PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “So it was sexual,” Aka said softly.

  “I guess. But they’re just boobs, right? Everyone has them in various shapes and sizes. It’s not like the moment was fuckilicious or anything.”

  “Kathleen, don’t downplay.”

  Dammit Aka. Tears stung my eyes, but I blinked them back. I’d have given anything for a friend who didn’t know me so well. I could deny all I liked, but Aka would know I was holding back. Fucking Aka. But I held back anyway.

  “It was a grope. Big deal. No one cares. Look, I can touch them, too.” I grabbed my breasts with both hands and bounced them. I was pissed and possibly irrational.

  Aka’s gaze dropped to my chest, but only for a moment. “Your defense shields are up.”

  “I’m not a starship,” I said.

  “You can tell me anything.” He reached for my hand, but I took a small step back and tucked my hands into my jacket pockets.

  “Topic over.” I turned away from him to walk back to our friends.

  I reached the stairs and heard Erin say, “ . . . which is why I know God’s a woman.”

  “God’s definitely not a woman,” I said. “Periods, childbirth, all those years of oppression, seriously?” I sat down on the picnic table in the middle of the gazebo. “Think about boys for a second. They burn ants with magnifying glasses. They pull the wings off flies to watch them writhe around. This sounds a lot more like God to me than a girl does.”

  “Got your man hate on today, I see,” Erin said. “It goes lovely with your shoes.”

  “I just don’t think a man could make anything to his ideal,” I said. “They’re always changing their minds about what they like. Same with a woman, really. I don’t think God is either one, honestly. It’s androgynous, I think. Not both.”

  “Yeah, I doubt God’s a hermaphrodite,” Erin said. “And the constant pursuit of such concepts as perfection or idealism can drive a person mad since such words are objective to each psyche. If there was such a thing as perfection, then its true form is chaos.”

  I opened my mouth to reply to the odd madness of Erin, but then Rigel hopped up on the table. My reaction was to swat him away. What the hell was he doing? He was a secret. He was supposed to remain separate from everything else in my life. He was definitely not allowed to come socialize with my friends.

  “No, don’t chase him away,” Sarah said. “He’s so cute. I think he’s tame.” She pet him and he arched his back under her fingers like a cat.

  I glared at him. “He could have rabies. Skunks carry rabies.”

  “He’s not acting rabid,” Dylan said. “He’s probably someone’s escaped pet. I mean, they breed skunks to be white. They don’t happen in nature, I don’t think.”

  “I’ll agree he seems unnatural,” I said. My eyes narrowed at Rigel and mentally I told him to go the hell away. If he could read my mind, he pretended he couldn’t. I breathed out a sigh. He was real. Rigel was real—and not some imaginary creature of my slowly deteriorating mind.

  “Who does?” Aka said. He had not followed me immediately from the pond and now he stood at the bottom of the gazebo stairs.

  “Our new skunk,” Sarah said. “I think I’ll call him Lily. He’s white and the skunk on Bambi was named Flower. Besides, he’s an animal. He won’t know he’s got a girl name.”

  “You can’t keep him,” Erin said. “He belongs to someone. We should probably take him to a shelter or something.”

  “He definitely needs to be in a cage,” I said.

  Rigel hopped down from the table and headed straight for Aka. He wound around his legs like a cat, which was just stupid. Cats did that to rub scent on their masters. If a skunk wanted to put scent on something, it would spray.

  Then again, if Rigel sprayed Aka, I’d have to kill him. I didn’t know precisely what I would do to him, but it would include pain.

  The next hour was a display of douche baggery never before displayed by an animal. Rigel would cuddle up into different girls’ laps, nuzzle at Aka, roll onto his back for petting; and each minute that passed sent my blood pressure soaring into the danger zone. He took a special interest in Aka, and I swear he wore a smug smile every time he looked at me.

  “I need to get home, guys,” I said when I couldn’t take it any longer. “I’ll catch up with you later online or whatever.”

  They all said goodbye in their different ways. Rigel sat up on his back feet to watch me go, an act Sarah apparently found adorable enough to squeal over. I didn’t know what he was up to, but the little pest had just crossed the line. No, more than that. He had jumped over it with a pole and done a dance of mockery.

  16: Late Night Phone Calls

  Karen looked like a queen at her throne. She sat at the end of the kitchen table in a high-back chair. Her makeup was perfect, her hair luxurious, her skin flawless, and her smile warm and inviting.

  Wow. Some idiot I’d been, thinking all those years we were related by blood. I used to tell myself she used up all the good genes being born first. Now it was clear I probably looked like someone I’d never met.

  When we were still in school at the same time, I used to watch her during lunch hour. As she stepped from the shadows of the building into the afternoon sun, she appeared to be a radiant goddess. Her long, thick hair was aglow with golden light, as if it was set ablaze. The breeze seemed to pull gently at it, playing with it lightly and tossing it around her head in slow motion. That ever-present grin on her face seemed to emit tangible mirth, and her eyes were alight with a merry mischief as she’d wave at friends. She was like a graceful, delicate swan, and I always wondered how I’d been trapped in my short, round body when she was perfection incarnate. Life was monumentally unfair. Situation normal.

  “When did you get in?” I said.

  “About an hour ago.” Karen stood and opened her arms for a hug. I went to her, but kept my arms down and leaned against her. I didn’t like to hug.

  “Where’s Dad?” I said.

  “He’s upstairs on the phone with Aunt Cheryl.”

  Aunt Cheryl was Mom’s younger sister. She was a coach at a high school over in Springfield. She drove a Camaro, loved beer, and I never knew her to have a boyfriend. She was my favorite relative. I long suspected she was a lesbian, but no one ever said so. I didn’t know if it was because she was in the closet or if everyone else was in denial.

  “So, how’s college?” I tried to replace the awkward silence my sister and I shared with fake interest. I didn’t care if she had a good time. I didn’t care if she did well in class. I only cared that I wasn’t there with her and was stranded back home without her.

  “It’s okay,” Karen said. She sat back down and tossed one slender leg over the other as she leaned back into the chair. “I’d rather win the lottery and not worry about things.”

  We might not have been related by blood, but we definitely shared some interests. “I promise I’ll share my winnings if I strike it rich. That is, when I’m old enough to buy a ticket.”

  “I’m sure,” she said, smiling. “In the meantime, I’ll muddle through.”

  Karen didn’t “muddle” through anything. She was intelligent, ambitious, and a hundred other things that guaranteed she would succeed in life. I leaned towards creativity where she was far more technical. I liked to think if I failed at journalism and needed a full-time job, she would be a CEO somewhere and could get me in the door. Possibly in the mailroom.

  I believed in a good backup plan.

  “I hear you got grounded,” Karen said.

  “Yeah.” I didn’t want to elaborate. Discussing either Mom’s insanity or personal lubricant seemed inappropriate under the circumstances.

  “For what?”

  “Mom thought I stole from her. I didn’t,” I said. Not that I needed to convince Karen. I wasn’t a thief. Even when we were kids, I was quite belligerent about personal property and which fashion doll belonged to which girl. Mine were clearly marked with my initials both front and back. Most of mi
ne were also missing their heads or had mysteriously lost all of their hair.

  Karen waved it off. “She probably just forgot where she put it.”

  Which might be true, but it didn’t make me any less grounded. Her disappearance made me less grounded, so that part worked out. If Mom was to reappear with a personality transplant, then life would be roses indeed.

  “Dad’s pretty worried.” Okay. So maybe I was a little worried, too. But I wasn’t going to admit it, not when I wasn’t even sure how far that worry extended. Certainly not to the point that I wanted to give back the pizza and my cell phone. Since it wasn’t Mom I was worried for, my degree of anxiety was hard to categorize.

  I worried for Dad and Karen, but also the future of everything in my life. What if we had to sit through a trial if she was murdered? What if she was kidnapped and a call from the kidnappers came at any moment? What if she ran away with some young stud and Dad killed himself in despair? What if she lost her mind and drove to Canada to “find herself” at some religious cult’s Communist-sex-orgy-child-sacrifice-vegetarian complex? These were points to ponder.

  Especially the religious angle. She’d fallen down that rabbit hole before.

  “Nice scarf,” Karen said.

  It was her way of mentioning what I really didn’t want to talk about. I ignored the bait. We could read each other well enough after a lifetime. She knew my boundaries.

  “Got it at Goodwill,” I said. “Christmas cash.”

  Which was true. I found many a treasure there. Instead of discarded belongings, I preferred to think of the items on the shelves as homeless companions of the recently deceased. Sort of like pets that just need a good home because their home had been sold off by the relatives of their dead master. In a way, I supposed that would make it the Humane Inanimate Objects Society.

  But only to people like me who didn’t like things with eyes to feel abandoned, even if they are only buttons or glass. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t shake the feeling the eyes plead with me to take them home. That, or they sat in silent judgment of me.

  Funny I didn’t feel that same empathy for living things with beady little eyes. Rigel, for example.

  “It suits you,” Karen said.

  The small talk was too much. I could always just explode into an angry rant about everything that had gone wrong that week. The pressure I put on myself to be stoic compressed my soul in a vise of false indifference. I wanted to scream and throw things.

  “Look, I’m going to my room,” I said. “Let me know if anything comes up.”

  “Okay,” Karen said. She did not budge. Her countenance remained benevolent. “I love you, kid sister.”

  “Same here,” I said. I hesitated, then turned to go upstairs to hide in my room.

  ***

  I fell asleep in my clothes across the bottom of my bed. I had waited for Rigel to come to my room, but I dozed off before he arrived. I might have slept that way all night if my phone hadn’t rang.

  The phone rang again. I didn’t recognize the number. I debated ignoring it and checking messages in the morning, but curiosity got the better of me.

  “Hello?”

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” The hostility in the voice caught me off guard. It took me a couple of breaths before I realized it was an enraged Josh.

  “What?” Not my best comeback. “What did I do now?”

  “You know.” His heavy breathing freaked me out. I pulled back the phone to look at it, as if I feared Josh was about to jump out of the display like a ghost in the machine.

  I chose to assume he hung up, though I wouldn’t be surprised to read in the paper the next day he suffered spontaneous combustion and nuked his phone.

  “Who was that?” Rigel said from the windowsill.

  “The Josh Hulk,” I said, gazing at my phone with a growing sense of unease. I could picture him as his muscles lumped up and skin turned greener than his eyes, only to lose his fury when his tight pants refused to shred properly and his boy bulges became boy pancakes.

  “I do not understand what you mean by that.” Rigel’s flat tone and disinterested expression were unusual, given he was always so inquisitive. He hopped down from the sill and headed to my closet, which was perfectly normal behavior for him.

  “Never mind,” I said. “It was a joke. Hey, where’ve you been? I waited around forever to chew you out for that crap you pulled at the park today.”

  “It did not sound like a humorous exchange,” Rigel said. He stood on his back legs while he seemed to survey his clothing nest with the eye of an interior decorator. He bent and began to scatter my clothing around in what seemed like an effort to make it more comfortable. Or just bigger and more obnoxious—it was hard to know without asking.

  “It wasn’t,” I said. In fact, it scared me. Josh was super-pissed about something, and had convinced himself I had done whatever it was, or—to judge by his words—I knew what it was.

  Yet, clueless was I.

  “Move it.” I swatted Rigel out of the way so I could rescue a pair of shoes before they disappeared under his new nest.

  I turned to close the window, and that was when I spotted the circus of emergency lights down a nearby street. One or two vehicles would have been remarkable, but the whole area was awash in blue and red. Numerous white spotlights turned night into day.

  My curiosity demanded I go check it out. It was late—late enough that Dad and Karen would surely be asleep at that time of night—so I tip-toed the edge of each stair as quietly as possible, clinging to the banister. To tread down the middle would normally have meant the shrill screech of Mom’s voice, but tonight I didn’t have to worry.

  I slinked out the back door and headed across the yard. Rigel waited near the back gate. Why did he even bother with climbing in through my window if he could easily pop from place-to-place? If I were him, I would just appear somewhere rather than heave my large carcass through a window. Or, in his case, furry carcass.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  “Are you blind?” I opened the gate and gestured towards the public servant carnival. “I wanna see what’s going on.”

  “It is a macabre spectacle,” Rigel said with a shake of his head. “Are you entertained by the misfortune of others?”

  The honest answer to that was “yes.” My conscience assured me it was not a personal failing, but a common impulse in my fellow humans. Not to revel in the bad luck of others, of course. We do it to take a thankful breath and be grateful we’re not them. We shrug softly, and for a short moment are perfectly content to be ourselves instead of someone else. This envy-less period ends pretty quick.

  But I wouldn’t call the habit of doing this “entertainment” exactly.

  “No,” I said. “I want to make sure it’s no one I know.”

  The excuse sounded pretty lame, but I had just received a call from a furious Josh about something and the commotion of emergency vehicles was too near Josh’s house for me to ignore.

  People gathered across the street from the spider web of yellow police tape that encased a modest one-story brick house. They gawked at whatever had happened. I scanned nervously, looking for Josh’s face.

  He appeared from the backyard, surrounded by police officers. His wrists lacked handcuffs, so whatever happened either wasn’t his fault or the police didn’t suspect him. His eyes found mine. Grief or shock burdened them.

  Guilt swallowed me, and I didn’t even know what I’d done yet. My eyes broke contact and I turned away, like a voyeur caught in the act. I wasn’t as curious anymore.

  “Hey!” It was guttural and savage, a cavernous timbre I would never expect from Josh.

  A deer in headlights, I turned to face my accuser.

  He charged across the front yard in a swift march which broke into a mad sprint when his shoes hit asphalt. He was less than ten yards away when a white streak named Rigel threw himself in front of Josh’s feet. The running boy became the falling down boy.

  I
imitated a statue. It was the most useful tactic I could summon at that moment.

  It took all my wits to refrain from speaking to Rigel in front of other people. The effort was short-lived as he dashed off into the bushes across the street. I didn’t know if I should offer to help Josh up. It would be the polite thing to do, but not one minute prior he looked like he wanted to kill me. Decisions, decisions.

  The debate between politeness versus survival had not manifested a victor when Josh lifted himself from the street. All around us—neighbors, the lights, the police, dogs barking at the commotion—it all dimmed. My entire scope of awareness was reduced to a slow motion tunnel which ended at Josh. More specifically, his enraged eyes.

  My heart threw itself against my sternum like a panicked beast trying to destroy its cage in order to escape an approaching storm. The tempest lurked in Josh, and through his soul windows I saw lightning crash and thunderheads swelling the horizon.

  “I’ll get you.” His voice again was so unfamiliar to his mouth. It was like watching a foreign film dubbed in English by Clint Eastwood and Barry White’s lovechild.

  My inner smartass begged me to ask if he’d get my little dog, too. I managed to control it. Sarcasm was my crutch when I was . . . breathing. I’ll admit I didn’t know how to exist without it. But I knew it was best to control it at the time. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about or why he quite clearly hated me with every cell of his being, but I was sure I didn’t want to ask. Not yet.

  A pair of officers flanked Josh, and one of them grabbed him by the elbow to lead him back to their patrol car. Under their direction, he remained noticeably more placid and was obedient and silent as they ducked his head to seat him in the back.

  The car pulled out of the driveway. Josh’s window was near me for a brief moment. He looked out at me, fury still smoldering in his eyes. The car drove away. I watched it go. Neighbors whispered among themselves, and Josh’s property remained awash with public servants and officials.

  I stepped into the street and watched the taillights vanish around a corner several blocks away.