"That wasn't
…
" but my voice choked off and my eyes filled with tears. It might not have been what had me so distracted, but as her words soaked in, it was impossible to hold back my sobs.
"Pull over honey." Almost blindly, I veered onto the shoulder of the road. I'm pretty sure Mrs. Dutton was the one who did the braking. She reached over and turned the keys off in the ignition, then sat there quietly while I bawled for about five minutes, tears streaming down my cheeks, dripping onto the polyester of my cheer top and rolling away in little droplets.
When I finally started to calm down, Mrs. Dutton took my hand in hers and spoke in a gentle, quiet voice. "I never understood how one woman could have so many children she didn't want, and I couldn't have even one. But if I'd ever had a child of my own, I would have wanted her to be a lot like you."
I sniffed back the last of my tears and hiccupped. "A total fuck up who can't tell the difference between drive and reverse?" I turned to look at Mrs. Dutton and saw her eyes become sharp and flinty.
"No. A strong, beautiful young lady who won't let a bad deal beat her down."
I shook my head and felt my eyes fill with tears again. "I'm not strong."
Mrs. Dutton's hand tightened on top of mine. "I've lived in my little house a long time. I was there when your parents moved in, and the things I have watched your mother do
…
they've curled my toes on more than one occasion. But you have a steel core inside you, and you refused to bend, let alone break. You may not feel strong, but you are."
"Mrs. Dutton?"
"Yes, sweetie?"
"Is my mother a prostitute?"
Mrs. Dutton sighed heavily. "No. I don't think she was. But there used to be a lot of men. I can see how rumors might get started."
"Oh, god. How did I not know about this?"
"It stopped when you were young. I suspect your father put his foot down."
"Ha." I pictured my dad, sitting on the couch, his hands in his lap, his eyes staring vacantly at the wall. "Doubtful. More likely she got high speed internet and was too busy playing whatever came before Farmville."
"Probably Minesweeper." Mrs. Dutton crossed her eyes at me, and I burst out laughing. "Seriously, I meant what I said. You are a wonderful girl, and if you ever need anything, you ever run into any trouble or just need someone to talk to, my door is open. Not literally. Bad neighborhood and all. But you can come to me, and I'll be there for you."
"Thanks Mrs. Dutton."
"Call me Joanna."
I smiled. For the first time in my life, an adult asking me to call them by their first name didn't creep me out at all.
The following morning, Derek wasn't in first period. He wasn't there the next day either. When he didn't show up on the third day, our teacher merged our skit group with Derek's. Derek had been Ares, the god of war in his group. Because Kaia was playing Athena, the goddess of war, it made sense to combine our two groups into one big war party, the teacher said.
Kaia tracked Derek down and found out he'd dropped world history and transferred into a physics class. He played it cool and didn't mention me at all, but Kaia and I both knew he was avoiding me. I guess you could do whatever you wanted with your schedule when your mom was a guidance counselor.
The only times I saw Derek for the next few weeks were random ones. We passed each other one morning as Kaia and I climbed the stairs from the parking lot. Our eyes met for a brief, painful second before he flicked his glance away and jogged past us. Kaia said hi, and I turned my head to see him simply nod in response.
I stopped on the stairs and watched his retreating back, but he didn't turn around.
"I don't think he's ever going to forgive you," Kaia said quietly.
"I didn't do anything to him," I muttered, climbing the stairs again and walking past her.
"You made him care about you," Kaia called softly after me, but I kept going, refusing to acknowledge her.
I knew they were still friends. Kaia was really excited about a party he was throwing after the first football game of the year. She'd been talking about it at lunch one day and managed to use the word "epic" twice before she really looked at me and immediately shut up. She hadn't mentioned it again. I was careful not to ask her about Derek, and as far as I knew, he wasn't bugging Kaia for tidbits about me.
I continued to see Grady a couple times a week. He was such a warm person, and his sense of humor could come out of nowhere to surprise me, but there was no spark there. I couldn't tell if he knew it or not. I'd gotten better at watching my mouth when I was around him, and not cussing all the time was actually improving my vocabulary, so that was one for the win column.
Grady had stopped asking me to go to youth group with him, so I didn't need the "cover" of going to the nursing home with Kaia, but I went with her a couple more times anyway. We'd finally convinced the old people that we weren't the same person, and I'd told them my name was Barbie. Try as she might, Kaia hadn't been able to come up with a nickname for me that I'd tolerate. Kaia was crazy for all the mythology stuff we were doing in world history, and she'd tried all sorts of those on me, but there was no freaking way I was going to let her call me Baubo after some goddess who'd flashed someone, or Hygieia because I liked to wash my hands a lot or any one of the other ridiculous names she suggested. It wasn't all about the Greeks though. I'd also shot down "Jazz Hands" and "Clutch Killer" and a couple dozen other names she'd tried to saddle me with. At least "Mary" had died an easy death. Grady called me Barbie now along with everyone else, and every time I heard him say it I felt like more of a phony than ever.
After school cheer practice was going really well. While I still thought of Amy, Ashley, and Hannah as "the Hilltop girls," I no longer thought of the rest of the squad as "the Lincoln girls." I knew them all by name, and collectively, I thought of them as my team.
Kaia and I had even hung out some after school with Lisa, the ninja Lincoln girl. She was kind of intense, but she was an amazing dancer. I think the other girls thought she was a little bit weird, but I liked her. She was especially irritated by the busy work we were doing in sixth period, and she'd had words with Stephanie, the varsity captain, about it.
"She told me to shut up and quit my bitching," Lisa said, "or she'd give me something to be pissed about."
A couple of the other girls groaned. We were wrapping up practice for the afternoon, stretching out on the mats so our muscles wouldn't bunch up. "You don't want to make her mad at you," Brenna said. She sat on the mat, stretching forward, reaching her fingertips towards her toes and bouncing a little.
"No," Lisa said. "It's actually the other way around."
Brenna looked up from her knees and fixed her worried gaze on Lisa.
Lisa smiled back serenely.
"Do you have a license to kill?" I asked, laughing.
Lisa hopped up. "No sugar, I've got a license to
thrill
." She threw down a couple hip-hop moves and devastated us with a triple spin. She grinned as she left the room, but Brenna still seemed worried.
"What's the matter?" I asked her.
She stared at the door as it closed behind Lisa. "Nothing, I guess. It's just
…
" she shook her head. "Lisa, well, she's kind of unpredictable."
Personally, I liked that in a friend.
I was turning out to be a pretty spectacular driver, now that I'd finally figured out the difference between drive and reverse. I looked forward to my nightly drives with Mrs. Dutton, or Joanna as I called her now. A couple of times, on nights where she hadn't had any other classes to rush off to, she'd taken me out to Denny's for a strawberry lemonade and a banana split.
She'd told me all about her husband, a firefighter named Todd who'd died before I was born. Apparently Joanna and Todd had basically bankrupted themselves trying to have a baby together, spending thousands of dollars on frozen embryos and in-vitro fertilization, which is how she ended up living in such a crappy house. They figured after they finally had a baby they would get a better place. Then he'd been diagnosed with cancer. He'd only lived another three months.
It seemed to make Joanna happy to talk about "her Todd," and I was happy enough to listen to her, though if it had been me, I think I would have been depressed to think about him too much. I was depressed enough whenever thoughts of Derek crossed my mind, and it's not like I wanted to have his baby. God.
"My Todd would have loved you, sweetie," Joanna said one evening, sipping her lemonade and shredding a napkin absent-mindedly. "You remind me so much of him. You even look a bit like him, you lucky girl. He was devilishly handsome."
"Isn't cuteness, like, a job requirement for firefighters?" I asked.
Joanna nodded seriously. "There's a box for it on the application and everything."
I laughed, and she sighed. "I wish he was still here," she said.
I stopped laughing and stared uncomfortably at my dessert dish, the dregs of chocolate syrup and melted ice cream swirled together in a complicated pattern on the boat shaped dinnerware. "I'm sorry," I said quietly.
"No, I'm sorry. I don't like to get so melancholy." She rolled the shredded napkin bits in the palms of her hands. "He was so confused, at the end. Before they even found the cancer, I knew something was wrong. He couldn't think straight, he was making crazy decisions. We got a new washing machine a month before I finally got him into the doctor. You know where he installed it?"
I shook my head.
"In the driveway. He hooked the hose up to the outside faucet and decided to call it good. The tumor was pressing on his brain. Do you know, we had fifty thousand dollars in our savings account, and it vanished? Simply vanished. I have no idea what ever happened to that money."
"Did you ask him?"
"Of course I did!" Joanna said, tossing the napkin pieces on the table. "Unfortunately I didn't find out until he was in the hospital, and they kept him higher than a kite on morphine. When I asked him about the money, he started babbling about religion and God, and how your mother would find everything she needed in the Bible."
"
My
mother?"
"I know. For goodness sakes, the Jehovah's Witnesses won't even come to your door anymore, you ever noticed that? Me, they visit twice a week."
"Yeah, my mom sprayed them with a can of cheese a few years ago, I think that must have been the last straw."
Joanna laughed, a sad little chuckle. "Poor Todd. He was so smart. He would have hated to know how addled he was at the end."
"It's not fair," I blurted. "You really loved him, and he died. You wanted a baby, and you didn't get one, even though you would have been a great mother. My mom and dad don't love each other at all, and they still managed to have five kids together." I balled my fists up and stuffed them in my lap. "It's not fair," I said again.
Joanna sighed and placed her fork and spoon on her plate and motioned for the check. "No, sweetie, life never is."
I agreed with her then, but at the end of the week, something happened that made me rethink my opinion.
* * *
The first football game of the season was Friday night, and the cheerleaders had been in a tizzy all week long, with the varsity squad pulling long practices and us JV cheerleaders running around like short-skirted administrative assistants, doing anything and everything the varsity squad asked of us. Brenna actually wrote a history paper for one of the varsity girls, and when it received a D, Amy Yates ripped Brenna a new asshole in front of all of us.
"What do I know about the freaking Gassden Purchase?" Brenna asked me in an undertone. "I Googled it and nothing came up."
"Isn't that when they bought some of Arizona to make the border a straight line?" I asked. "It's Gads-den."
"Jeez, Wikipedia, I guess I should have asked you," Brenna teased, right as Kaia walked by. Kaia spun around, her eyes all lit up.
"No," I said holding up my hands and giggling. "Absolutely not."
"Wiki!" Kaia crowed. "I
love
it."
She gestured to me. "Come on, Wiki. The 'real squad,' as Amy calls it, needs their Starbucks before the big game." She rolled her eyes. "I'm on point. Those bitches better pay me back, I'm practically broke."
Lisa jumped up. "I just got my allowance, so I've got tons of money. I'll take care of it."
"Really?" Kaia said. "That would be awesome, I've got barely enough to put gas in my car as it is."
I shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. I never gave Kaia gas money. It's not like I had any money, but still, I felt bad.
"Sure, I don't mind at all," Lisa said.
"Wow, well
…
thanks. That's really nice of you." Kaia narrowed her eyes at Lisa. "Hey, wait a second. What do they have
you
doing that you're so eager to get out of?"
Lisa folded her arms across her chest. "So suspicious! Can't I just do a good deed?"
Brenna looked at her sideways. Before Kaia could answer, Brenna interjected. "Nope, I'm not sure you can." A slow smile spread across her face. "Go get the coffee. We'll take care of your project, whatever it is."
Lisa smiled back at Brenna and walked away without another word.
"Okay, what in the hell was that all about?" I asked.
Brenna looked at the ceiling, the clock, the bleachers, pretty much anywhere but at me as she replied. "Lisa's still water, running deep."
"Okay, 'Talks In Code.' Can you clarify that statement?" I said.
Brenna grinned slyly and put her hands on her hips. "Just rumors, stuff people have said. Her parents are pharmacists, you know?"
That was news to me, but I wasn't sure how it related. I didn't have a chance to follow it any further though, because Amy walked through the door just then and started screaming at Kaia, telling her to get the damn coffee and why the fuck wasn't she already there and back already and blah, blah, blah. By the time that got sorted out, Brenna was long gone, and the other girls were busy with their own work. We had a massive amount of things to do before kickoff at seven-thirty.