Outside In (9 page)

I went and said in Dave’s ear, “Your brother is paying Joanie Buczko gimp not to talk until lunch.” He smelled of warm grass and Bazooka bubble gum. He just walked away. Nathan followed him to the baseball field, glancing
back at Joanie twice as he went. Eventually Ziggy went to play baseball, too, and the camp was split boy-girl as usual, except for Sandy, who stuck around. Curious, I guess.

When Bunny and Pie and Micky (who didn’t know) were all off doing other things, Pete started goading Joanie to talk. He called questions to her, trying to fool her into answering. Then he started telling Sandy that Joanie would never get through the morning without talking. “She’s just naturally got a mouth on her,” Pete said.

“Just ignore him,” I told Joanie, passing three cards from my hearts hand to Rosa. Even to myself I sounded like my mother.

Two of the other girls rolled their eyes at each other. One said smugly, “I’m glad I’m not some boy-crazy flirt.”

Rosa caught Joanie’s eye and said, “Gimp. Think gimp.”

Twenty minutes before lunchtime we all had given up the card games and were sitting around, waiting for lunch. The baseball players, red and sweating, had begun trickling back to the tables under the trees. Joanie stared off into space, watching the end of the game of keep away going on in the outfield. Pete began poking her. He took her elbow and hauled her on top of the picnic table. Normal Joanie would have made an announcement or a joke, but silent Joanie sat on the table and just waited.

“What’s your problem, exactly, Ass-conti, huh?” I asked.

Pete pushed Joanie back and forth, making her rock on the tabletop. “Talk to me, Joanie. You’ve got the vocal cords.”

“Leave her alone!” I shoved Pete away with both hands. Joanie waved her hands at me, gesturing:
Don’t, it’s okay.
Pete spun around, put his fist against my chin.

“Come on, Pete,” said Sandy DeLuna, of all people. The
last time Pete had grabbed somebody by the chin, it had been Lucy.

“If you lose, you’re going to have to give away gimp that’s not yours,” I told Pete. “It’s Park and Rec’s, not yours.”

Stupid Sandy said, “Park and Rec will just think the group sure used a lot of gimp.” Whose side
was
he on?

“Stay out of it, Sandy,” said Dave. Pete was now punching my chin ever so gently, a preview of coming attractions.

“
You
wouldn’t want to get involved, would you, Davey?” I muttered.

He glared at Pete. “What my brother does is his business.”

Pete waved his finger in Joanie’s face. “Make it all day,” he said, “and you can have five rolls of gimp.”

“Don’t, Joanie,” I said. I elbowed Pete away from her.

Joanie shook her head.

“That’s okay,” said Pete. “Everybody already knows you’re a big motormouth. You couldn’t shut up if your life depended on it.”

I wouldn’t have cried, wouldn’t have let myself cry, but Joanie did.

Pete said, “Go on, let it out. Make some noise.
Waah!”

I’d never seen Pete this nasty. What kind of boy set somebody up, put somebody down, so you could laugh at them? What was going on inside Pete?

I went at him. I leaped on his back to knock him down, get him away from Joanie.

Pete stood still, not trying to wrestle me off the way he would have anytime before. Instead he said, so quietly that only I could hear, “I’ll punch your face in, Chérie, I swear to God.” I let go and slid to the ground.

But the one I hit when I jumped up was Dave. I socked him right in the stomach, so hard he doubled over, so hard he cried. Some friend he was, some friend!

Sandy went to the gimp box and took out two colors. “Black and red?” he said to Joanie. Pete whipped them out of Sandy’s hands and threw them back into the box. Sandy actually shoved Pete out of the way. “Black and green?” Pete didn’t dare scuffle with Sandy; Bunny was crossing the softball field.

“Let
her
tell you,” he said to Sandy.

“Black and white!” I told Sandy. He threw the green back, pulled the white out, tossed them one by one to Joanie. Tears and all, she caught them deftly and jumped off the table. She sat in the grass on the other side of the big tree, her head down, the rolls of gimp cradled in her lap.

She wasn’t the only one I watched, though. I kept my eye on Dave Asconti, in his blue All-Stars shirt. From then on he kept his back to me.

P
AMMY
R
ANKIN HAD A NEW RED BIKE.
A two-wheeler. And she could ride it. It wasn’t the least bit unusual for a seven-year-old like Pammy to be riding a two-wheeler. She just hadn’t had the chance before. Dave Asconti had ridden at four. I’d been five. Sandy had been six, but, well, that was Sandy. He grew too quickly and was awkward, not like Aimée.

I felt so bad because Aimée couldn’t—wouldn’t—remotely consider taking off her training wheels. When I watched Pammy circling the circle on her two-wheeler, I burned for Aimée, but I burned about her, too. Why was she so chicken?

“So show me this famous elf house,” said Joanie to Aimée. For a second I thought, Hold it, that’s pretty fresh. But there was real interest in Joanie’s face. I hadn’t told her Aimée couldn’t ride, but it seemed she’d figured it out. So together we three got down on our knees and crawled under the biggest forsythia bush into Elfland, leaving Pammy to conquer the circle on her bike.

There among the branches were the beginnings of the
elf house masterpiece: an elevator and a television set, an old tea set teacup, and a piece of hose. “That’s going to be the sink,” I said, and Joanie listened as I described how water could get pumped to the sink from a thermos bottle tucked behind the leaves.

Mom called out through the neighborhood for us to come home. “’Bye, Em!” yelled Pammy, all puffed up with importance and too busy to come riding over.

Joanie walked around the corner with Aimée and me to the foot of our driveway, waved a hand at the Ascontis’ house just in case they were watching, and rode off on Frank up Marvin Road.

The second Joanie was gone, sobs gushed out of my sister.

I went up the steps and sat on the porch, my head in my hands. “You can try,” I said. “Right here. Right now.”

“No way! I’m a baby, like Pammy says,” she said.

“Pammy calls you a baby?”

“Only about bike riding. And crying when I get upset.” Her crying right now made more sense than it usually did.

“I’ve offered to teach you,” I said in a businesslike way. Then I changed the subject. Riding a bike was something real to be afraid of, like being kidnapped. You could get killed. For the first time I knew what Aimée felt when she was so scared she shook. All I could do was change the subject.

“Aimée?” I said. “What kind of baby do you think Mom’s going to have, a boy or a girl?”

“A thingy,” she said, and cried some more.

“A thingy?”

“I don’t care,” she said.

Who was I to be disgusted with Aimée for being scared, whether it was about riding a bike or adding a child to the
family? I wasn’t sure what I thought having a new baby would be like … or how my room, and I, might have to change to squeeze the baby in.

And I might have been brave about bike riding, but I didn’t want to walk anywhere. I couldn’t stop looking behind me to see what cars were coming, looking ahead of me to see what cars were coming, wondering where in the world the green station wagon was that had taken Wendy Boland away.

More and more often I found myself working on elf things alone in my room. I was there now, sitting on my bed with a big wooden cutting board in my lap, building a bed out of some giant Legos Aimée said she didn’t want anymore. Fabric and glue and scissors were all around me, and chopsticks and a handkerchief. I was trying to use the last two to make a canopy, but it wasn’t working. The glue wouldn’t hold, and the whole thing kept collapsing.

Across the road I could see Aunt Bonnie’s head in her sewing room window. She was done painting our house and was back to painting the house picture in her studio. Not that I knew this from experience, because I’d been staying out of the Ascontis’ house completely since Pete tried to shut up Joanie. I missed Dave, missed knowing what book he was reading even if he wasn’t about to start acting anything out. And I missed pasteling beside Aunt Bonnie. Aunt Bonnie wasn’t coming over much lately anyway because she was in the doghouse (she and Faux Pas both) with Dad on account of our cherry red house.

It looked so beautiful, but he had come home from his two-week meetings and just stood there in the driveway, staring, his five o’clock shadow making him look tired, his old leather briefcase drooping from his hand. Chicken Aunt Bonnie was hiding in her house, but Mom stood on
the porch with her hands folded, waiting to see what he’d say.

He said, “You painted the whole thing on your own?”

Mom must have thought it best just to nod. Yes, the whole thing. She would get around to the
on your own
part later.

“Oh, Mitchie,” Dad had said. She came down the step, and he put his arm around her shoulders and turned to walk into the house. They had been a long time apart, so the fighting came later. But it did come.

“Did you hear about that kid?” Joanie said.

“What kid?”

“That girl in Claybury.”

I crossed my arms over my stomach and leaned over the edge of the Little River bridge, noticing the pattern of the stones at the edge of the wall. Joanie had been riding Frank, and I’d been doing my route on Reshna, and we’d bumped into each other and stopped to talk about boys at camp she thought were cute. Not Pete anymore. Not Sandy.
Dave.
And Nathan. Not Ziggy, of course, who would?

This—Wendy Boland—was some subject change.

“Claybury is really far away,” I said.

“No, it isn’t,” said Joanie. She used her thumb and pointer to flick pebbles off the wall. “We had a swim meet there last year. They beat us. That girl could have even been on the swim team. There was this one girl who swam butterfly who keeps coming into my mind. I was trying to remember from the newspaper picture, you know? But she probably had her hair under a bathing cap, so it’s hard to tell. I think maybe—”

I said, “Stop it. Please stop talking about it. Do you have
to talk about it?” My throat felt funny. Maybe I was getting sick. I felt tears filling my eyes. I felt—oh, God—I felt the way Aimée looked when she got into one of her states, as if things were going to fall apart any minute.

I turned my face toward the road and automatically watched for green station wagons. The air blew cool on my neck. I’d gotten Mom to pin my braids up across my head, Heidi style. I’d told her it was because it was hot, but the truth was I didn’t want them hanging down, an invitation to kidnappers.

“Claybury’s not so far away.” Joanie rattled on. “Just a couple of exits on the thruway, my mother said.”

I forced words out of my mouth. “Your
mother?”
I repeated. My own mother hadn’t even mentioned the kidnapping, only snapped the radio off again one day in the car when news about it came on. I still didn’t even know if Mom had heard about Wendy Boland. I tried to picture Mom talking about it.

I wished I were with her right now. I wished Joanie and I weren’t on this bridge with nothing between us and the cars going by, nothing but the river on the other side of the wall, no getaway but our bikes.

I tried to breathe deeply, the way Mom always told Aimée to do when she got nutty.

“What’s the matter with you?” Joanie asked.

I breathed louder, deeper. I said, “I’m thinking about riding up that big hill on Hill Road.”

“And back down?” Joanie asked.

I nodded slowly, wiggling my eyebrows in a way I hoped was cool like Lucy DeLuna.

“My mother would have a coronary,” said Joanie.

“Good,” I said.

I hoisted myself up and leaned out far over the bridge
wall, lying across the warm stone, my feet kicking air. Beside me, Joanie had her feet on the ground, standing very still. “Chérie, we’re not going to get kidnapped, you know.”

“She’s just like us,” I said. “She goes to school and plays at the park. Her father even works in a factory, like mine. She has braids like mine. When she goes to high school, she might be in Dave’s father’s English class.”

“She’s thirteen,” said Joanie.

“I’m going to be thirteen in November,” I said.

But Joanie said, “I’m already thirteen. So what?” She flung a pebble into the Little River. “Every girl in the eighth grade at St. John Vianney’s is thirteen. And so is every girl in the eighth grade at Bridgefield Junior High. And Claybury Junior High. And every junior high. Hundreds of thirteen-year-old girls. Thousands. All over the country there are thirteen-year-old girls!”

“So?”

“So he only took one.”

I thought I was going to throw up. The pattern of the edge of the bridge wall went: big rock, little rock, big rock, little rock, big rock …

I swept both my hands forward over the wall, sending a shower of pebbles and sand into the river.

“It could have been me,” I said.

I wished vacation were sooner. I was ready to get out of the county, out of the state. Things were quiet in the newspaper. The news about Wendy had slowed to a trickle of pleas. Please.