Like Mandarin (4 page)

“So, Grace,” she began. “Polly Bunker called and said you lost the essay contest. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t lose, exactly,” I said. “I got second place. I won fifty dollars.”

“She won fifty dollars,” Taffeta repeated.

Momma smiled patronizingly. “You mean they gave you fifty dollars in consolation. That was awfully kind of them. They don’t always give runners-up prizes.”

I speared a pineapple fragment so brutally the tips of my fork clanked against my plate.

“Though speaking of winning,” Momma continued, “Little Miss Washokey is coming up. And we all know what an important pageant this is. When Taffeta wins this year, she’ll be eligible for the tri-county pageant, and after that, the state pageant, and after that—if the Lord wills it—the stars!”

I wondered what the Lord thought about her invoking his name. I glanced at Taffeta. She just sat there, sucking her fingers—a habit left over from toddlerhood. At least it wasn’t her thumb.

I guessed you could call Taffeta Counterexhibit A: Momma’s final hope. Taffeta’s miraculous voice was proof things might be on the upswing. That year, Momma hadn’t entered her in any pageants prior to Little Miss Washokey. Everybody in town knew about Taffeta’s voice, but Momma didn’t want to reveal her secret weapon prematurely.

“Grace, you remember competing in your Little Miss Washokey, don’t you?”

She brought it up at the start of every pageant season. Like clockwork. I felt something gritty between my teeth. I stared at my mushy lettuce, trying to determine what variety of Hawaiian produce could account for a crunch. “Not really,” I replied.

“Well, everyone else in this town does. Especially Polly Bunker. She’ll never let me forget about Alexis’s win. She wouldn’t have won at all if it weren’t for your debacle onstage. I know you remember.”

“I remember too,” Taffeta said.

“You weren’t even born yet,” I said. “Loser.”

“Grace, enough!” Momma’s accent had vanished. Whenever she was angry, she talked just like every other grown-up in Washokey. “I want to have a pleasant dinner for once. Can’t we ever conversate like a normal family?”

“We’re not a normal family,” I muttered.

Momma cleared her throat. “Grace, go to your room.”

I wanted to roll my eyes.
Too little, too late
, I thought as I pushed my chair back and headed for the stairs. Why did she even try?

My fifteenth birthday was coming up in May, but I knew not to expect anything more from Momma than the cake and the box of last-season Femme Fatale makeup she gave me every year. She never asked about the books I read, or the rocks I lugged home. She only looked at my report cards so she could brag about my grades to her friends. She knew nothing about me.

But I knew all about her.

That was what happened when you stuck around in the town where you’d grown up—even your daughters learned your stories.

Like me, Momma had felt the pull of far-off places during her girlhood in Washokey. When her parents died in a highway accident, she saw a chance for escape. At eighteen, she left her grandmother’s house and moved in with her uncle on the other side of the state.

I knew what had really happened during her three-month stay in Jackson. I knew all about the nights she’d spent in the brush beside the Snake River after her uncle had turned out to be some kind of pervert. The solace she’d found in crummy bars. And the nice police officer who’d rescued her at her lowest point and driven her home to Washokey. He’d gotten her pregnant with me on the way, although she didn’t know it until he was long gone.

Momma had spent fifteen years of both our lives trying to compensate for her disgrace. It didn’t work, of course. Because small towns don’t forget.

And neither do daughters.

After Ms. Ingle handed back my history exam on Wednesday, she lingered by my desk. “Would you mind staying after class for a few minutes?” she said in a low voice. “I’ll write you a pass.”

I nodded, watching as she continued up the aisle. Her brown dress drooped around her skinny frame like a burlap bag, and her nylons sagged in the knees. I knew she refused to buy Femme Fatale cosmetics from my mother, preferring the cheaper grocery store brands. She often kept me after class to discuss more challenging assignments, or simply to talk history. Sometimes she showed me historical postcards Mr. Mason had purchased online: pictures of women picnicking in stiff skirts, or frontiersmen crossing the bridge over the Bighorn River.

In spite of her fondness for Washokey history, Ms. Ingle was an out-of-towner, assigned to our school due to a lack of able teachers. No matter how long she lived in Washokey, she’d always be someone different, someone we pretended to scoff at but really envied because she’d had a whole other life outside of Washokey. Just like Mandarin Ramey.

Once the bell rang, I approached Ms. Ingle’s desk.

“I thought I’d give you a couple days before I told you I’m sorry about the contest,” she said. “I suppose you can’t win them all.”

Don’t tell Momma that
. My hand located the small piece of nephrite jade in my pocket. Jade was Wyoming’s official mineral. The stone was the color of verdigris, like an ancient Greek coin gone turquoise with age.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about you, Grace.”

“Okay …,” I said.

“I’ve always regretted that we haven’t been able to challenge you the way you deserve to be challenged. Though I stand by the notion that advancing you another year isn’t the best option.”

I shook my head so hard my brain almost rattled.

Sure, skipping me again would get me into college—and out of Washokey—faster. But I already felt light-years behind the rest of my classmates in all the real-life things that mattered. If they made me a senior next year … I shuddered. Already, the only sophomore who talked to me was Davey Miller, and he talked to everybody, whether they listened or not.

Ms. Ingle knew how I felt. She’d pried it out of me the first week of school, after I’d overanalyzed a “What’s
Your
History?” essay and turned in a twelve-page manifesto. Our junior high teachers had spooked us into believing that high school would be tough.

“You’ve excelled in your alternative course work,” she continued. “But I’ve noticed you haven’t signed up for a community service project yet.”

Washokey students had to take part in ten hours of community service in both fall and spring. Momma wanted me to help backstage at Little Miss Washokey—an appalling idea, but I hadn’t come up with anything better.

“Unless you were planning on assisting Mr. Mason again …”

“I haven’t decided.”
No way
. Some of those ancient photos had sharp edges. I still had scars from the tintypes.

“Of course, cataloging our history for future generations is priceless. But I’ve been thinking. How would you like a project whose results are a little more … immediate? And that takes advantage of your extensive brainpower?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess.”

Ms. Ingle hesitated. When she spoke again, I could tell she was trying to sound nonchalant. “By any chance … do you happen to know Mandarin Ramey?”

My thoughts blanked out for a second. Then they returned as a series of exclamation points instead of words.

“Grace?”

“Well, no, not like
personally
 … But I know who she is, yeah.”

“Mandarin’s predicament is the opposite of yours. We should have held her back years ago, but she swore she’d drop out if we did. We’ve lightened her load enough for her to scrape by. Yet anytime our help is obvious, she rebels. I’ve never met anyone so averse to a helping hand.”

Ms. Ingle held out a glass candy dish filled with Reese’s Pieces. Taffeta called them Reesey Peeseys. I took a single orange candy to be polite. It stuck in my throat.

“She needs help in all her classes,” Ms. Ingle continued. “But geometry and history the most—which happen to be your two best subjects. Mandarin also hasn’t chosen a community service project. She needs twenty hours to count for both semesters, since she didn’t complete a project last fall. I was hoping you could help her choose one. You don’t have to participate, but any sort of guidance—”

“I’ll do it,” I said.

As soon as I uttered the words, a bizarre image flashed behind my eyes: Mandarin and me sitting side by side in the library, leaning over a massive reference book as thick as an ancient Bible. For some reason, we both wore glasses.

I felt a tickle of laughter in my throat threatening to overflow. I coughed to keep it down. I didn’t want to look crazy. But the absurdity of the two of us, paired up—hysterical. Not just Mrs. Cleary hysterical, but straitjacket-bound, funny farm–inmate hysterical.

We might as well frolic through a horse pasture, holding hands.

“You look apprehensive,” Ms. Ingle said, misreading my face. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea.”

“No,” I said. Or I thought I’d said it. It was as if I were outside myself, listening to me speak. “I can do it. But … I just want to get this straight. My service project is helping Mandarin find a service project?”

“With some tutoring on the side.” Ms. Ingle smiled. “You’re a good person, Grace. I knew you had a strong sense of self. With the wrong person, Mandarin could be a …” She paused. “I just trust you won’t be influenced.”

I felt the urge to laugh again, but this time at Ms. Ingle, for so thoroughly misreading not only my facial expression, but everything about me.

“There’s just one problem,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Why would Mandarin want my help? I’m just a sophomore. The youngest sophomore in the school. It would be embarrassing for her. She’d never want to work with me—not in a billion years.”

Ms. Ingle took a small handful of Reesey Peeseys and rattled them in her palm. “That’s not a problem at all,” she said. “Mandarin asked for you herself.”

No matter what Ms. Ingle said, I never believed the whole preposterous mentorship enterprise would happen. Because that was the very definition of my rocks-and-books-and-badlands existence: in my life,
nothing
happened.

So when Mandarin approached me on Thursday, I was completely unprepared.

I was standing in the hallway between fifth and sixth periods, trying to buy a drink, but the fickle soda machine refused to take my dollar. Every time I crammed the bill into the slot, the machine spit it back out, like a wagging tongue. I began to feel frantic with thirst. In a few minutes I’d be late for English. To make matters worse, the machine sat at a nucleus of student traffic, and people kept jostling me, swishing their elbows against my overstuffed tote bag and knocking me sideways.

At last, I crumpled the bill into an unreasonable wad and tried to stuff it into the slot.

“I’ll trade you,” a voice said.

I whirled around, backing into the machine.

Mandarin was posed before me in a lavender sweater, one hand balanced casually against her hip. With the other, she held out a fresh, unwrinkled dollar bill.

“Go on,” she said.

I plucked it from her fingers and gave her mine. “Thanks,” I mumbled. “I’m really thirsty.”

“Sure seems like it.”

The machine took Mandarin’s dollar on my first try. I pressed the button for a bottled water, and it banged down into the catch.

“Just water?” Mandarin said. “There’s a fountain right around the corner, y’know. Spouting out an unlimited supply. For free.”

“I know. It’s just … the tap water here’s kind of disgusting.”

“Yeah, I guess it does taste dirty. Moldy, even. They probably pipe it straight outta the irrigation canal.”

Mandarin watched as I unscrewed the bottle and sipped at the water self-consciously.

“I thought you were thirsty.” She reached out. “May I?”

I handed her the bottle. She tipped her head and drank, her throat rippling with each swallow, as if my water were ambrosia, nectar of the gods shipped down from Mount Olympus. A trickle escaped from the corner of her mouth and she caught it with her index finger. Then she handed the half-finished bottle back to me.

“So there’s a reason I tracked you down,” she began.

My heart began pounding like an Indian drum. I hoped she couldn’t hear it.

“I ain’t doing too good in history,” Mandarin went on. “Actually I ain’t doing too good in any of my classes. Like math, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. I never got two- and three-sided shapes, not to mention five- and six-sided ones.”

There’s no such thing as two-sided shapes
.

“And history. I’m flunking history. Plus, I haven’t even chosen a service project yet—and neither have you, I’ve heard.”

Now my heart pounded like a whole symphony of Indian drums. An entire drum circle.

“So I thought, maybe there’s a chance you could help me out.…”

“But
why
?” I blurted.

Mandarin studied me, her eyes narrowed slightly.

“Well,” she said after a long pause, “you’re, like, Washokey’s resident genius, right?”

“I do fine, I guess.”

“You don’t have to be modest,” she said. “Not around me. Like I said, I’m flunking, and graduation’s getting close. And I sure as shit ain’t going to stick around, not even for an extra day. So, what do you say? Is there any chance at all you’re free to come to my place this afternoon?”

I replied in involuntary gulps, like hiccups: “I can come. I can help.”

“Perfect.” Her smile exposed a row of crooked bottom teeth. “Come around five-thirty, if possible. Wait—you need my address. You don’t know where I live.”

I shook my head.

“Here.” Mandarin withdrew a fat red marker from the seat of her jeans and took my arm, extending it in front of her. I held my breath as she tattooed her address onto my flesh in bold red letters:
34 Plains Street
. She didn’t release my arm right away. I felt the cool touch of each of her fingertips separately, like bits of ice.

“So five-thirty, yeah?”

“Five-thirty,” I said.

“Bring your textbooks. I always forget mine.”

Finally, Mandarin dropped my arm. She waved, her hand fluttering like a hummingbird’s wing, and sauntered off down the hall.

My eyes traveled back to my arm, tracing the cherry-colored letters, and stopped at the water bottle in my hand. I glanced around to make sure I was alone. Then I tipped my head back and tried to swig like Mandarin had. But when the final bell rang, I choked.