My Tiki Girl (7 page)

The little fact that I killed his wife.

My mother and I were on our way to
The Wizard of Oz
dress rehearsal in the junior high auditorium—we were already late. There I was, in my stiff blue-and-white-checked farm dress, my hair braided in pigtails, when I called out in a very un-Dorothy-like way, “Oh shit!”

“What is it?” my mother asked.

“Toto! I forgot Toto!”

And she did a U-turn in the middle of the intersection, not seeing the truck coming at us from the left. Then everything went black and
poof!
I woke up in Oz for real.

My dad would never come right out and say I killed her, see, but I know he thinks it. He thinks it and feels guilty for thinking it. For blaming me. He tells me he loves me, but really, what he wants to say, the words I see hovering in the air above him like a cartoon bubble, is
We had it so good, Maggie. I was happy, you were normal, we all loved each other. But you had to forget that goddamned dog. And now look at us. Just
look
at what you did.

It’s there above us as we eat our pizza with extra pepperoni, sip our Diet Pepsis while I make up lies about how great school is, how excited I am about my new jazz CDs. I tell him Dahlia is not only the best singer-songwriter out there, but also a straight A student. That her mother is a gourmet cook and when I go over, we spend all our time playing great music and studying while her mother cooks fancy dishes with French names and that they’re the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted. After his head is full, and he’s convinced that things are A-OK with his murdering Magster, I am excused from the table to my room, leaving him to do the dishes, then turn on one of the gritty cop dramas he loves. The programs where life is cut-and-dried. There’s a good guy and a bad guy. The murderers always get caught. Justice triumphs. End of story.

Back in the safety of my room, I put on headphones and pop in the Doors CD Dahlia lent me. I’m listening to “People Are Strange,” with the volume cranked up to 10.

I close my eyes and picture Dahlia’s face and I’m almost happy again. I’m almost able to forget that I killed my mother with a simple mistake.

What would I be doing if I was at Dahlia’s now instead of trapped here in my dumb room full of relics from some other girl’s life? Working on the new Dead Aunt Mary song, probably. We’d be Tiki and LaSamba and nothing else would matter.

Dahlia’s never come over, so thankfully she’s never seen the pink quilt and matching ruffled curtains. The unicorn poster I’ve had since I was ten. The bottle full of layers of colored sand I made at the fair with Sukie, who made a matching bottle using the exact same colors. The ridiculous clown lamp with a red nose and happy painted smile, not at all like the sad LaSamba clown who I now understand myself to be.

There, beside the lamp, is a photo of my mother in a gold frame. Even here, on my bed with my eyes closed, I can feel her smiling out at me, all radiant and perfect in her best summer dress. Her skin bronze from the beach, a necklace of shells dangling just below her collarbone. She’s smiling, saying I’m her best girl, her beautiful swan, and all the while those laughing eyes are asking,
Why did you have to forget the dog?

When I get tired of The Doors, I thumb through my other CDs, my BTA collection: pictures of pretty boys on the covers, girls who sing bubblegum songs about feelings they’ve probably never felt. I’m not in the mood for any of these, so I take out the Artie Shaw CD and play the first song, “Nightmare.” I slide the headphones back on.

It’s not what I expected at all. The music is sultry and brooding. Kind of eerie. And damn, the guy can play. I can hardly believe he’s playing the same instrument as me. He makes the clarinet cry out and wail. It whispers warnings, then takes you straight into a carnival funhouse where nothing is what it seems. There’s a beat like the footsteps of a giant behind him. I turn it up and close my eyes. Just when I think he’s winding down, the music builds again. Cymbals crash. Horns join in. The giant gets closer. I’m moving my fingers, nodding my head, floating up on some cloud of notes hanging in the air. I don’t even feel the bed beneath me. I’m not in my room anymore. There’s no box of cards a dead woman painted underneath me. There’s no pain pulsating in my ruined leg, reminding me of all that I’ve lost. Before I know it, the song is over, and I’m hitting the button to play it again. I listen to it eight times, then pull off the headphones and move like a sleep-walker into the living room, where my dad is on the couch with a bowl of peanuts.

“I listened to ‘Nightmare,’ ” I tell him as I collapse on the couch beside him. One of his cop dramas is blaring on the TV.

“I told you it was good stuff,” he says, smiling, passing me a handful of peanuts.

“Way good,” I tell him.

I don’t know what else to say, or how to put into words how the music made me feel, so I just sit here, cracking open peanut shells with my dad, both of us smiling like we’ve just won the lottery.

But like I could have predicted, the moment doesn’t last.

On the TV, a car chase ends in a crash—tires squeal, the windshield shatters. My entire body goes rigid. My father clears his throat, switches channels, then lifts his glasses and rubs his watery red eyes. I let the rest of the peanuts he gave me fall back into the bowl.

Just like that, I’m murdering Magster again.

7

Dahlia made flyers
to put up at school today. GUITARIST WANTED, they say. ECLECTIC PLAYER AND POETRY LOVER. BIG EGOS NEED NOT APPLY.

Dahlia’s got on the Dead Aunt Mary dress, with the big rips safety-pinned together, and I’m trying not to notice the way her breasts practically burst through.

We’re taping one of the flyers up outside the band room when Sukie Schwartz comes over with her perpetual sidekick, Heather Tomasi.

Sukie and Heather are almost identical. They both have fluffy blond hair. They’re the same height. They wear the same clothes, right down to their bright white sneakers with pink laces. The only difference is that Heather has braces, which she doesn’t seem self-conscious about at all. You can tell by the way she smiles this glinting metal grin, like she’s proud of all the hardware in there.

It’s weird to think that back in junior high, Heather was a quiet, bookish girl with flat hair, old-lady glasses, and buck-teeth. She was someone Sukie and I used to make fun of. We called her Granny Gopher. Not to her face or anything, but behind her back. Then she showed up at the beginning of ninth grade with braces, contacts, and a spiffy new wardrobe. Somehow or other over the course of freshman year, Granny Gopher turned herself into a princess who just happens, by some strange coincidence, to be Sukie’s clone. As I pulled away from Sukie, Heather saw her chance and moved in, taking my place as Sukie’s new, improved best friend.

I read once in a magazine that in every relationship one person always has more power. They were talking about guy/ girl relationships, but I think it works for friends, too. When I was best friends with Sukie, I was the one with more power. I didn’t know it then, never thought about it, but I see now that I could always talk her into doing whatever I wanted. She would pout and sometimes throw a hissy fit, but I always got my way. Like when I wanted her to audition for the play back in eighth grade, she dragged her heels and only went with me when I told her that if she didn’t get a part, I wouldn’t see her until after Thanksgiving because I’d be too busy with rehearsals.

It must be kind of nice for her now to have clone-girl by her side, ready to follow any order with obvious pleasure. But the thing is, Sukie sucks at giving orders. So Heather just makes her think she’s the one calling the shots, to give her this illusion of being in control and actually thinking for herself. It’s kind of creepy to watch. Like if they’re talking about going to the movies, Heather will say something like, “Didn’t you want to see that new Tom Cruise movie?” and Sukie will go along with it, like it was her idea to begin with, when the truth is (and I know this for a fact) Sukie couldn’t care less about Tom Cruise and would much rather choose the cheesy romantic comedy playing next door.

“Hey, Maggie,” Sukie says, nodding hello.

She reads the flyer, then turns to Dahlia, her eyes moving from Dahlia’s face to her dress with the safety pins.

“So you’re starting a band?” Sukie’s expression looks pained. She so doesn’t approve of Dahlia. She tells me whenever she catches me alone in the halls. The other day, she said, “You know, Maggie, I’m a little worried you’re falling in with the wrong crowd.”

“I have one new friend,” I told her. “It’s not exactly a bad-girl posse.”

“Why don’t you stay inside for lunch today? Come and sit with me and Heather,” she said.

“Thanks anyway, but I’m meeting Dahlia. We’ve got stuff to do.”

I was too polite to say what I was really thinking, which was that I’d rather eat ground glass than sit at a table with her and Heather. I mean, Heather obviously despises me. And Sukie has no clue who I am anymore. No clue at all.

“Nice dress,” Heather says to Dahlia.

Then Dahlia does this killer thing. She looks up, right into Heather’s eyes, and smiles real big—a warm, genuine, all’s-well-with-the-world smile. “Thanks,” she says. “I’d offer to let you borrow it, but I’m afraid it would be a little too baggy in the chest. Don’t you hate it that all the really sexy stuff is made for girls with tits? It must be hard to find stuff with your figure.”

I see Heather’s chin quiver and she opens her mouth to say something, but no words come out. It’s not like she’s totally flat-chested, but compared to Dahlia, she doesn’t have much going on in the tits department. Sukie puts her hand on Heather’s arm to lead her away. I am so proud of Dahlia I could kiss her. Seriously. I imagine it for a second, my lips touching hers while Sukie and Heather look on, Sukie finally getting a clue and giving up on saving me once and for all.

Shop class is horrible, but it’s one of those things they make you take before you can graduate. It’s taught by this hulking man with a last name so complicated, no one can say it, so everyone just calls him Mr. G. You have to wear these dumb plastic goggles and earplugs. You run big machines like the table saw and drill press, and the whole while you’re sure you’re not going to make it to your next class with all your fingers attached.