Ms. Nash emphasizes this inability to avoid risk, risk that includes getting pregnant, as she pairs us up, heteronormatively, for the start of our final project. She gives each couple a plastic baby, dressed in pink or blue, to rock and hold and care for until the bell rings for next period.
No pun intended.
Winthrop and I scramble to make sure we’re partnered. And when we receive our bouncing plastic baby, we name it Porhtniw Neleh, to commemorate the backward beginning of our child’s life in this backward place.
And because it’s a little bit Satan-y.
SLANT RHYME
Ms. Millen in English class wants us to write a poem about the teenage experience.
She says when we’re older, we’ll wish we could see us. Now, “on this cusp, the edge of adulthood. The precipice.”
Ms. Millen uses too many words, every synonym, for an exercise we have no interest in, especially since science class just taught us that our brains are fucked.
The only reason we have any fun is because we’re trying to die before we grow up.
RISK AVERSE
if your friends jumped off a bridge
would you
oh parents
can’t you remember
those friends
they are the bridge
DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME
My life is like one of those movies from the 1980s they’re always having weekend marathons of on TV, even Rosary TV, because the kids in them are white and their problems are sanitized for our protection. Those movies where everyone is stuck in detention together and the girl’s family forgets her birthday. Where her dad, newly returned to the land of the living thanks to his horrendous but life-resuscitating fiancée, the fiancée with the son whose presence screams, “Fuck me,” that one where the dad plans his wedding for the same day as the daughter’s prom because that is the only weekend day the VFW hall is available and he can’t wait any longer to have aged-person sex. The prom his daughter has been planning on destroying, but in the best way, with her best friends, since before he was even engaged. And she already has a dress and her eyebrows are tamed and she’s learning to shimmy and her two dream dates have already planned how to decorate the Epsworthys’ van better than any limo.
Have you seen that one?
It has a killer soundtrack. Mainly, it begins with me yelling, “No,” right before slamming the bedroom door on my dad’s face, and him saying, softly at first from the other side, “Helen.”
I shout through the door, “No,” and he says, louder, “Helen.” Then I scream, “NO,” and he loses his cool, so it turns into this:
“Hell.”
“NO.”
“HELL.”
“NO.”
“HELL!”
“NO!”
Exactly the point I am trying to make.
AND BRIMSTONE
The phone ringing in the middle of the night stops my 1980s-style, no-commercial-break marathon of feeling sorry for myself. Our phone hardly rings at all, much less in the middle of the night, and of course it is Aunt Bev and of course she is calm even though I can hear the sirens in the background, can hear a loud voice giving orders.
The shoppe was torched. The fucks of Rosary went from ASK JESUS to BURN THE WITCH at the speed of hypocrisy and the giant palm on her front window is gone forever.
But she is fine.
* * *
She had been out back, sitting in that plastic chair, her Saint Mary Magdalene tapestry wrapped around her, her phone in her hand. And she waited for the tires to squeal away before calling 911 even though she heard the glass shatter and even though she knew the brick that shattered it was followed by a glass bottle full of gasoline and that the gasoline had a bit of rag in it that had been lit on fire. She knew because she had seen it coming with great clarity, she told me. And she knew because this has all happened before, to everyone who has ever been like her.
I’ve seen Aunt Bev do things outside of what is considered normal, outside of what is considered possible, for my entire life. I guess that is why I have never really questioned that she spices up her psychic days with some overtime at night, that she sees little divide between climbing into someone’s psyche and climbing into bed with them. Plus, it’s not like she waits for customers in a negligee and high heels and hopes for the best. She picks, she chooses. Aunt Bev is the smartest person I know, so I don’t worry that she has “internalized the patriarchy,” like Rain says we all have.
I never have worried about Aunt Bev at all. Until now.
Because she was prepared, called right away, by the time the first fire truck arrived, the second one wasn’t needed. And when I ask her how come she wasn’t in bed, when I panic after the fact, imagining her sleeping through the crash of the glass, suffocating under smoke, or worse, she tells me about what she had seen. She says, in that way she has of brushing off a question, like it’s a gnat, a nuisance, “I hate getting woken up by fumes.”
“But why didn’t you stop them.” I hear my own voice as I say this. I hear that I am not asking a question. I am making an accusation.
Whoops.
Aunt Bev’s face grows severe, her lips grow white as she purses them. She gives me a look that makes me feel like a child. And maybe it’s the smoke still fading from the room, the scare of losing her fading with it, maybe it’s the wet chemical smell from the fire hoses, but I swear Aunt Bev grows tall all of a sudden, looms over me. She shoots up through a hole in the burned roof, her body blocking out the night sky. And the room disappears. And there is only her.
Her.
Her voice is everywhere. I don’t hear it so much as feel it.
“That is not what the gift is for, Helen.”
I want to scream back at her, want to scream, “Fuck the gift,” but I also wish I had something to hide behind and my voice comes out small. I don’t forget the question mark this time.
“But why see it, then?”
I start to cry. That really pisses me off, and I manage to add, in an almost loud voice, “Why see it if you can’t change it? What kind of gift is that?”
The walls are giving way around us, something necessary to keep them up was lost in the fire. Everything is crumbling.
“Change requires sacrifice.”
Or I am just trembling, because Aunt Bev is shouting now.
“Never think that I have not sacrificed.”
We shouldn’t be allowed in here. It can’t be safe. What was the fire marshal thinking?
She takes a deep breath, softens.
“I could not change what happened to your mom, Helen. But I promised to take her place in the only way possible.”
The ruined shoppe steadies around us now.
“I’m here,” Aunt Bev says, in her normal voice. “I’m here for you.”
She is her usual size and shape again, but I still feel small. And I sob in her arms, and in this mess of smoke and loss, her arms are a gift.
ABOMINATION
It’s not like Aunt Bev doesn’t care about who lit up the shoppe with a Rosary cocktail. It’s like she actually does, like she is interested in the state of their souls the same way they would probably claim to be interested in hers, even as they try to destroy the body and home and business that are meant to serve it. Aunt Bev would never press charges. But her insurance company does not have any spiritual qualms about wanting revenge, and neither do the Rosary police. The department may be made up of Thumpers but they leave New Testament ideas about forgiveness at home. It is an eye for an eye, and pretty much any eye will do.
Soon enough, I know, the authorities will come sniffing around the Dickheads. What I don’t know is that soon enough, they will have a suspect.
Winthrop Epsworthy.
* * *
Apparently, Winthrop has a little bit of a criminal record. Apparently, Winthrop used to like to go into other people’s houses. But only when they weren’t home.
“And just hang out,” he says. “I didn
’t ever take anything. I just looked around. Sometimes I’d watch TV. And one time, just one time, there was a fire.”
The image of Winthrop, in his ironed button-downs, watching TV on a stranger’s couch, stealing the comfort of their home while they are away without taking anything else at all, it makes a weird kind of sense. And now it makes sense that the Epsworthys have moved around so much. It’s why Mr. Epsworthy has a hypnotizing speech ready for the principal’s office to absolve his children, about how teenagers in particular are the lost continent. And it’s why Winthrop and Rain know that speech by heart.
What doesn’t make sense is why I am just hearing this now. And maybe that bit about a fire.
Winthrop is telling me this in his bedroom the night after the fire at the shoppe. We have been up since Aunt Bev’s phone call to me, after mine to Winthrop and Rainbolene, when they walked down there in their pajamas and sweats to watch the firefighters pack it in. We all cleaned up together as the sun rose, Aunt Bev and Dad and me, then the Epsworthys and the Doncasters, pink boxes of donuts from the Donut Hole springing up like flowers after a rain.
Winthrop and I are in the fort we create by pulling a blanket across the two beds. There’s a porn book between us, She Drives a Semi, but we did not get a chance to open it before Winthrop made this confession. Or whatever it is.
He’s acting weird. Something like afraid.
“Helen,” he says, “I don’t do this anymore. I mean, I didn’t do this.”
I didn’t think he did it. I don’t. I wouldn’t. I want to know how he stopped. “How did you—”
“I didn’t!” He starts to get up and the blanket fort collapses around us. His voice cuts through the stripes and zigzags of his comforter, a design that has always reminded me of Charlie Brown’s T-shirt.
“I swear to God.”
“I was going to say, how did you stop?” I pull the blanket off of our heads. Move a pillow behind us and make him lie down then, in the valley between the two beds. The valley of truth.
We stare up at the ceiling of this room Winthrop shares with his sister, the ceiling that is covered with glow-in-the-dark stars in constellations they invented together. Kitten with Yarn is just above us. I remember my first nights sleeping over, how safe I have always felt in this spot, how lucky. How this does not change when I understand that Winthrop has a little bit of a trespassing problem.
“Before we came to Rosary, at the last place, in Alaska, I got in trouble. I got caught. And because it wasn’t my first offense, I was supposed to go to juvenile hall.”
I reach for his hand.
“We moved. Dad posted bail and we left.” He says, “I am on the lam.”
I do not laugh. I do not think this is cool or neat. The cops are looking at the Dickheads, or they will be. And we are the Dickheads. And they are going to find out these historical facts about Winthrop.
And he never told me.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” he says, like a mind reader. “My mom doesn’t even know. Not about the last one. Dad told her we had to move for his work.”
I don’t know what I’m more afraid of. That Winthrop will have to go to the farm, to some juvenile detention center where they are just training guys for the major league of prison. I don’t want to think about Winthrop’s big soft self in a hard place. But I don’t want the Epsworthys to move away either. I don’t want Winthrop to get caught, but I don’t want him to run.
“I’m going to miss you, Helen.”
I try to hide my selfishness. Of course they should leave.
“But I want to be at Rain’s graduation.”
Okay, so they’ll hold out for graduation. I squeeze his hand. Kitten with Yarn is all tangled up above me and I wipe my face on my sleeve.
“Where?”
“Nowhere. I mean, to juvie. Alaskan juvie. We’re going to see, if I turn myself in before they find out about my record, if they will let me wait until after Rain graduates.”
“Really?” I am so excited that they’re not moving away, I sound happy. Which is kind of the wrong emotion to express right now. “But you didn’t even do this.”
“I did light up someone else’s store, though. Used furniture. It was a thrift store and it had been closed for months and all these old couches just kept getting piled up outside of it, until it was like this couch graveyard and they were moldy and gross, so I poured a little lighter fluid on one and, whoosh.” He sounds nostalgic. “But the fire got big fast and a little tiny bit of the store burned before the fire department could put it out. They saw me running away. Saw that a fat kid wearing a tie had been there. Dad started packing us up before the sentencing, and the next thing I know, we’re in Rosary.”
Rain comes in then, which is good because I don’t know what to say.
“Helen, I guess you finally met my baby brother the arsonist?” She sounds all right, but she doesn’t look like herself.
I sit up. “He says he’s going to let them put him in the farm? In Alaska?” I say. I ask.
“Win knows what he wants,” and she looks right into me in a way that would make Aunt Bev proud, “and he wants us to stay in Rosary.”
“Yay, juvie!” says Winthrop. “It’s the best news I’ve had since I found out my sister is my only date for prom.” He gets up.
“You owe me more than one dance, Helen. You owe me for the prom you’ll miss and for the wedding reception I’ll miss.” He puts on the playlist we made for our drive to prom, all the oldies and bootleg R&B that won’t be played there. We were going to do our best that night with the sparkly white-boy bands and tween-girl pop, but for now, at least, Winthrop is our DJ.
He takes my hand. And we shimmy right through all the fears and all the worries. We shimmy until we are brave.
THE SECRET LIFE OF PIT BULLS
There is the supposed love story that is about to move in to my own house, I’m helping Aunt Bev restore the shoppe, worrying about Winthrop going to jail, and then, on top of everything else, Winthrop falls in love.
Fast Eddie got a dog. The fire at the shoppe has us all looking at the Thumpers like maybe they are dangerous after all, and nowhere is more flammable than the tire yard. So here is Pen. Short for Pendeja, which is Spanish for asshole, I guess, and somebody’s idea of a joke, but no one speaks Spanish around here, so Pen it is. Pen is big enough to be terrifying, that’s for sure, but she’s not. And she is definitely not a watchdog. Unless you count watching Winthrop, because that is all she does.
It’s that sweet something Winthrop has. A secret scent. His sweat curls up into the rolls of his flesh like sugar in a bun. Pen likes Winthrop’s smell, I’m guessing, and I know she likes that way he has. She acts kind of wild, jumping and barking at us from her corner with her bowls and an old moving blanket, but Winthrop always says hello to her when he comes in. She sits when he does, sits and waits. And finally, after her first few days at the tire yard, tired of waiting for more than that hello, she makes her move.
She strains at the end of the leash but she’s not yapping or frothing. She’s wagging, wiggling her butt with its badly cropped tail, and she’s coming right toward Winthrop. When he sees her coming at him, he moves from a corner of the couch to the armrest, from the armrest toward the dog, goes nearer and nearer until he is close enough to reach out his hand.
Fast Eddie comes out of his office when all the Dickheads start screaming.
Eddie’s probably thinking lawsuit, finally, after all the laws we break in here. He’s been nervous since she arrived, irritated. And he yells, “Sit.” And the dog sits. Not because of Fast Eddie but because Winthrop is right in front of her at last. She sits and sniffs Winthrop’s outstretched hand. And then she licks it, like he is her own pup, tastes that sweetness. Eddie pulls her back, tells her to “Stay,” and for the rest of the afternoon, Winthrop keeps his eyes on her. She looks right at him, and lets out these big doggy sighs, licks her lips, and remembers the taste of kindness that fills him inside like marrow.
/> * * *
At Fast Eddie’s the next night, Sissy and Mo have already traded for beers for Bird and them. They climb the tires, slip and fall, and when their six-pack is almost gone they start making out, with each other and Bird. I watch for a little bit, enough to be sure no one is watching me, and then I head toward the bathroom but nod at Eddie as I go by.
I don’t go all the way into his office, I stand just inside the door.
“You want a beer, Helen?” he says as he comes in, not to me but to my chest. “Half a beer?”
I am very tired of this joke.
“I don’t want beer.”
“What am I, a charity case?”
“I want Pen.”
“That stupid dog?” Then he is all business again. “But the dog has bigger tits than you.”
I turn to go. I’ve never cared about flashing him, but I don’t think I can do more. Not for that sweet dumb dog I know Eddie already regrets getting. Not even for Winthrop and the magic trick I’m trying to work here by giving him one more tie to Rosary just in case he decides to run.
“Such a bargainer.” He laughs. “Let’s talk. Sit down.”
I keep my hand on the doorframe. “I’m listening,” I say.
“A case,” he says. The laughter is gone from his voice now. This is code for Eddie getting to put his hand in my pants. Eddie never fucks anyone, not that I know of, but he will trade all the beer in the world to feel you up. And down.
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