Daisy Lane (9 page)

Just then Grace heard her grandfather bellow from his room.

Grace froze, and the look on Mamie’s face showed the sound didn’t half scare her as well.

“That’s my grandfather,” Grace said. “Do you want me to get him?”

“No, no,” Mamie said as she backed away. “Don’t let’s bother him when he’s just got up from his nap. You come see me up at my house. You know the one? It’s the big gray house across from the Eldridge Inn on Morning Glory Circle. You come up there sometime soon and I’ll give you a nice big check for the swan. Don’t break it! It’s very fragile.”

Grace almost laughed at how scared Mamie seemed to be to meet her grandfather. The old woman hobbled down the steps and hurried out to the car, where a man held open a door for her. Once she was inside, it backed down the alley all the way to Lotus Avenue.

“Grace!” her grandfather bellowed again. “Damn your hide, where are you?”

Grace took the box with the swan in it to the kitchen and quickly hid it in the pantry as her grandfather came in.

“Who was that?” he demanded. “Who left in that car I heard?”

“Mamie Rodefeffer,” Grace said. “She wanted to see you but I said you were taking a nap.”

Her grandfather was uncharacteristically silent, and Grace was taken aback to see his face flush and begin to perspire.

“Are you alright, Grandpa?” she asked.

“Shut your mouth,” he said, and sat down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs. “Get me some water.”

Grace quickly filled a glass from the tap and handed it to him. His hands were trembling as he accepted it and he spilled water down his chest as he drank. When he had one of his spells, Grace stood well away; he tended to lash out. He sat the glass down on the table top so hard she feared it would break.

“What did she tell you?” he said.

“Nothing,” Grace said. “She wanted to see you and I told her she couldn’t come in.”

“Good,” he said. “Don’t believe anything that old witch says.”

“Why?” Grace said.

“Dagnabit, girl, don’t question me!” he bellowed, and threw the glass at her.

His aim was wild. Grace ducked and the glass hit the wall above the window over the kitchen sink. It shattered, and the pieces fell into the sink, onto the counter and the floor.

“Don’t you ever talk back to me like that again,” he said, shaking with rage. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” Grace said, and swiftly went to the pantry for the broom and dustpan in order to clean up the broken glass.

“Clean that up and fix me some supper,” he said, wiping his sweating face with his handkerchief. “And don’t say a word while you do it. Not one word.”

Grace did as she was told, and kept her tongue in her head.

Grace and Tommy were in the hallway, putting away the books from their morning classes in preparation for lunch. Grace saw the lumbering football player known as Jumbo coming down the hallway, slamming locker doors shut and shoving people out of the way as he went. Charlotte walked right behind him, ignoring what he was doing while she texted.

A small boy was kneeling next to his locker and Charlotte just happened to trip as she passed him. Grace could clearly see he hadn’t caused her to trip; she just couldn’t walk very well in the tall platform shoes she was wearing. Charlotte was embarrassed and her face flushed bright red.

“Idiot,” she said to the small boy. “Why don’t you watch what you’re doing?”

The kid stood up, saying, “I didn’t do anything,” but Jumbo picked him up, walked across the hall with him, and dropped him in a trash barrel. Some people in the hallway laughed. Jumbo let loose a volley of vulgar language just as the Vice Principal rounded the corner.

“Mr. Larson,” the Vice Principal said. “Meet me in my office.”

To everyone else he said, “Go to lunch.”

Jumbo tried to look tough but his face flushed as he stomped off down the hall with the Vice Principal. Grace helped the boy climb out of the trash can and then fished out his glasses, which had fallen off. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. Everyone else had turned away, but Grace picked up the books he had dropped and handed them to him.

“Here,” she said.

“Thank you,” the boy said, and wiped his face on his sleeve.

“No problem,” Grace said. “We small people have to stick together.”

She was rewarded with a smile, and he seemed to recover some of his dignity.

“Jumbo’s just an overgrown toddler but with less impulse control,” Grace said. “Just remember someday his job will be stirring the poop at the sewage treatment plant.”

The boy smiled and said, “What’s your name?”

“Grace Branduff,” she said. “What’s yours?”

His reply was cut off by Tommy loudly confronting Charlotte.

“How can you be with him?” Tommy asked Charlotte, who was already looking over his shoulder for someone more popular to talk to.

“What?” she said with derision, and the look she gave him turned Grace to stone; she wondered if Tommy could survive what was coming.

“How can you be with someone so stupid and mean?” he said. “He could have really hurt that kid; he’s three times his size. How is that a fair fight?”

“How could I be with him?” Charlotte said in a shrill voice that drew attention from everyone left in the hallway. “You mean instead of a dirt-poor hick raised by some dumbass con artist? Huh. Why in the world would I want someone who comes from a nice family, who lives in a nice house, instead of someone like you, whose real mother got blown up in a meth lab?”

Tommy looked as if she had swung a baseball bat into his midsection. He turned and fled, leaving his locker open.

“Shame on you,” Grace hissed, and Charlotte had the decency to blush. “We’ve been your friends since kindergarten. Who in the hell do you think you are?”

“Don’t you cuss at me, Grace Branduff,” Charlotte said. “I go to church. I’m a Christian.”

“Some Christian,” Grace said. “You lied about him tripping you; you tripped over your own damn feet in those stupid shoes. I saw you do it.”

“You two need to get over it and move on,” Charlotte said, flipping her hair over her shoulder as she walked away. “We’re not friends anymore and we never will be.”

Grace took out Tommy’s and her lunch bags, closed and locked both of their lockers, and then paused. Where would he have gone?

Out in the student parking lot the holler kids were hanging out with their monster trucks, listening to country music. The girls had on jeans and cowboy boots with their hoodies, while the boys wore construction boots and Nascar T-shirts.

“Hey, Grace,” one boy said as she approached.

“Hey, Jimmy John,” Grace said. “Have you seen Tommy?”

“Naw,” he said. “But if you do tell him we’re going mud boggin’ next weekend. You should come too.”

“Thanks,” Grace said.

Grace circled around the school, past the hip hop kids with their pants falling down, listening to rap music. She passed the hipster kids with their half shaved heads and big glasses, listening to obscure music they hoped no one else yet knew about, and headed toward the FFA barn. There, some farm kids were tending to cows, sheep, and pigs that would compete and then be auctioned off in the Pine County Fair later that summer. They were dressed similarly to the holler kids, and were also listening to country music.

“Hey, Grace,” one of the girls said.

She was brushing a huge black cow’s shiny coat. It was the biggest cow Grace had ever seen, and the girl was standing on an overturned bucket in order to reach its back.

“Hi, Dreama,” Grace said. “Cute cow.”

“She’s a he,” Dreama said. “Herbert is an Angus bull.”

“Is he mean?” Grace said, stepping backward.

“Not to me,” Dreama said, as she lovingly smoothed his coat. “I bottle fed him from a calf, so he follows me around like a puppy.”

“Won’t it be hard to give him up?” Grace said.

“It’s what happens,” Dreama said with a shrug. “I just don’t think about that part.”

“Have you seen Tommy?”

“He stopped by earlier,” Dreama said. “He’s writing something for the school paper on Herbert. Did you check the journalism lab?”

“No, but I will,” Grace said. “See ya.”

Tommy was not in the journalism lab, where two girls were debating the merits of state colleges versus private colleges.

“State is so much cheaper,” one said.

“But the classes have like two hundred people in them,” the other said. “In a small school you get much more individual attention.”

“I’d kind of like to disappear,” the first said. “I’m kind of tired of individual attention.”

Grace stopped in the girls’ bathroom by the back door and was dismayed to see every stall taken. Underneath one stall door she could see the entwined legs of the lesbian couple who shared the locker on one side of Grace’s.

“Lydia? Louise?” she said. “I’m sorry to interrupt but I really need to pee.”

The door swung open to reveal them both texting, not making out as Grace had expected. Neither looked away from her phone as they left the stall and wandered out into the hallway.

Sitting on the toilet, Grace could hear someone throwing up in the stall next door. It made her a little queasy to hear. As she washed her hands afterward, Stacy Rodefeffer left the stall from where the puking sounds had originated. She had long blonde hair, a giant apple-green handbag, and wore a pink velour sweat suit.

“Sup?” she said in a bored voice.

“Hey, Stacey,” Grace said. “Feeling alright?”

“Just peachy,” Stacey said.

She took a swig from a small bottle of mouth wash and then spit it in the sink.

Stacey examined her face in the mirror, and then took out a lip pencil, a pot of lip color, and a brush, with which she reapplied her mouth makeup. Over in the corner, waiting on her, was Stacey’s best friend Aleesha. She was eating corn chips and texting.

“Hi, Grace,” she said, without looking up.

Grace left the school through a back door, and walked toward where the pumped up lifters were weight training outside of the gym.

“Hi, Grace,” one of them said as she passed.

“Hi Billy,” Grace said.

Billy used to be a small skinny kid until the summer before a growth spurt caused him to shoot up to six feet tall. Now he was covered in big round muscles and could barely fit through the doors to the classrooms.

Charlotte and the Beal sisters were sitting at a table on the quad. They quit talking as Grace passed, but gave her an up and down look that conveyed their contempt. As soon as she was a few yards past them one of them said, “Nice shoes,” and they all burst into peals of mean laughter. Grace’s face burned but she ignored them.

Grace walked out toward the football field. Under the bleachers the emo and Goth kids were hanging out, listening to their gloomy music. A subset of these groups, the witchy-vampire-emo-Goths, had drawn a pentagram in the dirt and were casting spells. They were dressed all in black with pale faces, black kohl-rimmed eyes, and everything that could be pierced had been.

“Hey, Grace,” one of the witchy Goth girls called out.

“Hi, Whitney,” Grace said. “Whatcha conjuring today?”

“Oh, you know, demons,” the girl said. “Evil spirits, that sort of thing.”

“Good luck,” Grace said. “Have you seen Tommy?”

The girl gestured toward the bleachers.

Further on, the stoners were passing a joint. The smoke blew over Grace’s face and caused her to cough. They all chuckled over that.

“Hola Grace,” one of the boys said. “Did you know there’s like this wild marijuana field out back of Possum Holler, like up on the hill? An old guy used to live there, like, some scientist type guy? He planted it like fifty years ago and the buds are like as big as your fist.”

“No,” Grace said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Well, we’re like, going to go up there this weekend? And look for it? You wanna go?”

“No thanks,” Grace said. “But good luck. Seen Tommy?”

He pointed to the far side of the field where Tommy was sitting on the top bleacher, looking out at the nearby highway, his face turned away from the field.

“Hey,” Grace said when she reached the top and sat down next to him, putting their lunch bags between them. “Talk to me.”

“I love her,” Tommy said. “How could she do that to me?”

Tears were streaming down his face. Grace felt a stab of sympathy for him along with a burning anger for Charlotte, who didn’t deserve his devotion.

“I know you do,” Grace said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It just really hurts,” he said. “Like, I have a real pain in my chest. I think my heart is actually being damaged by her.”

He wiped his eyes with the end of his T-shirt and sniffed a few times.

“God,” he said. “I hate feeling like this. Why is she doing this to me?”

“She’s making a huge mistake,” Grace said, when what she really wanted to say was, “This is what happens when you fall in love with a selfish person who picks popularity over a lifetime of friendship.”

“I tried to talk to her the other day, out on the quad,” he said. “She gave me this look, like I was beneath her and irritating her.”

Grace didn’t say what she was thinking. Even though he was hurt he wasn’t going to listen to a word said against Charlotte. Not yet.

“It’s all their fault, Jumbo and the Beals,” Tommy said. “They’re a terrible influence on her. If she could just see them for how they really are.”

They sat in companionable silence for a while. Then Tommy took out his sandwich and took a bite. Grace started on hers.

“Remember that time we sat on the third floor balcony at your house and threw chestnuts in the river?” he said.

“We threw them, but I don’t think any got as far as the river.”

“When you went downstairs to get the cards, I kissed her,” he said. “I kissed Charlotte, and she kissed me back. She did. It wasn’t all on my side.”

Grace knew about this because Charlotte told her, had laughed about it. She was just experimenting with kissing but he thought it meant she loved him.

It had been the beginning of the end, just after school started last fall. Charlotte got her braces off at the end of the summer and was wearing contact lenses. Suddenly all she was interested in was makeup, clothes, and boys. She also made cutting remarks about how Grace and Tommy dressed and acted.

“It’s time for us to grow up,” Charlotte said to her one day, after Grace tried to kid her about how pretentious she was acting. “We aren’t kids anymore.”

It wasn’t much longer before Charlotte was riding to school in an expensive SUV with an older group of girls, and eating lunch at the popular kids’ table in the cafeteria. Grace had tried to talk to her about it, but Charlotte said, “My mom says it’s totally normal to outgrow your middle school friends. We all mature at different rates, and you and Tommy are just maturing more slowly than me.”

Grace had said, “You’re acting like an idiot and those people you’re hanging out with are a bunch of stupid snobs.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand the social advantages of hanging out with the right people,” Charlotte had said, with a disgusted look on her face. “Considering how you’ve been brought up I doubt you’ll ever need to know.”

Charlotte had blushed then, as if even she knew how awful she was being. That was the last time Grace talked to Charlotte until today. Tommy had still been trying, and it was heartbreaking to watch him try to draw her attention only to be dismissed with an eye roll and a disparaging comment shared with her new friends. Now that Charlotte had that hulking dumbass for a boyfriend, Grace feared Tommy might get physically hurt.

“He’s not worthy of her,” Tommy said. “I’m not saying I am, but for sure he’s not.”