or Mrs. Radcliffe would know my location—and I wasn’t ready for that until I got settled. “I can scrimp and have enough to cover me for a month renting at the by-the-week motel. I can tutor, or work in a bookstore or a restaurant.”
Wilde let out a long sssss. “Jobs are tight all over, Mousie. But you’ll figure it out. Tell me about this rich-bitch school of yours.”
So I described Greenwood, Birch Grove, the hills, and the fog. “It’s like in those movies where trees grow over wide streets and blond kids ride bicycles. They all live in these mansions with their families and they all go to the country club for parties. The cops don’t ever hassle anyone.”
“It sounds unreal.”
“It is unreal. It’s antiseptic and protected. If they could build a moat around their town and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist, they would.” I thought about Mrs. Radcliffe’s serene smile as she welcomed me to Birch Grove. “They’re so polite that you can’t tell which ones are being phony.”
“What about the guy?” she asked. “Because I know there’s a guy involved somehow.”
As much as I tried, I couldn’t see Lucky as twisted and deceitful. He’d told me that I might not like him when I really knew him. He had been as honest with me as he could be. I thought about the intensity in his blue eyes as he asked for my loyalty. “He’s not interested in me that way.”
“All guys are interested in all girls that way. Anyways, Mousie, you always act like you ain’t hot.”
“I’m not. I’m puny, and I don’t have any bounce, and I’m plain.”
“You’re plain stupid about some things, that’s for sure. You skipped out on all that because they’re a little freaky?”
“They want me to be a part of that life, and…” I had to think about why I’d really been frightened. “It’s like they’re controlling me and I’m just going along with it. That’s not me.”
“Well, you always liked running your own schemes, Janey.”
“Yes, my sinister studying-hard-to-get-ahead scheme. I plan to reap in a fortune any decade now.”
Mary Violet would have giggled and told me that she was going to write a book about an evil mastermind, but Wilde smiled blankly and took another drink.
* * *
I spent the next few hours on Wilde’s laptop. First, I searched for a room I could afford. Most of the shared situations required a big deposit. I e-mailed a few people, but the only person who responded immediately sounded too excited by the fact that I was in high school and wanted me to send a photo.
I had time to apply for a few entry-level jobs, filling out extensive applications that kept bumping me out of the system when I left blank spaces. But I had no experience, no degrees, no references.
I left before Wilde’s first client arrived and had dinner at a fast-food place. The gray hamburger meat tasted flat and salty, and the soda was syrupy sweet. It didn’t make my lips go “smack.”
I went to the movies and sneaked from screening room to screening room until the last show was over, but when I returned to Wilde’s, she was still busy. I sat outside on the steps, remembering the last time I’d been out this late, with Hattie in the birch grove.
Saturday night in the city was so bright and noisy. I heard the diesel engines of buses roaring, cars and horns, music thump-thumping, sirens, laughter, and fighting. I counted out six rapid shots of a semiautomatic and the response of ten shots. When footsteps vibrated on the cement stairs, I’d draw my hoodie over my head and scoot to one side so the men could pass by.
Suddenly I began laughing as I realized that I was actually worse off than I had been at Mrs. Prichard’s. My laughter turned to tears and I felt utterly hopeless and lost.
I had worked so hard, so incredibly hard to improve my life … and that’s when I angrily swiped my tears away. I could figure this out. I would figure this out.
* * *
Sunday was more of the same: going online to apply for jobs and look for a rental. Now I had to wait for responses, so I visited Cecile, a friend from City Central who lived nearby in a dilapidated Victorian house.
Cecile unlocked the iron gate at her front door and grinned. She was a tall girl with a watchful expression who hacked her hair short and wore a frayed flannel and torn-up jeans. “Hey, Jane! What are you doing here?”
“Hey, Cecile. I’ve got a few days off so I wanted to see how things are.”
She gave me the sort of hug guys give, with one arm around my shoulders and another patting my back.
“Come on in.”
We passed through the cluttered living room, stepping over kids’ toys, and we went to her tiny bedroom. Books were piled on the ratty olive green rug, and the walls were covered with posters of Marie Curie, Sally Ride, Toni Morrison, and Susan Sontag. We sat cross-legged on the bed and I looked for changes since I’d last visited. A dozen snow globes were arranged atop her dresser.
“Where’d you get those cool snow globes?”
“Someone threw them out. My mom’s got me Dumpster diving with her, mostly for food, but we check bins when people move. You can’t believe the great stuff people toss.”
“I used to find things in the trash, too.” I was sure that Greenwood people threw out valuable things.
“You know, we were betting on whether you’d ever come back to visit or not.”
“Well, here I am. I would have been in touch more, but I don’t have a phone or computer access.”
“You wrote about that and we didn’t believe it, but we saw it on Birch Grove’s Web site.” She eyed me top to bottom. “Nice clothes and sweet kicks.”
I glanced down at my new jeans and tennis shoes, remembering my shopping trip with Mrs. Radcliffe. “The school bought them for me. So what’s going on at Hellsdale?”
“You want a list of the dramas over babies’ mamas, or what’s happening in class? It’s always the same crap—someone trashed the chem lab two weeks ago.” Cecile’s features tightened into anger. “Can’t we have one damn thing that’s decent? Is that too much to ask? They moved the class to a trailer, but we can’t do our labs because of fire codes, and we’re all behind. And AP classes got slashed with the last budget. All the languages got hit and European History, too.”
“What about Latin?”
“Totally decimated. Is Birch Grove everything they say?”
“And more.” I chewed at a hangnail. “But the people there have no idea of what the real world is like. They’re smart, but not street smart because they don’t have to be.” I looked at one of the snow globes on Cecile’s dresser. I reached across for it and shook it so the white flakes fell on a small cottage surrounded by trees. “They’re like this, living in a bubble, and they never have to see anything outside the bubble. Violence, poverty, pain are abstract concepts to them.”
“A microcosm. Isn’t that the same way here? Most of the kids at school think the world ends at the bus terminal. It’s like those ancient maps where unknown territory was marked There be dragons!”<
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“You’re right.” I shook the globe again, watching snow fall on the miniature cottage. “Some of the people there are really nice anyway, smart and even funny.”
“You never liked funny much, Jane.”
“I didn’t, did I? Maybe I had too much to worry about.”
“You look sorta worried now.”
I hesitated before saying, “I’m thinking about transferring back to City Central.”
Cecile’s mouth dropped open and she stared at me. “You are out of your mind … unless the work’s too hard. Is that it? Don’t beat yourself up if you gave it your best shot.”
“It’s not that. It’s that I didn’t fit in there.”
“It’s a universal truth that geeks are always misfits, Jane.” Cecile patted my knee. “Look, we’re meeting up tonight. The crew will be glad to see you. Do you still have a curfew like in the old days?”
“No, I’m free to do whatever. I can fall off the face of the earth into there-be-dragons land for all anyone cares.”
We went to a hookah bar in the mall that let in underage kids. My friends smoked shisha and asked about Birch Grove, like kids wanting to hear a bedtime story. Terrance, a good-looking senior I’d lusted after for years, said, “I told them you’d be back. Here, you’re a wizard, but there, what are you? Nothing.”
“I’m not nothing!” I glowered at him. “I kicked ass. I was the top Chem student. I was acing Trig and Latin.”
“Yeah, that’s why you’re back,” he scoffed.
“I have my reasons and I don’t need to share them with you.”
Cecile changed the subject to a pirate radio show she was hosting, and I sat back in the shadows, seething. I’d told the truth. I was as smart as anyone at Birch Grove. I’d earned my place there.
* * *
On Monday morning, I took the bus to Helmsdale City Central to see about transferring back in. I made my way through the wild crowd milling at the chain-link fence around the school. Yellow police tape cordoned off a parking space that had rusty-brown splatters of dried blood.
Students jostled and cussed each other out as they lined up to enter the building. They placed their backpacks on a table to be searched and walked through metal detectors. I didn’t have a City Central ID, so a security manager had to be called to let me pass through.
I waited in the admissions office to ask about a transfer and got bumped to an enrollment counselor who said she needed to check my records, left the room, and never returned. I did the whole thing over again with another counselor.
She gave me a folder with an application and district residency requirements. “The first-tier classes you want are filled, so you’d have to choose other courses and start another language since Latin is gone. Next!”
Back at Wilde’s place, I searched online for other public high schools in the district, but they were already closed to transfers for the academic year. I tried to cyber-stalk my Birch Grove friends and Lucky, but Mrs. Radcliffe had done an amazing job of keeping them off the radar. I redid Wilde’s Web site and compiled information about beauty schools and GED programs until she got up in the late afternoon.
Wilde seemed happy with the changes to her Web site and then asked me all about Greenwood and Birch Grove. She seemed so curious that I talked more than usual.
“I still don’t get it, Mousie. You rave about the school and you’re crushing on that hot dude, Jack.”
“Not Jack, his brother, Lucky.”
She twisted her lips and shut one eye. “Which one is the musician?”
“Jack.”
“Yeah, the sexy one.”
I knew that Wilde was too high to think straight. “He’s in love with my friend Hattie, who is perfect.”
“No one’s perfect.” Wilde went to her refrigerator and pulled a bottle of vodka from the freezer.
“I bought some juice today. Wouldn’t you rather have that?”
Wilde very deliberately unscrewed the bottle and gulped the booze. She swiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “How’s that room hunt going?”
“I’m still looking. I can be out today, though.”
Her face clouded. “No, no rush. But don’t judge, Jane.”
“I’m not judging, but … I want to help you get clean. You’ve got so much potential and it kills me to see you living like this, dealing with sus people. I want you to have a better life.”
“Maybe this is where we’re supposed to be, Mousie. Maybe we should make the best of it and not expect too much and get disappointed.”
“I don’t give up.”
“Then I must be hallucinating that you’re back here in Hellsdale, back to your same old running ways.”
That was as far as our talk went before Wilde started getting calls for evening appointments.
I fumed a little because I was sensitive about some things, too. Leaving Birch Grove because they were trying to convert me into their weird society was not the same thing as giving up.
“Yes, you did well to awake,” he said. “That warning came from your subconscious self, which never wholly slumbers, and cried out to you of deadly danger. For two reasons, then, you must help me: one to save others, the second to save yourself.”
E. F. Benson, “Mrs. Amworth” (1920)
Chapter 24
It was long after midnight, and I was drowsing off on the concrete steps, waiting for Wilde’s last client to leave, when I heard her scream.
I jumped up and raced into her apartment. Techno pulsed behind the closed bedroom door where an angry man shouted, “Filthy dirty whore!” and Wilde cried, “Please don’t hurt me!”
We are so sensitive to some sounds that we can perceive them through all the random noise of life—music pounding on a stereo, bickering nearby, TVs blaring, traffic on the street. When I heard the distinctive sound of an open hand striking flesh, something in me clicked, like a key turning in a rusty lock, opening a door to a secret room.
And in that room, I saw my mother.
She was crying and cowering beside the refrigerator and a bear of a man—my stepfather—was shouting and moving toward her with his hand raised.
The memory stunned me, but that numbness lasted only a moment. Then came grief so intense that I would have collapsed there on the floor and curled into a fetal position, but another scream snapped me back to the present.
In Hellsdale, no one ever answered cries for help. I ran to the window, shoved it open so hard that it jumped off its cheap aluminum track, and screamed, “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
I grabbed a tall brass candlestick and rushed to Wilde’s bedroom. The door flew open and Wilde bashed into me as she entered the room, clasping a shiny red kimono closed over her body.
“Where! What’s happening?” she said as she looked around frantically.
Through the doorway, I saw a man yanking on his pants and picking up a shirt. I looked back to Wilde, who had a red welt across her cheek.
She stared at the candlestick in my hand. “What the hell are you doing, Mousie?”
“Are you all right, Wilde?” I moved to her side, still gripping the candlestick and keeping my eyes on the man. My childhood memory felt as real to me as this scene and my heart beat fast—because I had the insane idea that my mother was in Wilde’s bedroom.
That she would step forward and say … what would she say to me?
But it was Wilde who stepped in front of me, glowering. “Is that what this is? You shoulda knocked and asked. Actually, you shoulda just kept out of my business!”
The man jammed his feet in his shoes and walked through the living room. He sneered at Wilde. “You’re not getting paid, bitch.”
Footsteps pounded in the stairs and Wilde’s pimp, Junior, blocked the doorway. He looked from the man to Wilde and me and back to the man again. “What’s going on?”
“The deal was special treatment and then this … this stupid kid screams fire,” the man said as he squeezed by Junior.
“Hey, you gotta pay fi
rst!” Junior followed him down the stairs and their voices got louder and angrier.
Wilde grabbed a pack of cigarettes and lit up. “You’ve caused me a whole lot of mess.”
I set down the candlestick. “I thought he was hurting you. He was hurting you. You shouldn’t let him do that.”
“I get paid for it, and now I won’t get paid!” Wilde paced around me, jabbing the air with her cigarette. “You always think you know everything, don’t you? You always think you’re so damn smart.”
“I’m not. I just try really—”
“Don’t give me that line. You talk about people being fake, but you’re a phony. You fake that you don’t think you’re smarter than everyone in Hellsdale, and I bet you fake with all those rich bitches, acting like you don’t think you’re better than them, when you do because you did it on your own.”
I wanted to slap her and I wanted to cry. My voice shook when I said, “I’ll talk to you when you’re not wasted.”
She laughed an ugly laugh. “Oh, yeah, Miss Holier-than-thou, that’s another thing I’m sick of. Not partying and not putting out doesn’t mean you’re any better than me—it means you’re boring. You’re just jealous that I have a boyfriend and get lots of action, and no one wants a boring priss like you.”
I stepped forward and stared disdainfully at her. “Because you’re so interesting when you’re passed out on the sofa, or rambling about what you’re going to do someday, how you’re going to get straight someday. You’re so interesting when you’re talking about your boyfriend when he’s nothing but a cheap, nasty pimp who sells your body and keeps you hooked.”
Her expression softened and her lower lip quivered the way it used to when her father didn’t show up on his visiting days. The welt on her face was darkening into a bruise.
I looked around at the depressing apartment with its flimsy pay-by-the-month furniture and stained shag carpeting. I saw the cigarette burns on the tables, the faded silk flower arrangements, and a goldfish bowl half-full of murky water.
