A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (39 page)

I thought,
This is drugs. This is what Liza was like. This is what I am not supposed to do or be.

Part of me was al calm and stepping away out of myself, noticing how al the obvious, boring things Big and Liza said to me a thousand times were so much truer and realer than I ever thought. Drugs
were
bad. I
shouldn’t
go to dark places al alone with boys. I wanted to hol er that I had learned al these super-valuable lessons now, and so please someone needed to come and get me and say,
See, Mosey? Now you know it is all
all so very true, and let’s go home.

But no one came, and his big hand was coming at me again.

I ducked under his arm, and I ran. It was the wrong way, toward the hal instead of the front door, but anywhere away from him was good. I heard Roger yel ing, “Stop it, stop it!” but I didn’t know where Roger was.

I didn’t even make it out of the den. The guy’s long ape arm snagged me and picked me right up off the ground, so my arms were pinned. I kicked and flailed my feet at the air. I could hear myself screaming and Roger screaming, too, behind us. The guy put his other hand over my mouth and nose to stop me, and I couldn’t hardly breathe, and I was too scared of him to bite him.

Roger hol ered words then. “I wil cal the cops!”

The guy laughed. He didn’t even turn around, just started walking toward the hal with me kicking helpless at the air.

“And I wil snap your fuckin’ neck. Shut up and be glad I’l take a piece of this instead of cash.”

My whole body started jackknifing in his arms like a fish, trying to get away from him. I thought I might be peeing, and I almost laughed because it seemed not real, except his crazy, shiny eyes had already told me he would rape me anyway, pee or no, and I could feel what I thought might be his dick, hard and pressed against my butt. I whipped my whole body with al my strength, fighting so hard, but he held me like al my mightiness was nothing. I was too breathless now to scream, and he shifted his hand from off my mouth, moved it down to rumple at my boob.

He cal ed to Roger, real casual over his shoulder as he walked away with me, “She ain’t got tits for squat,” like he was complaining. Like Roger could have brought him something better.

I kicked backward, hard, trying for his shin, but I got nothing, and this was real y happening, and I couldn’t stop it.

Then I heard Roger say, “You put her down, or I am going to shoot you. I am going to shoot you a lot in your back.”

That made him stop. He stil had his hand on my boob, like he forgot it was there, though it was burning me like acid eating through my clothes.

He turned around, so I was a shield hanging between him and the gun. The SIG twitched and wobbled in Roger’s hands, and I was staring into the weaving black hole at the front of it. I got stil then, too.

There was an endless pause. I looked down that black hole, and everything in me and the room and the world went deadly quiet. Then the guy threw me. He tossed me toward Roger like I was weightless paper. I landed on my hands and knees, and I scrambled away from him, wedging myself against the wal by the lamp again, pressed up against the sofa’s side. He walked slow to Roger, and I could see his crazy drug face and it was fearless. Roger’s hands had gone white on the gun, he was squeezing so hard, and nothing happened and nothing happened. Then the guy reached him, and he ripped the SIG out of Roger’s hands and tossed it away, back behind him near the hal way. He was between both of us and it.

“Safety, numbnuts,” he said to Roger, and grinned this ugly grin. “Oh, how I love me some dumb-ass rich kids.”

His big hand swung out hard, and it caught Roger in the face. Roger tumped over backward. I found my voice and started screaming for real. I grabbed the first thing I found in my hand, and it was the floor lamp. I picked it up like a bat, and I ran at him swinging it and screaming and screaming. I hit him with it twice before he caught it and wrenched at it so hard he tore me off my feet. I went down stil screaming, and I saw something zinging through the air past me. Roger had pul ed himself up on the coffee table and was throwing the plates. The guy ducked, and the first plate shattered into the wal like a bomb going off. The second thunked into the guy’s arm with a meat-slapped sound. Roger was screaming, too, words, but I couldn’t understand them. The guy laughed this awful raging laugh and wading toward me through the glasses that Roger was throwing now, batting them away. I tried to crawl backward away, but he dropped down to al fours and grabbed my ankle and pul ed me across the floor toward him.

That was when the world blew up. It exploded into this most loudest bang that rang the air and kept on ringing after. It was a noise like the end of the world, and we al just stopped.

It was the SIG.

A woman had come up the hal way in al the loudness and gotten the SIG and pointed it up and made it shiver the world with its huge, booming voice.

No one moved, except the woman. She scrubbed at her eyes with her free hand, al sleepy, and plaster came sifting down from the ceiling in a powdery hail where she’d shot it.

“Mother
fuck
, Janel e,” the guy said, letting go of my ankle and pushing himself into a squat. My heart had stuttered, and every hair I had was standing straight up, but the guy, he rose to his feet and turned to her, like,
exasperated
.

She took her hand down away from her face, and then he didn’t matter anymore. I could only look at her. I heard Roger, behind me, breathe the words “Holy shit,” and I knew he was looking at her, too.

She was me. She was me if I was old and awful and a monster. Her thin hair was my color hair, her scabbed-up nose was my shape nose. She wore my own wide mouth pul ed down into my exact mad frown. She was a gray skin sack stretched too tight over my very own shape of bones.

She was me.

I glanced at Roger, standing frozen with the bong lifted up in one arm, ready to hurl it like a round, glass javelin. He was staring at her, and his arm slowly lowered. I stared at her, too, but she was only looking at the big scary guy.

She had a scratchy voice, clogged up with sleepy, and she croaked, “What is going on in my goddamn house? Huh? Huh? Now you made me shoot a gun, and my whore neighbor wil cal the cops if she is goddamn home. Chuck, you need to get the product and go out the back door.” She glanced at me and Roger, then said, “And who—”

She saw me. Her creaky voice got stuck in her throat. She looked and looked at me with my own eyes. Her voice tried to make more words, but they petered out into panting. The gun wobbled, and her hands dropped so it was pointing at the floor. Final y she got words out. Two.

She said, “Jane Grace?”

I answered so fast, so loud. “No.”

“Jane Grace,” she said again, but this time, there wasn’t a question sound to it.

“No,” I said again. “No. I am just some girl.”

“What’s up, Janel e?” the scary guy said.

The woman didn’t take her eyes off me, not at al . She said, “Chuck, get the goddamn product out the back. And this, too.” She held out the SIG.

“Oh, right,” he said, and he took it and headed down the hal way like this whole day with the attempted rape and the shooting and the plates coming at his head was a normal day in his life. I sat on my ass on the carpet with my boob burning from where he had touched it with his grossness, and I was looking at my mother.

“You’re so pretty,” my mother said. “You’re so prettier than pictures.”

I think I was crying. “I’m not her,” I said.

We looked at each other for a long time, me crying and her standing there. She looked at me like she was drinking me. She looked at my nice skirt and my hair and my face, her eyes going place to place, and they were my shape, my color, except the whites were the color of dirty snow and her lids looked stretched out so far they’d gone saggy. She took one step toward me, and I scrabbled backward, and I would die and burn up into an ash pile if she touched me.

I said so loud I was yel ing, “I’m just some girl! I’m just some girl!”

She stopped. She didn’t step toward me again. She twisted her hands together in a worrying way. She looked at me for what seemed like a long time, with my ragged breathing the only sound in the room. In the pause I could see her deciding something, because she made my very own deciding face. Then she blinked and swal owed, and final y she spoke. “My neighbor real y might cal the cops. You kids better scoot.” It started out very plain and matter-of-fact, like she was talking to a mailman, but her voice cracked near the end, and I could tel she was close to crying.

I felt a hand on me, and I almost came out of my skin, but it was Roger, helping me up. He’d dropped the bong on the floor, and we could hear the water gurgling out onto the carpet.

That woman watched me with her ruined eyes stil al huge, like eating eyes, and Roger and I backed up and backed up. He got his hand on the door, and I heard that beautiful sound like a crow scraw. Sunlight came in behind us, so unkind, and lit up the gray-faced ghost that was my mother.

She let us go. And I was crying stil , because it was so plain that this was mercy. She let me go.

Roger slammed the door shut behind us, and we ran for his Volvo. We got inside and locked it, and his hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t get the key to go in. He laughed, kind of hysterical sounding, and said, “Do you see this?” nodding at how the keys wouldn’t go.

I hadn’t stopped crying in a thousand years, but al at once it real y amped up. I was letting out these awful whooping cries.

He said, “Mosey…” and he stopped trying to get the key in. “I think she…”

But I couldn’t even think of her yet. I couldn’t stand to hear him say anything about her. She was too big and for later. I whooped out another huge sob, and I hol ered over him, “He touched me on my boob!” Roger shut up and looked at me al helpless, not sure what to do with that. “I didn’t want him to, and he did anyway, and then he complained about it! Like my boob wasn’t good enough!”

This was the only place I could get to now; that big guy’s hand on me and how it shouldn’t be that way. It should be my first boyfriend, whoever that would be, and I should just like him so much. We should be in his car, in the dark, maybe behind the DQ with our mouths al cold from ice cream, but warming as we went on kissing and kissing for a long time, and I should be wondering if I was fal ing in love with him, and his hand should creep sweet up my waist al careful, waiting to see if I would stop him, and I wouldn’t. It should matter, and it should be like a present we would give each other, me and a boy I liked just so very much. I didn’t know how to say al that, but it was in my head, and al I could say was, “Like, seriously, he gets to
complain
?”

Somehow Roger got it. I know he got it, because he put his keys down in his lap and he turned to me and his face was very serious. He reached out slow with his hand, and I knew what he would do, and I sat there, and he did it. He put his hand right over my boob, the one the scary guy had grabbed. He took it like he was meeting it, formal y, shaking hands. His pinkie was a little under, so his hand cupped it. I went stil , and his face washed into a blush, this bright tide of red coming up his neck and flushing his whole face. His breath changed, going short.

He said, “Wel . It’s my first boob. And I think it’s goddamn perfect.”

He never said “goddamn” because of being Baptist. But he said it now and meant it, and he sounded al strangled about it. Then I smiled at him, and it was like I felt myself going al clean under his hand. He was taking it away, what that scary guy did, because he so, so very meant it, and he was my best friend. It wasn’t at al romantic or anything like that. I didn’t want to kiss him now and be al , oh, yay, a boyfriend. He was only my best friend Roger, fixing my tit for me.

Then someone banged the window with a fist, and he jerked his hand away. I screamed because I thought it was the cops or, worse, that the zombie mother who was me had changed her mind and come out after us. It was even worse than al that, though.

Roger jerked his hand off my boob too slow, and I was outside my secret corpse-mother’s house, and glaring in the window at me, banging at it with her fist, was Big. Big in Montgomery. Big losing her total shit.

It was the worst possible thing, but I was so glad to see her. I tore the door open, almost knocking her down with it. She came around it, and I spil ed out into her arms, already crying more.

She clamped me to her, hard and said over my head to Roger, “You! Start your damn car and fol ow me. I want to see you in my rearview every second al the way home. I am going to get you safe back to your parents before I decide if I have to murder you. And if I ever see you with your hand where it just was? You wil be drawing back a nub. You hear me, mister?”

My face was pressed hard into Big, the warm brown-sugar-and-vanil a smel of her. I heard Roger say, “Yes, ma’am.” Then the car door slammed.

Big hauled me along the street to her Malibu, parked right behind us, and I hadn’t even noticed her coming. She pushed me against the side of the car and grabbed me by the shoulders, her eyes going up and down me. Al at once I felt how dirty and crumpled I was, my clothes al twisted up and filthy from the fight.

“Are you hurt?” I didn’t answer, and she rattled me around by my shoulders. “Mosey. Are you hurt? Did anyone hurt you?”

I shook my head. She dug her hands into me harder and stared into my eyes until I said, “No, real y. We got out okay. I’m okay.”

Then her eyes sprang up ful of tears. She dashed them away, mad. She put me in the passenger seat like I was this limp little rag, and I was. I sat there snuffling as she came around and got in the car. She peeled away from the curb and drove toward the highway. I sat there thinking how the cops stil hadn’t come, which was the scariest part of al . I had screamed and screamed, and a shot was fired, and that man could have done anything to me and taken the gun and shot us and buried us under the almost-dead azalea for plant food, and who would have ever known?