I fold the photo in half and shove it into the clear sleeve of my wallet. I place my toothbrush, hairbrush, a tube of hair glue, two spare T-shirts, a pair of jeans, and a handful of bobby pins into the front zip of my bag. It’s not much for a six-week competition, I know, but it’s almost too much when you consider the fact that I’m not even on the show. Yet.
I check my bedroom clock: 6:36 a.m. I’ve got about twenty minutes before Summerland wakes up and that means twenty minutes to bust out of here without bumping into a gazillion people that I’ve known since I was, like, five, all wanting to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what trouble I’m possibly causing now.
I glance out the window one last time. The sight of Rose and that gun make my chest all tight and achy.
I hate that Rose blames Mom for what’s happened, when they’re the ones who made Mom relapse again and again and again. I hate that Rose doesn’t care anymore what they think, doesn’t believe that what I’m going to do will be big enough to change them. Change all of this.
I watch her busy frame as she scoots fifteen feet to her left, makes suction, and then sifts through another mess of mud and sand, gloves off. Her hand must be numb, bitten by the teeth of the Pacific. At this rate, she’s going to pull her whole quota before most people even get out there, but that’s probably her plan.
I tear my gaze from the window. My right hand slips under my bed and rustles around for my piece of pillowcase. I find it and secure it under my bra strap where it’ll stay as long as I’m sporting this hoodie to hide it.
I sling my bag over my shoulder and bolt out the back door—the one that faces away from the beach. Rose can’t see me from here, and God knows that’s for the best.
For both of us.
I hate cycling in the morning, even in July.
The chilly wind whips my neck and nips at my cheeks, turning them this raw shade of pink, which stings like crazy. But this is the quickest way for me to get from A to B around here, and like I said, I don’t have much time.
My feet pedal fast—past the Pic ’N’ Pay, past Xanadu Mini Golf, past the Taco Stop. Past Miller’s darn bakery with those awful cakes that people pay ludicrous amounts of cash for, unlike Mrs. Moutsous’s cakes, which are good—no, great—and not just because they’re fondant-free.
Every now and then my flip-flops catch themselves on the pedals, but I keep going full tilt until I see Deelish. I round the corner and hop off before my bike is completely stopped. It’s how I always do it, how I’ve always done it. How all of us Summerland kids have always done it.
My hands dig into my pocket for the set of keys Mrs. M. had made for me. Underneath them, I feel the smooth paper of the note I wrote last night after my fight with Rose. The one that says, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Moutsous, I won’t be at work today, or tomorrow, and maybe not on Wednesday, either. I’m sorry and I understand that you can’t save my job for me for when I get back. I’m sorry.” At the bottom of the page, I’ve signed it Magnolia Grace Woodson. Not that she won’t know who I am. Mrs. Moutsous knows my handwriting. After all, she’s the one who helped me learn how to do it in the first place.
“Magnolia?”
I spin around.
Mark’s there on his own bike, strong arms bent over his handlebars. “What are you doing here?” he says, like I have no business being here at all.
“Um. I work here.”
He smiles. “Yeah, I know. I meant, what are you doing here at this hour? Deelish doesn’t open this early, does it?”
“No, not until ten.” I search my brain for something else to say. Something smart and normal. Something that will allow him to pedal his ass out of here and tell no one about what, or whom, he saw. “I forgot to lock the cash register last night. Just making sure everything’s where it’s supposed to be.”
“But the door’s locked, right?”
“What?”
He points to the key I’m holding, already inserted into the hole. “The door. If it’s still locked, you should be all good, right?”
“Let’s hope so.”
He waits, kind of staring at my shaky hand while I wiggle the key, hold the knob, turn it, and push open the door. I scoot to the register and pop open the drawer and, sure enough, it’s still full of cash. I laugh nervously. “Guess I worried for nothing.”
“Better to be safe than sorry.” He walks his bike inside and then glances behind him and then back at me, I guess, to see if anyone’s noticed him come in here with me. If they did, I don’t know what kind of shit they’ll give him later. Mark and I are friends but we haven’t been close in a while. Not since we started senior year and definitely not since Colleen. Most of his friends these days are dance friends and cool-kid friends, and though I still dance, I’m not either of those things. The last memory I have of the two of us together and alone is the day with our bungled schedules and our butts behind that bush. But he always makes the time to talk to me whenever we find ourselves in the same space. I know he was only trying to help on the beach yesterday. I don’t know how to say thank you and I don’t know if thank you is what he’s looking for here.
He holds up the bag in his right hand and smiles, his top teeth so perfectly crooked they remind me of the cliffs, the rocks, the smooth edges from the waves lapping against them.
“I should get home,” he says. “My mom can’t see straight in the morning without her coffee. Good thing the Pic ’N’ Pay opens early.”
“I’ll see you at dance?”
“Definitely,” he says. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
I come toward him, ready to shut the door. But he hops off his bike and leans it against Deelish’s window. “I heard you’re trying out for Live to Dance. I mean, like, for real you are. Not just saying you are like everyone else.”
“Maybe. I think so.” I fiddle with a loose piece of hair that’s dropped from my beanie. “You’re not trying out?”
“Nah. I’m not really into the whole competing thing. It’s like, if you’re lucky enough to dance, you’ve already won.” He laughs, like it comes so easily for him. He’s not like George, all peppy and cheery all the time, but he’s got a great smile. “Pretty cheesy, right?”
I get what he’s saying. About dance being more a way of life, a state of soul, rather than this thing to prove. But I also know that it’s him that doesn’t get it. Of course he feels that way. He’s got nothing to prove, has always been a winner in this town for as long as I can remember. He might not be all fire and show the way George is, but he’s really not that different.
“I just wanted to say good luck.” He shuffles his feet, curling his toes against his flip-flops. “I think you’ve got a really good shot at making it. You’re a harder worker than anyone I know.”
My breath catches in surprise.
“Maybe I could come down there with you,” Mark says. He lifts his head a little and his eyes meet mine. “You know. Cheer you on.”
It’s a nice thought, but it’s no secret that he and George don’t exactly get along. Anyway, I know he’s only saying it to be nice.
“Nah, it’s okay. George is going with me. And I doubt it’s worth missing class for.” I laugh. “We’ll probably be back before anyone even notices we’re gone. Anyway, Katina would kill you if you ditched out, too.”
Mark’s gaze falls to his pedals again. He tells me good luck again, backs his way out of the shop, swivels his bike around, and starts pedaling without ever looking back.
I shut and lock the door behind me and wait another second until I’m sure he’s gone, until I’m sure that he’s halfway up the cliffs right now, toward his side of town. The lucky side.
I grab the note from my pocket and smooth it out with both hands and set it on the counter where I know Mrs. M. will see it, next to the cash register and photo of her, George, Mr. Moutsous, and George’s brother, Malcolm, smooshed together in front of their floor-to-ceiling fireplace. I bet that somewhere in Mark’s house there’s a framed photo just like it, with
his mom and dad and sister looking happy and loved, too. I close my eyes and try to remember the last time I went to the McDonald residence. I’m almost positive I can see it. Giant and framed and hanging in their foyer, where no one would ever miss it.
I back my bike out of the shop, turning it toward the cliffs too, rising on the right pedal and pushing it down, hard. The way up is slow going and I study the short row of million-dollar homes that line each side. I swallow, and then again. Note dropped at Deelish, check. The one “t” I needed to cross before I could leave for the competition. Now all I’ve got left is to dot the final “i.”
I can do this. No matter what Rose says, I can do this, for her and me and for Mom who’d never come back to this place unless it wasn’t like this anymore. Like Mark says, I can do this for real. My feet push faster, faster, around corners, past shops, past houses that I’ve known and pedaled past for fourteen years, more. I don’t stop. If I’m going to try out and be on TV and put myself out there for all the world to see, there’s still one person I need to see me first.
SIX
It’s not like I’ve never been here before.
To these streets, lined with pretty mailboxes and pretty lawns, pretty iron gates leading up to each and every more-than-pretty house that makes up the cliffs neighborhood. I know people that live here. Like George, and George’s family, and Mark and Abby and Quinn, and other people besides Mayor Chamberlain. So it’s not like I have no business being here.
Still, I feel all weird and wobbly as my thighs push my bike through the uphill burn, passing house after house, each one equaling about ten of my houses in size. I know which one is his. Everyone knows which one is his. The one with the tallest hedges. The one with the biggest roses. The one with the thickest gate.
I round the corner of his street and squeeze my handlebars even tighter, my knuckles whitening. I thought I could do this. I thought I could just rock on up here and tell him we didn’t know and tell him we would have stopped it if we could have. Now, looking up at his sad house with no lights on inside and no people around outside, I doubt he’ll even answer. I don’t know what I’ll say if he answers.
I hop off my bike, just kind of staring through the climbing vines that snake the gate and beyond. My finger hovers over his doorbell, not touching it—an invisible force field between him and me. A chill whips through my chest and then out again. I can’t press it. I mean, if he answers, what would I say to him? Good morning, Mayor Chamberlain, welcome back to town, I’m sorry my sister and I let our mother kill your daughter? It sounded good in my head on the way over. Now it sounds like the saddest sentence one stranger could ever say to another. Not to mention, halfway through something like that, he’d probably kick my butt out of here faster than you can say Summerland.
I stare through the bars, the thick foliage. It’s too dense to see anything. I creep around the side of the house and shimmy halfway up the gate, peering over the stacked hedge and into their sprawling yard. There’s patio furniture there, a croquet set that looks like it hasn’t been used in ages, and a pool that’s still covered, even though summer in Summerland never gets warmer than this. I know George said the mayor has been back a whole week, but it looks to me like he still isn’t back. Maybe he never will be.
The chill threads through me again. This time, it’s like a shadow. A spirit. Telling me what I should have known long before I came here: that I can’t disturb him or his wife or his other, younger daughter, Annie, who’s going to be a freshman this year at my old school. How I can’t intrude on their perfect life anymore than I already have.
Behind me, the quick whoop of a siren sounds.
My fingers release the gate and I fall back, landing on the soft bed of bushes, flattening a rose with my butt. I hop to the ground, turning my ankle in the process.
The cop leans out his window. “Hey. What’s your business here?”
“I—nothing. I just wanted to say hello.” I stand up. Brush myself off, hobble toward him, vaguely aware of my pants, dirtied, from my fall.
The cop squints at me. “You’re the younger Woodson girl, aren’t you?”
I nod. Swallow. Glance back at Mayor Chamberlain’s house. Down to my pants. Back to the cop. I swear to God, it’s not what it looks like.
But he thinks it is. “Haven’t you taken enough from them?”
“I wanted to tell him how sorry I was.”
“By trespassing on his property? Like hell you were.”
“I didn’t mean to trespass. I just thought—”
“We know what you thought. That your actions have no consequences. Isn’t that right?”
I stumble back to my bike, leaning against the mayor’s gate. I pull it toward me. Even my bike knows it has no business touching anything of his.
The cop watches me fumble around. He runs one hand over his balding head, like it has hair. “Come over here.”
I rest my bike against the sidewalk and take five small steps closer to his dusty black and blue car. I raise my head. He’s no different than any other cop in town, but there’s something about him. His eyebrows rise, daring me to come closer. My heart thuds, banging out a warning inside my chest. I know I shouldn’t get closer, but I do.
Something in his face is familiar. A scar—triangle-shaped—just above his lip, on the right. I’ve seen him before, coming out of Mom’s room while I lay flat and still, under my covers, disappearing, unexisting. That’s what I usually did when I heard them getting ready to go. That’s what I did to make sure they forgot all about stopping in my room to chat, like they sometimes did. What else could I do? Hold your breath. Hold it till they’re gone.
“Magnolia, isn’t it?” His lip curls, beckoning me.
“Yes, sir.”
“Your sister is Rose?”
“Yeah.”
“Your mom was Patricia, wasn’t she?”
“Is.”
“What?”
“Is Patricia.”
The cop picks at the corner of his left nostril. Smiles, revealing wide spaces and yellowed teeth. Canary yellow. Corn yellow. Piss yellow. I don’t remember those teeth. But it was a long time ago. Things change. People change.
“You’re a real fireball. I remember that about you.” His tongue runs across his teeth. My stomach turns. “You know,” he says. “I could write you up for trespassing. Or for intention to break and enter. Or for mischief.”
I close my eyes. If I challenge him now, blow up on his ass or blow on out of here, he’s going to write me up. And if he writes me up, my chance to be on the show is over. Fact is, someone with trespassing or mischief on her record isn’t the type to go anywhere in life, let alone on TV.
“But,” he says. “This time I won’t. I’d rather not bother his family anymore than I have to.” His gaze travels down my face, my chin, my neck. Further. “But we’ve got ourselves a problem here, don’t we?”
I nod my head, slowly. So slow.
“Maybe we could think of another way to solve things privately.” His head motions me closer still. I inhale, lean toward him. I’m wearing George’s sweatshirt, but it’s big and it leans off me, revealing my bare shoulder. I don’t pull it back up. His smile widens, stretching across his face so that all I can see are those teeth, those spaces. He leans across his car. Opens the passenger side and pats the empty seat next to him.
I walk around his car. I don’t know what I’m doing. But if it gets out that I was at the mayor’s house, doing God-knows-what, Rose and I will be ruined.
I pull my stomach muscles in tight and lower myself inside his car. Shut the door. Hold my breath while his eyes hold on to my skin.
He rests his hand on top my thigh, two inches from the last place on earth I want it.
A smack on my window scares me, makes me jump. Next to me, the cop jumps too. It’s George, on his bike, hand pressed to my window. My heart beats so fast when, a second ago, it wasn’t beating at all.
“What are you doing in there?” He shouts i
t through the closed window. The cop presses a button on his console to roll it down. George looks across me, to him, venom in his eyes. “Is she under arrest?”
The cop shrugs. “Not yet.”
“Get out of the car,” George says to me.
I don’t know what to do. He’s a cop. My whole body is shaking, yet frozen.
“Get out of the car,” George says again, this time louder. I open the door. George pulls me out, pulls me into his chest. Wrapped in the safety of his arms, my breathing slows. I whisper into his hoodie, “How did you know I was here?”
“I was worried about you. You didn’t return my calls last night. You weren’t on the beach with Rose this morning. I went to your house, then Deelish. I found your note.” He breathes into my hat, my hair. His voice is soft. “I was on my way home when I saw you in there. With him.”
The cop leans out his window. “She was trespassing. I should write you both up for being here.”
I feel George’s body tense. See his face twist into something I’ve never seen on him, even when Mark “stole” his part as Peter Pan in Katina’s end-of-year production three years ago. That was mad. This is something else entirely. “I live in this neighborhood,” George says. “She was here visiting me. I should report you for sexual harassment.”
The cop scoffs. “Right. In her dreams.”
George rests his elbow on the cop’s open window. I see him smile. See him lean into the cop like he’s not at all scared the way I was. The way I am. “That’s where you’re wrong,” George says. “If you ever go near my friend again, it’ll be your worst nightmare.”
SEVEN
The cop turns on his red light and speeds down the hill into town, fake rushing to a fake call. The second he’s out of sight, George says, “How could you?” He throws one leg over his bike and pushes down on his pedal.
Spin the Sky Page 6
