A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (10 page)

I prodded him. OK I am not a twin. WTH then.

There was a long pause again, like more than a minute, and then final y a message came: I need 2 do some research. Distract the backyard people?

How???

Just make them look @ U for a sec.

I can’t.

Yes U can. You wil . I am coming down.

He would do it, because he was Roger and he never got caught. So I jumped up and slammed open the back door and dumped myself out into the yard yel ing, “Hey! Hey! Everyone, lookit! Look here at me!”

I must have sounded genuinely desperate, because they al looked: Chief Warfield and Officer Joel and Tyler and both bone professors, the dinosaur one and the real one. I didn’t have a single durn thing to tel them. Worse, Chief Warfield was standing toward the rear of the yard; he’d stil see if Roger came down.

So I kept on hol ering. “I need you al to come here to the patio! Now!”

Tyler hopped down from his truck bed, saying, “Mosey? Is Liza okay?”

That got them moving toward me, and immediately I saw Roger’s feet come out of the hole in the floor of the tree house. I yel ed even louder, “My mom is okay, but
I
am not okay! I am
not
okay!”

It sounded very, very true when I heard me say it, and Roger had said that the simplest explanation would be true. I could see Occam, with that weird shaved ring of hair like friars have and a brown robe, standing stern and barefoot in my mind’s eye, asking me,
If the bones are your mom’s
baby and she only had one baby…then who the hell are you?

“What do you mean, you aren’t okay?” Tyler said, trotting toward me with worry lines mapping across his forehead.

The look on his face made me realize that he’d been around my whole life, practical y, cleaning our gutters and changing the filters in our furnace; he must by now real y like me to look so worried. You have a person around for years, maybe you get fond of them even if they aren’t real y anything to you, and that struck me as huge and important in some way I couldn’t get a good hold on. Everyone else sped up, too, coming toward me, and behind them I saw Roger drop the last two feet, stumble, and then he righted himself and swarmed straight up the fence and across like a big-head monkey. He dropped over the top and was gone.

I guess I should have stopped then and said never mind, but I found myself stil yel ing anyway, desperate like. “I want you al to get out of my yard, is what. Y’al need to go away now, please.” My voice was rising and getting louder and louder, and I couldn’t make it stop getting louder even though Roger was already gone. My voice yel ed, “I am so tired of this, and it is time for you to go away! I want you out, and plus, you are al bastards! You are al al al al bastards!”

The back door had opened behind me while I was yel ing, and Big came up beside me. Her cheeks were bright red, and her eyes looked red, too, almost swol en. Her mouth dropped open in surprise. She gaped at me and didn’t even say, “Mosey! Language!” so I knew then I must look like a total freak. I started up crying, and Big turned to al the adults who were looking at me, some worried and some just surprised.

Big said, “Okay, you are done here.”

Chief Warfield said, “But the medical examin—”

“Rick, please,” Big said. “Al you people are making my kid a dead mess.”

“I can’t leave,” Chief Warfield said. “The medical ex—”

Big interrupted, almost yel ing, “Fine! You stay, but you don’t need this whole herd of mammals mil ing on my grass.”

She sounded close to going as hysterical as I was, and Chief Warfield took over, saying, “You heard the lady. Let’s move it out, everybody. No, Joel, don’t troop through the house, use the side gate. Tyler, move that truck.”

While Chief Warfield rounded them al up, Big put one arm around me and turned me away and pul ed me into our own kitchen. She kicked the door shut behind us with a great whamming slap of sound. I couldn’t stop crying, because I’d gotten it by then, what Occam and Roger thought was the simplest explanation.

That baby in the yard. My mother said that was her baby, and so I was what? A little something picked wild in Nevada or California, unwanted or stolen or maybe abandoned someplace and rescued like a foster dog? I wasn’t Liza’s. That meant I wasn’t anything to Big either, and Big didn’t know. Big’s real grandbaby was the baby in the yard. I couldn’t hardly be stil thinking this, and my arms started flailing and my head went whipping back and forth and my whole middle churned.

Big stayed so calm, gathering al my flailing pieces one by one and tucking them into herself, like my body was made up of fifty different upset ducklings. Once she got me stil , she held me while I wailed it out. It seemed like it took a long time. But final y I couldn’t keep listening to myself, and I stopped. I snuffled against her shoulder, soaked with al my gross snot and tears. I stayed anyway. When I’d been stil for what seemed like a long time again, she sat me down in the kitchen chair and said, “I think we need hot chocolate.”

I sat like a tumor while Big got out the milk and a saucepan and the powdered cocoa and the sugar bowl, making me cocoa the same way she had the day I realized Briony Hutchins had ditched me, or when I got that D on the algebra midterm I’d studied so hard for. Big didn’t have a Roger.

She didn’t know Occam. She didn’t know. I part wanted to tel her, but I couldn’t stand for her to know I wasn’t real y hers. I pul ed my phone out and texted Roger instead.

That’s Mosey Slocumb, buried in that box.

I waited for him to say that I was crazy. I waited for him to say anything.

Final y his answer came: Occam? Is that you?

Maybe. I could be Occam. I could be NE1, since the real Mosey is bones.

Big said, “Who is texting you? I thought you kids couldn’t text from school.”

“Roger must have study hal ,” I said. “He can text from there.”

“Mm-hm,” said Big in a skeptical voice, stirring.

I sat there holding my phone, waiting for it to buzz. Waiting for Roger to give me any kind of answer. It was weird, though. Now that I’d decided not to tel Big, I felt clear and light, and I felt little bubbles forming everywhere inside of me, just under my skin. Like when you pour a Sprite and forget about it and al the carbonation sticks to the inside of the glass.

When he final y did, I lifted the phone and read five words: Yes. You could be anybody.

I nodded like he was there to see me, and I felt a couple of the little bubbles launch off the sides of me and rise.

There was another Mosey Slocumb. If she had lived, no doubt she would be scared to move, because every step took her closer to what everyone already knew she would become. Mosey Slocumb would have to be perfect every second, or else she’d slip and land on her back only to stand up pregnant, or she’d gobble drugs and worship trees like a freak, or she’d end up a bank tel er in ugly uniforms so no one noticed she was stil cute and she’d live for her kid and her kid’s kids and probably their kids, and she’d never so much as have a date. But I wasn’t that girl.

I was something stolen from someplace so foreign it sounded made up: Miss No One from Nevada. Anonymous from Arizona. My phone buzzed again, but I ignored it. Outside, I held my body stil , and the lady who had raised me stirred my cocoa, and the big world turned. But inside, the bubbles went running up through me, more and more, until I was fairly popping with them.

I wasn’t me. I wasn’t Mosey Slocumb. It was like weights fal ing off. I could be anyone, and that meant I might do anything. Any damn thing I felt like. Anything at al .

CHAPTER FIVE

Big

WE LOST LIZA almost four months ago, on the night of Calvary High’s End-of-School Luau. That night she seemed altogether too pleased to be going to an event that seemed about as much fun as dental surgery to me. Too pleased, and way the hel too pretty. She sauntered out to the car with her eyes striped in black liner and her fat mouth painted a deep plum. She wore a pair of her regular tight Levi’s, the ones she cal ed her tip-getters, but she’d paired them with a dressy white silk blouse. It was buttoned to the top, but sheer enough to tel me plain she’d put on a black bra.

“Shotgun!” she cal ed over her shoulder; Mosey was dragging out the front door in her wake.

I was sitting in the driver’s seat already, engine running. I narrowed my eyes as Liza climbed in, and she widened hers at me in response, feckless and overinnocent as a kitten who’s been off in the kitchen licking the butter.

“You’re a little too cute for the room,” I said, but she only flirted one shoulder up at me and climbed into the passenger seat. I added, “Would you let Mosey out of the house in a top like that? Monkey see, monkey do.”

“Lucky we’re not raising any monkeys, then.” She tipped her seat forward to make a crack for Mosey, who had final y trudged across the yard to the car. Mosey slipped in, sighing a loud, martyred sigh.

I said, “Oh, stop it. It’s not like anyone in this car wants to go.”

“I do,” Liza said, slamming the door. “I like a luau.”

“A Baptist luau? Since when?” I said.

Liza smiled al smug and creamy to herself, facing out the front windshield. Right then I should have sent Mosey back inside and pinned Liza down and tussled it out of her, exactly who she was al dressed up for. Almost every man there would be married and either a teacher or the devout daddy of one of Mosey’s classmates. That read to me like three different kinds of hands off, but when it came to men, Liza could miss the nuances.

It was already pushing six, and the luau only went to seven. I backed out of the drive and pointed the car toward Calvary. I’d keep a hard eye on Liza tonight, but I figured I could tel her later on that she ought not to crap where Mosey had to eat. I was certain that al the later on I needed was waiting right around the corner.

Once we were out of our neighborhood, I sped up and said to Liza, “Don’t run off. The new science teacher wil be there, and we need to meet him. See exactly who is going to be screwing up Mosey’s worldview next year.”

“Oh, my God,” Mosey said to no one, in the back.

“She’s not five, Big,” Liza said. She was making hula-girl arms, first toward the window, then toward me.

“How else wil we know if she only needs to watch Discovery Channel for five hours a week or if I’m going to need to hire one of the fel ows who kidnaps cult members to do an un-Baptisting detox?”

“Please don’t embarrass me,” Mosey said.

Liza was stil dancing her top half around in her seat, but she shot me a sideline grin and then said, “Sucks to be a teenager, Mosey-baby. Big has the power to embarrass you just by breathing in public.”

Mosey said, real pointed, “I mostly wasn’t talking to Big.”

Liza laughed outright at that. “I’m the only one looking forward to this, and you want me to sit it out? Fat chance.” She was getting used to this new tone Mosey took with her now. A few months ago, Liza had left her little girl to go on an overnight druid campout, and she’d come home to a ful -

fledged teenager who eye-rol ed and flounced and sighed at everything her mother did.

I said to Liza, “Durn right you’re going. The first half of Mosey’s tuition is due this week if we want to hold her place. Mrs. Doats has left me four messages saying you have not returned her cal s.” I wasn’t about to shel out almost a third of my yearly salary so that Mosey’s civics teacher could tel her who was going to hel (Democrats, loose girls, and most medical professionals) and those who weren’t (Baptists). “Can you write her a check tonight?” I pressed. Last year Liza had paid every scrap up front, out of her “savings,” an animal I would have thought was off playing cards with Pegasus when the ark fil ed up.

“Tel her I got it covered,” Liza said, unconcerned. I felt the little row of suspicion hairs that grow on the back of my neck rising up even higher, because having it covered wasn’t the same thing as saying plain she had the money.

I turned in to the Calvary lot and parked, and al I said was, “Mm-hmm. After you write the check, take Mosey around to the booths and take a look at next year’s extracurriculars.”

“Oh, my God,” said Mosey and Liza, same time, same exasperated inflection.

“I’m sorry, but if the child is going to stay at Cal, she needs to have more friends than the Evil Fetus.”

“She’s staying at Cal, al right,” Liza said, firm, at the same moment Mosey said, “His name is
Roger
.”

“His name is Raymond,” I told her, and Mosey sat up straight so I could get a good view of her rol ing eyes in my rearview.

Liza was already slipping out of the car and speeding away ahead of us across the parking lot, getting the jump on me, no doubt running straight into man trouble. Or money trouble. Or both. I tilted my seat back open so Mosey could scramble out, and she stomped along slowly right in my way with her arms crossed and her shoulders in an angry hunch. Liza had disappeared inside before I could hustle our mud-foot kid even halfway across the lot.

Inside, the gym looked as though a discount-vacation brochure had thrown up al over the auditorium. Inflatable pink-and-green plastic palm trees hung down from the ceiling, and a long sheet of butcher paper with a wobbly ocean view painted on it lined the wal behind the stage. Way too many of those seagul s that look like M’s had been drawn on, as if it were the backdrop for the high-school musical version of that Hitchcock film. Parents and kids who had come on time were standing in chatty bunches, eating store-bought cookies and drinking what looked like foamy white slushies.