Good Girls (23 page)

Abruptly, she turned around, not because of any weird wind, and not because of Dead-Rat Sombrero-Dude, and not because she felt cowed, or scared, at least not by that guy. But Jack, on the other hand … Maybe she needed to deal with Jack first. Because however strange she felt, how on earth must
he
be feeling?

She could still picture—would never forget—the expression on his face as Sombrero-Man took hold of her. Really, though, it had been more an
absence
of expression. And then he'd just sat there, watching her assaulter. And he'd done nothing.

The fucking bastard. Coward, weakling, asshole …

She was kicking the ground more than walking, now. She was also back on the sidewalk, circling the woods to stop by Jack's place. Despite what he'd done, or hadn't done … despite what she'd seen or hadn't on his face … she was somehow sure that all it would take, tonight, was a single glance, a kind word, to reassure them both. Whatever the hell had happened, it was not what it had seemed, could not have been. Sure, Jack could be a coward. Actually, Jack
was
a coward, always had been, reluctant to confront, unable just to come out and say.

But mostly, that was because he himself got angry so rarely that he was too slow to recognize anger in others. And that was because he was Jack, her lovely too-soft, dart-sporting, bowling-shirt-wearing friend, who made the world sparkle, and understood what board games and brooms and ice rinks were for.

Jack, whom she loved.

She was almost back to Starkey's Pizza, half a block from the edge of town proper and the end of the woods, when she stopped in mid-stride and swung toward the trees again. Then she held still, staring again through the laced branches. The sun hung so low that it seemed to have lodged in the heart of those massed pines, like a fire in a woodstove. Or a firefly in a jar.

And yet, the day hadn't cooled any. Everything about Kaylene felt sticky-August-New-Hampshire hot, except her throat.
That
felt cold.

There's nothing in the trees,
she told herself, and watched the woods a little longer. But she didn't see anything in there except twilight, or hear anything but birds and just-awakening bats
.
And maybe one thing more. She couldn't even sort what it was, but it was there: a bit of extra movement, maybe, a rustling right along the edge of shadows, just out of sight behind the branches. As though someone on the other side of that first row of pines was pacing.

You did this to me,
she let herself think.
You fucking bastard.
For an astonishing second, she felt she might cry out.

Don't let me see you again,
she thought. Then she said that aloud, to the sidewalk and the trees. “I mean it. Don't let me see you again. Bub.” And with that, she wrenched herself around and stalked into town, leaving the woods behind her.

To her relief—at first, it was relief—she didn't even have to ring the clown-nose doorbell on Jack's door. As soon as she'd turned onto his block, she saw him emerging up the stairs from his tiny basement apartment—
as though out of the ground,
she thought stupidly, crazily—and then he was free of the shadow of the ramshackle blue house he lived in, moving over the grass, Operation game under his arm and what looked like a brand-new thrift store bowling shirt—where did he
find
them all?—buttoned crisply to his neck. In the instant before he saw her, she wondered what the name on the shirt would be tonight. All Jack's shirts had names on the pockets, none of them his.
Herman. Jimenez. Kennedy. Bill.

He saw her and stopped.

For Kaylene, the worst moment—not including the actual choking—came right then, as she realized that her first instinct was to spin on her heels and
run.
The Jack in front of her was her Jack, the one she'd always known. But hovering in the air between them, forming and re-forming over his face like a mask made of mist, was the face she'd seen on him this morning, in the too-clear dawn light, on the bus stop bench:

Jack-minus-Jack. Jack, watching her die.

She came so close to spinning and running. But her stride barely hitched. And as she moved forward, that mask-face superimposed over her friend's seemed to burst beneath the heat of her glare, glitter in the air like firecracker smoke as she strode through it, and stream away. She walked right up to him.

“Kaylene, I don't even know what to—”

She threw her arms around him, eskimo-kissed his nose (only a little harder than she meant to, with just a bit of head butt), and said, “Come Curling.”

He blinked as she released him, blushed, ran a hand through his Persian-cat poof of brown hair—his
combed
Persian-cat poof, which made Kaylene realize, with just a tiny twinge of hurt, where he'd been heading just now—and looked at the ground, then back up. “I'm really glad you're here.”

“Of course I'm here. Come Curling.” Kaylene reached for his hand, ignoring the last shudder of watcher-from-the-woods crawling up her back. At least, she hoped it was the last.

“I can't. I mean … you know I love you.”

“I know you love me.” She held his hand, feeling neither twinge nor shudder; she really did know.

“But—”

“And I know you love Rebecca more.”

“Not more.”

“Okay. Different.” She watched him smile shyly, his little-boy-with-a-sled, little-boy-let-out-of-his-room-after-being-grounded smile. It rankled her, but less than she'd feared it would. “Human Curling. One round. You're the stone. I get to shove. You owe me.”

Then he just up and said it, went right at it, because he wasn't such a coward, after all. “To get rid of last night? This morning, I mean? Bury it, once and for all? Can we … I mean, is that poss…? Can we, Kaylene? Please?”

“I'm…” Kaylene started, and realized that she was at least as uncertain of what to say as he was. “I'm not even sure what I remember about last night. Or this morning.”

“Really?” said Jack, with no smile whatsoever. “Because I'm pretty sure I do.” A single sob wracked him, right there in front of her.

“Okay, that's just wrong. That's all wrong. Jacks don't cry.” Yanking him by the wrist, ignoring the catching as he got control of his breath, Kaylene tugged him around the corner toward the triplex where she lived with Marlene.

They'd reached her front stoop, Kaylene dragging Jack up the tilting porch steps she and Marlene couldn't get Smoker Harris or his crazy wife to let them fix, when Jack caught the edge of the railing and dragged them still. He pulled Kaylene around to face him, though he wasn't quite looking at her. At least he wasn't crying anymore, either.

“Really?” he said. “We're okay?”

“We are Jack and the 'Lenes,” Kaylene said, and was relieved to hear how certain she sounded. “‘Okay' doesn't enter into it.” She made herself smile at him until she didn't have to make herself anymore. Then she called into the triplex, “Marlene, put down that orgo chem book.”

At the front screen door, in his permanent, private Pig-Pen cloud, Smoker Harris appeared, saw Kaylene, and stepped into the evening. When he saw Jack, he held up his hands so Jack could see his nails. This was how Smoker always greeted Jack. “Full yellow,” he said.

It was true, though hardly a revelation. The guy smoked so much that his hair, nails, irises, even his gums had clouded.

“Smoker, you are magnificent,” said Jack. “
Those
are magnificent.”

“Always appreciate a kid who can appreciate,” said Smoker, coughed, and shook his ash-gray hair like an ancient dog rousing itself off a mat. “I think Marlene's studying.”

“Not anymore,” Kaylene said. “Mar
lene
!”

Marlene appeared, coughed as she brushed past Smoker, but also patted him on the back. He had been their landlord ever since they'd come, together, to East Dunham. He would be their landlord, Kaylene knew, until the day they left, even if he stopped leaving bourbon-flavored beignets outside their upstairs apartment door every single Sunday morning, an act he still called their “move-in special.” On the day they'd first come to see the place, Kaylene had told him, “Sorry, I can't handle the smoke.”

“What smoke?” Smoker had said. “No one smokes in my house.” And no one had, from that day forward. Smoker didn't even do it on the balcony anymore, even though Kaylene had never asked him to move away. He went all the way to the back of his yard and stood under the hickory tree, even in winter, even when it was snowing.

“I'm studying,” Marlene said, though Kaylene noted that she hadn't even bothered to bring out her orgo book.

I have broken you,
Kaylene thought, and grinned. “Human Curling.”

“At…” Marlene checked her pocket for her phone, but it wasn't there. “This early?”

“What, you think Mrs. Starkey refreezes the rink at midnight?”

“I think school starts in sixteen days.”

“I know. And you're only eleven weeks ahead in the reading.”

“Thirteen.”

“Move it. We're going to Human Curl. See you, Smoker.”

Then they were all moving together, slipping into formation, Jack in the center, a 'Lene on each arm. When Rebecca was with them, they really were a humming combine of good days, harvesting the fun from mucky lakes and mini-forests and too-long lectures and crisis centers and hundred-year-old pizza barns. Mulching Dead-Rat Sombrero-Men wherever they sprouted. Down the block, there were kids playing kick the can, ghost in the graveyard, one of those in-come-free games. They moved through midge clouds as thick as Smoker's smoke, which blurred their edges against the deepening dark, made them look like kid-shaped smudges, their voices wild and shrill as loons'. Every one of them was someone Kaylene knew.

Marlene, annoyingly, kept falling half a step behind, as though considering retreating to the triplex, but then Kaylene glanced over and saw the look on her face, registered the concern there. She hadn't told Marlene a thing about last night. She'd told Rebecca, because Rebecca needed to know. Even now, Kaylene wasn't sure whether to tell Marlene, or exactly what she
would
tell her if and when she did.

Yeah, no biggie, Jack probably wasn't
actually
going to let me die.

Their eyes met. Marlene's were wide, so green behind her glasses, teeming with all the things Marlene always knew. She was more than a little like Rebecca, in that way. So completely and permanently her friend.

That was enough. It was all Kaylene needed. She tilted out her arms, ski-jumper style, and leaned into the oncoming night. Marlene matched her.

They didn't even bother stopping into Starkey's proper, just swooped down the dumpster alley toward the giant barn out back, bumping each other as usual, laughing. That's why they didn't notice Mrs. Starkey at the bottom of her back stoop until she whirled on them.

“
Hah!
” she shouted, lashing out with a ladle and waving it back and forth in the air between them. The ladle still had cannellini beans and bits of stewed tomato in it. Even after she'd clearly realized who was standing in front of her, she kept the ladle raised, jabbed it toward them a few more times.

For a moment, none of the trio moved except Jack, who'd jumped back in surprise. Marlene had flinched hardest, and now she just stood there, processing. Kaylene allowed herself a moment of that, too. She took in Mrs. Starkey's lumpy, veiny bare feet in the grass, heavy as old stones, the apron only half on, twisted about her neck and one shoulder, her hair out of its hairnet for once, and—surprisingly—
not
white, not all the way, and also
long,
with lots of lustrous uncolored brown still threaded through the heavy braid that switched on her back like a horse's tail. Mrs. Starkey's warm, brown widow's eyes positively leapt from face to face. She kept the ladle out in front of her chest, bulbed end pointed at them.

“Mrs. Starkey?” Kaylene said. “Are you okay?”

It should have been funny, and would have been if this were some other day, and also if the woman weren't trembling. Actually, she
wasn't
trembling, now that Kaylene looked closer. But she looked as though she had been, just a few seconds ago.

Jack had laid the Operation game he'd been carrying on the stoop and stepped back into line with his 'Lenes. Kaylene felt more than saw his careful smile. “You wave that thing like you mean it,” he said. It really was masterful, the way he did that. He was so good in other people's crises, the best she'd ever seen, until she'd seen Rebecca.

“I'll put your eye out,” Mrs. Starkey said, waving the ladle one last time, but less like she meant it, more like she was threatening to withhold pineapple from their pizza.

“Probably be more ‘scooping' than ‘putting' with that thing, really,” Jack said. “Right?”

Mrs. Starkey scowled. From long experience, Kaylene knew that was Mrs. Starkey's version of laughing. The woman's shoulders came down, though not the ladle. She seemed to notice her disheveled apron, reached up with her free hand to pull it all the way off or maybe on, then patted the top of her head instead, where her hairnet wasn't.

“You have beautiful hair,” Marlene said.

Sighing, Mrs. Starkey twisted fingers through her braid, yanked it once, let it go. “I do,” she said. “I did. Some days, you kind of forget it's there, you know? No, you don't know. May you never. The fucking foxes are back.” She gestured at the woods across the yard, behind the barn.

“Foxes?” Marlene asked.

“Last summer, they ate my cats.
Both
of my cats. This time…” Instead of waving the ladle, she leveled her gaze at the trees, which seemed, to Kaylene, considerably more intimidating.
If I were a fox …
she thought. Then she said, “Can we use the rink? We really need to Curl.”