My Tiki Girl (26 page)

Dahlia, for once, has nothing to say.

“So, are you like, into girls for real now?” Albert asks me. “Is that why you broke up with me?”

I roll my eyes.
Please.

Dahlia stands. She’s there looking all pissed off in her crumpled Paper Dolls T-shirt, and all I can think is
Goddamn, Dahlia is the most beautiful girl who ever lived.

Yes, Albert, I guess I am into girls for real now.

“I’m gonna go get some munchies in the kitchen,” she says. And without any clear sense of whether or not I’m invited, I follow her.

I stand with my back against the granite-topped counter while Dahlia opens cupboards, digs around, looking. She walks past me to the fridge, opens it, then shuts it seconds later, frustrated at not having found whatever she was searching for.

I’m wondering if I should go home. If Dahlia’s just going to go on ignoring me.

“What is up with that movie?” Dahlia finally asks, her back to me as she opens yet another cupboard. She pulls out a bag of pretzels, takes a bite of one, then drops the rest of the uneaten pretzel back into the bag and returns it to the cupboard.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Pretty sick, huh?”

“What’s sick is that they thought we’d be into it. Idiots.”

She turns to face me, her face twisted with what looks like worry.

“I mean,
you’re
not into watching it, are you?”

“Jesus, no!” I tell her.

“We’re not like that,” Dahlia says. “We’re not what everyone at school says we are.”

I shake my head, agreeing, but all the while I’m thinking,
I am. I am like that.

“I mean, you might be, but I’m not,” she says, as if reading my mind.

“Right,” I say. “I remember. You just want to be normal.”

Dahlia shakes her head, obviously disgusted.

“I don’t get it, Maggie,” she says. “I don’t get why you had to ruin everything.”

“Me?” I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I can’t believe that any of this is happening, that Dahlia and I are actually having this conversation. “
I
ruined everything?”

She nods her head.

“How’d I do that?” My words are clipped, angry.

“When you told Sukie about us.”

She stares straight at me, and I open my mouth to explain, but she cuts me off.

“And I can’t
fucking
believe you made a move on her,” she hisses.

“You actually think that? You actually believe Sukie’s screwed-up little story?” I’m gripping the counter behind me, squeezing so hard my fingers ache.

“What am I supposed to believe?”

“Me,” I say, my voice tired, strained. The answer is so obvious that the very fact that I have to tell her finally clues me in on the hopelessness of our situation. “You’re supposed to believe me.” I let go of the counter, my arms falling limply at my sides.

I’ve lost her already. I can feel it.

“Okay then,” Dahlia says. “Tell me what happened.”

I take a breath, then begin. “It was Sukie who made the moves on me.”

Dahlia laughs. “Yeah, right.”

“Really. I’m not lying. One minute we were talking, the next she was kissing me. I think it was this weird desperate attempt to reach me somehow. Like she thought me being queer was this wall between us that she had to find a way to scale.”

“And is that what you’re saying you are? Queer? Because I’m not, Maggie. I can’t be like that. I can’t live with what everyone at school was saying.”

“Oh come on! Since when do you give a crap what they say? Last week they were calling us vampires. And before that we were witches. We’re freaks to them no matter what. Who cares!”

But already, I know the truth. My mind flashes to the past weeks—to Dahlia sitting at Troy’s table, Dahlia on the front page of
The Chatterbox
, Dahlia with a gang of kids gathered around her locker asking for Paper Dolls T-shirts, treating her like a star. Of course she cares.

“This is different,” she says, turning away from me, looking to her left, to the doorway that leads to the front hall. Troy is standing there, watching. I have no idea how long he’s been there, how much he’s heard. I suddenly have this absurd sense that I’m on a stage; this whole conversation is just a play we’re putting on for him. And I know the rest of the script. I know how it will end.

“Oh,” I say. “So that’s it? Just like that, it’s over? All of a sudden you care so much what people think that you’re willing to just give up?”

Dahlia doesn’t say anything.

“What about the song you wrote for me? And what happened to ‘There are no wrong feelings?’ Is that just some line you use when it’s convenient?”

I don’t want to cry. Not here with Troy watching. But I feel the tears starting, my face taut with the strain of trying not to totally fall apart and turn into a blubbering idiot.
Rage
, I think. Try to focus on the rage.

“Is it?” I ask again.

Dahlia doesn’t answer. She just looks down at her combat boots, scuffs the terra-cotta-tiled floor with them, then looks back toward Troy.

“Fuck!” I scream, kicking back with my bad leg into the cupboards behind me. The tears are coming now, there’s no holding them back. The pain in my leg is almost a relief compared to the cracked-open feeling Dahlia’s left me with. I take a few limping steps toward Dahlia, who still won’t meet my eyes. “Please,” I whisper. She doesn’t look up.

This girl who made me say the word
forever
. Who promised we wouldn’t drown.

“Well, I guess that’s it, then,” I say, turning to do my Frankenstein girl walk out of the kitchen. I tell myself that she’s going to stop me any second, throw her arms around me. Rescue me once more. But she doesn’t. She’s chosen normal over me. I can’t believe it, but at the same time, it makes all the sense in the world.

“Have a nice
normal
life,” I tell her bitterly, my once-upon-a-time mermaid wife.

26

It’s started to
snow and I’m not wearing a coat, just this wool sweater that gets caught in the prickers as I make my way down the path to the stream. I left my coat in Troy’s basement, only remembering it after storming out on Dahlia. Like I would go back there.

I cross the stream, hopping along on the backs of slippery rocks, not feeling very sure-footed in the snow but not caring if I slip and mess up my leg for good. Maybe I’ll get lucky and drown.

But I’m just being sulky and melodramatic, which is more Dahlia’s thing than mine. The truth is, I don’t really want to drown. I just want to get warm. Rethink things. And mostly, what I want is to not be alone. So I’m going to see the one person who might just take me in.

By the time I clamber up through the roots and boulders to the cave, the snow has turned to wet, heavy flakes, and my hair is soaked.

“Joey,” I call at the mouth of the cave, “you in there?”

Please, God, let him be here. If he’s not, I don’t know where I’ll go.

I hear scuttling like the sound of a giant crab, and smell smoke.

“Joey?”

I crawl through the dark entrance of his hideout, which is thick with smoke. I can hardly see. I push past a blanket hanging over the opening and get to the center of the cave.

Joey’s left eye is bruised purple and red, swollen almost shut. He’s got tears streaming down his cheeks, and with shaking hands, he’s trying desperately to start a small fire in the center of his cave. He’s gathered sticks and papers and he’s lighting match after match, trying to set the damp mess in front of him on fire.

“What are you doing?” I ask, practically choking from the thick smoke that fills my throat and lungs.

“Cold,” he mumbles.

“But you can’t start a fire in here!” I say. “Jesus, it’s not safe. Your sleeping bag is like six inches away. You could die of smoke inhalation. I can barely breathe in here. Put down the matches.”

I reach out and take the box of matches from his hand, which is ice-cube cold.

“What happened to your eye, Joey?” Now that I’m closer to him, I get a better look. It’s so swollen, it turns my stomach. In movies, they put a cold steak on black eyes. This is way beyond that. I’m thinking ice packs. I’m thinking maybe he should see a doctor.

“Dad,” he says, looking down at the dirt floor.

I lean in and touch the puffy skin around his seeping eye. He flinches.

“That looks bad. I think we should get you to a doctor.”

Joey shakes his head.

“Why is your sleeping bag here? I thought you were staying in Jonah’s room.”

“Leah got mad,” he says.

“Mad at you?”

“Just mad. She was drinking bad. Yelling. Throwing stuff. I left last night. Went home.”

“When did your dad hit you?”

“Today,” he says. “After school. Today.”

“What are you gonna do?” I ask.

He shrugs.

“You can’t stay here,” I tell him. I look around at the smoking pile of tinder, the snow coming through the crack in the roof.

“Cold,” he says.

“Yeah, no kidding.” I shiver, try to brush some of the dampness off my sweater.

Joey turns, rustles around in his sleeping bag, comes back with a plaid shirt that has a quilted lining. He hands it to me.

I peel off my wet sweater and put on the shirt, which smells like earth, like being underground. It’s Joey’s smell and it’s not bad, like the smell of graves, but fresh and clean and full of possibility, like when you turn over dirt in a garden bed.

“Did you hear what everyone was saying in school today?” I ask.

He nods, not looking at me.

“Most of it isn’t true. But some of it is. The part about me and Dahlia is.”

He looks at me and says, “Okay.”

That’s all. Just a tentative sounding “Okay.” But it’s the most supportive thing anyone’s said so far, and I could just hug him.

“Joey, I have something to show you. Want to see it?”

He nods excitedly, like a little boy.

Then I do it: the thing I’ve wanted to do since I met him.

I roll up the leg of my pants and show him my scar.

“I was in an accident,” I say. “My mother died.”

Joey nods, and I know that brain-damaged or not, he gets it completely. I know because he starts to cry.

Joey’s crying, soft little snuffles, the kind of sound a dog makes looking for food that’s been dropped on the floor.

When I look at Joey now, I almost don’t notice the scar. It’s funny, because it used to be the only thing I saw. Now when I look at other people, I think something’s missing from their faces. He reminds me of some storybook hero, a knight who has gone off to slay the largest dragon and come back scarred but with a sack full of scales and treasure.

I think about how he’s never kissed any girl. Here I am all freaked out about how Dahlia and I might be over when poor Joey might go through his whole life without ever kissing anyone, and this just about breaks my heart.

He looks up at me through his good eye, the one that isn’t swollen shut, wipes his nose with the sleeve of his shirt. I put my hand on his back and rub comforting circles. He leans into me and I wrap both my arms around him. Joey’s breathing these little crying gasps into my neck, warming it.

“It’s okay,” I tell him when I know things are not okay at all. He only cries harder. I feel so helpless, so desperate.

I kiss the top of his head. His hair smells like autumn leaves. I keep kissing him there, thinking of the warm sunset colors of fall. He lifts his face, and I kiss his forehead. Then his cheek, which is salty with tears and tastes like the ocean. Before I can think about what I’m doing, I move my mouth to his, and he doesn’t pull away. He presses into me, kissing me back.

I can’t explain why I do it. Just because I can, I guess. I let my lips part a little when they meet his. Joey’s lips are warm, softer than I imagined they would be. I keep my mouth on his to show this is not just a friendly little peck, to show him what kissing is like, since he’s never done it. Here I am, giving the String Man what might be his one and only kiss, so I want to make it a good one.

To my surprise, I kind of get into it. It actually feels sort of nice. And not in this aren’t-I-so-charitable-giving-the-poor-retard-a-kiss? kind of way, but in an authentic, warm and prickly all over kind of way.

It’s stupid, kissing Joey like this. Kissing him when I’m in love with Dahlia.

I think of what Dahlia said to me once:
It matters and it doesn’t matter.
Then I think of the other thing she said:
There are no wrong feelings.

Right now, all I want in the world is to be a normal girl. A girl who likes boys, who isn’t in love with her best friend. I kiss Joey harder, deeper, pull him closer, and the next thing I know, I’m on my back on the floor of his cave, and Joey’s on top of me, our lips cemented together.

Our kiss is like a wish.

Please, make me a normal girl.

Please, make me a normal boy.

But nothing happens. There’s no magic moment where everything changes. No
poof
! So we keep kissing and wait.

There’s a stone beneath me, digging into my ribs, sharp and painful. I try to imagine the size and shape of the stone, which feels like a tiny dagger but may really be shaped more like a heart.