The Baddest Girl on the Planet

by Heather Frese

  I reach over and wipe at Austin’s mouth. He’s been on a SpaghettiOs kick and has red sauce all over his face. He squirms out of my reach, and I give up. “What do you mean?” I ask Stephen. I’m not even nervous. My heart doesn’t pound. I’m resigned, and a little relieved.

  “I know you’re spending above our limits so there’s nothing left for me to go back to school with,” he says.

  I sag back against my chair. And then a second later I’m pissed. “Austin needed an outfit for karate, and then he had his checkup. I’m not just spending money to spend money.”

  “Mom,” Austin says. He puts down his spoon. “What’s bigger? A hippo or a jaguar?”

  “This is what I mean, Evie,” Stephen says. “We don’t need to be spending money on karate lessons.”

  “Hippo or jaguar?” Austin asks.

  Stephen looks at me. “Austin’s asking you a question,” he says.

  “Hippopotamus,” I tell Austin. “He needs to be around other kids, and it’s good for him,” I say to Stephen.

  “And what about the bill from the salon?” Stephen asks. He’s stopped eating his food.

  Okay, that was bad, an unnecessary pedicure, but I’m not admilling it to Stephen. “I needed a haircut,” I say. Like Stephen would even notice I hadn’t had one.

  “Mom,” Austin says. “Is a lion or a tiger bigger?”

  “I’m not sure,” I say.

  “Why?” Austin asks. He pushes his finger into what’s left of his SpaghettiOs.

  “They’re about the same,” I say. I wonder when I became the poster girl for National Geographic.

  Stephen stands up and takes his plate over to the sink. “You should have asked me about the karate first,” he says.

  “A humpback whale or a condor? Mom?” Austin asks. He pushes his finger in rapid circles on his plate.

  “Stop playing with your food,” Stephen says.

  “Whale,” I say. “Whales are really big.”

  “Did you hear me?” Stephen asks me.

  “How could I not?” I reach over and hold Austin’s arm still. When he looks up at me, his eyes are big and dark. I relax my grip.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Stephen says. He walks into the living room and turns on the TV.

  I take Austin’s plate and finish his SpaghettiOs. They’re cold and clammy, and the thin sauce tastes like the can.

  “Mom,” Austin says.

  I stand up and pile our plates together. “Yeah, baby?”

  “A sloth or a penguin?”

  I used to have a thing for Sherpas. Actually, I still do. If that doesn’t end up working out as a career path, I’d want to be a whirling dervish. I watched a show on the Travel Channel about them once. They spin and spin and spin. That’s how my head feels lately when I’m with Royce. It spins and spins and spins. I’m leaning back against him and his office is dark, and the purple lace Victoria’s Secret bra I mail-ordered is on the floor.

  Royce snuggles me closer. “What are you thinking?” he asks.

  Sometimes Royce asks me this question, after. This time I give him an honest answer. “I’m thinking of leaving Stephen,” I say. I burrow under his arm a little more. Royce doesn’t stiffen, but by his silence I’m afraid I’ve said something wrong. I nibble on my lower lip. It’s sore from kissing. “I didn’t mean for you,” I say. But this might be a lie. I might want him there to catch me.

  Royce turns me around to look at him. “Evie, honey,” he says. “There are plenty of fish in the sea, and you just caught yourself a largemouth bass.”

  I squint up at him. His hair is rumpled, his head silhouetted against the back of the sofa. A largemouth bass.

  I cough. I picture my son asking, “Mom, what’s bigger? A large-mouth bass or a carp?” I press my face into Royce’s chest and try not to giggle. Stephen, for all his faults, would never say anything that corny. My husband is one sharp cookie. To be honest, I feel bad he had to quit school when I got pregnant. To be honest, I feel bad about a lot of things.

  Royce must mistake my silence for me being overcome with emotion because he says, “Don’t cry, honey. It’ll be okay. I’ll take care of you.” He rubs his hand up and down over my shoulder. The gesture irritates me. I think of what it would be like to wake up every morning to Royce Burrus rubbing my shoulder up and down like that. I think of having to tell him to smooth down his hair or iron his shirt. And then, inexplicably, I think of Mike Tyson. I think of Mike Tyson, good old Kid Dynamite, grinning at me with that gap-toothed leer, and I want to put my hand over my ear just in case another man who I thought was a good man turns out to be bad.

  There are way too many things spinning around in my head, and somehow this has the paradoxical effect of making my head stop spinning for Royce. Royce’s hand slides down my arm and rests in the curve of my waist, then moves down again. I look up at him, shifting his hand off. His hair and eyes are the exact same color, and this annoys me. He looks at me big and mopey and pleading. I get up and put on my bra.

  It’s a pretty Saturday, so I pack up a picnic and take Austin to the beach. Stephen is off somewhere doing something; I don’t even bother asking what. I think it’ll be good for Austin to get away from the television. Austin holds onto my hand as we walk over the dunes. He holds onto my hand as we stroll down the beach. He holds onto my hand as I try to fix the blanket and spread out lunch.

  “Baby, you need to let go,” I say. I shake his little hand in mine, then feel guilty as Austin stares up at me. He’s got that look on his face like he’s about to cry, the one where his upper lip curls into a baby Elvis snarl. I think about the summer I was nine, when Charlotte and I got on an Elvis kick, how we danced around her living room to “Blue Suede Shoes.”

  “Don’t get all shook up,” I say, even though I know he won’t get the joke. I sit down on the blanket, and Austin curls himself onto my lap. He sticks his index finger in his mouth, a gesture I thought he’d long since outgrown. I pull his hand down. “Let’s go look at the water before we eat,” I say.

  It’s barely April, so the water is too cold to get our feet wet, but Austin and I take our shoes off and walk along the shore. It’s a gray-green, rolly-crashy sort of a day, with long, lacy breakers and an onshore breeze.

  “Look,” Austin says, letting go of my hand. The air feels cool on my palm. He runs down the beach and points at something on the sand.

  It’s a blue jellyfish, and it looks like a cross between a dildo and a conch shell with long, crinkly tentacles spreading over the sand. A Portuguese man-of-war. Austin reaches for it and I swat his hand. He knows better than to touch a jellyfish. He gives me the Elvis curl again and I pull him to me. “The tentacles will sting you,” I say. “They’re mean.”

  Austin buries his head in my stomach. He shakes his face back and forth into me. And then the little shit backs up a couple of paces and gives me this look and reaches out to touch the jellyfish again.

  “Austin!” I say, grabbing his shoulder. “What’s your deal, man?”

  “I want to touch it,” he says. “It looks squishy.” He leans closer.

  Against my better judgment, I show him how he can carefully touch the ruffly pink top edge without getting stung. “Stay away from the tentacles,” I tell him.

  “It’s pretty,” Austin says. He crouches and runs his finger over the safe part of the jellyfish.

  It is pretty. The inside of it’s filled with clear blue liquid, the color of a summer sky. Or Windex. Or that awful blue Kool-Aid Austin likes. But the man-of-war is tricky, too, the way it pretends to be a harmless seashell, the way the tentacles look like seaweed. I pull Austin away, and we go back up to the blanket, which is blowing away at the edges where the picnic basket doesn’t weigh it down.

  I smooth things out and sit, then hand Austin a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Austin looks at it. He pokes at it. He takes a bite and spits it into the sand.

  “What are you doing?” I ask. I root around for my own sandwich.

&
nbsp; Austin has grape jelly on the side of his mouth. “I hate jelly,” he says.

  “You don’t hate jelly,” I say. He loves jelly. Especially grape jelly.

  Austin throws the rest of the sandwich down. Grape jelly oozes onto the blanket, and I close my eyes so I don’t scream at the thought of the extra laundry.

  Austin looks at me, and his I’m-going-to-cry face is gone. He has an I’m-going-to-pick-a-fight face instead, narrowed lips and sparky eyes. “Mother,” he says, very formally. “I have always hated jelly.”

  And this is terrible, but I just want to smack him.

  I know he’s not a dumb kid. I know he’s not the only one who lives in a tense home that’s not really a home at all. But when he says, “Mother, I have always hated jelly,” and sticks his index finger in his mouth, I want to smack him.

  I look out at the crashing waves, the rickety fishing pier. My hair blows back from my face, and the breeze is cool and crisp. I take a deep breath and push it out through my teeth, thinking of the funny hee-hee-hee breathing I did while I was in labor.

  I hand Austin half of my sandwich. “Then you’ll just have to eat bologna.”

  You know what I’ve never understood about soap? Soap scum. Soap is supposed to make you clean, not create scum. And what do you clean it with, because you sure can’t use soap, at least not the scummy bar. Do you use a different bar of soap? Doesn’t it just get scummy, too, from cleaning the original scummy bar? How can something clean be dirty and something dirty be clean? Has it ever really changed? I bend over the bathtub and scrub at the hard-to-reach back corner and wish we could afford an automatic shower cleaner, the one with the scrubbing bubbles. The front door slams, and Stephen’s footsteps clump up the stairs. I lean back on my heels and throw the sponge in the tub. The footsteps stop, and Stephen is in the room with me, his face red and his hair messy.

  “Did you think I was stupid?” he asks. He paces around the room and hits his fist against the wall.

  I stand up. There’s no way to answer this. “Maybe,” I say.

  “Because you must have thought I was stupid to go and fuck Royce Burrus and think I wouldn’t find out.”

  My first instinct is to tell him to lower his voice, that Austin will hear, but then I remember Austin is with Stephen’s parents for the afternoon. “How did you find out?” I ask. Curiosity always has gotten the better of me.

  Stephen looks at me like I’m a largemouth bass or something equally ridiculous. “If you must know, I went in to the office to ask Royce to take the house off the market, and I saw your little love note on his desk.”

  Shit. I try a new strategy. “It’s not like I did anything you didn’t do.”

  Stephen runs a hand through his hair. “So this is a revenge fuck?” he asks.

  “Maybe,” I say. I only say this to make Stephen mad, but it occurs to me that it might be the truth. “What does it matter? Besides, I ended it.” I did end it. I don’t know why Royce still has love notes on his desk.

  “And that makes it okay? We can just go back to being happily married?” He huffs a little on the word happily.

  I turn away from Stephen to wash the shower cleaner off my hands. “Did you think you’d get rid of me that easily?”

  Stephen grabs me by the shoulders and turns me around, fast. The water still runs in the sink. “You are suffocating me, Evie. You are suffocating me.” And Stephen puts his hands around my neck. He presses for a second, moves my head back and forth once, then releases me. It doesn’t hurt. He doesn’t press hard. He doesn’t shake me hard. But I start to cry all the same. Stephen lets go. “Jesus, why do I even bother? You’re not worth it.” He steps back with his hands at his sides, breathing so I can see his chest rise and fall.

  I slap him.

  I slap him and I push past him and I walk out the door.

  I get Austin. Stephen gets the house. It was never really mine to begin with. It wasn’t worth the fight. He sells it, though not through anyone in my office, and I get a little check for the four years I pretended it was my home. And sure enough, a few months later, I drive by and it’s not there. It’s just gone. Like it was never there at all. It’s only a matter of time before some big pink thing is built in its place.

  Austin and I move into a room in my parents’ inn until I can get back on my feet. I don’t tell him Stephen is gone. I tell him Daddy’s at work without mentioning that work is in Raleigh. I try to make it a fun summer trip to Grandma and Grandpa’s, and whenever he wants to go home to the house that isn’t, I let him get in the pool.

  It’s summer, and I have to leave extra time to get to work because of tourist traffic. Plus Austin throws a fit whenever I go. But at least I only have to drive up and down twice instead of four times now that Austin is already with my parents. I wonder if my son ever thinks of his days as green and blue and gold. Probably not. He probably thinks of his days in terms of Transformers and whichever animal Diego is rescuing. I wonder if he registers the fact that Stephen is gone for good.

  One of Mike Tyson’s trademark combinations was a right hook to his opponent’s body followed by a right uppercut to the chin. I don’t know how he moved his hands that fast. People were afraid to fight him; he was that mean. I used to tell myself that maybe he wasn’t so bad, that maybe he just liked to fight. There is something about having battles, some kind of adrenaline rush that makes you feel spiky and alive and full of power. Maybe that’s what made him move so fast. Maybe he just craved the rush. But I don’t really buy it. What I really think is that Mike Tyson was a bastard like all the rest of them.

  I drive up the road and it’s a lovely end of the day, and I’m sure the sun is doing amazing sparkly things on the beautiful, beautiful water. It’s a view people drive thousands of miles to see, but I can’t see it anymore. All I can see is the road. I’m twenty-three years old, and for forty more years I’ll drive up and down this road to work and back again. I can’t quit. I’ll never go back to school, or climb Mt. Everest, or meet a Sherpa, or throw a whirling dervish out of whirl. Those days are gone, and now it’s just this. This day, these wheels, this road.

  TWO

  Evolution of a Bad Girl

  Bad Girls: Are not good. They’re not good at all. But they are interesting.

  They: Cut off their own pigtails. Pull sea oats out of the ground on purpose. Make up lies. Bad girls make up lots of lies. Sometimes accidentally. Sometimes on purpose.

  When they get bigger, Bad Girls: Wear too much eyeliner. Make out in baseball dugouts.

  Let boys touch their breasts. (Both breasts. But mostly the left one.)

  No one writes songs about being Good. Good to the Bone. Big Good John. Good Moon Rising. Michael Jackson would never grab his crotch and sing You know I’m good.

  Bad Girls don’t know they’re bad until someone tells them. They just get tired of hair sticking to the backs of their necks. They want to wash away. They want things to be interesting.

  But once they’re told, they realize they’ve always been B.A.D. Bad.

  I just might be the baddest girl you’ll ever meet. The baddest girl on the planet.

  Three

  Part Spell, Part Séance, Part Prayer

  — 1999 —

  My name is Evie Austin. You say it like it’s two letters—E. V. Sometimes that’s how I sign my name: E. V. Austin, even though I know it’s not true. My middle name is Ann, so it should be E. A. Austin to be true. My whole first name is Evelyn, but I hate that name. It sounds awful, like a little old lady. When my dad dropped off me and my brother to live for the summer at our Aunt Fay’s house, which isn’t a house at all, but a big old camper van, he took my face in his hands and said, “Evelyn, you be good.” I hate being Evelyned. I crossed my eyes at him and turned my face away. Then he and Aunt Fay started talking. My Aunt Fay said, “No, I do not want to keep them at your house. What if she comes back?” And my dad said, “She’s not coming back.” They were talking about my mom, who moved to Buxton for the summer
for an important job. If it wasn’t important, she wouldn’t have moved for the whole summer. Then my dad left and went to work.

  I am nine years old, and now, I’m a gypsy. I live in the National Seashore campground in Frisco, North Carolina. Frisco is a town on an island, and this island is full of danger. My island has a nickname, and it is: The Graveyard of the Atlantic. This is on account of all the shipwrecks it’s caused. So, that’s one source of danger, things that cause shipwrecks, such as shifting shoals, which I learned all about from Mrs. Hammond in science class last year. There are many other dangers, including: jellyfish, riptides, hurricanes, cactus, and brothers. My big brother, Nate, teases me all the time. I warn the tourists about sources of danger when I talk with them, but I leave out my brother. Mostly because he’s not a force of nature.

  It’s a real big camper that we live in. You have to pull it with a truck. Aunt Fay stays in it all the time since she sold her house and hasn’t yet got a new one. She says she likes it just fine. We’re going to live here while our dad’s busy with tourist season, since he’ll be gone too much to take care of us. Dad comes to visit us most days before he goes to work at the restaurant. My mom has not yet come to visit. She’s awfully busy being on the welcoming committee for the lighthouse movers from Buffalo, New York. That’s another danger: erosion. That old ocean just ate away and ate away and ate away at the beach so much that the lighthouse (which is the tallest lighthouse in America) could topple over and wash off at any second. That’s why it’s getting moved. They’re going to pick it right up and move it inland on a little train track, is what they’re going to do. So it’s very important to treat the lighthouse movers nice or else they might ruin our lighthouse.

  No lighthouse would mean no tourists. Tourists love lighthouses. There’s not a thing you can buy here that doesn’t have a big old lighthouse on it. I’ve even seen dog hats with lighthouses on them. I wish I had a dog. But I wouldn’t make it wear a hat, not unless it wanted to. Tourists love to buy things with lighthouses on them, but this is complicated. My dad says, “They are good for the economy.” My dad works for a restaurant, and he feeds tourists every day. He works late, which is why he can’t visit us every single night. He likes it when tourists buy things. My Aunt Fay says, “Tourists are a nuisance. Our economy did just fine for two hundred years before they started showing up.” Aunt Fay has a bumper sticker on her truck that says, “If it’s tourist season, why can’t I shoot ’em?” I don’t tell anybody, but in secret, I like the tourists. They make summer exciting. I spy on them all the time. I get real low behind a sand dune and I watch them. But there’s been nobody interesting yet at the Frisco National Seashore campground. Just a bunch of boring old fishermen. It is only June, so maybe the interesting tourists aren’t out of school yet.