Like Mandarin (6 page)

She stopped pacing.

“It’s
suffocating
. And it ain’t just suffocating me, but everybody.”

I thought of her mom and the duct tape.

“Everybody’s dying a little more every second,” she said. “Like frogs stuck in a septic tank. But not a single person in this shit town gets it.
Nobody gets it
.”

To my astonishment, she dropped to her knees. Right in front of me, on the hideous old-man carpet. She grabbed my hands. I willed them not to shake.

“Except maybe you, Gracey.”

Why do I get it?

“Did you know I read your essay?”

I swallowed hard. “You
did
?”

“They had ’em all hanging on the bulletin board outside Beck’s office. I had a couple chances to flip through yours while I waited. I read it and I was like,
finally
, here’s somebody who understands!”

I had trouble meeting her eyes. Because how could my essay have meant something to her when I’d written it for
them
—all the people she hated?

“It was just for the contest.… I don’t even remember what I wrote, exactly.”

“You’re not like the rest of them. All everybody does here is bitch and moan about how they want to move to the big city, how there’s never nothing to do here—but they don’t mean it. Not truly. Otherwise, they’d
try
. But you …”

She squeezed my hands.

“You’ve got your shit together. You know how easy it is to get stuck in this place, and unlike the rest of them, you’re actually trying to get unstuck. You see, Gracey? We’re two of a kind. That’s why I wanted you to come over. We’ll die here if we don’t get out.”

She was so close to me I could see my reflection in her pupils.

“You’ve still got lots to learn. But we’re two of a kind. I can
feel
it.”

Two of a kind.

What if she’s right?
implored the hopeful girl inside me, pounding on the bars of my rib cage.
You have it in you
. What if I really could be like Mandarin?

“M-maybe I should go.”

“Go? Why?”

Because I’m not you
, I wanted to say.
You’re wrong, and the girl inside me is wrong. I’m nothing like you at all
.

I couldn’t look at her as I pulled my hands from hers, closed my textbook, and stood.

“It’s not like I’m asking you to run away with me,” Mandarin said. “I just wanted to talk. Even in your essay you said—”

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” And then I fled.

I listened to my sister sing while I did the dishes. Her voice was as warm and fluid as the sudsy water pouring over my hands. She was rehearsing Andrea Bocelli’s “Con Te Partirò” for the upcoming pageant.

In
Italian
.

It had all started the afternoon when Momma put an Italian opera album on repeat. After just two loops, Taffeta was singing along. She couldn’t understand Italian or read Italian words. But she could sing Italian perfectly.

That was my sister’s secret weapon.

It was a mighty good one. So good it seemed almost blasphemous for something that transcendent to be unveiled in a small-town pageant. I’d been in dozens of child beauty pageants and attended dozens more. I’d never heard a contestant sing in another language. As a matter of fact, outside of our crappy high school language classes, I’d never heard anybody in Washokey speak another language, other than the handful of Mexican migrants who picked sugar beets in the fall.

I drizzled a trail of lime green soap over a pink plate and scrubbed. Although I never admitted it, I loved listening to Taffeta sing. As long as I stayed in the kitchen while she rehearsed, I could eavesdrop without Momma’s knowing. But that night, Taffeta seemed tired. It was past her bedtime. Momma’s off-key screeching kept interrupting the song. And worst, the memory of what had happened at Mandarin’s house kept pushing against the backs of my eyeballs, threatening to flood.

Mandarin Ramey had invited me into her world. And I had
refused
her.

But her world isn’t what I thought it would be
, I thought, trying to console myself. Just like her crummy bedroom, or the inside of her house. The reality was entirely different from the fantasy. Like opening Pandora’s box when I’d only considered the engravings on the outside. I thought she’d be her confident, carefree self.

I didn’t know she’d be so
vulnerable
.

When I pulled my arm from the suds, I noticed Mandarin’s address—
34 Plains Street
—still visible on my skin. I reached for the dish soap and squeezed a trail over the angular red letters. With the rough side of my sponge, I scrubbed until my skin felt raw.

“Grace?” Momma called. My sister stopped singing. “Could you come here a minute?”

In the living room, Taffeta stood on top of the coffee table, wearing her new blue pageant dress. Her cheeks glowed pink with exertion. My mother, kneeling in a pool of sewing debris, squinted at the needle she was attempting to thread.

“You want me to do that?” I offered.

“No, I wanted you to …” She paused. “Just a second. One second. Almost got it. Oh, it slipped. These things are awful. There! It went in. Lovely!”

I glared at her. She was being Princess Adrina: teacup-toting British royalty out of a bad television miniseries. Her newest character to go with the phony accent. Even when we were her only audience, she felt it necessary to pretend. The real Adrina Carpenter emerged only when she yelled. Or on those mornings when she sat staring at the kitchen table, inexplicably depressed.

“I need you to hold the dress tightly around Taffeta’s middle while I sew it together. This is real fine quality fabric, did I tell you?”

With both hands, I pulled the dress taut around Taffeta’s middle. I leaned away from Momma as she leaned in to stitch. Even so, I was assaulted by the scent of the apple conditioner she used to glossify her brown hair, mulled with the smell of the spicy cinnamon gum she liked to chew. A pleasant fragrance to anyone else, but it made me gag. I breathed through my mouth.

Mandarin’s mother is dead
.

The thought set my insides reeling. Everybody knew that Mandarin lived alone with her father, Solomon Ramey, a man who seemed to exist only in and around his bar—except for the time I saw him at the Sundrop Quik Stop. He was tall and gaunt, his face dreadfully unique: a beaky nose, yellow skin, thin black hair, a crumpled brow. Like some kind of bogeyman. When I tried to imagine him at home with Mandarin—the two of them drinking coffee at the table or eating canned chili in front of the TV in that dark house—the scenario seemed outrageous. Almost as outrageous as my helping Mandarin with her schoolwork.

Mandarin’s mother had always been this shadowy, mysterious figure the town knew little about. Some people supposed she was an alcoholic. Others claimed she had a pain disorder. Physical or mental, they never specified. Still others assumed she was simply too poor to take care of her daughter.

Nobody guessed Mandarin’s mother was
dead
.

A dead father, like mine, was nothing shocking. In a town where every man owned at least two guns, hunting accidents happened frequently. Also mining accidents. And car wrecks, like the one Momma’s parents had been in, even though the county highways were wide and lonely. Washokey men always found ways to get themselves killed. Often explosively.

Fathers, in a way, were expendable. Having a mother was the important thing, the thing that made you normal.

Well, except in my case.

Momma tapped Taffeta’s stomach with the back of her hand. “Can’t you suck in a bit more, baby?”

“But then I can’t sing.”

“At the pageant you’ll have to suck in and sing at the same time. You might as well start now.”

Taffeta glanced at me. Then she sucked in her belly as best she could and attempted to squeeze out the notes.

Without looking at me, Momma remarked, “So I heard you went to tutor the Ramey girl today.”

I practically jumped. “From who?”

“I’ve got my sources.”

Polly Bunker
. Alexis’s mom had spies everywhere, probably including Plains Street. Half the mothers in town were part of her coven of gossips.

“I don’t like you going over there,” Momma said quietly, as if Taffeta couldn’t hear her. “That girl’s a tramp.”

“I
know
that,” I said, hating the plaintive tone in my voice. “But she needs help in school. Ms. Ingle asked me to. It’s for my service project.”

“I thought we decided you’d work backstage at Little Miss Washokey!”

“
You
decided that.”

She shook her head. “That girl’s beyond help, Grace. The mother’s who-knows-where, and the father’s a drunkard. You
know
what they say about him.…” She lowered her voice even more and tipped her head toward mine. “About how when Mandarin was younger, he used to—”

“Momma, I don’t want to hear it, all right! I know what they say!”

“I just don’t want you getting mixed up with a girl like that. There’s no future for her but trouble. Believe me, I know! I know better than anybody. And the last thing you need is for people to associate you with her. They’ll look down on you, too.”

She wound the thread into a knot and then snapped it off. “You can let go now.”

In my bedroom, I slammed the door and fell face-first onto my mountain of pillows. They had been my grandmother’s, and they reeked of musk and age. I smashed my face into them so deeply I could hardly breathe.

My mother was clueless. Didn’t she see? She was only making Mandarin seem
better
.

Late that night I lay awake with a single white sheet pulled over my ear. It was warm out, and I had left my window open. The darkness chimed with the midnight music of crickets.

Several minutes had gone by before the low hum rumbled into my consciousness. Distant at first, the sound grew louder and louder as it approached, until it came around the corner and surged into a roar. Smashing one hand over my nose, I kicked off my sheet, darted across the room, and slammed the window shut right as the mosquito truck lumbered down our alley. I could see it through the chinks in my backyard fence as it hunched along, saturating the air with poison.

I remained at the window until the truck rounded the corner. The roar faded into a dull rumble. Now the crickets were silent.

I’d forgotten that spring brought mosquitoes, followed by the pesticide trucks to destroy them. Spring also brought the cottonwood snow that stuck to the bottoms of my shoes. It brought the agony of fire-ant bites, the crash-shatter of thunderstorms, and the dread of another sunburned summer. Three endless months with nothing for me to do except reread old books and accompany Momma and Taffeta on pageant trips.

Even more than summer, I dreaded that first yellow cottonwood leaf in August, which meant autumn, and the start of school. At least school filled my time.

Most of all, I dreaded Washokey’s winters. The chapped hands, the puddles in the hallways, the searing winds during our walk to school. The burny belch of radiators, making our classrooms reek like wet dog. And the two dreary weeks of holidays I spent cooped up with my mother. It took centuries for spring to arrive.

Spring—which I dreaded.

I dreaded
every
season. How tragically depressing. Like when I sat in class, staring at the clock, willing the second hand to move faster. Until I remembered I had no place to go. Not until college, at least.

As long as I lived in Washokey, would there be nothing for me to look forward to?

I stared out the window, both my hands gripping the sill. In our backyard, which we rarely used, I saw a plastic baby pool filled with stagnant brown rainwater. My rusty bicycle, half hidden by dry grass. A pair of Taffeta’s old red pageant shoes.

I sighed, then crossed the room and fell back onto my bed.

I found myself thinking about an incident in seventh grade. A bird had somehow flown into the busy cafeteria during lunchtime. He darted from one side of the room to the other, flying faster and faster, until at last he slammed into one of the enormous windows. Then he picked himself up, dove across the room, and slammed into the opposite window.
Thunk
. He did it again, and again. The cafeteria was filled with hoots and laughter while the bird wrecked himself against the deceptive square of sky. I’d wanted to shout at everyone, to shut them up. But even if they’d heard me, no one would have listened.

Right now I felt like that bird.

Mandarin’s words flared back to me all of a sudden, as if she were flitting back and forth across the dark room beside me, beseeching:
We’re two of a kind. I can feel it
.

But how did she know?

And then I remembered: she had read my essay.

Sure, I’d written it for the judges. But there were some truths, too. Things I didn’t quite believe but wanted to. About how we all had leaders inside us. And we couldn’t let other people hold us back. Because that first step into the future had to be ours alone.

Before I fully realized I was moving, I’d jumped up, yanked open my dresser drawer, and thrown on my clothes over my pajamas. I shoved my desk chair over to the window. Heaving it open, I climbed from the chair onto the sill. I lowered myself until my feet were dangling in the open air, over the ground almost ten feet below.

I hung there for a moment, my heart thumping.

Then I let go.