Scary Out There (40 page)

That's what Aria called the new boyfriend. She wasn't being disrespectful, not really, because that's what the boyfriend did for a living, part-time at least. The rest of the time he didn't do much of anything, as far as she knew. He dressed up like a clown for kids' parties, acting all crazy and performing stupid magic tricks. Clown stuff. She guessed he was good at being goofy, and the kids all seemed to like him, but it creeped her out. Clowns creeped her out. She couldn't believe her mother was dating a stupid clown when she knew how much Aria hated them.

They
lied
for a living—that's what they did. They pretended to be happy when they weren't. They pretended everything was a joke, but some things were too sad and scary to joke about.

The boyfriend had just gotten out of bed, and he still had some of his clown face on. That was typical. Sometimes after a clowning job he'd drink, and he'd rub his face with a towel, not enough to remove all the makeup, just smear it around some, and then he'd just flop down in bed and get his face paint all over Mom's pillows, so it looked like his face had melted, or maybe he was a person magically turning into a clown, or
maybe he was a clown trying to turn into a person. Aria had no idea. But either way he never finished his transformation, so he just looked like this trashy thing that was all dirt and grease and a big, scary mouth.

“What are you looking at?” he was saying to Joey, growling like he was some kind of bear.

“Noth . . . nothing,” Joey said, looking away.

“Don't lie to my face!” the angry clown shouted.

“Don't yell at him!” Aria pulled Joey out of his chair and sent him and his sandwich off into his bedroom. Joey ate in his bedroom a lot when the clown was around.

The clown watched Joey go into the bedroom and close the door. Then he turned to look at Aria. Except it wasn't like he turned his head in any normal way. His painted features just slid around his head so that his bruised clown nose and his big, ugly clown mouth were just below his ear, and his eyes were peeking out of the side of his head. And the right eye was almost swallowed up by his long, greasy hair.

Then, as if he'd just realized he'd done something wrong, he moved his head around so that his real eyes and nose and mouth and his clown eyes and nose and mouth all matched. Or almost. His clown mouth wriggled a little below his real mouth, like he was fighting between a smile and a frown.

“Don't . . . ever . . . do . . . that . . . again!” his struggling mouths growled. “You . . . don't know . . . what I . . . what I . . . can do.”

But Aria
could
imagine. She could imagine very well what that angry clown could do. And then Mom's boyfriend's face settled down, and he was just this sleepy, lazy guy, slurring his words. “It's my house. You're living in my house now.”

Which wasn't even true, because Aria's mom was paying most of the rent. But she didn't bring it up because it wouldn't matter anyway. She went into her room and locked the door.

Most days the boyfriend spent the morning in bed, coming out of the room he shared with Mom around noon. So at least Aria didn't have to see him at breakfast or before she went off to school each day. The clown was just this
thing
living in their apartment that came out every now and then to annoy and frighten them. Aria worked hard not to resent Mom for it. Her mother was a smart lady, in everything but this one area. She just had this weird thing about men. She was always picking out the broken ones, the ones that women with good sense didn't want. Aria kind of understood this. When she was little, her favorite dolls were the messed up ones, and who didn't like an ugly puppy? But those were things that were just broken in their looks. And nobody was perfect in their looks. What Mom didn't seem to understand was that not everyone was good on the inside. Sometimes a guy who was all weird on the outside was even weirder on the inside.

Every afternoon Aria would meet Joey at his school and they would walk home together. Joey was always a little sillier the closer they got to their apartment building. It annoyed
her, maybe because it reminded her too much of the clown. But Joey couldn't help himself—they never knew what they'd find when they got home. The boyfriend might be up, playing video games, or in some crazy mood. Mom wouldn't be home from work for at least a couple of hours.

“Black Hawk down!” Right when they got in the door. A black remote control helicopter buzzed right by their faces. She saw Joey's hair move—the idiot flew his toy
that
close to her little brother's face! The first time it happened, Aria had freaked, thinking it was a giant insect or a bird or a bat or something. At least now that it happened all the time, she knew what it was. The boyfriend had these remote control toy helicopters, three of them, and he liked to fly them at you. Just never when Mom was around. So when Aria complained about it, he could always say she was just making stuff up, or exaggerating. She could tell her mother was suspicious, but Mom seemed to believe the boyfriend anyway, or at least pretended to. Aria understood that, even though she didn't like it. If you had a boyfriend, you took his side if you wanted to keep him. So maybe she'd never have a boyfriend. She never wanted to do that. She thought it was a crazy thing to do, actually, but she would never call her mother crazy.

“Kaboom!” the boyfriend shouted. The helicopter crash-landed on the coffee table in front of Joey. Joey screamed with laughter. He couldn't help himself. Aria could see that it was a growing problem—Joey was a kid, and boys especially could
like things and be scared of them at the same time. It was exciting for them. They were mixed up like that. But you tried to help them get un–mixed up.

“Here. You try it, Joey!” The boyfriend hunkered over and shoved the remote control into Joey's hands. Joey cheered with pleasure. Aria walked toward her room, but before she got there, Joey flew the helicopter into the back of her head, with some steering help from the boyfriend. Joey howled with laughter and the boyfriend hooted like a loon. She turned around angrily and stared at the helicopter lying there on the floor. She wanted to stomp on it. But who knew what might happen if she did that?

Inside her bedroom Aria tried to do her homework while listening on her headphones, but sometimes she'd slip them off to get some sense of what was going on in the rest of the apartment. Of course it was a madhouse, Joey and the boyfriend running around and making noise. She should be out there, watching Joey, but the boyfriend was out there too, and she just couldn't deal with him. She was afraid. She'd feel terrible if anything ever happened to Joey, but she just couldn't be out there. She guessed she was just some terrible coward.

“Kaboom! Kaboom! Rat-a-tat-tat-tat!” That wasn't Joey—that was the boyfriend. What was he, five? She thought about the creepy clown face, and what she had seen it do. Maybe her nerves were just getting to her. The boyfriend was crazy. That was certainly bad enough, but that was all there was to
it. Sometimes your nerves made you see things, incorrectly.

The situation always calmed down a few minutes before Mom got home. The boyfriend was pretty careful about that—he seemed to have a special sense for when Mom was going to walk through the door. Suddenly he would stop what he was doing and start straightening things up, picking up all of Joey's toys and his own toys and getting the dirty dishes into the dishwasher. Sometimes Joey and the boyfriend would be sitting together there on the couch watching television when Mom got home, even when they had been yelling at each other just minutes before. Even when Joey didn't want to be sitting on the couch. Aria would come out of her room and say hello to Mom, and Joey would look at her like he was begging her to do something, but neither of them ever said a word. What was there to say? The boyfriend looked at her too, not saying anything, but daring her with his eyes as he put his big arm across Joey's little shoulders.

Tonight was no different. Joey and the boyfriend played like crazy until Mom got home, and everybody said hello as if nothing were going on. Then they went their separate ways. Aria and Joey always had homework to do, and the boyfriend would sit out in the living room with Mom, and she would talk about her day and he would lie about his.

But then later that night, when Mom called them all to dinner, Joey and the boyfriend both showed up in clown makeup.

They were a mess. Obviously, the boyfriend had painted
on both of their clown faces. She guessed they were meant to be identical, but that just meant the boyfriend had smeared greasepaint on approximately the same places on Joey's face. Mom stared at the two of them for a minute or two when they sat down. Aria was sure Mom would yell at the boyfriend for this one, but she looked so tired, and her belly so huge, about to burst, that it didn't really surprise Aria when her mother said, “He's kind of cute. What, is he your little twin clown, your little buddy?”

“I'm thinking I might add him to the act,” the boyfriend said. Aria shuddered to hear this.

“I'm Boo Boo the clown,” Joey said, and giggled. But it was a tired, sleepy giggle.

Mom turned to the boyfriend then. “So does that just make you Boo? Or Big Boo?”

The boyfriend frowned, looking like he wasn't sure if he was being insulted or not. “Boo,” he said. “Just Boo.” He looked ready to be angry, but he looked that way most of the time, just waiting for somebody to say the wrong thing. “Just trying to teach him a few things about work, about being a guy. Trying to spend some quality time with the little fellow.”

The idea of the boyfriend teaching her little brother anything made Aria feel cold inside. Mom stared, looking as if she was trying to decide something. “I'm glad you're spending time with him, but maybe he shouldn't dress like that for dinner.”

“He's fine. I'm dressed like that.” Using his spoon, the boyfriend started shoveling mac and cheese into his greasy mouth.

Mom looked irritated then, but didn't say anything, so Aria didn't think she could make a fuss about it either. Mom kept stretching out her hand and holding it under her belly like she was trying to hold the baby in, like maybe the baby wanted to come out right then, and Mom was trying to tell it that now wasn't exactly the most convenient time. Aria kept watching her face, and sometimes Mom would wince a little, then she made this awkward smile like she was trying to cover it up. Of course the boyfriend didn't notice a thing—he was too busy feeding his face.

His clown makeup looked creepier than usual. The black grease around his eyes made his head look like a skull, the pale white eyes just flopping around inside the big, deep holes. And the purple spots on his nose made it look like there were pieces missing out of it. And the red smeared and runny around his mouth made it look as if he were eating himself alive.

Aria tried not to watch the boyfriend's mouth, but it was like seeing a train wreck—she just couldn't turn away. He was eating just plain old mac and cheese, but every once in awhile something odd would pop up between his lips: a fish head or the tail of one of those plastic ducks from the bathtub, or a skinny bird's leg, claws and all. It made her put her fork down. She was unable to eat.

So she started watching Joey, and Joey looked all wrong under that nasty clown makeup. He looked worn out, and too old, and like he hadn't slept for about a thousand years. He had red smeared around his eyes, and it looked like some of the red had spread onto the whites of his eyes. And the way his hair was pulled up on top and dyed orange. An old, old man hiding inside a little boy's body.

A huge bug appeared between Joey's lips, its legs claw claw clawing at Joey's mouth, trying to get out.

“Can I be excused!” she said too loudly, and jumped to her feet. Joey and the boyfriend stopped eating and stared at her. The bug leg disappeared back into Joey's mouth.

Mom looked up at her. “What's wrong, sweetheart?”

“I think I'm going to be sick,” she mumbled, not sure if it was actually a lie or not.

“Oh, honey, maybe you should go lie down.” Mom reached up and touched her on the back, and Aria felt a little shiver. She couldn't remember the last time her mother had touched her like that.

“Maybe I will,” she said, leaving the table. The boyfriend watched her with cold lizard eyes. Joey was busy eating again. The clown makeup was leaking away from his mouth, getting all over his tongue, all over his food.

Aria lay down on her bed with her music, not really wanting to rest or sleep, just needing to hide. And not knowing what to do with herself while she was hiding. If it had been a
few years ago, she knew Mom would be coming in and checking on her from time to time, but that kind of thing didn't happen anymore. Maybe that was okay—maybe she was getting too old for that anyway. Getting older sucked sometimes. Little kids could be dumb and happy. As you got older, you suddenly understood too much about things you couldn't do anything about.

Every few minutes she'd slip her earphones off and try to listen to whatever was going on in the rest of the apartment. They had music playing too—that weird South American stuff the boyfriend liked to listen to. Usually, Mom didn't let him play it when she was at home—it made her nervous. Aria hoped Mom wasn't getting too agitated—it was bad for the baby.

The parking lot outside the apartment complex seemed unusually busy tonight. Headlights kept burning through her curtains, washing across her walls. It made her room look cheap and bare. She should put up some posters, but she never could make up her mind about what to put up. She never seemed to like anything for very long anymore.

Then she heard her mother laughing and the boyfriend making those stupid ape sounds he liked to make sometimes. Mom's voice went high all of a sudden, like she was in pain. Aria got out of bed and went to the door, cracked it open.