My Tiki Girl (9 page)

“Wow, thanks for the tip, Heather,” I say, just dripping fake sincerity. “I
totally
appreciate your input.” Heather reddens a bit, which thrills me no end, but my heart is still hiccupping —
car accident
;
his mother died
. I know I have to talk to Joey.

“See ya later, rock stars,” Heather says. She winks before following Sukie off down the hall.

“Joey, huh?” Dahlia says once they’re out of earshot, making my face burn.

“He’s just a kid in Shop class,” I say, my voice coming out more defensive than I meant. “He has a scar.”

“Whatever you say,
Mags
,” Dahlia says with a sly smile.

8

My dad and
I are in the living room eating dinner on wooden TV trays pulled up in front of the couch. Big bowls of beef stew are steaming in front of us, and the evening news is on. They dump all this really depressing stuff on you about wars and genocide and corrupt politicians, then, at the end, they do this cutesy little human interest story that’s supposed to make the world seem okay again.

Tonight it’s about this girl my age who is walking across the country to raise money for the homeless. Her dad is walking with her, and they’re already halfway across. The girl says that you can’t think about the whole journey—you have to go day by day, step by step. She’s says God gives her the strength to keep on going.

“Well, how about that?” my father says, clearly moved by this girl’s dedication.

“Whatever,” I say, trying to sound unimpressed, but the truth is, I have this big rotting lump in my stomach because I feel like a complete loser. This girl is doing something important, something great. Something no one (except God maybe, if you believe that) told her to do. And me, I can barely get myself out of bed in the morning.

I wish I could tell my dad all this. I want to open my mouth and tell him everything I long for, right now at this moment: to do something great; to make some kind of difference in this sorry-ass world. But the thing I long for most is to turn back time to the night of the accident, only this time around, I’d remember the dog.

And while we’re on the subject of longing (and since this is a total fantasy), I’d also tell him the truth about my best friend, Dahlia Wainwright. How she’s invaded my every thought; how little pieces of her have made their way into each cell of my body like some crazy disease, leaving me achy and feverish. I’d tell him about the way I catch myself staring at her mouth, wondering what her lipstick would taste like.

But I can’t say that, can I? So I’ll play it safe and stick to music, which is pretty much all my dad and I talk about these days.

I’ve been asking him all about Artie Shaw, about jazz. My dad has kind of an encyclopedic mind when it comes to jazz, and he’s been telling me all about Shaw’s career. Last night he told me Artie Shaw played with Billie Holiday, and they toured together throughout the South. Today at school Dahlia said she’d never heard Billie Holiday, and when I described her voice, said that she had died of a heroin overdose, Dahlia begged me to bring one of my dad’s CDs over. Who’d have thought I’d be borrowing my dad’s music?

Tonight he’s explaining improvisation.

“It’s all about letting go,” he says. “Letting the music take over, just flow through you.”

“I’ll never learn how,” I tell him.

“It’s not something you can learn,” he says. “It’s something you feel. Like falling in love.” He smiles at me, his eyes watery behind the thick glasses.

My face burns a little.

“Go get your clarinet,” he says.

I push aside the TV tray, go to my room, and when I come back, my dad is sitting at the piano. He stares at the keys a minute, blinks real hard like he can’t make sense of what he’s seeing, then puts his fingers down and starts to play.

My dad is actually playing the piano, and I’m so startled, I forget all about Dahlia and how freaked out I am about the way she makes me feel. I even forget the accident. I watch as my father’s whole body changes. He looks loose, like a puppet man. He’s playing “I Got Rhythm,” and he nods at me to join him. I lick my lips, pick up the clarinet, and start to play. It’s like that girl on TV said, you can’t think about the whole journey. I’m just going step by step, note by note. I’m following along the best I can, and my dad’s hammering at the piano, shouting, “That’s it, let it flow, Mags! Let the music take over!” And I relax a little until the music really is just pouring out of me. I’ve got magic fingers. I feel like I’ve just heard a secret that someone promised never to tell, and when I look over at my dad, he’s smiling like he’s heard it, too.

9

Dahlia Wainwright is
my best friend and will be forever. The tea leaves told her so. Dahlia and I brew pots of green tea that Leah buys at an Asian market in West Hartford. We drink the tea in cracked thrift-store cups and when we’re through, Dahlia reads the leaves left on the bottom.

Leah keeps a shelf in one of the kitchen cupboards full of loose teas and jars stuffed with Chinese herbs: roots and powders that are supposed to give you strength, stamina, and vitality.

“What’s my fortune today?” I ask Dahlia, pushing my cup her way across the table in her kitchen.

It’s the day before Halloween, and Dahlia and I are sitting at her kitchen table with the teacups and a bag of licorice allsorts. The GUITARIST WANTED flyers have been up all week, and if anyone other than Troy has approached her about joining our band, she hasn’t mentioned it. This afternoon we’re supposed to be working on our science project, but she’s reading our fortunes instead. She’s wearing a hippie skirt covered with elephants over a black bodysuit. Strands of straw-colored hair have fallen out of her ponytail and down over her forehead and eyes. She’s so beautiful, so perfect right now, that I could scream. She pushes the pieces of hair back, tucks them behind her ears, and takes my cup in both hands, holds it like it’s extra-fragile. It’s thin beige china with a delicate ring of blood-colored roses. None of the teacups in the Wainwrights’ cupboard match. Each cup abandoned, the one remaining piece of a set whose mates broke long ago. Salvation Army teacups: wedding gift china; cups from the attics of dead grandmothers; cups rescued, pulled dusty and forgotten from the backs of pantries.

“You will fall in love, LaSamba,” Dahlia says, her blue-gray eyes narrowing, then growing wide as she searches the bottom of my cup for the future.

My heart drops into my stomach like a cannonball.

Shit
, I think, looking away from her face, down at the elephants marching in perfect lines across her skirt.

I think I already have.

It’s not like this is the first time I’ve considered the possibility, but hearing it out loud, I realize it’s true. For weeks the idea of being in love with Dahlia has been there like a toothache I’ve been trying to ignore.

A girl. I’ve fallen in love with a girl.

This is not the way it was supposed to be. I mean, this is not the big moment I’ve been waiting for all my life, the one all the magazines, books, and movies prepared me for. This is not some cute boy who is going to offer me his class ring and take me to the prom. This is a
girl
. And not just any girl, but dark, intense, freaky outcast poet girl Dahlia Wainwright.

I’m officially panicking now, because it seems pretty much for sure that I, Frankenstein girl, have gone and turned queer, which is the second-biggest shock of my life next to waking up in the hospital and being told about my mother. And now, just when I think things couldn’t get much worse, my face has turned beet red, and Dahlia is looking up from the cup and smiling like maybe she already knows.

Dahlia and I have only one class together, Earth Science with Mr. Knapp, who wears tight polyester suits, his small head appearing to sit right on top of shoulders sprinkled with dandruff. He has chronic bad breath and a white film that sticks to his lips and gathers at the corners of his mouth when he talks. No-Neck Knapp, Dahlia calls him, but I feel sorry for the guy. It’s the only class I ever raise my hand in.

For the most part, I’m in the classes with the smart kids. Dahlia takes the easy classes, but not because she’s dumb. I mean, she reads Sylvia Plath and Carl Jung for fun. She’s smarter than I am. Anyone who knows anything can see that, but she just doesn’t try. She’s got her mind on other things, bigger things than algebra and sophomore English. She’s writing songs, memorizing poems. She doesn’t believe in putting time into homework. She does hers on the bus on the way to school and hands in pages of incomplete problems, essays consisting of only one or two paragraphs, the margins full of scribbled lines of poetry.

Meanwhile, there I am like a sucker diligently doing my homework at our yellow kitchen table every night while my dad watches his cop shows. Some nights, if I’m at Dahlia’s late, I’m up until midnight working on it. Sometimes I wish I could be like Dahlia and care less about grades because, to tell you the truth, it’s kind of exhausting to try to keep up with homework, Dahlia, and the band.

In Earth Science, we’re studying rocks and minerals. Dahlia and I are lab partners, so we’re doing this rock project together. We have to collect specimens, mount them on a sheet of cardboard, and carefully label each one. After school, we go for walks to find the rocks. Dahlia picks up anything she thinks is pretty. I go for variety. I know we can’t hand in a collection of all quartz and mica.

Dahlia says the stones I choose are ugly—chunks of granite, smooth feldspar. I tell her what the rocks are when I hold them in the air in front of her, small offerings. Igneous. Sedimentary. Metamorphic. She says I’m a show-off. A suck-up to No-Neck Knapp. Last week, I caught her writing
Maggie loves No-Neck
on the desk. It was in pencil, so I erased it before anyone saw.

Jonah knows about rocks. He collects them, too, offers us some of his best specimens. He says that different rocks have powers, like the quartz crystal he wears to protect him from trolls. Jonah spends a lot of time collecting, and it’s not just rocks he finds, but oddly shaped sticks, tufts of moss, giant hard fungus pried off dead trees, puffball mushrooms that make clouds of smoke like atom bombs if you step on them. He’s gone for hours after school and comes home just in time for supper with his black knapsack loaded with finds—old railroad spikes, pieces of broken reflector, corroded pennies, the skull of a squirrel. Each of these objects has powers, and he lines them up carefully on his bookshelves. His room is like a museum.

Jonah’s out on one of his excursions now, and Leah is in bed. It’s one of her sick days where she spends the whole time either in bed or on the couch with the TV on. We have to be quiet so she can rest. We want her to gather her energy so she’ll be well enough to go trick-or-treating with us tomorrow.

Dahlia and I are at the table in the kitchen. Between us are rocks, cardboard, and glue. Our half-finished mounted collection has a teapot resting on it, making a circular water stain just below the row of metamorphic rocks. It’s due tomorrow, and I’m thinking there’s no way we’ll get it done. I’ve never handed in anything late in my life, never got a grade below a B, so the idea of a big red Incomplete is stressing me out.

“So, we’re going to Troy’s Saturday,” Dahlia says matter-of-factly as she pours herself another cup of tea.

“What? Why?”

He got to her, I think. Maybe
I
should memorize some Sylvia Plath poem if that’s all it takes.

“To hear him play. See if he’s any good.”

“But you said there was no way. You said he was pathetic.” I’m practically whining now.

“I know. But there are other factors.”

“Like what?”

“Like that he’s got a basement to practice in. He’s got amps and microphones. And, best of all, he knows the manager at Terrapins. They have all-ages shows, the battle of the bands, all that. If we get good enough, this guy can get us gigs there.”

I don’t like this. I don’t want gorgeous, hotshot Troy Farnham ruining our band. Mostly, I don’t want him stealing Dahlia away from me like he once stole Sukie, but that wasn’t the same at all—I wasn’t in love with Sukie.

I’m about to object to Troy, to remind Dahlia what a poser he is, when we hear the front door open, and Jonah comes flying in, his knapsack making a thud as it hits the living room floor. He tears around the corner into the kitchen without slowing.

“I’ve discovered something,” Jonah blurts out, his voice all wheezy, like he’s been running for miles.

“What is it?” Dahlia asks, setting down her cup of soggy leaves.

“A cave,” he says in a whisper, his eyes huge. “The cave of the String Man.”

“What do you mean?” Dahlia asks.

“I’ll take you. You have
got
to see this, Tiki. We have to hurry before it gets dark.”

“This better be good.” Dahlia eyes Jonah as she rises from the table, but I can see she’s happy to leave the rock project behind.

“What about the rocks?” I ask.

“They’re rocks, LaSamba,” she says like I’m the biggest idiot on earth. “It’s not like they’re going anywhere.”