Hyacinth Girls (17 page)

Every time DH invited me along I carried a leaf and a twig in my pocket. When their mouths flew open, slobbering with laughter, I slid one finger in my pocket and touched the soft leaf-skin, the biting twig.
I could be as silent and blind as a tree. With no eyes to see, it would just be the sun on my limbs, leaves twisting in the breeze, my roots deep and moist in the ground. If two girls came up to me with a sharp blade and cut a name into my bark I would hardly feel it. Someday I might even forget it was there.

In the food court of the mall, Dallas pressed her fingers into the fattest part of her chin. As she jabbered, I wondered if the small potted tree near the escalators would be planted outside when it grew too big. Dallas said she wanted liposuction.

“You look amazing, but the surgery would probably make you even better,” Ella said. Ella started pushing up the tip of her fox nose to show how she'd look after she turned sixteen and got a nose job. Then they turned to me, to see what I'd change.

Everything, but I didn't know how to say it. There would be an operating room, and a doctor with a metal cart full of scraps. He would sew bark over my hands and face, then plant seedlings into my shaved scalp. When the surgery was done, I would head for the woods and never return.

“I think her cheeks are weird,” Ella said.

Dallas looked at me with flea eyes. “They're crooked. And a little too flat.”

“Cheek implants for Babyshits!”

I stood up and walked toward the escalator near the potted tree. Dallas called after me, “You know your problem, Babyshits? You think you're too fucking perfect.”

The leaves were damp from rain that day. When I stood behind the shed and reached up to touch one, it felt like Robyn's cheek. Another was her hand, and I held it for a second. I thought of the way the shower curtain sometimes billowed out, touching my back so lightly it could be somebody's warm fingers. But no one would touch me now. I was Babyshits.

When I went inside, Rebecca was home. She was wiping the counters
with bleach and there was a salad on the table. She smiled at me. Rebecca was my always-cheerful, turtleneck-wearing, cupcake-loving, raspberry-tea-drinking, germ-obsessed, possibly-lesbo guardian. Even though she was thirty-four and younger than most people's parents, she didn't act young. She never went out and she liked torturing me with random rules and bad music, like jazz from the 1930s. When my principal called her about Robyn, she almost died. She couldn't believe I'd do anything wrong. She thought my friends were wonderful—she'd once said Dallas reminded her of Mom. She didn't mean it in a bad way, but she was a complete disconnect when it came to what they were really like. If I'd told her, I knew that first she wouldn't believe me, and then she'd probably dissolve into a puddle. Best friends meant everything to her.

She took a grapefruit out of the refrigerator and cut it in half as she asked me how they were. For the last month I'd kept her away from them, saying I was riding my bike to help the environment. But half the time I just rode around instead of going to their houses.

“You know, hon, I was thinking. If you'd rather spend the last week of summer with your friends, I'm sure we could shorten the time you're supposed to stay with Bea.”

“No. That's okay.”

“I just know how it is when you're fourteen. You want to spend all your time with your friends.” She pressed two fingers against her chest and I knew she was thinking about Mom. She had a tattoo of a spiky purple flower under her collarbone that she didn't like anyone to know about. She always touched it when she was thinking about Mom, who had been her best friend.

“I told Grandma I'd help her. So I definitely want to go.”

“I just wonder what you'll do all day.”

Rebecca had total odium for Grandma, even though it was her own aunt. Whenever I visited, she barely came inside, and later when she
picked me up, she'd sniff my hair and say it was fine if Bea wanted to kill herself quicker with a million cigarettes, but she had no right to risk my life too. Grandma didn't like Rebecca either. She made faces behind her back and called her The Enforcer.

“I hear The Enforcer's got you working for free this summer,” Grandma said the last time we talked on the phone. I'd been volunteering at the nature reserve since July, and the truth was I actually liked dissecting owl pellets and counting amphibians, but I'd never admit it to Grandma. She wanted us to be on the same team, and for my upcoming visit, she'd Tivo'ed a whole season of the vampire show Rebecca said was too gruesome for me to watch. Grandma and I both had a sweet tooth, and I knew we'd spend most of the week eating strawberry shortcake and chocolate cherries, maybe sipping some of her beers while watching TV in her living room and forgetting about my life. I couldn't wait.

“I'm going to help Grandma go to her doctors' appointments,” I told Rebecca. “And I'll cook food for her, too.”

“Well, it's good of you to want to help,” she said. “But if you change your mind, it's not too late.”

She put down the grapefruit knife and reached over like she wanted to stroke my hair, but I ducked away at the last minute and her hand landed on my shoulder, which she rubbed three times, like I was a lucky purple pebble.

Here's something I've wondered a lot. If I could go back in time to the day before I left for Grandma's, would I:

A. not go to the mall when Dallas invited me

B. go to the mall but leave her cell phone alone

C. do the same thing I did, but bigger—finally serving her the shit-steak she deserved

I wouldn't let there be any fourth choice (D. none of the above, fuck your life), because in reality that's what I chose.

DH was sitting in the mall food court again, thinking up jokes with Babyshits for a punch line, while I stared at the potted tree by the escalator, wondering if someone had dumped a bowl of fried rice on it. It was looking kind of greasy.

Dallas leaned forward and said her boyfriend's jizz tasted like warm pickle juice. I waited for the punch line as she smacked her lips, but instead she started showing Ella how she'd gagged on it, and I must have looked like I was about to lose my flap because Dallas pointed at me.

“Look at Babyshits. She's scared of dicks.”

I wasn't scared of dicks. I stuck my finger in my pocket and touched the ruffled edge of a leaf. In less than twenty-four hours I'd be at Grandma's house, watching vampires. Until then, I had to let the burnt mud slide back down my throat.

“Ella, you've got to see this,” Dallas said. She took out her cell phone and pulled her chair closer.

Their heads touched and they spewed laughter. I sipped my Coke and leaned over to see.

Dallas covered the phone with her hand. “Not you, Babyshits. This is adults only.”

I was sure there was something about me on that screen.

“What is it? Kevin's dick?”

“Don't you wish you knew.” She gave her bleachy hair a victory toss and I sat back in my chair like a very weak tree that's stood alone in a
field through snow and rain for a hundred years and can barely hold up its last few branches.

Ella said they were going to the bathroom and I could stay behind to watch their bags. After they left, I looked at Dallas's phone on the table. It had spent thousands of hours under her fingertips, pressed against her face, dropped into her bag, hidden beneath her desk, and tucked under her covers. It was the first and last thing she touched every day, when she checked her power and leaked tongue cheese to half the world. But her phone was just plastic and silicon and chemicals, put together on an assembly line in a faraway country by someone who'd never imagined it would end up here on a table in a mall in a country they'd only ever seen on TV. I closed my eyes. I was dangling from a branch, and the air felt cool around my edges as I swayed in the breeze. I was either Double Hockeysticks or I was dead. I picked up the phone and started scrolling through her pictures.

Dallas's cats. Kevin. Someone's foot. Kevin at her house. Ella. My thumb swiped faster and faster.

Then Dallas, stripped and stupid, white as a peeled potato. She'd taken the picture herself in front of a mirror and she was triple-X, über-waxed. She'd arched her back and shoved up her boobs to make them bigger than they really were, and then her neck was bent to one side and she'd puckered up, showing off the biggest, puffiest fish lips I'd ever seen.

That's when I chose none of the above and fucked my life. I didn't put the phone down. I didn't select “send all” to launch the picture to all her contacts. I didn't even think about how it might look on her Facebook page. The multiple choice in my brain went into full hibernation and when the name Dad popped up, I clicked and hit Send. Then my life was over.

I would never be Double Hockeysticks again. When the ringtone on
Dallas's phone started playing a second later, I realized what they'd say: that I was a tit troll and a meat monster. A real grimy fuck. I stood up and walked to the escalator like a zombie. Was there a name for someone as brain-dead as me? Yup. Babyshits. A pile of yellow-green turds about to get squashed. By the time I got home, they'd sent me seventeen texts.

Babyshits gonna cry cry? Die bitch DIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

Pervy Mervy run away. Pervy Mervy fucking pay!

Every time the phone buzzed, my stomach jumped like I'd just swallowed too much mustard. I belched and put it on silent, but the buzzing didn't go away. It hummed in my head as I walked back and forth, slapping my hands against the trees behind the shed. Dallas would probably be in trouble for five minutes. Her dad would sit her down for a big talk, and she'd sell him some juicy story, and by the end of it, he'd think that I was the one who'd ripped off her clothes and taken the picture in the first place. And for the next four years, I'd spend my life getting crushed in new and more evil ways. DH was like a virus that would get stronger and meaner as I got weaker and sicker. I sat down on the grass and pressed my mouth against my knee. I was Babyshits. Babyshits was me. I tried saying it soft and shy. Then I spat it into the air. I coughed it and swallowed it over and over until I could taste it. I found a twig on the ground and stuck it in my mouth, chewing and sucking the dirty end. Chewed. Spit. Chewed. Spit. The pressure built up in my ears until the twig was gone.

That night I got a message from someone calling themselves Phoenix Drake. Her profile picture showed the Grim Reaper smiling out from under a black hood.

Babyshits

U got no friends u smelly little baby and I've been hired to burn your stinking ugly ass. Better watch out because I am coming to kidnap u and murder u. U R GOING 2 DIE.

I will keep u alive first and cut off your fngers, stick them up ur butt the way u like. Plug the poopie hole so u stop making a mess. You've been warned.

Phoenixxxx

Phoenix Drake's profile was empty because DH had just created her. They wouldn't let it get traced back to them. This was how they were starting, but I knew they would do much worse. I wished for a minute that Phoenix was real. Then she could come and cut me to pieces and finish me off. I wouldn't have to worry about what was coming next. The biting and gobbling and pulverizing that would be more painful every day.

I didn't write back to Phoenix. Instead, I Googled “emphysema.” If I learned enough about Grandma's disease, I could help her and she might let me stay permanently—change to a new school. But what I read gave me the grinds. People didn't get better without a lung transplant. The Google image showed a pair of lungs like an upside-down tree in a man's chest. Each lung had its own set of pink branches. The sick lung was different. It was gray, with rotten black leaves, thick and blobby, crowding the end of each branch. As I stared at the black leaves I was breathing harder and harder and it felt like I was going deep and deeper and deepest all over again.

“You seem quiet,” Rebecca said, on the way to Grandma's house. “Are you sure you want to go?”

I said I was looking forward to it
extremely
, and then Rebecca pulled out her strawberry ChapStick and rubbed it on her lips for the ten-thousandth time that morning.

“Teach me some Latin,” she said.

Rebecca had signed me up for private tutoring with Miss Jarvis because someone told her it would help me get a higher score on the SATs. Rebecca thought I was probably going to end up somewhere like Yale, and she'd once driven me to New Haven to walk around the campus. “Imagine you're a student here,” she said, as we looked up at the buildings made of lion-colored stone. “You're about to go to class. How do you feel?” I hated when she did this. She looked at me like I might turn into someone else, and I knew who she was thinking of, and I knew it wouldn't work. But I couldn't figure out how to tell her this, so I just said, “It feels fine,” and kept going to the library to practice Latin roots with Miss Jarvis each week.

Rebecca tapped the steering wheel, waiting for me to speak Latin. “Come on. I want to learn,” she begged.

“
Corpus
,” I said. “Body.”

Rebecca nodded and repeated the word.

“
Oculus:
eye.”

“Like octopus.”

“
Manus:
hand,” I said. “
Donum:
gift.
Laguna:
small lake.”

“I know that one,” Rebecca said. “And
caveat emptor:
buyer beware.”

She waited for me to tell her some more, and when I didn't she started talking about passports. “I forgot again,” she said. “I meant to get your picture so we could apply over the summer—I'd hate for you to miss out because I didn't apply in time. The high school does so many trips. I think they go to England, Spain, France. Maybe some other places, too.
I should probably get mine—you know, I've never even been out of the country. Wouldn't it be funny if they asked me to chaperone?”