Faking Normal (13 page)

Something is hiding in my childhood. Something
off.

My fingernails bite into the palm of my hands, where they leave little U-shaped dents.

Because there
is
something.

I’m scared and I’m wet. And naked. There’s a damp, musty smell that clogs my nostrils and closes my throat. I’m maybe three or four years old, a chubby little girl with two dark pigtails.

And I
remember.

Swimming lessons at the local Y.

“Don’t wanna go in there,” I say.

“I’m sorry, honey, but Mommy’s late and you’re missing your lesson. I can’t take you into the little girls’ bathroom, but you can go in the boys’ side. It’ll be okay this once.”

My dad pushes open the blue metal door and calls out, “Anybody in here?”

Silence.

“See, sweetie, there’s no one inside. It’s okay.”

I shake my pigtails. “Don’t
want
to.”

But I really have to
go,
so I wait while Dad checks the boys’ bathroom.

“See, Lexi?” He kneels down and smiles, squeezing my hand. “It’s fine.”

“But what if someone comes? A
boy
?” I ask.

“I’ll stand out here by the door and make sure no one comes in. And if you need me, you can yell. Okay?”

“Promise?”
I say, and my voice is a frightened squeak.

“Promise.”

I hurry into the boys’ bathroom, past the low sink-looking thing, and enter the first stall because that door is wide open and the other two are closed and scary.

Struggling out of my one-piece swimsuit, I climb on the toilet. Before I can grab it, my suit falls past my knees to the concrete floor. Dripping wet and shivering, I pee.

I’m feeling relieved when there’s a rustling and stirring in the next stall.

I’m not alone.

My body locks up, and I’m frozen to the toilet as a bare butt wiggles backward into my stall.

“Wanna play swords?” a boy says as he turns and scrambles upright.

Then his eyes widen until they almost pop out of his head. He’s staring at me, and I’m staring at him. His hoo-hoo is right in front of me; hot tears fill my eyes.

“You’re
not a boy,” he says like an accusation. But he doesn’t crawl back to his stall, and I’m trapped between his hoo-hoo and the potty.

“I’m Ray,” he says. “Who’re you?”

My tongue is sticking to my mouth, but I slide off the toilet and I’m all thumbs in my panic as I struggle to pull up my wet swimsuit.

“You okay in there?” Daddy calls from outside the bathroom. “Need some help, Lex?”

I shove past naked Ray and run out to my dad. But I don’t say a word about what happened. Not then and not ever.

I push it far back in my mind until it’s as if it never happened.

But now the memory is so vivid that I know it’s real.

The thing is, why am I remembering it now? Especially since . . . I
know
naked Ray.

He’s Ray Johnson.

Liz’s
Ray.

I roll out of my bed and pad down to the den. The streetlight casts enough light through the half-curtained windows that the couch is visible. Sinking into the cushions, I run my hands over the woven upholstery and cover my lap with the throw pillow. And wish I’d closed my eyes when Ray crawled under my bathroom stall.

Ray Johnson’s seen me wet and naked. And I’ve seen him. We were three, and it shouldn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. My brain processes the innocence of this memory. Kids don’t mind being naked. I’ve done enough babysitting to know Mrs. Hampton’s kids down the street wouldn’t wear clothes if she didn’t insist. So, this particular memory isn’t important. There’s a hammer pounding on my brain that says I’m missing something. Have I forgotten other things? Other things that keep me silent?

“Whatcha doing?”

Bodee’s whisper causes me to jerk with surprise. He’s shirtless, so I look past him into the hallway toward my parents’
bedroom door, where snorts and snores assure me they’re asleep. Bodee and I could be a herd of elephants, and they wouldn’t hear us.

“Trying to figure some things out,” I whisper.

“You should sleep,” he says.

There’s a shadow of a bruise under his rib cage, courtesy of Hayden. Tomorrow it will look black and angry, but I doubt I’ll see him without a shirt tomorrow.

“I know. You all right?” I ask.

“If you are.” He sits on one side of the couch and puts the other throw pillow in his lap.

“Well, you’re not asleep either,” I say.

“Weird getting used to a bed.”

Whether it’s the hard ground and a sleeping bag or a closet and clawing fingernails, the familiar soothes us like a milk shake sliding down a sore throat.

“But are you making it okay?” I ask. It’s been only two weeks since his mom died. When my granddad died, I cried for weeks. Bodee’s tearless, but I see the pain oozing out of him.

“What’s okay?” Bodee’s question is rhetorical and not meant for me to answer.

He slides his right leg under him, and I notice the hair on his legs is blond and soft and nearly invisible. I always notice the guys at school who swim or bike because they shave their legs and arms. Very sexy. Body hair usually grosses me out.

But I don’t mind Bodee’s almost invisible, blond leg hair.

Funny, the things I know about Bodee Lennox that I never
thought I’d know. Or care about.

“You can talk about her if you want,” I tell him.

“I will sometime.” He twists the pillow by the corner and then lets it spin. “You can talk about
it,”
he says.

My heart thumps like a rock inside a coffee can as I ask, “What’s it?”

“I don’t know, but you do. And I know you should tell someone. Even if it’s not me.”

Whenever I’m with Bodee, it feels as if I’m made of glass. Mascara, blush, and fake smiles never fool him. Maybe it comes from years of seeing his mother hide her fears from the world. But I’m not ready to share.

“There’s a place I want to show you tomorrow,” I say, hoping the topic will fade away.

“Okay.” Bodee stands and holds his hand out to me.

My pastor held his hand out to me during an altar call at a morning service. I didn’t hesitate that day, and I don’t tonight. Putting my hand in his is for me and has nothing to do with
us.
This is an offer of comfort. An invitation. He traces the lines in my palm and pats me the way my granddad used to.

“You’re going to be okay,” he says, and squeezes my hand. I watch as he leaves the den and climbs the steps to the bonus room. Maybe Bodee’s not really a teenager. Maybe he’s an old man trapped in a sixteen-year-old body. Then again, he did knock the shit out of Hayden.

For tonight, at least, I’ll trust his words. Instead of going
back to bed, I unfold the throw on the back of the couch and curl up beneath it.

It is the smell of bacon tickling my nose that finally wakes me.

“Lex, it’s ten thirty. You going to sleep the day away?” Mom plops down beside me and pulls my toes into her lap.

Yawning, I say, “No-oh-o.”

“Why’d you sleep in here?” she asks.

I sit up and cover my lie with a big yawn. “I didn’t mean to. Just keyed up after the dance, I guess.”

Mom removes her reading glasses from the top of her head and tosses them on the table. There’s nothing between me and her blue eyes. “Craig told me this morning that Hayden got sick and had to go home early. I’m sorry, sweetie. That’s a real bummer.”

Out-of-date word alert.
Bummer.
Out-of-touch mom alert. Thank goodness. “Yeah.” I go with Craig’s lie.

“I thought you got home a little early last night, but I didn’t want to pry.”

“Hayden was probably just exhausted from the game. No big deal,” I say, praying there are no more questions. Bodee and I had waited at Kayla’s car until she showed up about eleven forty-five. Besides walking home, which had been impossible in my high heels, my sister had been our only transportation option: something Craig should have remembered when he ordered us to get lost. It wasn’t like
we could go back to the dance. Everyone would have asked about Hayden, and there was nothing I could say.

Mom’s eyes dart toward the stairs leading to Bodee’s room. “What do you think about Bodee, Lex? Is he all right? Did girls dance with him last night?”

“I did,” I admit. “I’m sure other girls did too.”

“Oh, that was sweet of you. I worry about him. Dad’s tried to get him to talk, you know, but Bodee says he’s ‘fine.’ But I don’t see how.” She puts her reading glasses back on and then pushes them onto her head. I’ve seen her do that a million times when she’s thinking. “We checked with the guidance counselor, and Mr. James says Bodee’s keeping it together at school. But I don’t know. Considering what he’s been through and what he’s had to do just to survive, he’s probably good at faking it with adults.”

This makes me giggle with amusement and shudder with regret. Because the very thing she worries about in Bodee, his ability to fake normal, she has dismissed in me. Thank the good Lord. I am
glad
I haven’t given her cause to worry over me. “Well, we’re gonna hang out today. I’ll check on him,” I assure her like a good spy.

“Perfect. Dad and I are going to that flea market on Old 48. Kayla and Craig have plans too; I forget now what she said. There’s food in the kitchen. Junk food, anyway. I
have
to keep your dad out of the grocery store. The man’s addicted to sugar and starch. Oh well.” She pats my toes, and then kisses her hand and smacks it to my forehead. “Love you, Boo-Boo.”

“Love you back, Coo-Coo,” I say so she’ll smile again.

My mom is blissfully simple and unsuspecting that any bad thing has ever touched her younger daughter. As she leaves the room, I decide that’s my gift to her. I’ll keep it that way as long as I can.

Bodee’s towel in the bathroom is damp. He’s up, but I take my time washing away last night. My neck isn’t as bad in the morning light as I thought, so I tuck my wet hair under a baseball cap and set out to find Bodee.

He’s on the back deck eating bacon from a paper plate. He has a blue-and-black flannel shirt I’ve never seen tied around his waist, but other than that he’s back to wearing a white T-shirt and jeans.

“You ready to go somewhere?” I snag a piece of bacon and bite into it before he can protest.

“Been ready all morning.”

I open the gate of the privacy fence that surrounds our pool without letting my eyes drift to the area near the deep end. “Follow me,” I say as we step into the backyard.

There’s nothing great about our house; it’s just a brick split-level ranch we’ve added on to three different times. But I love the trees that surround us and make our house an island in the midst of the woods.

“You guys own all this?” Bodee runs a hand back and forth over his hair. It is purple-brown today, and now it’s standing up like a forest of its own.

“Yeah.” The subdivision ends with our house, and we own
the land behind us all the way to the river. There’s still a remnant of my path. Weeds, those little plants I call umbrellas, and fallen trees clutter what was once a well-traveled thoroughfare for my bare feet. I pick my way forward, swinging my arms right and left at the spiderwebs hanging from low branches. If not for spiders (and the fear of snakes), I could navigate this path on a starless night.

Craig and Dad must have made a hundred wheelbarrow trips this way. It should have taken fewer trips, but I insisted on riding atop the pile of building supplies each time.

Dad would sing out, “Have you met the Queen of Never Ever Land?” And Craig always went along with him and pretended he couldn’t see me. I remember as if it happened this morning instead of eight years ago.

I laugh, and Bodee raises an eyebrow. “This is Never Ever Land,” I explain.

“Nice,” he says. “Why Never Ever Land?”

“Well,
I
would have named it Land of the
Lost,
but I had a lisp,” I say, “so Lost sounded like Loth.”

“I remember. We had speech together in elementary school.”

“We did,” I say. And there he is in another memory. In a white T-shirt and jeans, sitting in the desk across from mine.

“We got trapped during that storm too,” he says.

“I’d forgotten about that,” I say, wondering how I could have forgotten something that wasn’t that long ago. June. But
it was
before.
And it’s like when I whited out the bad, I also whited out the good.

“I didn’t.” Long pause. “I like your Never Ever Land.”

“Thought you would. You could bring your tent out here sometime if you wanted.”

“I might,” he says.

There’s no grass growing under the trees, but everywhere else green is changing into red and yellow and orange. In another month, my fort will be visible from here. But right now, the leaves haven’t abandoned their summer homes for the forest floor. One of the smaller creeks we cross is bone dry, so we don’t use the plank bridge my dad set up against a huge fallen oak.

“Almost there,” I say as I claw my way up the dry bank. I can feel the magic of my old hideout calling me. It’s where I played G. I. Joes and Polly Pockets and Hot Wheels. It’s where I read stacks of library books. And pretended. My fort became a plane wreck, a log cabin, a space station, a boxcar, and dozens of other stories in Never Ever Land.

“Who built this?” Bodee asks as he gets his first look at my fort.

“Dad and my uncle Tommy. And Craig.” The urgency to be inside, to show Bodee my safe place, is overwhelming. I plow through the last part of the trail to reach the four tall poplars Dad used to frame the fort. First, I check the mailbox Craig nailed to the tree. Empty. Well, of
course
it would be.
Even in its golden years, it held only imaginary mail. Then, with one hand on the ladder, I say, “Pretty cool, huh?”

“More than cool.”

I wonder if Bodee’s thinking that this place is a palace compared to his tent. Two tiers of platforms and real windows and doors have to be better than whatever was in that small nylon bag I put in the closet of the bonus room for him. We climb to the top level, probably twenty feet from the ground, and I open all four windows. I lean out and let the breeze kiss my face and swirl the loose curls that have come untucked from my ball cap. Oh, I’ve craved this for months without knowing it.