Bleed (16 page)

“See this line in the middle?” I say, looking back at her palm. “That’s your fate line.”

“And what’s my fate doing?”

“It’s broken,” I say. “See here, where your life line interrupts your fate line? That means that stuff goes on in your life that keeps you from reaching your destiny. And this line, here, your line of sun? This also interrupts your fate line.”

“What does that mean?”

“Your line of sun speaks of your spirituality and well-being. But yours is weak, except where it breaks your fate. Your love line, too; it’s crossed by branches of your fate and sun. Even your family line crosses your love line. It’s like there are so many kinks, but your lines can’t quite make it over them.”

“I guess I don’t have a chance,” she says, but she’s laughing when she says it, like she’s long been resolved to a fruitless future. Like it comes as no surprise at all.

“Sure you do,” I say. “There’s always a chance in Life School. It’s all about learning. Just ask yourself, what in your life causes difficulty. What harnesses you from attaining your goals? If you can identify that, you can change your own fate.”

“Easy,” she says.

“It’s not easy. In my case, my family line interrupts everything—my fate, my sun, my mind—though, at the same time, it’s the dullest line of all. I just have to remind myself of that every once in a while so I don’t let my lack of roots consume me.” I inhale a cleansing breath, thinking how good it feels to be reminded.

“I don’t know why you can’t just plant your own roots,” she says. “Why can’t you just decide to be someplace and then be there? Make friends there? Make a life there? Why do you need to rely on people who obviously don’t know or give a shit about you, to get on with your life?”

“Don’t you believe in a sense of blood relation?”

“I have no reason to. And from what you’re saying, neither do you.”

Her verbal acid sinks into my chest, eats a hole in my heart, makes me want to cry bright fiery tears. But I don’t. I can’t. I have to be strong for her. Maybe she doesn’t know what she’s saying. Maybe she’s just trying to be honest with me.

“Can I ask you just one question?” I say.

“What?”

“Does your family line interrupting your love line have anything to do with these scratches on your arms?” I pull up on her sleeve, and finger over one of them, the blood still a bit fresh.

Maria responds by snatching her arm away. She stands up and grabs her lunch box—a scratchy-eyed Diana staring into my knee. “Fuck you!” she says.

“I just want to help you, Maria.”

“Help
yourself,”
she huffs. “You’re so fake, pretending to be all sensitive and everything. You’re not fooling anyone with all your sunny pink bullshit.”

I feel my jaw tense, my chest weep. I sit up tall, trying to retain confidence, trying to assure myself that none of what she’s saying is true.

“You’re not even worth it to me,” she says, glancing down at her lunch box. She turns on her heel and dashes down the street, leaving me alone.

I fold up from the bench, feeling completely defeated—filled with more rainy-day sadness than I thought I’d ever know. Still, I decide it would be best to go after her.

I begin walking down North Street. Maria actually isn’t that much ahead. I follow as she takes a bunch more streets, keeping at least three shop lengths behind her as she continues on to Hawthorne Boulevard, passes the Irish church, the wig shop, and crosses the street to the bank. There’s one of those old-fashioned phone booths in the parking lot, the novelty kind. I watch from the alcove of the wig shop as she steps inside the booth to make a phone call. The fusion of scents in the air—of oily hair mixed in sweet perfume—makes me feel queasy.

Four minutes flip forward on the digital bank clock. Then ten. I wonder what’s keeping her. I cross the street and approach the booth. Her back is toward me, but she’s not on the phone. Her head is down and she’s curled up in the corner. I knock.

“I’m busy.”

“Please, Maria,” I say. “I want to speak with you. I want to help you. Don’t you realize? We were fated to meet.”

Since we’re so much alike.

Maria turns to face me, her eyes all red and spider-veiny. I imagine her aura as a solid black cape over her shoulders. Her lunch box is wide open on the ground. Her sleeve is rolled up. And there’s a safety pin, of all things, jammed deep into her inner forearm, all the way in.

I fold the door open, and there are blood tears running down her olive cheeks. “Here,” I say, “let me help you.” I take her arm and cradle it in mine, pull up on the safety pin and pluck it out.

Maria allows my arms to wrap around and hold her. I feel her fingers press against my back. And I think how it must have been destiny that Ache and I never did end up meeting today. How maybe Maria’s the first real friend I’ve met since I got here.

How maybe I’ve accomplished a lot today.

S
ATURDAY
, A
UGUST
12, 5:45
P.M
.

I don’t know Kelly Pickerel. But I know of her.

I know that Mr. Vargas, the computer teacher, paid her two hundred dollars to give him a blow job, and that she ended up doing it, right there in his classroom, right under his desk. That’s what I heard. I also heard that she did it in the park with four guys from the lacrosse team—all four at once!

She’s one of those girls who, on the surface, everybody
thinks
they want to be like—pretty, popular, lots of boyfriends. Except as soon as she opens her mouth you can tell she’s really a bitch and a slut, and everyone knows it.

I flip through the scrapbook I’ve found at the back of her closet. She’s got some pretty screwed up hobbies. It’s loaded with all these old newspaper clippings about some guy who murdered his girlfriend.

“Ginger?” Emily calls from the doorway. “What are you doing in Kelly’s room?”

“Your mom asked me to clean,” I say, draping one of Kelly’s scarves around my neck—a purple shimmery one with silver threads woven throughout. “Go play.”

Emily gives me a pouty face, but she knows better than to give me shit, so she just stomps off.

I love babysitting for the Pickerels. Not that I love kids. I
hate
kids. I hate all kids over six and under thirteen. My sister Sadie is eleven and she’s the worst. Emily is five, so she’s borderline.

Babysitting here is cool for the following reasons:

1. Mrs. Pickerel only goes out for two hours, tops.

2. She pays me fifteen dollars an hour, plus a big tip.

3. Emily doesn’t mind playing by herself.

4. Unlike my mother, Mrs. Pickerel could probably care less that I’m a dancer. So she doesn’t care when I pig out on her snacks. Doesn’t say anything about how many Suzy Q’s are gone from the package. Or how big my thighs are. Or how straight my back is when I do a pirouette.

5. Kelly’s away in California for the summer, visiting her father, so her room is ripe for snooping.

Of course, it wasn’t easy landing this gig. I had to work for it. I knew Kelly had a younger sister, and when I found out through Cheryl’s older brother’s friend Jessie that Kelly was going away for the summer, a lightbulb clicked on over my head.

The day after she left, I went by Kelly’s house, rang the doorbell, and introduced myself to Mrs. Pickerel. I told her that I was fairly new to the area, just riding by on my bike, looking for kids (potential clients), noticed she had some (from the telltale swing set in the yard), and was wondering if she’d ever need someone to look after them once in a while. Then the clincher: I started talking about all my plans for college and how I was
already
saving up, how I was the freshman class treasurer at Salem High, certified in CPR, and a classical ballerina, happy to pass on my dancing skills to small children, namely hers. A perfect blend of responsibility, brains,
and
talent.

But I think what really did it was the resume I typed up, with the carefully chosen font—Comic Sans—to show my fun, yet professional side. I listed my work experience in bold: a babysitting job of Cheryl’s that I passed off as my own, a fund-raiser thing I’d organized (a chocolate sale I’d read about in some book for English class), and a volunteer summer gig at the Crombie Street Shelter.
All
completely bogus.

All so I could get into Kelly Pickerel’s room and teach her a lesson once and for all.

Of course, I can’t just rifle through her room
every
time I’m here. Emily would get suspicious and I’d be fired. I have to be discreet, rummage through in stages, cover one area at a time (like today, for example, with her closet). Plus, I’m not just looking for
anything.
I’m looking for
the
thing. The one ingredient that will really bring Kelly down.

A couple weeks ago I went through her bookcase. They say you can tell a lot about people from what they read. Plus, since I like to hide stuff in and between books, I thought this might be the most incriminating place. She’s got a few copies of stuff I’ve read—-Judy Blume, Christopher Pike, Maya Angelou. But mostly it’s all these touchy, feel-good, self-help books. Titles like
When Nothing Matters Anymore, Fighting Invisible Tigers, Get Over It
, and
When Love Hurts.
Total snore material.

The time before that, I looked under her bed. I found one of those fire-safe boxes. At first I thought I’d hit the incriminating jackpot, seeing that there was a key sticking out of the lock, but instead it was kind of … weird. There was all this stuff crammed inside. One of those plastic snow globes with a family of yellow cats holding paws in a circle, one spotted cat in the center. A handful of foreign coins. A set of rosary beads and a laminated picture of the Virgin Mary. And then, at the bottom of everything, as if it were a liner, a folded up drawing of a whale. It had been done with little-kid hands, in crayons, and signed at the bottom:
Love Kelly.
At the top it said
To a Whale of a Dad.
I could tell it’d been crumpled up, and that Kelly had done her best to try and straighten it out.

It made me wonder if my dad still kept my old art stuff. Or if it, too, ended up crumpled into a paper ball.

The closest I’ve ever come to actually talking to Kelly was this past year. I had my hair braided and then spiraled around the crown of my head. I don’t normally wear it that way, but I was being dragged into Boston right after school to try out for the
Nutcracker
(my mother’s stupid idea), and needed to have it up. Kelly and her friend, this girl Maria, were talking in the courtyard outside the school gym. Kelly tapped me on the shoulder as I walked by them. “Hey, freshman,” she said, “do us a favor and be the ashtray.” Then Maria, the smoking one, flicked her ashes in my hair, and Kelly let out this loud hyena laugh.

Then, one time after school, right before Thanksgiving, I saw her walking with some jock-guy from the lacrosse team. He had his arm dangling around her shoulders, but he kept moving it down to tickle her waist. She was laughing extra loud, like she wanted everyone to hear how much fun she was having—she thinks she’s so great. But then she saw me, just standing there watching her, and her expression changed—two rock-hard eyes; one long, tight slit of a mouth—like she was mad or embarrassed or something. She peeled the slit open for only a second to mouth the words “go screw” at me.

But my worst run-in with the bitch was right at the beginning of finals last year. It was in study hall, in the cafeteria, and I was talking to Matt, this guy in my algebra class who I’d been majorly crushing on for the past two quarters. Of course, Matt didn’t know about my crushdom—at least I don’t think he did—because I’d been pretending to be interested in his math skills (yeah, right!). Anyway, while the two of us were reviewing his Pythagorean theorem notes, Kelly and her bitch friends were sitting a full two tables back, but I could still hear their huge junior mouths. Obviously none of them cared about passing finals or getting into college or anything, because not even one of them had a book opened. I kept eyeballing Mr. Vargas the whole time, wanting him to say something to them. I mean, after all, it was
study hall.
But he just kept flipping through the pages of his newspaper like the overweight and underpaid slouch of a teacher that he is. Not that I ever really expected him to reprimand his precious Kelly; that could cost him some serious nookie points.

Anyway, after a good twenty minutes of listening to Kelly’s hyena laugh, I felt something hit against the back of my head. I ignored it at first, hoping it was just a fluke, but then I felt more.

“Hungry?” I heard someone shout out.

At the same moment, a handful of sunflower seeds landed on the table in front of me. I looked up at Matt to see if he’d noticed. He had. He was staring right at Kelly and all her bitch friends.

“Tell her to have some birdseed,” Kelly shouted at him.