Orphea Proud (8 page)

“There!” she said, plopping down on the bed. “Footsteps!” She pointed to a spot with her pinky. “Footsteps in the snow! They must be yours. That’s so cute!”

I grabbed the picture. “Let’s see.” I squinted, trying to see what she had seen. She leaned over and pointed to a tiny trail of specks.

“Are you sure that’s not dirt?”

“They’re footsteps. Don’t you see?”

I shrugged. “Amazing. All these years I’ve had the picture and I never knew they were there.”

She poked me in the ribs. “Because you really weren’t looking, Duckfeet.”

“Oh my gosh—I just had a memory!”

“Something new?”

“Yes! I remember making my footsteps! I was making them with the boots that were too big for me. And I thought that my footsteps looked like a giant’s. Like the giant’s in
Jack and the Beanstalk!
I told Nadine and she started laughing at me and so did some other people.”

“Maybe the aunts!”

“Yeah, maybe. That’s so cool—I can remember the actual feeling … making a footstep in the snow. That was the first time I ever remember seeing snow.”

“We should go there,” Lissa said.

“Where?”

“Proud Road.”

“When? It’s miles and miles away.”

“We’ll make it a stop on our road trip.”

“But you want to go to L.A. to find your birth mother.”

“We’ll stop on our way.”

“Come on, Lissa. You don’t have to go to some hick place on top of a mountain, just because I have a picture on my dresser.”

“It probably isn’t a hick place at all. It could be artistic!”
Artistic
was one of our favorite words in
those days. “Anyway, you and Nadine are in the picture. I want to be there, too.”

“Where?”

“With you on Proud Road …”

A couple of days after my visit with Icky and Marilyn, Rupert surprised me in the front hall when I got back from school. It was unheard of for him to be home at that hour. It was even early for me, but since Lissa died I’d been skipping out on after-school activities. Rupert had a drink in his hand. Not that he ever overdid it; he never drank more than one, three ounces of bourbon over cracked ice with a pinch of sugar and a slice of lemon. Since he asked me to make it sometimes, I had the drink down pat.

“You’re home early.”

“I was waiting for you.” Cutting right to the chase, he presented me with Icky’s envelope. “Where’d you get this?”

“None of your business. Don’t tell me you’ve been in my room?”

“I’m your guardian. If you’re stealing, I need to know.”

“You know I don’t steal.”

“How do I know that? I thought I knew you, but then—”

“If you’re referring to me and Lissa, drop it. If you hadn’t busted into my room that morning, she’d be
alive. What were you doing? Listening at the ceiling for a squeak in the bed?”

“You had that ignorant music blaring. That’s why I opened the door. I knocked but you didn’t hear me.”

“So now Lissa is dead.” Inside I was boiling with red-hot anger. “Guess you wish I died, too.”

“Oh, come off it.”

“Then you wouldn’t have to be reminded of the horrible, disgusting sight that you saw—two girls hugging, ooh!”

He put down his glass. “I saw a lot more than hugging.”

“Yeah and you freaked out,” I taunted. “You tried to kill me.”

“Don’t be so melodramatic.”

“You busted my lip. You cut my eye. Icky and Marilyn saw me that day. That’s why they gave me the two hundred dollars, to get away from you.”

He snarled. “You got the money from that lowlife?”

“They’re not lowlifes. They’re good people. They’re kind. Something you wouldn’t know about.”

“They wouldn’t be so kind if they knew you were a slut.”

“I’m not a slut! Give me my money.”

“No.”

“Come on, Rupert. It’s a business deal. They’re paying me to write poems.”

“I’m supposed to believe that?”

“Believe what you like. Just don’t take my money. You have enough of your own. You don’t need mine.”

He grabbed my shoulder. A shiver went through me.

“Let go of me. I have to do homework.”

“You haven’t done homework in weeks. Ruby spoke to your teachers. You’re flunking out, and you used to be an A student. All because of some identity crisis.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That thing with you and Lissa—Ruby read about it—two girls who don’t know who they are, pretending to be boys. Some sick experiment.”

“It wasn’t like that!”

“Is that what your Icky and Marilyn friends say? I hear the guy’s an ex-con and who knows what rock she crawled out from under.”

“They understand me more than you ever did. And they know all about me and Lissa!”

His face darkened with rage. “You told them?”

“Yes.”

“Are you trying to ruin me?”

“It has nothing to do with you.”

He raised his hand. I moved out of the way.

“You’d better not hit me again!”

“I’ll do better than that,” he said, turning away. “You’re grounded. Don’t leave this house.”

All that evening I was on pins and needles. Ruby came home and cooked; then she dragged Rupert off to tango class, of all the insane things. Even after she got
her degree, Ruby was always studying something. I was relieved when I heard my brother’s car roll out of the driveway. I thought of calling Marilyn and Icky, but I knew they’d be busy getting ready to leave. If only I were going with them …

The very next day after school, Rupert and Ruby met me at the door. My duffel bag and knapsack were in the front hall.

“What’s that?”

“You’re leaving,” said Rupert.

“What?”

“You’re out of control,” Ruby said. She avoided my eyes.

“Fine. Where am I going?”

“That’s for us to know and you to find out,” Rupert taunted. “Get in the car.”

“Not until I know where I’m going.”

“Don’t start.”

“Just get in,” Ruby pleaded. “It’s for your own good.”

“Can I at least go to my room, before you kick me out?”

“Five minutes,” said Rupert.

I splashed some water onto my face in the bathroom. My closet was pretty cleaned out. I grabbed the picture of me and Nadine and my journal. I was excited but also terrified. Maybe they were sending me to a psycho ward, where doctors would think I was crazy and dope me all up. I tried to get a grip. Anywhere would be better than being with Rupert.

“Let’s go.”

“You seem eager,” said Rupert.

“Nothing left here for me.”

He hurled my stuff into the car, and the three of us took off.

The trip was endless. I still had no idea where I was headed. I’d acted tough in front of Rupert, but honestly I was scared shitless. Pretty soon it was dark. I occupied myself by floating on the ceiling. A kind of out-of-body experience thing that’s really easy to do if you have imagination. Lissa is the one who taught me how to do it. First you close your eyes and imagine that you hear the buzzing of a fly. The buzzing noise tells you that the fly is hovering near. Next, you imagine that you see the fly; it’s hovering right above the center of your head, never leaving that spot. It’s only a hop and a skip to seeing yourself hovering up there with it. Then you experience a floating sensation and you’re on your own. You’re still sitting on the car seat, as in my case, but at the same time you’re also hovering up near the ceiling, looking down. Having a view of yourself from above is liberating, especially if you can also imagine boring your way up through the roof of the car and getting outside. Then you’re looking down not only at yourself, but at your car, the car in front and the one behind you, the landscape, and the highway. It’s kind of like
flying, no, actually, more like floating. Anyway, that’s what I did.

That’s only one of the tricks that Lissa taught me. She also taught me how to see people naked, and better still, in Rupert and Ruby’s case, see them as skeletons. I got a kick out of that. There they were in the front seat; thinking that I was all subdued, when in fact I wasn’t even in the car. I had escaped to the top of the world, where I could see them as they really were, a couple of skeletons. I found it very relaxing, so much so that I fell into a sleep where bits of me melted like sugar before I tumbled into blackness.

I dreamed of Lissa. She’d stayed over. It was the night before the snow day. A damp smell filled the air. I read her a new poem. We were sitting on the side of my bed. The poem was about a spider. It was peculiar, nothing like what I’d written before, this ditty that sounded kind of like a nursery rhyme. I recited in this screechy voice to make Lissa laugh. She doubled over onto the bed and kicked her legs up. We were so silly. She threw a pillow at me and I ducked. But I kept on reciting the poem. We were so happy. Suddenly in the dream there was a real spider on Lissa’s forehead. Huge. She didn’t know it was there. She was still laughing. Then I felt something on my thigh, and there was another spider, just as huge, on my leg. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out. I looked over at Lissa again and
she
was a spider! And so was I! I woke up screaming at the top of my lungs, and Rupert and Ruby were shouting for me to shut up. But I
kept right on, seeing how it was driving them crazy. Frankly I’m not sure I could have stopped. Something had snapped inside me.

I screamed myself hoarse, over the blaring radio, which Ruby had turned up to top volume to drown me out. Then Rupert pulled off onto the shoulder and got out. He threw a cold cup of coffee in my face. It stunned me but I still kept screaming. Screaming in rage, screaming in pain, screaming because I hated them and blamed them for what had happened.

Ruby got out, too. She opened my door and glared down at me. She looked possessed.

“Shut up!”

Then she did something really un-Ruby-like. She slid in beside me and got me in a headlock. Rupert got in the other side and gagged my mouth with her scarf. Then he bound my hands behind me with his necktie. It happened so fast. “Lie down,” Ruby ordered. “You’re overwrought.”

No kidding!

“I’ll stay back here with you,” she said, pressing down on my back until my face was flat on the seat. “Get some sleep!”

I didn’t sleep, but I did bite her expensive scarf. I also tried to tear my brother’s expensive necktie.

Just before dawn, we stopped abruptly, the only car in sight on a winding dirt road. Outside, the moon and sun were trading places, making the sky a split screen between night and day.

Rupert opened the front door and then Ruby
opened mine. For a giddy moment, I imagined that they’d driven me to some Godforsaken place to murder me.

Ruby undid the gag and my seat belt. I lurched past her, slamming my feet onto the ground, my legs throbbing from sitting so long in the same position. Approaching me cautiously, Rupert untied my hands.

“We’re here,” he announced in a weary voice. He gestured up the hill with his head. “I can’t take a chance of my car getting stuck. You’d think they’d get a decent road after all these years in this hillbilly place. Go on! You can walk the rest of the way.”

I blinked, trying to orient myself. There didn’t appear to be a single house.