Girl Mans Up (23 page)

“I know. That's why I like her.”

“Good. So maybe if she's not rushing into anything, she's still worth sticking around for, you know?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Got it.” He puts the receipt piles back into the register. “That guy who showed up at my house—that friend of yours—is he going to be a problem?”

“Not for her,” I say, although there's no way for me to be sure of that.

Elliott nods. It looks like he's going to say something else but the store phone rings.

THAT NIGHT, WHEN IT'S
super late, Blake sings something soft into my ear, through our phone connection. I don't know what it is, but it's pretty. She tries to stop but I convince her to keep going. Pretty soon I'm closing my eyes knowing she'll be pissed at me for falling asleep on her again, but I can't help it. Her voice makes me all mellow when it's late and—

Something hits my bedroom window with a massive crack sound.

Then there are three more cracks.

I bounce up in bed, dropping my phone. “What the hell!”

It's like someone's smacking a hand against my bedroom window, except there can't be anyone there unless they can scale a brick wall. Through the curtain, the moon shines and round shadows appear. I pick up my phone, hearing Blake calling my name.

“I think someone just egged my window!” I tell her.

“Can you see who it is?”

“Hang on.”

I pad over, parting the curtain just a bit. An egg cracks right at face level against the glass, making me jump back. I look again, and there they are past the blur of egg guts, standing in the bushes. Garrett, Tim, Ray, that Jake guy, and Colby. Ike and Tristan aren't with them. Garrett waves at me, then winds up to throw another egg while Ray holds the carton out for him. Garrett whips two more eggs at my window, and Colby smokes, watching it go down. He won't look directly at me, even though he's the one I'm staring at. My heart beats so hard, but I think it's mostly from getting startled awake by egg gunshots. Tim pulls out his phone and aims to take a picture. I close the curtains just as my bedroom door bursts open.

“What!” Mom rushes inside and goes for the window. “Duarte!”

Dad's yelling from somewhere down the hall or maybe downstairs already. Blake's forgotten at the other end of my
cell phone which I leave on the bed while I run down. How did they even hear the eggs? My dad must've been up with indigestion or something.

Dad goes out in shoes and pajamas. I follow. Of course the guys are gone by then. The empty carton of eggs lies in the grass. My dad's silent but heaving like he's about to have a heart attack. He backs up and stares at my bedroom window. There are splashes of egg guts all over it.

“Who do this?” he asks too loud. I don't want the neighbors to wake up, to see how pathetic this is.

“I don't know.”

“You no lie! Who?”

I back up then head into the house, hoping he'll follow so we can at least be loud inside. Mom's at the bottom of the stairs, holding the phone like she's waiting for the signal to call the cops. It's just eggs, not a drive-by. Still, this is bad. I don't have the kind of parents who tolerate any bull that happens after the sun goes down.

Dad comes in shouting about how I know who did it and I'm not telling. Mom marches around the front hall, nodding like she's been proven right about something. Dad goes off about how eggs eat at the paint and now the windowsill's going to be wrecked.

“You see?” my mom says. “I tell you. You go out look like this, you ask for bad things. I tell you stop it! I tell you! When you be a boy, boys come be boys with you!” Then she tells my dad she's had it, that he needs to put his foot down because no one listens to her.

“I don't throw eggs at houses! I'm not the one who made the mess. I was at work and then I came home. That's all I know.”

“I call police,” Dad says. He wants to file a report.

“It's just eggs,
Pai
!”

“This my house!” he shouts, taking the cordless from Mom.

It's everyone's house but mine.

Mom drifts off to go sit by her Mary statue, probably to complain about me in prayer, and Dad changes his mind about the phone. He does this thing I hate, motioning for me to follow him with this pissy finger-curling motion, like I'm a seven-year-old about to get in trouble for leaving my toys out. He grabs his jacket, so I grab mine, then we're back outside. He punches the combination to the garage door and it goes up. He comes back out with the hose, holding the end of it like a gun. It's almost three in the morning, and Dad shoots water at my bedroom window. The sound breaks the night and now I'm sure the neighbors will come see what's up. After a moment, my dad hands me the hose and says, “You stay here. You clean. You no come inside until everything everywhere is
limpo
!” He leaves me out here.

Fifteen minutes later, I've managed to wash off most of the egg, leaving a couple smudges and streaks that are probably frozen. By the time I roll the hose back up in the garage, I'm shivering and my nose is leaking.

In my room, my Blake phone call is long gone, replaced by five texts from her wondering what's happening. I dial, but not her.

“What happened?” Johnny says, sounding panicked through a sleepy haze.

“Colby egged my window.
Mãe
and
Pai
are awake and freaking on me.”

“Pen, man. What's been going on?”

I didn't get to fill him in on everything. This Colby stuff, though, I thought was handled already. What I want to tell Johnny is that everything's blowing up around me. That Mom thinks I caused this by looking like a punk druggy dude, that she's two seconds away from enrolling me in a makeup class and forcing me to wear a wig. That Dad will back her up now because I've caused enough trouble to pull him away from his TV and out of his sleep. And I feel like the only way I can keep everything from falling apart in my life is by making sure Olivia doesn't fall apart—and those things don't even go together.

“I sort of realized Colby's an ass,” I tell Johnny. “And now the egg's all frozen and it won't come off, but
Pai
says it'll ruin the windowsill.”

Johnny sighs and makes sounds like he's getting up. “Listen, are you gonna be able to handle yourself with Colby?”

“Yeah.” No.

“Because I can't ignore this kind of stuff for too long. If you can't deal with Colby, I will.”

“No,” I say. “I'll figure it out.”

Sitting here in the silence means I'm stuck thinking about what the guys did, which ends up making me feel like more and more of a douche. Pretty soon the darkness inside me
stirs—the darkness that's always hanging out in my gut but never gets me anywhere. I'm just mad as hell with no one to throw my anger at.

So I text Colby:
u better watch yrself, douche—i'll take u down—i swear—i don't care what happens 2 u anymore

MOM WAKES ME UP AT TEN THE NEXT MORNING
by yelling my name over and over from wherever she is downstairs. I shuffle down barefoot where Mom throws a flowered apron at me.

“Busy busy,” she says. “Chop chop.”

She heads for the kitchen. When I get there, a bunch of cleaning products are lined up on the counter. Today is the day I learn how to clean an oven. She tells me to put on the apron, but I don't want to. She gave me the one with the spring flowers while she's wearing my dad's barbecue apron, the black one with an image of a stack of hot dogs on a plate. I know it's just an apron, but it's like she gets off on making me feel like crap. I won't put it on.

I help her scrub the grime off the grill, off the inner walls of the oven. Then we pull out the stove burners and soak them, replacing the little foil plates that catch all the spills. After
that, it's laundry, where she teaches me how to fold a bottom sheet. She makes me try twice but it's all messed-up-looking.

I do all she asks, and I don't say anything about it.

She won't get a reaction from me anymore.

“Ma, I gotta leave for work by two,” I tell her, which is in an hour. I don't have to work, but it sounds more legit than having plans with my friends.

She does this annoyed sigh, pouring Pine-Sol into the mop bucket.

“I'm serious. I have to leave in an hour. I have to get ready soon.”

“What you want? You want the money? I give you the money. I buy you the clothes. I buy you the telephone.”

“I want to work and make my own money.”

“Why? Why you need the money?”

“Because.”

She tells me she and Dad talked and they're in agreement: I don't need to be working. My only job is to do well in school. “You
pai
he got the money for school. You do homework,
Pai e Mãe
pay for the nurse school.”

“I don't wanna be a nurse. Is it
you
who wants to be a nurse?” The look she gives me—it's like I dared to say something she wasn't expecting. “I have to go now.”

She lets the mop fall into the bucket, hot water splashing around it. I've seen this look on her face a butt-load of times before. She's fed up to the point of crying. So I turn around and leave, because I'm starting to think that maybe I'm reaching that point, too.

AFTER MY SHOWER, I
find my baggy jeans and my red tee. Over that, I try on this new silky black button-down Mom had bought for Johnny, but it's too tight around his biceps. It's short-sleeved so my leather wristband shows. I put my silver chain on—the one Blake likes. In the mirror, I start to think maybe I'd look cool with a lip piercing, or a pierced labret. I can picture black lines etched up and down my arms, no colors like in Johnny's tattoos, just tribal designs or something. I can see my hair going even a bit shorter, buzzed close to the scalp with a shorter fauxhawk. I can see so many things about me that I'd like to play around with.

People should just be allowed to look in the mirror and see all kinds of possibilities. Everyone should be able to feel nice when they look in the mirror. They should at least be able to see themselves reflected in there, even if they look all weird.

In the mirror, I see myself standing there and I think I'm all right. I think there's no other way I could look, or should look. My mom must be blind if she thinks her vision of me would look normal. It wouldn't. I know it wouldn't.

I start pulling off my chain, my wristband, my belt. I put it all in a bag, then I head for my parents' bedroom.

I TAKE THE STAIRS
with this feeling that I could die before reaching the bottom. My mom's heels are maybe a fifth of the height of Blake's, but man, they're still massive stilts that make it impossible for me to walk the way I usually do. And this skirt keeps trying to get caught under my left foot. The
skirt is navy blue and I had to tuck it into my boxers because it would've fallen right to the floor otherwise. The blouse is one Mom's never worn before; it's the only one that was close to my size. It's shiny white, with small buttons that are covered in the same material as the shirt. My boobs are there, just being all girly about it. On my ears are gold round earrings my mom must've worn before I was born, or maybe never. There's this burgundy stuff on my lips, and I colored between the lines. I couldn't put anything on my eyes because it made them water when I got too close.

I'm the lady from the perfume counter at the mall.

I reach the bottom of the stairs still upright. The shoes clack against the linoleum. I head for the living room, where I know my mom will be scowling at the TV.

“I'm going to work now, Ma.”

She doesn't want to glance at me, but she has to. Then she has to look at it. This costume she's been so desperate for me to wear. It's all right here, covering me up. I don't want to fight anymore, because I don't even know what kind of fight this is.

There's no relief on her face. “You laugh at me.”

“I'm not laughing,” I say.

I'm in drag right now. I'm a homo right now. This is worse than a Halloween costume because it's not funny.

Mom's chin quivers, and she puts a hand against her heart.

She's looking at me with all kinds of bad feelings in her eyes, which is no different from the way she usually gazes at me; the only difference is that now I'm looking at myself the same way.

“I look nice, just like you wanted, right?” I say. “So can I go to work now?”

My eyes sting, but I don't quit looking right at her. Not even when her face goes hard.

“Get outta here,” my mom says.

So I leave.

IN THE TRUCK, JOHNNY'S
mouth hangs open. “What the hell, Pen? I'm gonna have nightmares about this.”

“Me too.”

“What's going on?”

“Nothing.” I put on my seat belt, fixing the skirt so I can let my legs hang loose. “Can we sneak in through the back door of your building or something? I need to take a shower and start over.”

“You're playing a dangerous game, little sister.”

“I'm not the one who picked the game.”

“I can't look at you, man.” He drives and keeps stealing glances at me. “You look like
Tia
Jacinta.”

“Well, that's just great. I look like an old lady.”

While we drive, I scroll through my cell but I keep going back to that text I sent Colby, which he never replied to. But he got it, there's no doubt about that. Lying in the dark, I felt so sure that I could beat the crap out of him. But right now, my head's somewhere else. I just never want to deal with Colby again. He could fade away, and that would be fine by me.

I have new friends, and Johnny and I are cool again. I feel all right. I'm still me.

I send Colby another text:
u leave me & my friends alone, I leave u and yr friends alone—we don't have 2 talk—we don't even have 2 look @ each other—i'm over it—truce & walk away

I don't get a reply.