A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (15 page)

But I didn’t have any real information, and anyway, even if I did, he’d never once been nice to me. I started talking real y loud and perky over him.

“So, Coach, I was hoping you would write me a pass to spend study hal in the library. I want to work on my
Scarlet Letter
report for English.” It was real y a two-page reader response that any person with nine working brain cel s and Wikipedia could do without cracking a single book, including the actual
Scarlet Letter
. It was already finished, stuffed in my pink Trapper Keeper, waiting for its due day, the way my homework always was.

But I wasn’t that girl anymore. I was someone new, shutting Coach down in the middle of a question, lying to get a pass I didn’t need, standing in this spot where Liza used to stand.

“Sure, let me get my pad,” he said, subsiding, and the interested light was gone from his eyes. He was once again looking through me, like I was the same old Mosey Slocumb, the one girl at Pearl River who was too plain to perv on. He turned his back on me to open a battered-up briefcase on the stool behind him.

The kids were mostly talking to one another now, leaning across the aisles to whisper. Only Deb was stil watching me, wide-eyed and interested, like Mosey Slocumb getting a hal pass was newsworthy. Yesterday, with Olive and that pack of assholes stomping around our grass, I’d purely hated it, but I’d been me then. Now that I actual y
was
just The Girl with Human Bones in Her Yard, I kinda liked it. Al at once I wanted for her to see I’d changed. I wanted someone to witness me doing a thing Mosey Slocumb wouldn’t ever, ever do.

I stepped up close to the desk so my bel y was almost pressed against that newspaper story in its special frame. I waggled my eyebrows at Deb and put my hand on it. She raised her eyebrows, like to say,
What?
My hand clicked the frame closed into a book, and I slid it to the edge of the desk and stuffed it right down the front of my pants. I almost yipped out loud and had to turn the noise into a cough to cover; the back of the frame was metal and ice-cold.

It had happened so fast. Deb stared at me with her mouth dropped wide open. I stared back, shocked, too, but I told myself that I hadn’t real y stolen it yet. The frame was stil in his room, after al . Just accidental y down my pants. I put a “shhh” finger against my lips. Deb snapped her mouth shut, choking back the giggles, and gave me a big thumbs-up.

Coach found his passes. He scribbled on one and then turned and held it out to me without even looking at me, saying, “Bel in one minute.” I took it. Now I didn’t see how I could get the frame back, and anyway, served him right.

I walked careful out the door with his footbal memento pressed cold against my bel y, completely stealing it, as easy as if Liza real y was my mom. Hel , she’d stolen a whole baby. Thinking that put my little teeny thieving in perspective, and I realized I was more excited than scared anyway, and dying to show Roger.

He was stil in the library doorway, craning around for me. I kept my eyes forward and marched toward the end of the hal like I wasn’t seeing him there. That gave him time to find me and arrange himself al leaned and cool in the doorway and be the one to say, “Yo.”

I turned al surprised and then grinned at him and said, “How on earth?”

He shrugged. I could see that his forehead was red from where Charlie gave him the cathead, but he’d wiped the suck away. “Simple. I told Mr.

Lex I needed to go the library to do research for debate. He wrote me an off-campus pass, and I told the secretary here it meant this one, not the branch.”

“Pretty slick,” I said. “Come in here, I have to show you something.”

His eyes got bright behind his glasses, and we ducked into the library.

I paused to drop off my pass at the front desk, and then we hustled back to this dark hole of a room behind the biographies. It had a smal round table in the middle, and against the wal was a thousand-year-old microfiche machine that looked like a headless R2-D2.

“So what’d you find?” Roger said, library-quiet, but real intense.

I pul ed the frame out of my pants, Roger’s eyes widening as I did it, and I opened it up on the smal table. “I stole this.”

He bent his head over and started to read the actual newspaper story, interested. “Is it about your mom?”

“No, it’s about footbal . Why are you even reading it? Roger, listen: I total y stole this.”

He looked down at the picture. “Why?”

I said, “I don’t know. Isn’t that so not like me, though?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But, like, you stole it from your mom or—”

“Oh, my God, can you stop with my mom?” I said, exasperated. “Forget my mom. This is Coach Richardson’s framed thingy, and I stuck it down my
pants
.”

He waved that away. “Okay. Wel , next time put something useful down your pants. Like a pizza. Mosey, I need you to focus.” He made a peace sign with his fingers, then pointed it at my eyes and then his own. “We’ve got to find somehow to trace your mom’s route. It’s the only way we’re going to find out who you are.”

“Unpossible, Roger.” My voice had gone al sharp. I took the frame from him and put it in my backpack, saying, “She was out there for almost two and a half fricken years.”

He shook his head. “Yeah, but she had to get you pretty early on, when you were little. Because by the time she came home, the two of you were bonded and crap.”

I shrugged, but it was mad, like my shoulders jerked up and then dropped. I’d only just stopped being me, and he was al hot to make me someone else before I’d even caught my breath.

“It was fifteen years ago, and they had only just invented e-mail. It’s not like they had blogging back then or she had a GPS app and could tweet her location from her iPhone every fifteen minutes. She hitchhiked around in loop-de-loops, righteously effed up on fifty kinds of drugs. If we were serious, we’d have to try and go in her path. You think your mom is going to be al cool with that? If you and me blow town in the Volvo, you be Sherlock, I’l be Hot Watson, and we’l sleep by the side of the road and live on chips and gas-station-brand Cokes until we find my real mom, baking cookies in, like, Iowa and pining for me?”

His face flushed a dark, dul red, and he cut his eyes away and mumbled, “We could maybe fake a school trip or…”

He petered out, and I felt like Lowly Worm. He was always so careful to keep that I’m-a-boy-and-you’re-a-girl distance in between us. He never let me get al huggy or treat him like my stuffed rabbit, and now I’d seen al the way back into his head, to where he kept his secret reasons why. This whole investigation, it wasn’t real y about finding where I came from. It was about me and him, maybe on the road, sharing al kinds of secrets and a sleeping bag, and I had just peed on it.

“Not that that wouldn’t be super great,” I said, lame like.

“Whatev,” he said, trying for cool but with his cool gone. There was this awful teetering moment, and I felt like I’d busted something up, bad. He wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I felt exactly like when I’d found my mom’s secret sex vibrators al over again, except with Roger, so it was worse.

I had this lump coming up in my throat, and he started to stand. I knew if I let him walk away now, we might stil be friends, but this thing where we were a team, him and me versus everybody, that would be over. I grabbed his arm, because I couldn’t stand it, and he stopped and went into that kind of stil ness he always got when I touched him.

I took my hand away and said, fast and quiet, “I searched Liza’s room.” That paused him. I spoke again, like the last six seconds had been some weird, unaccountable blink of nothing. “I’m being al hateful and acting like you are Detective Suck, but it’s me, Roger. I’m the suck. I mean, I’ve been trying to make you quit it, and I keep saying I don’t want to know anything. But then, this morning, I snuck into her room and tore through al her things.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets, leaning toward me from the waist, more like his usual Spocked-out self. “What did you find?”

I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said, but I said it too quick, and I felt my own cheeks pinking, because of course what I’d found was a total y unrelevant pouch of perv toys. Maybe I would tel him that at any other time, but not right now. Not while he stil had a little of the secretest piece of him showing on his cheeks as two red spots.

He said, “Nah, you found something.”

I pul ed the picture of Bunnies out of my back pocket. “This was the most personal thing I found in her whole room. Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“Mmm,” he said, like real thinky.

I went on. “She lived in that same room almost for her whole life, but there’s nothing there even from when she was a kid. I think I know al about her life, because she way overshares, but most of the time her stories have these big fat morals tacked on. Drugs Are Bad. Keep It in Your Pants.

Skipping Causes Cancer. Those kinds of stories. Nothing real y…you know, personal.”

He was looking at me now with his eyebrows raised and a crafty smile growing. “Come on.” He got up and walked away, fast, leaving his stuff in the little room. I got up and fol owed as he race-walked through the stacks on a mission. He stopped in the nonfiction, dropping to sit on his butt on the floor between two tal shelves.

He ran his fingers along the spines of a long row of books that were al the same height—tal , thin spines, but in different colors. He pul ed out two of them that were side by side and held them up, one in each hand, covers facing me. They were yearbooks from fifteen and sixteen years back.

The years my mom was in school here at PRH.

He said, “Here’s the thing. Your mom had to have friends in Immita. It was before texting, so what if she sent them snail mail, maybe postcards, from the road? She could have told some local chick al about you.”

I stared at him. It seemed real y long-shotty to me, but I didn’t want to bust his happy when he was looking at me like we were in on this together, me and him, a team, and that weird moment in the microfiche room hadn’t happened.

I fingered the picture of Bunnies. My mom never kept anything, not even a picture of Big and me on her nightstand. No souvenirs from the years she was on the road. No bring-home-to-meet-the-fam-style boyfriends. She gave away every foster dog as soon as it was wel and ready, even Bunnies.

The only thing she’d ever kept was me.

I didn’t think Roger’s plan to investigate my mom’s high-school years would tel us who I was, not in a tril ion years, but I didn’t care about that anyway. What I wanted now was to know who
she
was.

I plopped down on my butt beside him. “So we use the yearbook to figure out who her friends were back in the way back back, and then we talk to them.”

Roger grinned and said, “And search their houses.”

I ignored that and grabbed the book from her freshman year.

Roger started flipping through the other one. “Was she in any clubs?”

I snorted. “Just the kind where you need a fake ID. Can you imagine my mom in Junior Boosters?” I turned the pages, scanning for mom pics while I talked.

“Not real y. But on the other hand, and sorry to say it, she was smokin’ hot.”

“Ew,” I said. “Unrelevant.”

“Not at al . If any of the yearbook-club photo geeks were guys that year, there should be plenty of pictures of her. Do you know who any of her friends were?”

“Just one, but only because she’s such a major player in Liza’s Just Say No stories. And
she
can’t help us.” I flipped a few more pages and came to a photo spread cal ed “Best Friends Forever,” with al these pics of girls posing in pairs. Right at the top, there was my mom, grinning up at me from the top of the page, her bright hair real y long and crazy with curls. She had one arm slung over the shoulder of a blond, fox-faced girl who was rockin’ that skeevy Seattle grunge look and wearing way too much electric-blue eyeliner. I leaned over and showed the photo to Roger. “You know who that is, right?” He looked at the picture and shook his head. “Melissa Richardson?” He stil looked blank. “Claire Richardson and Coach Creeper’s oldest daughter?”

His eyes widened. “Holy shit! The one that ate the bad X and thought her baby sister was a roast or something? I heard she baked her.” He did an elaborate shudder.

I said, “I heard it was acid, and she drowned her baby sister.”

“Either way, your mom was besties with the Beast of Immita. How cool is that?”

I said, “It’s not going to help us. The way Liza tel s it, Melissa ditched her sophomore year because Liza got pregnant and couldn’t party anymore.

Liza’s moral was ‘Druggie friends aren’t real friends,’ but I bet Melissa was just a typical asshole Richardson.”

Roger’s brow furrowed. “It’s a chicken-egg thing. Like, was Melissa Richardson a baby baker because her parents are assholes, or did they become assholes because she baked their baby?”

“Drowned their baby. But stil , if my mom sent any postcards from the road, they total y did not go to that house.”

“I’m pretty sure she baked her,” Roger said, studying the photo. “They look real y tight. Maybe they made up.”

“I doubt it, and anyhow, there’s no way we can find out.” After Melissa drowned the baby sister, she got charged with fifty mil ion different kinds of crime. Claire Richardson and Coach Creeper bailed her out and took her home, but she never showed up for court. Either she ran away or maybe her parents sent Melissa off to rehab in Switzerland or someplace, because Richardsons don’t go to tacky places like prison. Now people acted to their faces like Claire-n-Coach had only ever had their herd of boys, like the oldest and youngest girl kids had never happened.

“I bet her parents stil have a bunch of Melissa’s shit tucked away in the attic,” Roger said, speculative.

I snorted. “You want to break into the Richardsons’ house? You are going to so end up expel ed, you moron.”

But Roger wasn’t listening. He’d kept flipping through my mom’s sophomore year and said, “So after Melissa dumped her, who did your mom hang with?”

“How would I know?” I said. “Who did your mom hang with in high school? I bet unless one of her friends turned out to be an infamous baby
drowner
, you can’t list a one.”