“Sweet dung on a Popsicle stick,” Vicks says from the back.
“You got that right,” I say. I’m light-headed and can’t really feel my body.
“Is it chasing us?” Mel asks. “Please tell me it’s not chasing us. Is it chasing us?”
The Opel may not be fast, but it can hit sixty miles an hour. I punch the gas pedal to the floor.
“It’s not chasing us,” I say. “That gator is one long-gone daddy.”
Vicks is breathing hard. A glance in the mirror shows me she’s squeezing Mel tight and patting her over and over, while Mel sits frozen like a lump. Mel’s face is pure white.
“Don’t you ever,” Vicks says to me. “Don’t you ever pull a stunt like that again, do you understand?”
I’m chastened by her tone. I could have killed us all…and for what? A duckling that right this second is squirting green poop on my bare thigh?
But then I’m filled with euphoria, ’cause we aren’t dead. We’re alive, and so is the duck. My duck.
“Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly the smartest thing I ever did,” I say. “But I sure did learn a valuable lesson.” I realize I sound exactly like Faith Waters, and a giggle burbles up. Me and the Gator and the Jaws of Death, that’s what I’d call this heart-stopping episode. “Don’t you wanna know what the lesson is? Huh?”
“What?” Mel asks faintly. She’s still shaking.
“Well…that life is life until you’re dead.”
“That’s your valuable lesson?” Vicks says. “That’s your valuable lesson?! Of course life is life until you’re dead. What else would it be?”
“Now, Vicks—,” I say.
“Nooooo,” she says. “The lesson is don’t get out of your car on a deserted road by a swamp, especially if it’s nesting season and the mama gators are all crazy to feed their babies. And if it comes down to you or a duck?” She leans forward and thwacks my head. “Let the gator have the duck.”
“Except I didn’t,” I say. “And now she’s safe, and isn’t that good?”
“She’s a she?” Mel says, though this talking thing is obviously still a struggle for her. She is just paler than pale back there in the moonlight. “How do you know?”
“Well, she’s not a mallard. So probably.”
Vicks thwacks me even harder. “Oh, put a lid on it. You don’t know crap about birds.”
“Ow!” I say. My duck quacks in protest.
“And you, you pitiful feathery thing,” Vicks says. “Shut. The hell. Up.”
SUNDAY, AUGUST 22
28
VICKS
“LET’S CALL IT Poopy,” I say, sniffing. We’ve been driving south for about an hour. It’s one in the morning.
“It doesn’t smell,” says Jesse. “It’s just little baby duck poo.”
“That’s a good name!” I cry. “Poo. Short for Little Baby Duck Poo. Alternately called LBDP. “
“Vicks!”
“Then we can shorten it to LB or DP, and then later just Pee, and then later P-Baby. It can have ever-morphing little duck names. It’ll be like the rap mogul of duckland.”
“No.”
“Or else we could call it Turd.”
“What part of no do you not understand?” Jesse asks me.
I persist. “Turdball? That’s better.”
“You’re a sick person, you know that?” Jesse laughs.
“You’re not going to keep it, are you?” Mel wants to know.
“Of course I am!” Jesse answers. “And Mama loves animals. There’s no way she’ll turn it out.”
“Hey,” I ask her, “does that guy next door to you still have that hutch outside with the guinea pigs?”
“Uh-huh,” Jesse says. “Otis and Lola.” When Mel looks confused, Jesse adds, “There aren’t any yards where our trailer is, so you can see everyone’s business.”
“You think you can keep the duck in a hutch?” Mel asks, wrinkling her nose.
“Like made out of chicken wire but with a cozy place to sleep,” Jesse says. “Out the back of the trailer. With hay or wood chips or something. At least until she’s bigger.”
“Turdball will love it,” I tell her. “She’ll love the hutch. I’ll get Penn to help you build it, if you want.”
I say this because I know Jesse thinks Penn is cute, though she fools herself that it’s a secret. Besides the free Coke she always gives him, she stands in front of him too long when she brings his food, and one day I caught her in the Waffle bathroom combing her hair when he came in for breakfast and she was working the counter. She actually left her station and went in the back to fix her hair, which is not something Jesse would ever do unless she felt like her hair was really, really important just then.
Jesse pulls a strand of that very hair over her lips, and I think, Uh-huh. Do I know my Jesse or what?
Then she nods, which throws me.
“Are you nodding because you want me to call him?” I say.
“Um. Why don’t you give me his number, and I’ll call him?” she says.
“You’re going to call him?”
She blushes, but she doesn’t back down. “Well, yeah. Maybe.”
“Okay, cool,” I say. “Don’t let me forget.” I turn to the duck. “Turdball, don’t let me forget to give Jesse Penn’s number.”
“Her name is not Turdball,” Jesse says.
“Lucky?” suggests Mel. “Lucky Ducky?”
“Or Hope?” says Jesse.
“Hope the Duck? Please.” I am indignant. “We can do better than that. Ooh, how about á l’Orange?”
Jesse squeals in horror. “You guys!”
Mel follows my lead. “What about Roast?”
“Or Peking?”
“Or Curried? Or Smoked?”
“Roast is good,” I tell her. “That’s funny. Hi, Roast. Hi, little Roastie.”
Jesse makes a growly noise while she changes lanes. I can tell we’ve pushed it far enough.
“All right, what about Waffle?” I offer. “Because we all work at the Waffle.”
“I like it,” says Mel decisively. “That has my vote.”
“It’s kind of ducky, too, isn’t it?” I add. “’Cause it sounds like waddle. Which is how it walks.”
“Hi there, Waffle,” Jesse says experimentally. “Do you like that name?”
The duckling is silent.
“If you’re not answering me,” says Jesse in mock irritation, “then how am I supposed to know what you think?”
We’re back on the highway, headed south toward Coral Castle. I am lying down in the backseat. Mel moved up front to let me stretch out, since I didn’t sleep as well as they did in the hotel. My mind was too wound up to go rapid-eye-movement or anything.
Well. We are alive, we are here.
We are badass.
We have a duckling.
We have left our families and their diseases and their worry and their expectations. We left our school friends and our work friends and our jobs and lives. We shook them all off to be here, speeding down the interstate, singing “Suddenly I See” in the dark.
Here, there’s no senior year of high school, no money worries, no everyday life. Just the three of us and a small aquatic bird.
And my brain, which is still wound up. And the ball of ice that’s still in my chest.
I reread Fantastical Florida with a flashlight Mel bought at a gas station. I figure with this short delay for a near-death experience we’ll get to Homestead by about five A.M. Then we can hit a Waffle House and suck down coffee and eat some bacon hot off the grease until Coral Castle opens.
The name of the girl Ed Leedskalnin loved—Ed being the Latvian guy who built the castle—her name was Agnes Scuffs. Such a stupid name for someone so beloved.
If I were named Agnes Scuffs, I don’t think anyone would ever love me.
Hell, no one loves me now and my name is Victoria Simonoff. Which is a very sexy name, actually.
Agnes Scuffs didn’t love Ed back, so he move
d 1,100 tons of coral by himself, using only his weird supernatural powers that he never even had until she dumped him. No one ever saw him build anything. Never saw him touch the coral. And no one ever helped him either. The guy was only five feet tall. When Agnes Scuffs broke his heart, he became magic.
I’m heartbroken.
I am.
I know I’m the one who broke it off with Brady, but I feel like he broke it off with me.
I used to think there was no way I’d ever build a coral castle for him, if he didn’t want me anymore. I thought I’d know how to get him back. Know how to make him want me again.
And if I couldn’t, I was sure I wouldn’t mope around. I’d just move on.
Now, I’m wishing that my heartbreak did make me magic. So I could make something beautiful, or do something heroic, and Brady would see it and that’s what would make him come back.
I would build a coral castle, if I could.
29
MEL
“IS SHE ASLEEP?” Jesse asks me.
I turn back to look at Vicks, careful not to wake the duck, who has tucked herself into a small fuzzball in my lap. Jesse reluctantly entrusted Waffle to my care after Waffle slipped off the driver’s seat and nearly got squashed by the gas pedal.
“She’s out cold,” I say, and indeed, Vicks is stretched across the backseat, her head cradled between her arms like she’s bracing herself for impact. I lower the volume on Macy Gray’s “I Try.”
“Saving me from the jaws of death must suck out the energy,” says Jesse.
I’ve been full of fun and smiles and alligator adrenaline, but her comment stings. I sink into my seat and stare at the blackness outside. Yes, saving someone from the jaws of death would require energy. But I wouldn’t know. Because I didn’t save her. I didn’t do anything but panic. “I’m sorry I didn’t jump in to save you,” I say.
“You didn’t need to. Vicks did.”
“I know.” My voice cracks, but I take a deep breath and keep going. “I just wish I was the kind of person who could.”
“Mel, you’re not a bad person because you’re afraid of alligators.”
I turn back to her. “I hate that I’m a wimp.”
“Hey. Some people are afraid of getting chewed up by alligators. Some people”—she jerks her thumb at Vicks—“are afraid of getting chewed up by other people. It’s okay.”
I think about my new school. My old school. My sister. The situations I was afraid to face. The people I was afraid to stand up to. The people I let slip away. “But I’m afraid of alligators and people,” I say. I hear the whining in my voice, and I’m embarrassed, because I’m not trying to turn this into a poor-little-Mel conversation.
“You’re not afraid of me, are you?” Jesse asks.
I laugh, startled out of my self-pity. Jesse. Jesse who once terrified me. Sweet, generous Jesse. Big-hearted Jesse. “No.” I pause. “Not anymore.”
“I was pretty awful to you.” She gives me a sheepish smile. “Why’d you come with us on this trip? For real?”
I run my fingers over the duck’s head and down its back. “I don’t know. You and Vicks seemed so close. You trusted each other. I wanted to be a part of that. And I guess…I guess I was tired of being afraid of people.”
We’re silent for a few minutes, while I pet Waffle and listen to the song. I wonder if you can know something about yourself and not know it at the same time. I wonder if everyone has secret fears, and not just me.
I think about Vicks, who’s so scared of getting hurt down the road that she decided to hurt herself now instead. “She’s making a mistake, isn’t she?”
Jesse must have been thinking about Vicks too because she nods and says, “Uh-huh.”
“We should stop her.”
She wrinkles her forehead. “How?”
“We’ll go find Brady.”
“Are you kidding me?”
I stop petting to reach for the map. “No, why not? She saved you. Now we’ll save her.”
Jesse’s forehead is still wrinkled and now she’s sucking on her lower lip. “Um, okay. But Vicks and me, well, we’re fixing things between us, I really do think we are, and…it’s just…”
She trickles off.
“You don’t want to mess things up,” I fill in.
“I don’t want to mess things up again,” she says. “For the forty billionth time. I mean, I’m sure this is one of those times when the right thing to do is speak up, but—”
“It’s okay,” I tell her.
“I’m sorry, Mel. For real.” She does look very sorry.
I realize what I have to do. “Hey, can you pull over? Just for a second.”
“Excuse me?”
I may be afraid of gators, but I won’t let myself be afraid of Vicks. “Your turn to hold Waffle. My turn to drive.”
“Er…do you know how to drive?”
“Of course I know how to drive. And if I’m driving, when Vicks freaks out it will be at me.”
Jesse drums her fingernails against the steering wheel, but I can tell she really does want to. “Are you sure? She’s going to be way bent out of shape.”
“I know.” I can take it.
Jesse pulls over to the shoulder and puts the car into park. We both open our doors and hurry around the front of the car. I pass her Waffle like a precious baton and then slip into the driver’s seat.
Well. Here I am. I notice the light creeping up over the horizon, as I adjust the mirrors. I feel my excessively pounding heart against my hand as I fasten my seat belt.
I can do this. I can do this. I place my foot on the brake, and shift the car into drive. Here we go. The blood rushes to my head.
Vicks might be mad, but I’m not going to lose her over this. Because it’s the right thing to do; because she might hate me, but she’ll get over it; and because I’m a good friend.
Bzz! Bzz!
“Your cell,” Jesse says. She reaches behind her to the backseat floor, where I must have dropped it. “Bet it’s your boyfriend.”
My boyfriend. Marco. Marco! I forgot about Marco! I mean, not forgot forgot, but I haven’t obsessed about him since the whole alligator debacle.
Maybe I’m tougher than I thought. I take the phone from Jesse and flip it open. “Hi there,” I say.
“I almost didn’t call since it’s so late—well, early—but then I thought, what the hell. Anyway. How’s it going?”
He’s babbling! How cute. “Great. I’m driving!”
“I thought you hated to drive?”
I feel the weight of the gas peddle under my foot and weigh the truth of that statement. “No. I’m just new at it. Guess what? I almost got eaten by an alligator!”
“What?”
I laugh. “Long story. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. Where are you now?”
“Back home.”
“Good. Are you going to sleep?”
“Yup. I just wanted to check in. Call me tomorrow?”
“Sure.” He wants to talk to me tomorrow. Because he likes me. Because I am likeable. Because I am going to be a great girlfriend.
“And I’ll take the bus up to see you next weekend. Cool?”
I sit up straight. “Maybe I’ll come see you.”
“Really? You can borrow a car?”
“I have a car.” My sister will have to deal. In the distance I spot a sign for Miami. “Marco, I gotta go. We’re almost in Miami.”
“I thought you were going to the castle.”
“We were. But I’m wild and crazy and changed the plan.” I laugh.
“Okay, Ms. Wild and Crazy. Have fun. Good night. I mean, good morning.”
“Same to you.” Adorable Marco.
I flip down the phone and hand it to Jesse.
“He’s going to have sweet dreams tonight,” she says. “He must be thanking his lucky stars he met you.”
The words, I doubt it, want to slip out, but I swallow them. I laugh instead.
We follow the signs to
the university. “You don’t know where Brady lives, do you?”
“No clue,” Jesse says. “Let’s just look for the dorms or something. And then we’ll wake her up. Well…you’ll wake her up.”
I continue along the South Dixie Highway until I spot a sign to turn onto Stanford Drive, and then I see the campus. Even though it’s only four in the morning, there are a few groups of students—probably drunk—milling around the lawns.
I stop the car and turn off the ignition once we’ve driven through the entrance gate.
It’s quiet.
“You gonna do it?” Jesse asks.
“Absolutely,” I say, my voice squeaky. “But you back me, okay?” I unsnap my seat belt, and climb into the backseat. I touch Vicks on the shoulder.
“Vicks,” I say extra gently.
“Oh, brother,” Jesse murmurs.
“Vicks,” I say louder. I’m a little bit afraid she’s going to punch me in the face, but I gotta do what I gotta do. An alligator she’s not. “Vicks, we’re here.”
She unclenches her arms and lifts her head looking like a turtle stretching her neck. “At the heartbreak castle?” she mumbles.
“Close,” I say. “But not exactly.”
30
VICKS
“I CAN’T BELIEVE you brought me here,” I moan. We are in a parking lot on the University of Miami campus. It’s dark, except for a couple streetlights.
“Don’t you want to see Brady?” asks Mel.
“No. He’s banging some cheerleader,” I protest. “He’s studying anthropology without me. He’s moving on.”
“Vicks.” Mel shakes her head. “How do you know that? You don’t know that. You broke up with him.” She shakes my knee.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask her. “It’s like four in the morning.”
“Four twenty-three,” says Jesse.
“You shouldn’t drink and dial, Vicks,” Mel scolds. “That’s a basic life lesson.”
“He texted me first!”
“So you don’t call him back drunk.” Mel gets out of the car and stands in the doorway, looking at me. “I bet you don’t even remember the details of the conversation when you broke up.”
How to Be Bad Page 19
