Girl Unmoored (2 page)

The black wall turned out to be a waterfall with two small hoses sticking out from the marble. Big silver letters spelling out SPRAGUE THEATER were staying nice and dry just below them.

Mr. Perry sat on a stone wall that came out in a corner, the water splashing behind him. I sat down next to him. On the other side of the corner, two mothers were trying to bounce the boredom out of their crying babies.

“You should pray for sons,” Mr. Perry sighed. “There’s never a line for the men’s room.”

“Okay,” I said, not really smiling back. The Perrys were the kind of people who always warned kids about stuff that happens to you when you get old. Which I guess is all you have left to think about once you never have homework again for the rest of your life.

Mr. Perry and I said nothing until everyone left and things finally got quiet. I could hear the uneven splashes behind me.

“So. How are you holding up, Apron?” he glanced at me.

“Okay,” I said wondering for a moment if he meant my broken shoe. But his face was more serious than a flip-flop, so I looked away and added a shrug. “I guess.”

“Six months seems like a minute and a lifetime ago, doesn’t it.” Another stupid thing to say. All it seemed like to me was a lifetime ago.

“Not really.”

Mr. Perry shook his head at himself. “Oh gosh. Of course it doesn’t.” Then he nodded at me with his eyes dialed on full. “I’m sorry, Apron.”

A few leftover people walked by us and Mr. Perry stared down at his shoes. “Apron, I …” he hesitated, his voice coming out in little jumps. “We all miss her. Holly was a very beautiful woman.”

“Who’s beautiful?”

Rennie was standing over us with her arms crossed. Those bouncing mothers were nowhere to be seen now.

“
There
she is,” Mr. Perry smiled, wiping his hands on his pants and standing.

Rennie dropped her arms. “Mom and I have been standing out there,
waiting
.”

“Oops,” he said, taking Rennie’s arm and starting toward the door; the two of them ignoring me and my flop trying to keep up.

“So what did you think, girls?” Mrs. Perry asked in the car after we pulled out of the lot. I looked at the back of Mr. Perry’s head, waiting for Rennie to answer first. Mr. Perry had an empty spot the size of a golf ball, but my dad’s head was still fully covered. People with red hair don’t usually go bald.

“Girls?” Mrs. Perry asked again and this time I looked up, catching Mr. Perry’s frown by mistake in the rearview mirror.

“Great,” I lied.

Rennie had been staring out her window ever since we got into the car.

“Rennie,” Mrs. Perry asked, shifting herself around so she could see her.

“That was the worst musical I’ve ever seen,” Rennie said finally. “There wasn’t even a happy ending. He just died. ”

“Yes, but remember, he died so he could save us all,” Mrs. Perry smiled. “You can talk to Reverend Hunter about it in Sunday School.” She looked at me. I didn’t go to Sunday School and we both knew it.

“It’s still a bad ending,” Rennie whispered.

I nodded, but Rennie didn’t see it.

“Well. I will say,
those
people certainly can sing,” Mrs. Perry sighed, glancing at Mr. Perry as she faced forward again.

“What people?” Rennie asked.

Mr. Perry snapped, “No people” and gave Mrs. Perry a sideways look. “And you wonder where Eeebs gets it from, Sue.”

Mrs. Perry huffed at her window. “Just an observation, Bill,” she said. “Most of them can carry a tune, that’s all.”

Mr. Perry shook his head.

Usually when the Perrys fought, Rennie would roll her eyes at me and mimic them. But this time she turned her head toward her window again and said nothing. So I said nothing back.

When Mr. Perry turned on the radio, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” blared out. Rennie and I turned to each other with sudden smiles. Mr. Perry had taken us to a Cyndi Lauper concert for Rennie’s birthday last year. Mrs. Perry wouldn’t come so my mom did instead and he bought all three of us a Cyndi Lauper backpack. But now, Mr. Perry tightened his jaw and flipped the station. Mrs. Perry didn’t like that kind of music.

“Dad!” Rennie whined.

But he was done talking. He stopped on some piano playing.

I waited for Rennie to whine some more like she usually did, but she didn’t. She just went back to her window. So I turned to mine and watched the streetlights whiz by in one long yellow streak until finally they started flashing and by the time we came to a red light they were just plain old streetlights again.

“And why was Jesus in his underwear, anyway?” Rennie asked.

“Those were shorts, dear,” Mrs. Perry said, bothered about it.

“Well, they looked like underwear,” Rennie smirked. And then I couldn’t help it; I started laughing. Mr. Perry told us to tone it down, but it was too late and before we knew it we were laughing hard enough for it to feel like things were back to normal. Until Mr. Perry turned right and we started down our long dirt road where there weren’t any streetlights at all and normal was a lifetime ago.

My dad was staring down at me smelling like coffee not wine, so you knew it had to be morning.

“Time to get up, Apron,” he said.

He looked tired; his freckles were hanging too low on his face. He used to have brown ones like mine, but now those were graying too.

“And don’t forget the tunics for the Meaningless Bowl. Twelve greens and eleven blues, unless,” his voice faded, “Jesus H. Christ, that moron, Chambers, shows up again.” I groaned, but my dad said, “Hurry up” or “Fire truck,” I couldn’t tell which, and walked out the door.

I blinked enough to window wash the sleep out of my eyes and twisted my bracelet around. It was going to be sunny today. Already a streak of yellow was sneaking in from under the window shade, lighting up the
Little House on the Prairie
books on my shelf. I had read every book in the series by the time I was eight, and a few hundred times over since then. I have to sneak them now, though, otherwise my dad says, “Aren’t we a little past those, Apron? I mean really. How about some
Moby-Dick
?” But the truth was that Laura Ingalls Wilder was the nicest girl I’d ever not known. Rennie would throw me under a bus for a piece of chocolate. M’s chocolate anyway. M told her it was from Brazil, but you could find the same kind at Stop & Shop if you knew where to look.

I flung my covers into a triangle and rolled out of bed. I could hear M banging things down in the kitchen and voices coming up from
Hello Maine!
By the time I got home from the play last night, M was asleep. That was all she did these days. At first I thought maybe she was sleeping in the guest room until I put a marble on her pillow that never moved. “They’re doing it,” Rennie nodded. I wanted to punch her perfect Bambi face in when she said it, but I knew she was right.

I shuffled over to my closet. You could hear a dog barking outside, which was Betty, whose mother, Nutter, was dead, too. My mom used to put leftover food on the porch for her until Mrs. Weller came over and told her that Nutter was getting too fat. My mom said, “Never again, Mrs. Weller. I’m sorry.” But Mrs. Weller stayed right there frowning in the doorway under her orange umbrella. It wasn’t raining, but everything she owned was orange. After that, Nutter came over anyway and my mom said, “A few bites won’t kill her,” which it might have, because after she fed her leftover meatloaf one time, Nutter got hit by a truck and the only way you could tell it was her was by the orange collar.

I walked over to my mirror and pulled off my nightgown. Two miniature pyramids with nipples that looked like someone had poked them through from the other side with a pencil stared back at me. Half the girls in my class were already wearing bras, but not me. Or Rennie, who had even smaller pyramids than I did. We were going to get our first bras together, though. “At least you have big brains,” Rennie would say. But brains didn’t need bras, so boys never noticed me.

I slipped on my long-sleeved T-shirt with
Portland Head Light
on it and stepped into my pants. Sometimes I went for days without changing my underwear.

Then I brushed down my red, sleepy head, trying to see what M saw when she looked at me: someone pointless and pale and always in the way.

Downstairs in the kitchen, M was standing at the stove stirring something bumpy. Her eyes were glued to
Hello Maine!
It was going to be sunny today: “Mid-70s and gorgeous, gorgeous.” She looked bad, even for M. She had sick mood written all over her and her black hair was down, which meant she wasn’t going to be a nurse until later and we would have to meet her at the hospital for dinner. She wasn’t a real nurse, she was only a nurse’s
aide
, so she got the worst shifts.

When I walked by, she pulled her eyes off the screen just long enough to look me up and down once before turning back to the weather. “Morning, Aprons.”

There weren’t two of me though; it was just her bad English. I was supposed to be named April after my great grandmother, but my dad found out that
April
in Latin meant “opening” and no way was his daughter going to be called that. My mom said Latin had nothing to do with the real world and my dad said it seemed to be paying for the real roof over her head. She put
April
on my birth certificate anyway, but in such tiny chicken scratch to hide it from my dad that some wizard thought it said
Apron
. “Apron?” my dad asked. “What kind of numbskull would write that?” But my mom said it served him right for being so stubborn. And then they never changed it.

“Morning,” I told M.

I climbed onto the counter and got down my bowl and cereal. Outside the trees were busy growing. Little green buds popping up everywhere.

“There is oatmeal,” M said. Well if you wanted to glue something together, then you needed M’s oatmeal. So I jumped down and went straight to the icebox for the milk. “Better that you eat the oatmeals, Aprons. In Brazil the Mammas would never let their childrens eat that
ca-ca
.”

I could feel that thing creeping up in my throat like it always did whenever M was close. Pretty soon even a Fruity Pebble wouldn’t fit down it, so I knew I better start eating fast. I got a spoon, took everything over to the table and sat down in my spot. A little girl lobster was painted right onto the wood. My mom had painted lobsters for all three of us: one with starfish sunglasses, one reading Latin, and one tap dancing. She quit tap dancing classes when she got into karate, but kept the lobster. The other side of the table was empty. It was supposed to have a baby lobster on it someday. I wanted a sister, but my dad wanted a son. Now though, I just wanted it blank. If M thought she could paint a nurse lobster there she had another think coming.

I poured some cereal and put the box in front of me so I could read the
Do You Know
s on the back. You never wanted to talk to M if my dad wasn’t around.

“You will get fat eating this,” she said anyway, pointing to the box and walking toward me with her bowl of glue and one of her Portuguese romance novels. “The boys will never like you.” I tried to look shocked that the yo-yo was the most popular toy in the world and took a bite of my cereal, which was the best thing you could ever taste unless you had something in your throat trying to kill you or M staring down at you. Then it tasted like cardboard.

The toilet flushed in the hall bathroom. My dad would be in for more coffee soon. Out the corner of my eye, I saw M put her bowl down on top of the tap-dancer’s feelers. My skin caught fire. You weren’t supposed to put anything hot directly on top of the lobsters. “Please move that,” I said as smooth as silk. But she ignored me. So I picked it up myself and put it down on the empty side of the table.

“Hey, that’s mines,” she whined.

“Keep it off the lobsters, please.” I slid a place-mat from the center of the table over to her. My blood banged too hard inside of me, but my dad still wasn’t out of the bathroom so I took another bite of my cereal. M clucked her tongue and reached over for her oatmeal, her book dropping to the ground with a thud as she did. But before she could snatch it up I saw it: a folded piece of paper that had fallen out of her pages. “K-1 Visa: Marrying within the U.S.,” it said at the top.

Just when you think the toilet is about to explode into a million pieces, it shuts off. But I didn’t hear it this time because of my bowl hitting the floor, causing a flood of Fruity Pebbles all around my chair. The cereal box had knocked over my bowl when I stood.

“What’s going on?” my dad growled from the kitchen door. I swallowed that sugary milk gone sour and looked up at him.

“Oh dears, just an accident, Dennis,” M said, wiping cereal off her bathrobe. The paper was nowhere to be seen now. I was the only one who knew the real M and what she was after, and M planned on keeping it that way. “I’ll get the mop,” she smiled.