Margarette (Violet) (10 page)

“And yet when Julie drugged me you didn’t do
anything.”

“You seemed to be doing alright. Everyone was
looking at you.”

“Yeah, well, I almost got
raped
, you bitch.”

Alice flinches. “I’m sorry about that,” she
whispers.

“I expected that from Julie, but not from you. I
thought you and I….”

Alice looks up. “What?”

“I don’t know. I thought we were closer than
that,” Margarette admits.

Alice’s lip trembles. “I thought so, too. But then
you were flirting with all the boys at the party. They all fawned over you.”

“What’s that got to do with you and me?”

“I thought you and I… I thought we could have a
different type of relationship. But you went for the boys. You went for Tommy.
You wouldn’t… consider
me
instead.”

Oh.

There is a long, awkward pause.

“You should’ve known I wouldn’t,” Margarette
finally replies. “That’s not how I’m wired. But even if I was… you’re a manipulative
bitch most of the time.” She ends lightly, giving Alice a small smile.

Alice’s lips curl up and her mouth responds with
her own sharp toothy grin. “Can’t a girl try? You like me. I know it. Admit it
to yourself.”

Margarette climbs down from the tree onto a wooden
bench at the edge of the deck. The sky glows with a large moon behind her.

“Alice Cherise, you are one dauntless jezebel.”

“Fine, if you’re going to be like….” She pauses
when she sees Margarette in the low light of the deck. “Holy hell, you’re
soaked. Do you want to change your clothes here?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Margarette sighs. “Look,
Alice… I’m flattered. Of course I am. You’re beautiful. So much more than me….
But I don’t see you that way. I wanted so much for you to be my sister.”

“Nothing else?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

Alice closes her eyes. “You smell like him.”

Margarette rolls hers. “That’s impossible.”

Nature chirps a few bars and a frog croaks in a
nearby creek.

Alice lights a smoke with a sharp bend in it and
leans against the edge of the tree struggling to keep it lit. “So what do we do
now?” she asks.

Margarette thinks about how she was before she
started hanging out with Alice, and figures that she is probably better off as
a lonely nerd reading books to pass the time. Paulie was right. Margarette
doesn’t belong with them.

“You want to pretend we hate each other?”
Margarette asks with an uncertain smile.

Alice laughs. “You know the truth, though.” She
takes a long drag from her smoke. “What are you going to do about Tommy?”

“Tommy’s so over. I’m never going to let that
happen again,” Margarette says.

“Ever…?”

“Forever and ever.”

They smile at each other and for a while nothing
is heard but the
chirp chirp
of the crickets.

Then they see Julie walk into the room and freeze
as she sees them outside. She storms outside, her mouth hanging open. But no
one says anything. Even the crickets go silent.

Margarette walks past her, secretly winking at
Alice, then without a word enters the room, takes the stairs and leaves through
the front door.

Two weeks later on a Sunday, Margarette walks
inside her house before her mother finishes closing the garage door.

Her face is flushed and it’s clear she has been
crying. She strips off the graduation gown and recalls the horrible day. It was
truly tragic, just like every other day of her recent life. When her name was
called there was only polite applause for her, probably leftover from the
previous name that was called, and it died rather quickly. She looked at her
mother who sat with arms crossed, not caring to clap. Margarette only got murmurs
as she hurried to line up behind some nameless classmate. As she was handed the
pretend diploma, devilish grins and nods of acknowledgement rippled through the
mob for the girl that broke up the perfect pair.

Sharon and Tommy’s breakup was a story now told
over lunch breaks and water coolers in almost every nook of the miniscule town,
and they all blame Margarette, even though she has not been associated with
Tommy these past few weeks. Yet that didn’t hurt her as much as her mother’s
reaction during the graduation ceremony. Her mother had chosen to remain silent
throughout the ordeal. Who doesn’t even clap for their own daughter?

Margarette runs upstairs to hide in her room and think
about her life. Four completed years of torture ending in sublime embarrassment.
In the back of her mind she had expected Tommy to be there, hidden in the crowd;
like he would just pop up and rescue her. Even though she had lain awake for
hours planning how she would ignore him if he showed up, she secretly wanted
him to be there; the one person who claimed he liked her. But her plan to avoid
him and her excuses were left unused. She remained alone.

She wants them all to burn in the hell of being
stuck forever in this little town. She knows that somehow she would escape. Somehow,
someday.

As she storms into her bedroom something catches
her eye. It is a picture of an innocent kitten hanging on the wall with a
number circled in a red marker. She stops cold and nothing that happened at
school or the auditorium matters anymore. This circle and the feline have
stolen her attention completely and she rips it from the wall tearing the hole
so that it can never be hung again.

Margarette slumps on the floor, her frame shaking
frantically. She looks at the calendar again and counts the weeks from the
circle. One, two, three,
four
, five…. Five weeks.

Impossible
, she thinks
. He wore a condom
.

Her period has been late before, but that was mostly
when she was younger; and she has never been late by a
week
. The
desperate thought that maybe it is the stress in her life screwing with her
body slowly turns into the horrifying thought that maybe she is just screwed.

Her hand grasps at her chest as if squeezing an
invisible heart on top of her breasts. She feels warmth inside her rib cage and
feels her blood turn into acid in her body. She tightens her abs and visualizes
crushing the imaginary child inside her womb. Margarette wants to hate
everything and everyone, especially Tommy and his seed, but she thinks of her
grandmother and her opinion of hate. Yet the feeling doesn’t wane. Thinking of
her grandmother has helped in the past, but doesn’t do anything now. She
reminds herself that her grandmother never let her say the word hate, yet the
old woman wished damnation in hell to just about anyone and the toaster until
the day she passed away.

Margarette’s head spins and the room wobbles as
though she was flipping cartwheels. There is a moment where she entertains the
thought of killing herself.
That would teach them
, she thinks, and she
lets out a sinister laugh. Teach her mother and the whole damn town she wasn’t
allowed to hate. Her death would be a tragedy, but it might keep them from
hurting others like they hurt her.

She nurses the thought for only a moment, though.
Before she could even figure out how she would best end her life she had let it
go.

She isn’t sure what to do or who to ask for help.
An infinite number of scenarios play out in her mind until she shuts her eyes.
A single tear falls down her cheek and she flushes. She would cry more, but she
feels empty and longs for peace. She firmly sets out to believe that this could
all be a mistake. Her destination is so simple… to the pharmacy to confirm or
deny. She quickly changes out of the simple dress she wore for graduation,
pulling on a pair of shorts and a shirt.

In a shattered screech that is hushed at the end,
she yells, “Mom!”

Oh, Joy, what am I going to tell her
?

Margarette certainly isn’t going to tell her
mother right now, but realizing she may have to eventually makes her feel like
she is on a cliff, and this moment is just some masochistic vertigo before the
fall.

She stands waiting for a reply and realizes her
mother never came in from outside. Her mother would have to be deaf not to have
heard her shout. She returns downstairs and looks around. Nothing. She peeks in
the garage and sees that it is empty. Her mother is gone. It knocks the breath
out of her.

It isn’t the first time that Margarette’s mother
leaves without saying a word. It may have shattered her on a different day, but
today it saves her from a lie in order to leave the house abruptly. What good
excuse could she have to go to the pharmacy? Her mother’s absence stirs the
thought of her father leaving, for some reason. Even though it hasn’t been that
long, she has a hard time remembering his face without pictures. Her mother
only kept a picture of him when he was a younger pharmacist. Not that pharmacists
really have a distinguishing outfit. Margarette’s father never really dressed
up for work. In the picture her mother looks so young standing next to him. It
was her vanity that kept it from being burned with the rest the stuff he left
behind.

“Where the frick is the car? Where does she even
go?”

Her hands wipe her eyes and she doesn’t notice the
sweeping smear near the corner of her eyes like a horn.

“MOTHER!” she screams again. Then she mutters, “I hate…
this. Why is this happening to me? What did I do? Huh? What? What did I do to
deserve this?”

She considers it is okay to hate inanimate objects
and situations. She hated a lot of things, but not people. Gran would be okay
with that, bless her soul.

The sun is out, the air is dry and her walk feels
more like miles due to the reasons for it. Apparently her bad day isn’t nearly
over. She has to walk down the side of the road near the edge of the ditch. It
makes her feel trashy. Every car that goes past is somehow better than her,
judging her.

In the middle of town she finds Square Park, and
to her surprise it is mostly empty. It is the first good news all day, since a
lot of kids from her school would park and hang out there. On the corner there
is a family-owned pharmacy next to the old bank building. The pharmacist’s children
are still in grade school, too young to know Margarette so it is much better
than going to the grocery store nearby where everyone knows your business.

She has been thinking about her next few steps the
whole way there. The walkway is cobblestone with scattered pebbles from the
park that people have deposited from the soles of their shoes over the years.
She tries to land her foot evenly on each slate stone to prolong entering. But eventually
she gets to the pharmacy. With a heavy heart she pushes open the door.

Ding
.

The door announces that Margarette is there to get
a pregnancy test. She counts the people inside. She had planned to leave and go
back if three or more people were there.
Shit
, she thinks.
Do I count
the employees
?

One young woman picks out get well cards for
herself and two old ladies struggle to find a better use of their time. What
did Margarette care about old women anyway? Not that they wouldn’t judge her,
but who would they tell other than their sewing circle? Moving on. Margarette
goes straight to the aisle that holds her business as her heartbeat quickens.
She examines her options for only a minute; with nerves pulsing with lightning
she picks the cheapest box and heads to the checkout counter. But she turns
around when she sees all three patrons are there with a struggling clerk.

Shit
!

Okay. She decides to wait it out nearby,
pretending to buy candy. But what if someone else comes in? Her heart is
beating so fast it threatens to fail. Then she has a brilliant idea and runs to
the back where the pharmacy counter is.

An old man in a white jacket stands behind the
counter with his back toward her.

“Excuse me sir,” Margarette calls him.

“Yes?”

“May I check out here?”

With a smile, the pharmacist says, “Of course. Did
you find everything okay?”

Nothing’s okay. That’s why I’m holding this box
,
she thinks bitterly. But she only says, “Yes.”

“Let’s see,” the nice pharmacist says, and takes
the box from her.

“It’s for my friend,” she explains unnecessarily.

The pharmacist’s smile falters a little as he
looks down and reads the box as if he were deciphering an alien language. By
the time his spectacles have been successfully centered between the bridge and
the tip of his nose, a grim line has fully replaced his smile.

“Oh yes… so that’s what this is,” he says.

“Yes,” Margarette says.

“Well… let’s ring it, shall we?”

She digs into her pockets and clenches a bill her
neighbor gave her that week for graduation. Margarette is very good with money
and never spends a penny unless necessary. Her palm shakes as she tries to
straighten the bill.

The pharmacist continues awkwardly. “Does she need
any instructions?”

“Who?”
Damn it, damn it, damn it
, she thinks
the second she blurts out the question.

“Your friend. For whom this is for.”

“Oh, no. She knows what to do. She’s older.”

“Odd that she would send someone younger to get
it,” the pharmacist says, looking down as he fumbles with the register.

“She knew no one would think it was for me.”

“Of course.”

There is a drawn out pause, then Margarette jumps
as the register drawer pops open.

“Here’s your change.” His voice has become
decidedly less cheerful. “Anything else?”

“No, thank you.”

“Whatever happens is meant to be,” he says for her
or for her imaginary friend. In either case it was said in a kind tone.

She turns around and walks toward the exit.

Whimsically, the old man mutters to himself. “Such
a beautiful young girl. What a shame.”

***

The glass door swings open into the parking lot. Although
the transaction was stressful, at least Margarette has the box hidden in a
small paper bag, and managed to escape without being seen by anyone she knows.
Hopefully
.
She turns to look back inside to make sure, and at the same time a young man steps
inside without looking up. He bumps into Margarette and automatically brings
his hands to her frame to hold her steady, but they land on her chest instead.

She looks down at the offending hands and then up at
their owner’s face, and Paulie stares up at her. He quickly takes his hands
back.

“Margarette?”

“Watch it, Paulie.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I got a cough.” She tries to walk past him, but
he catches her arm.

“Wait, I’ll go with you.”

“I’m done,” she says impatiently, shrugging off
his hand. “Don’t you need to buy something?”

“I was only going to buy candy. I can skip it. I’ll
go back with you.”

“No, thanks,” Margarette says. She keeps walking,
crossing the street to go back through the park.

Paulie follows slightly behind her anyway. “I was
at your graduation.”

“So was I,” she says, a little irritated but
trying to make it sound like she doesn’t care. She is paying so much attention
to his chase that she doesn’t notice that Square Park is no longer empty.

“And I clapped when you went on stage,” Paulie
keeps saying.

“Well… thanks.”

“I didn’t see you after the ceremony, though.”

“I left right after with my mother…” she starts to
explain, but trails off as she sees Julie talking to a big football player at
the edge of the park. Julie sits on the hood of a white car while the football
player leans against a red pickup truck. They’re both on Margarette’s way, and
to avoid them she would have to go cross back to the other side of the street
from where she just came. But that would show weakness, so she trails on,
determining to ignore Julie.

Julie yawns and rolls her eyes at something the
guy just said.

The guy notices her exaggerated open mouth and
chimes in with his best effort to be clever. “You better shut that before
someone puts….” He trails off as Margarette approaches with Paulie right behind
her.

Margarette squints as Julie finally notices her.

In her raspy voice Julie asks, “Is that your new
boyfriend?”

“What?” Margarette asks, exasperated.

“You broke up with Tommy for him?”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

The big redneck guy turns and looks her up and
down while the two girls exchange words. This happens to be the football player
would-be rapist from the party about three weeks ago. Fortunately he doesn’t recognize
Margarette, and she doesn’t recognize him, but Paulie knows who he is.

“That’s right,” Julie says. “He doesn’t have to be
your boyfriend for you to frick him.”

The football guy asks, “She’s fricking that guy?”

“Probably just blowing him,” Julie answers. “Lord
knows he hasn’t popped his cherry; his prick will be the cleanest thing in her
mouth.”