Ruby on the Outside (4 page)

Chapter Seven

I imagine there comes a
certain time
in a new friendship when the inevitable invitation comes up:

Wanna come to my house?

Which will mean, sometime fairly soon after that, you most likely have to reciprocate. This is exactly why I've always managed to successfully avoid it until this moment. Of course, that is also why I never had a best friend before.

“Wanna come to my house for dinner tonight?” Margalit asked me yesterday.

It isn't that I don't want anyone to come to my house. I do. It's just that I'm afraid they'll ask questions. They might wonder about Matoo's name or figure out that I am not, in fact, Navaho or Sioux or a descendant of any other Native American tribe. Or they will see the photo of my mother on the mantel.

It's actually a very important, special picture. It's a photo of me and mom at Christmas. But there are a lot of red flags in the picture. Well, not really red flags, but things that might lead to questions. Questions about where it was taken. And why it's so different looking.

They might ask.

For one thing, my mother is dressed in all green, but that, in and of itself, might not seem so odd. It's just a green sweater with the green collar of her shirt poking out and plain green pants. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, nothing fancy, and if you looked closely you'd see she has no jewelry on. But who would really notice that?

My mom is sitting on a metal chair—another giveaway—and I am standing in front of her, kind of between her knees. Her arms are around me. I am wearing this really ugly blue striped dress, because it's a holiday visiting day and they make a big deal of it at the prison, with decorations and sweets, and Matoo made me get dressed up for it with a hand-me-down dress from a friend of hers.

But that's not it either.

No, it's more about the roaring fireplace and the fur-trimmed Christmas stockings behind her. There is a big wrinkle right down the center, rolling right across the brick chimney and making a bump in that roaring fire, because it's really just a plastic background, like the screens they use for slide-show projections.

So it doesn't take a genius to tell it's fake.

There are no flames coming from that fire, no smell of cookies baking in the oven or turkey roasting. There were no presents under that tree. Not that year, the year before, or the year after. All of it was fake.

But then again, you couldn't get more real than spending Christmas Day with your mom in prison.

And I love that picture more than anything.

I just didn't really want anyone else to know about it.

Okay, so when Margalit asked me over to her house, I said no.

“Oh, all right,” Margalit says.

Camp is over for the day. Yvette and Beatrice walk us all back to our houses. We drop Elise off first. When we get to Margalit's house, her mom is waiting outside the front door. At least I assume it's her mom. When you don't have a regular mom situation you'd think you wouldn't assume these kinds of things, but I usually do anyway. Just like everyone else does.

“Are you sure you don't want to come over, Ruby?” Margalit asks me again. Then she looks up at the mom, like maybe
she
could say something that would change my mind.

I look up the few steps leading to their house. But, oh no, that
has
to be Margalit's mom. She has the exact same black hair, shiny and straight, only the mom has hers wrapped up on top of her in that way that looks neat and secure but also loose and pretty.

When I visit my mom, she brushes my hair, sometimes for the whole visit. We aren't allowed to have a hairbrush, so she uses her hands.

“Now, Moo, don't put your friend on the spot,” Margalit's mother says. “Maybe she needs to get home. Maybe she's just tired.”

And I am so torn because Margalit is the first girl that ever seemed like she might be my real best friend and if I don't take this next step, I'll never find out. Next year is middle school, and by all accounts a best friend is an essential accessory. Not to mention, I really really like Margalit.

“Maybe another night,” I say to Margalit, glancing up at her mom for her approval.

“How about tomorrow night, then?” Margalit jumps in right away.

Yvette and Beatrice are still standing there, waiting, not really listening but sort of half waiting for the conversation to be over so they can move on and get rid of me at my house, like when the bus driver patiently lets some kid hold on and say good-bye to his mom for longer than necessary. But you can bet if Margalit's mom weren't right here, Yvette and Beatrice wouldn't be being so patient.

“Moo, you're doing it again.” Margalit's mother was going to start to protect me again, but time is running out, and we are only getting older and closer to sixth grade by the second, so I just say it.

“Okay. Sure. Tomorrow night.”

Really fast, before I have a chance to come up with more reasons why this is a bad idea and change my mind, Margalit starts jumping up and down.

“Oh Mom, can you make us homemade macaroni and cheese? And can we bake cookies afterward and then do FIMO clay?”

“Okay, okay, hold on.” She is smiling. “Ruby. It's Ruby, right?”

I nod.

“Well, first we'll have to ask your mom,” Margalit's mom says. “Do you want me to call her?”

“Oh, no. That's okay,” I say. “I'll ask her when I get home.”

That's when Yvette seemed to come back to life.

“Okay, then,” Yvette said. “All settled. Let's get you home, Ruby. Bye, Mrs. Tipps. See you tomorrow.”

Tipps?

Beatrice adds in, “See you tomorrow, Mrs. Tipps.”

And somewhere in the back of my head that name sounds familiar, but I am more concerned with how I am now going to go to Margalit's house for dinner tomorrow afternoon without having to then invite her to my house, but maybe this will finally turn out to be my very first, very real best friend and maybe everything is going to work out perfectly.

Chapter Eight

It wasn't like we didn't
have our own story. We did. Mostly, the story between Matoo and me about my mother, was to hate Nick Sands.

“I never liked him,” Matoo would say. “Not from the first moment I met him. He wasn't nice to your mother. Oh sure, he said all the right things. ‘Baby doll.' ‘Beautiful creature.' He had all the lines, but that's all they were. Lines.”

I can't remember my mother at all from our time with Nick. I liked to imagine her, though. I like to pretend. I have this movie in my head of the two of us living alone and I am just a baby. And because in order for a good fantasy to really work you need to weave in some factual details, we live somewhere outside of Albany. We live in a little house, one story, yellow with white shutters. Or sometimes it's red shutters because that part I have to make up. My mother makes pies for a living, which means she is in the kitchen all day and I get to play with pots and pans on the floor right next to her. She sings while she is cooking and at the end of the day, we eat pies for dinner, then she gives me a bath and brushes my hair with a brush, while she tells me a bedtime story about her own magical childhood.

I had to make that all up too.

I can't remember anything specific from before my mom went to prison. We don't talk about my real dad, but I know my mom was really young when she had me. So I think when Nick came around she wanted so badly for someone to love and take care of her, take care of
us
, that she would have done anything for him. At least that's how Matoo describes it.

The truth is, I didn't want to hear even that much. But sometimes, my mom tries to tell me things.

One visit, about a year ago, we were in the children's center, which is that separate area of the visitors' room at Bedford Hills. There are toys and stuffed animals and books and art supplies and posters, so when you are in there, you can almost pretend you are in a nursery school somewhere, instead of a prison.

I was curled up in my mother's lap, but I was leaning over the table drawing while we were talking. At ten, I was probably too big to sit like that, with all my weight on her legs, but she was holding me, balancing me while I was working hard in that coloring book, trying to stay inside the lines perfectly, trying not to make a mistake.

“The social worker wants me to talk to you, Ruby,” my mother said.

I think it was the second time she tried to say this. I was trying to ignore her. I was glad I couldn't see her face, only the picture in front of me. Someone before me had already drawn in this coloring book. I found the only page that was still clean, that I could make my own.

“I mean, I want to talk to you too,” my mom went on. “About what happened that night. About why I am in here. I think you are old enough now to hear some things.”

I wasn't.

I kept coloring. Purple within the lines. Dark purple over the light purple.

And somewhere in my brain, a memory was triggered. There were little shots of bright white lights darting around a bedroom in my mind far away, flashlights and voices and shouting. And so long ago, a woman in a blue uniform handed me a teddy bear.

Then I don't remember anything else until I am living with Matoo, who isn't Matoo yet. She is my mother's older sister and I'd never met her before.

“I have to take responsibility for my choices, Ruby. I wouldn't be a good mother,” my mother paused, like she was stopping herself from saying something and then with effort she continued. “I wouldn't be a . . . mother . . . if I didn't do that. If I didn't take responsibility.”

I know Matoo says that my mother didn't do anything wrong. It was all Nick. I heard her talking, sometimes crying. Nick was a drug addict. My mother didn't even take drugs. Everyone gets tested when they get arrested and my mother didn't test positive for anything. Not even alcohol, and that's legal. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's what Matoo says.

“Ruby? Are you okay?” my mother asked me.

I didn't want to hear whatever it was she was going to say. But I had to say something to act like I was interested and then get her to change the subject.

“What happened to him?” I picked out a new color, orange, and I started going over the parts I had already colored purple and the whole thing was looking like brown mush.

“To who?”

“Nick.”

There were other kids around, some talking quietly, some playing games, some fighting with their mom, arguing about why they were getting in trouble in school or at home, or being disrespectful and angry. I never understood how you could use the tiny amount of time you have with your mom like that.

“He went to prison, Ruby. You never have to worry about him again.”

“For longer than you?”

I wanted to believe there was something fair about this whole thing, that seemed so horribly unfair to me, but when I asked that question I saw Matoo rolling her eyes around in her head like she was having a seizure.

“What?” I asked.

“That doesn't matter, Ruby,” my mother told me, which meant she wasn't going to answer me. “What matters is how I move forward from here and if you can forgive me.”

“Forgive
you
?” My orange crayon snapped right in half in my hand. “For what?”

I watched as Matoo started shaking her head in some silent sister communication. “Let it be, Janis,” she said finally.

And my mother got quiet. She kissed the top of my head, picked up a yellow crayon, and starting working on the page with me.

She was letting it go. Now I could breathe.

I already knew what happened to Nick, though, even before I asked. I had heard Matoo on the phone so many times even when I tried not to. Nick had some information about even bigger more dangerous drug dealers, the ones he bought drugs from, and he traded that information for a lesser sentence. He was offered what they call a plea bargain. He ratted out his drug supplier and in exchange he didn't have to spend as many years behind bars as my mother, who had done nothing. She didn't have anything to give them in exchange for a lighter sentence. They didn't even offer her a plea bargain.

Nobody needed anything from my mom.

But I did.

Chapter Nine

Margalit's house looks almost identical
to mine. The bedrooms are in the same place, the same little balcony from the upstairs overlooking the living room. The fridge and the stove and the sink are all in the exact same place as ours, but hers is ten times more crowded. And it's not just because three people live here instead of just two—Margalit, her mom, and her dad, who I haven't met yet—it's all their stuff.

I've never seen so much stuff. So much cool and interesting stuff. There are things everywhere, ceramic bowls filled with coins or dried flower petals, one with glass marbles. There are books, just randomly piled or stacked on top of any sort of surface; magazines; a little collection of antique-looking wind-up toys. Colorful glass bottles are lined up on the windowsill in the lower-level living room.

Matoo likes to keep our house very neat. If she sees me get up from an upholstered chair in the living room, she runs over and smooths out the lines in the fabric so you can't see that anyone had ever been there. We have a glass table, so you don't have to worry about your drink leaving a stain, but we aren't allowed to have any drinks in the living room, so it stays pretty clean.

It's not that Margalit's house isn't clean. It is. It's just wonderful. The white walls are so covered with artwork, framed and unframed, that there is hardly any white you can see. Some of the paintings were done by Margalit's mother and some by their grandfather, I am told, as Margalit points everything out and explains it. The couch is all mushy and soft looking, and there are different-colored, different-size pillows just thrown all over it, not fluffed up at all. Some are downright smushed to smithereens.

Matoo wanted to know whose house I would be eating at and what time I'd be home, but other than that I think she was happy I was eating with a friend.
Remember to smile,
she told me,
and be polite.

I am smiling now.

“I hope you like my homemade macaroni and cheese. I didn't think to ask,” Margalit's mom is saying when the house tour brings us into the kitchen. “Not everyone loves it like Moochie here does.”

That's what Margalit's mom calls her. Moochie. Or just Moo.

“Oh, I love it,” I answer, though I've never had homemade and I am wondering if it will be as good as the kind from the box, because I see it in the baking dish and it isn't even orange. Then Margalit pulls me by my arm.

“Come see my room,” she says.

We are both sunburned from being outdoors all day. Yvette wasn't there today and Beatrice kept us at the pool all day. She was actually a lot more fun without Yvette around. I guess, Beatrice felt she could be more like a kid without Yvette around. We played Marco Polo and water tag and it was almost like we were just four friends. I even think Elise had a good day.

I follow Margalit up the stairs, which are just like my stairs, and into her bedroom, which is right where my bedroom would be.

“Wow,” I say. It's all I can say.

Wow.

Before we can even walk into the room, we have to get past all the loose scarfs, hanging like a soft wavy rainbow from a bar that stretches across the top of the doorway. I carefully move some out of the way and then I kind of have to duck to get inside.

“Wow.” I say it again.

Margalit has a big double bed, like grown-ups have, but it's anything but grown-up looking. Like her couch downstairs, her bed is covered with pillows, but it is also covered with stuffed animals and blankets that look like they might have been baby blankets, knitted and flowery. One cottony blanket bunched up at the bottom has blue bunnies on it. There is one big sort of pillow–stuffed animal combo and it looks really old, and really well loved.

Her walls are covered with posters, some that were clearly from kindergarten, like Hello Kitty, and some must be pretty new, like Demi Lovato. Margalit's room is just like she is: a free spirit. An open book. An open heart with lots of color.

And then there are her books. Everywhere. Her shelves are filled with what looks like a history of art projects—little FIMO-clay creations, beads, crepe paper flowers—and her books are stacked on the floor, under the bed, and on the windowsill.

It takes me a while to see everything.

“My mom keeps wanting me to clean up,” Margalit says. “I will. Soon.”

“Well, it's not dirty,” I say.

Margalit bounces on her bottom right onto her bed. “Thank you,” she says. “That's what I say.”

“And it looks like you've lived here forever,” I say, because it does. It is so full of Margalit.

“I know, my mom wanted me to, but I wouldn't get rid of anything when we moved here from Glens Falls.”

“Where's that?” I ask, not because I really want to know but it sounds polite. I want so much for Margalit to like me. I don't want to do or say anything thoughtless or rude by mistake. Sometimes I do that. I don't mean it, but I do.

“Oh, it's a little town upstate. Near Saratoga,” she tells me

Saratoga?

That's where we used to live and I am just about to tell her that but I'm not sure that's very interesting, or if that's like being one of those friends that whenever you tell them something they tell you something about themselves right away. So I can't decide, but I don't have to because right then her mom calls up the stairs telling us dinner is ready.

“We gotta wash up.” Margalit jumps to her feet. “I can't wait for you to taste my mom's cooking.”

Me neither.

And by the way, homemade mac and cheese is much better than the kind from the box. Dinner is delicious. I wasn't going to ask, but Margalit's mom asks me if I want seconds, and I do. Margalit's dad is working late, so I don't get to meet him.

It's only seven thirty and it's still light out. Matoo had said it was okay for me to walk back home by myself. It's just two rows and a few condos down. But Margalit's mom makes me call my house first to say I'm on my way. I even remember to thank Margalit's mom for dinner before I leave.

“Anytime,” she says.

Margalit echoes, “Anytime.”

Now Matoo is waiting in the doorway. The light in the hall is on behind her and she's almost glowing. Her hands are on her hips.

“What's wrong?” I ask. I stop at the edge of the sidewalk, the way Loulou does when she doesn't want to come in from her walk, when it's so nice out and there's so much more of the world to explore.

“Nothing, why do you think something's wrong?” Matoo steps out of the way as if that will encourage me to come in faster. She takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes.

“I don't know,” I say, but I still haven't moved closer. “You look mad, that's all.” Without her glasses, Matoo looks more sad than upset, actually. Her face looks smaller. Her worry is more visible.

“Come on, come on already.” She puts her glasses back on and starts waving her arms. “You're letting all the bugs in.”

When I get inside, I see a bowl in the sink with leftover milk and a few Cheerios still, which Matoo must have had for dinner. I can't believe she hasn't washed her dishes yet and put them away.

Something
is
wrong.

“Did you have a good time?” she asks me.

“Oh, yeah. I had a great time,” I say. “I really did.”

Matoo smiles at me. “I'm so glad,” she says. Her face relaxes.

I know it sounds crazy, but I think Matoo missed me tonight. Like maybe she likes it when I mush up her pillows.

“Next time, you can invite her here.”

I think I will.