The Listeners (11 page)

“WILL MY BREASTS
be bigger than yours?”

“Pardon me?”

“When I'm a teen,” Mink's daughter explained.

“Only time will tell,” I said.

“Yours are really small.”

I'd liked her better before she learned to speak.

“Small but fierce!” I said.

Meli squinted. “How can a breast be fierce? I think mine will be big since my mom's are. Do you think I should get a bra?”

“You're eight.”

“A girl in my class has a training.”

I laughed. “What would it be holding up on you?”

“
You
wear one,” she said.

“I need to go ask your mother something.”

I was sitting on the toilet when Mink wrenched the bath taps, groped for a towel.

“What the eff,” she said. “Why are you in here?”

“She was insulting me.”

Mink hollered toward the door: “We need to leave in five minutes, okay?”

A faint yell of assent.

She patted the towel up between her thighs. The summer I caught the glingles from Lad, Mink had been ready with instructions. It wasn't a big deal, she had explained, if you cleaned downstairs with a medicated soap.

“Insulting you?”

“No, nothing. I just came in to say hello.”

She stared into the cloudy mirror, fingering her forehead. “I have new wrinkles.”

“Don't be a cliché,” I said.

“That line was
not there
before.”

“Don't be a wife-magazine article.”

“Oh, like you never worry about it? I read about this eye cream,” she went on, “that naturally unclenches the skin so that it lets go of each wrinkle—but it's sixty-five dollars a jar. I have to buy her summer clothes soon, she's growing out of everything. She wants to go to sleepaway camp because her two best friends are.
That's
not going to happen, let me assure you. Two minutes!” she shouted.

No response.

“Did you hear me, Meli?”

No response.

Mink slapped on lotion. “Of
course
you worry about it.”

“I don't know where my fisher boots are,” the girl complained through the door.

“Then wear your sneakers.”

“I need my fisher boots.”

“You don't need them, you
want
them. Different.”

“Same!” she whined.

“The car is leaving,” Mink said, “in one minute.”

How was Mink going to be ready in one minute?

“Fine then I'm staying here.”

“Put your fucking sneakers on!” yelled Mink.

In the truck, wipers churning, Meli between us blinked fast against her tears. Her lashes were tasselly. “Why's it raining again?”

“Because that's what it does,” Mink said.

“But why?”

“Because the sky grasshoppers are taking their bath.”

On the radio they were speculating about the Democrats' chances, the election mere months away, time at last to evict from the White House its death-happy emperor.

Meli reached for the dial.

“Wait,” Mink said, “I want to hear this.”

“But it's boring.”

“It's
important
, because we have a bad situation on our hands.”

“We do?”

“Remember we've talked about the war, and how so many people in the Middle East are dying—”

“Yeah I know but Mrs. Pargiter says we had to do it to topple the madman.”

Mink's foot banged the brake.

“Why are we stopping?”

“She said the invasion of Iraq was
good
?”

“I don't know,” Meli said carefully.

“Her teacher supports the war,” Mink said to me. “That's fantastic.”

Meli screeched, “Don't tell her I told you, she'll be mad at me, okay?
Okay
, Mom?”

“I won't, bee.”

Mink's forehead-prodding vanity was understandable. Earned. In the day, she had been gorgeous in a way that made guys do extreme things. She'd once had a boyfriend who kept three of her pubic hairs in his pocket watch—a nod, only half jesting, to the medieval custom where a knight wore his lady's private locks into battle, a way to maintain the discretion required by courtly love—and Mink had liked that he did this, although when he first plucked and set aside the hairs she thought it was weird, didn't know him well enough yet to trust that he wasn't one of those guys who run used-panty mail-order businesses out of their basements. Sometimes, she told me later, they'd be sitting around with a bunch of people and he would take the watch from his pocket, rub it with his thumb, and smile at her.

I was not across-the-room beautiful. Never had I felt the way Mink had been able to feel on a regular basis: that your face and body forced eyes to go in a particular direction. A conjuring act, to have your shell be so arresting that all motion in other people was halted. I used to get furious—not at Mink, because it wasn't her fault, but at
the fact that a girl's best weapon was her casing. Rare to run across one who played an instrument well enough to be noticed for the playing and not for how cute she looked while playing it. Voices, yes, could astonish—you'd find girl singers who used their vocal cords for paranormal purposes—but the cords were in their bodies; they were not foreign objects to be mastered. And for every hundred boys who played like crap, not masterly at all, there was a boy you could point to and say
He has powers,
whereas you could hardly ever point to a girl.

We licked soft-serve cones, supervising Meli's playground moves. “So he hasn't gotten in touch with you,” I said.

“For the third time, no. And I doubt he will. It's already the middle of the semester.” Mink yawned and tongued ice cream off her lower lip. She was able to switch her mind entirely to NOW. Give every inch of attention to her daughter's teacher, to a cone of ice cream, to refilling glasses of beer. For Mink, it seemed, there was no past. No guilt.

“And then in May or June he'll just, what, go back to Seattle? Just like that?”

“What else would he do?” she said.

YOU WERE A
shipwrecked sailor. A plague had fallen upon your boat, and your sick mates, believing the sea was green fields, had been throwing themselves overboard. Water, water, everywhere. The delirious captain had just set the deck on fire and lain down screaming in the blaze. You, untouched by malady, floated alone on a life raft.

One by one the creatures arrived: a trio of dolphins, a baby octopus, a circling shark, a vulture dripping bits of illness from its beak. And one by one the hurdles: lightning, hailstorm, tidal wave. A computerized voice intoned:
Slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea. About, about, in reel and rout, the death-fires danced at night; the water, like a witch's oils, burnt green, and blue, and white.

The joystick wasn't very good for swimming with, or ducking lightning, or plucking the pearl from its shell, which made it a maddening game—all this water and monster and weather and so little influence upon them. I was playing badly, drowned in the first round and eaten by a squid in the second.

I'D SEEN A
darkness on my underwear the night before, and hoped it was only from dinner. Asparagus made your pee smell so maybe it stained your underwear too. In the morning I couldn't pretend it was a vegetable's fault because the blood was so bright—a metal red on the sheet in the shape of a short, thick worm. Oh no oh no oh no. A burnt smell plugged my throat. Oh no. Her crusty eyes opened:
See?
and her voice said, The uterus is a pouch! and it said, A bullet is pennies in your mouth and a bullet tears flesh with the ease of a—I ripped the sheet from the bed, balled it, saw the worm had soaked through to the mattress pad so pried the pad off as well. The mattress showed a vague brownishness, hardly noticeable, but I flipped it over. Hid the sheet and mattress pad under the bed and tied a sweater around my waist. In the kitchen Mert asked what the trash bag was for and I said, A project.
See? See?
I kept the bag of stained cotton in my closet for three days until it was trash night, and waited until Fod had dragged the laden can to the curb
before running out with my secret bag and stowing it at the very bottom, under the grinds and shells.

A bullet, depending on its angle of entry, can cleave the striations of a muscle in such a way as to trigger profuse hemorrhaging that is difficult, if not impossible, to stanch.

 

At the new school, my teachers were all fake-nice. They knew, of course. I felt eyes, eyes, eyes. I couldn't laugh or tell a joke because the eyes believed I was sad all the time. I wasn't, though—I was nothing. My skull made a room with nothing in it. My one worry was Riley, who was so shy. The middle school was three blocks away and I'd go over during lunch to see if I could see him. Be brave, Coyote, I would whisper at the windows.

Lunch was a relief because I could be alone, away from the eyes. I ate my sandwich outside and checked my teeth for lettuce in a parked car's mirror. There was one crew of boys I didn't hate. They were not like regular boys. They slouched darkly at the ends of halls, in tight britches and heavy boots, their hair pink or blue or black-black. The tall one was in English with me; his best friend, the hot one, wasn't in any of my classes. I stayed on the lookout but rarely saw the hot one. The only chance was at lunch, and the cafeteria had all those eyes.

I was The Girl Whose Sister Got Killed. They knew the story. They put me in honors English, where the teacher said: “Quinn is an interesting name.”

I said not really, it was some dumb British relative's name.

“Are your parents British?” asked Mr. Nzambi.

I gouged at the desk with a pencil. Mr. Nzambi waited. When the silence got bad enough, a boy blurted: “Well everyone's parents are,
originally,
” and Mr. Nzambi cleared his throat and a black kid said, “Except mine!” and another black kid said, “Yeah, or mine,” and I felt bad for the boy, who sounded racist when he might not have been.

Mr. Nzambi moved on with attendance. When I looked up, the boy was watching me. I could not know—Cam told me only much later—that he pitied me because of my lame beige sweater.

WHEN I CALLED
the law school, I disguised my voice. This was not, I knew, exactly necessary. In a choked rumble I said, “I'd like the mailing address of your visiting tax professor, Cameron—”

“Okay,” the secretary said, and told me.

How could it be that easy?

Well, he wasn't a CIA agent.

“Thank you,” I grunted, and noticed that my voice sounded like a cartoon dog's, and hung up the phone.

HE PASSED ME
a scrap in Nzambi's class:
Want to go shopping after 8th?
It was better than going home. We took the bus downtown and went into a shop with glittering walls. A girl with shot-up hair stood at a mirror adjusting a white leather dress that did not even cover her whole butt, and I stared (until I remembered not to) at the scrumptious tuck where her netted thighs started.

Cam bent over the case of hair dyes, tapping his plastic rings on the glass. “Magenta or cobalt? What should I get?”

I said, “Isn't Pete's hair magenta?”