Prettiest Doll (6 page)

I could tell he was mad. Not at me. Just mad about the whole dang thing.

“Would the shots work?” I finally asked.

“Yeah, they'd work. I'd be taller. So?” He shrugged his shoulders. “They wouldn't make me a better chess player.”

“Don't you
want
to be taller?”

He shrugged again. More silence. I fought an urge to fill it up with questions.

“So I ran away,” he said. “About a week ago. I left her a note, so she'd know I'd be okay. I told her I would call her when I could.”

“You can use my cell,” I said.

“No, because then the police could figure out where I was and come and get me.”

“Really?” I was impressed at how much he knew, how smart he was. “She must be worried.”

At least he'd left his mama a note. But he should have told her why he was leaving. I never did find out why Uncle Bread just up and left. He never said. It was disrespectful, really, after all he'd said about loving me like a daughter.

“I can't let myself think about that,” Danny said.

“Do you have money for motels and food? Do you know where you're going?” I asked. There was so much I wanted to know, all of a sudden.

“A little money. I've been sleeping on the bus,” he said.

“Where do you take showers?”

“I wash a little in bus station bathrooms.” He looked embarrassed. “I'm probably not very clean.”

“I don't understand,” I said. “What are you going to
do?
”

There was people noise behind me, and I turned to look. Everyone was filing out of church, bundling into coats against the cold, heading off to their cars. I realized I'd forgotten it was cold.

“I have to go. My mom's going to be looking for me,” I said. “But I'll come back later.”

“I was going to go out,” Danny said. “I've been in this shed since yesterday. The bus doesn't come until tomorrow morning.”

“What bus?”

“The one to Chicago.”

“Is that where you're going?”

“That's where I bought a ticket to,” he said. “But I got off here, just to stretch my legs, and then I went into that store—Turner's, you said?—and that milk shake was so good. I lost track of time. The bus left without me. So I have to wait until Monday for the next one.”

“What's in Chicago?”

He paused.

“It just looked like a cool city,” he said.

“My school's up Mound Street a few blocks. Dale Hickey Junior High. There's woods behind the basketball courts. I can be there around three,” I said. “I could bring more food.”

He stood up and handed me his grease-streaked paper plate. “Don't bring any of that ambrosia stuff,” he said. He turned and loped back toward the shed. “I gotta hide until they all clear out. Thanks,” he whispered, half looking back at me over his shoulder.

I slipped in the back door and threw away the plates. Mrs. Carle was sponging down the countertops in the kitchen. “You been outside this whole time? You'll catch your death,” she said. “I think your mama's out front.”

Mama was already in the car when I found her. “Well, where you been?” she asked. She was in a good mood from Trudy and all the food.

“I took a walk,” I said.

“Are your shoes muddy?” She craned her neck to look down at my feet, her good mood evaporating. “ 'Cause you know I don't like mud in my car, Olivia Jane.”

“I know,” I said.

“You take 'em off on the front steps, just to be sure,” she said, pulling away from the curb. “I don't want that mud on my carpets.”

I nodded, too tired to say anything, thinking how, all my life, there'd be shoes I'd have to check, mud I'd have to scrape off, carpets I'd have to vacuum. So much effort to be clean and pretty and new-looking. Just thinking about it wore me out.

I managed to get out of the house by telling Mama I was going for a jog. “So I'll look toned for Prettiest Doll,” I said.

“What do you need a backpack for?” she asked, running a knife around the inside of a cake pan she'd just pulled out of the oven. The kitchen smelled vanilla-y.

“Extra weight. Books,” I lied. “Miss Denise says extra weight is good for toning.”

“You just watch that mud,” she said. “And the puddles.”

The sky was still thick with clouds, but every once in a while there was a hole and you could see past all the gray to blue. I love that—the way the blue is always there, even if you can't see it. I kept looking up, heading up Mound Street, forgetting all about the puddles, hoping for a glimpse of blue.

Danny was sitting on a downed shagbark hickory where the basketball courts give way to woods. His hair was wet and slick, with comb marks running through it.

“You look clean,” I said.

“I washed up at the gas station,” he said. “And I washed some clothes in the sink.”

“How are they going to dry?” I asked and then saw behind him how he'd hung them over some low-hanging boughs. Two shirts and two pairs of underwear. I looked back at him.

“I bet you were in Scouts,” I said, trying not to let my embarrassment about the underwear show.

“No, I hate that stuff. I just brought Woolite and a hair dryer from home. I used the hair dryer in the bathroom to get most of the water out. They can air-dry till morning.”

I sat down on the log and let the backpack slide off my shoulders. “I can't believe you thought of that. The hair dryer, I mean.” I pulled the backpack around to my lap. “I probably would have just gone to a laundromat.”

“Laundromats cost money.”

He said it as if I was acting all superior, as if going to a laundromat was the same thing as going to Buckingham's for barbecue every night of the week.

“It's not like we're rich,” I said. “I told you my mom works two jobs.”

“What about your dad?”

“He's dead.”

“Sorry,” he said. He looked as though he really was. “My dad's just an asshole.”

“Yeah,” I said. I know a lot of kids whose parents are divorced. Some of them like their dads; some of them don't. I just let people say how they feel and don't say what I really think, which is
At least your dad's not dead.

“You go to all those pageants, though,” Danny said. “Those things cost money.”

“Hey,” I said. “I know that. You think I don't know that? You think my mom works two jobs for fun?”

“Okay, okay.
Sorry.
Jeez.”

I hugged the backpack close.

“Now maybe I'm sorry I brought you food,” I said. “Maybe you're just going to think,
Oh, this rich girl's showing off how much
food
she has.”

Actually, I had worried about giving him our food when we had to be so careful about money. I talked myself into it by saying that that's what Jesus would do. But it got on my nerves, the way Danny was acting all judgmental about pageants. It wasn't his business how Mama spent our money.

“No. I won't think that. Really,” he said.

He had long eyelashes, which I hadn't noticed before. Sitting this close, I couldn't stop looking. If he were a girl and did pageants, he wouldn't even need false ones.

“Really,” he said again, and then looked at me hard and deep, until I felt myself believing him.

“Well, okay,” I said.

“So what did you bring?”

I handed over the backpack and he unzipped it fast.

“It's just cold cuts and bread and a couple of stale doughnuts,” I said. “One of my mom's jobs is at a bakery and she gets to take the day-old stuff home.”

“Chocolate glazed are my favorites,” he said, pulling out the plastic grocery bags I'd stuffed almost full. I thought he'd eat one right then, but he zipped the backpack up and held it out to me. “Thanks. This is great. This'll get me through till tomorrow.”

I remembered then that he was leaving in the morning. I realized that I'd never said goodbye to someone I'd never see again, except my dad, who didn't really count because when I said goodbye to him I was four. Also, I didn't know he was going to end up dead on the 475.

“Do you know
anybody
in Chicago?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“So it's just because you think it looks nice?”

“It'll have snow. I've never seen snow.”

“Missouri has snow. You've never seen it, really?”

He shook his head.

“It's not that great,” I said. “It's pretty when it first falls and sticks, but then it gets gray and slushy.”

“I just want to see it,” he said. “Sometimes, you just want something different, even if it isn't better.”

“I guess I get that.”

“I'm sick of southern accents. And rodeos. I hate the rodeos,” he said.

“Wouldn't you want to go somewhere with a beach?”

“I don't know. Not really.”

“No one hates the beach,” I said. I wasn't sure about that, because I've never actually been to a beach, or at least not a beach with an ocean attached to it. I'd gone to Table Rock Lake with my grandpa once, but we just rented a boat at the marina near Lunker Landing and fished for striper.

“Beaches just aren't my thing,” he said.

He did look pasty.

“I think it'd be nice,” I said, “sitting on a towel, getting tan, watching the waves. Your skin smelling like coconuts. Maybe it'd be like on TV, where waiters bring you pop in glasses on a tray. Maybe it's not really like that, but that's how I like to think of it.” I rubbed my hands up and down my arms, trying to get warm. “Just one time, I'd like to order a Shirley Temple on the beach. And not worry about how it's really just 7-Up and the restaurant is giving it a fancy name so they can charge more.”

“It figures you'd like the beach,” Danny said.

“Why? 'Cause I want to lie in the sun? 'Cause I want someone to bring me a Shirley Temple for once?”

Danny looked at the ground and dug his toe into the soft, wet dirt. “I've got better things to do than just lie around,” he said. “And anyway, all that sun gives you skin cancer.”

We sat without talking for a bit. I thought how we had nothing in common. He played chess, like Richard Androtti, who smells like benzoyl peroxide and the inside of an old suitcase. And Danny was kind of nasty, the way he made comments about how I looked. I was used to it—people always think that if you do pageants and are pretty, you must be a jerk or stupid—but I usually stay away from people who think things like that.

Still, I didn't like the idea of never seeing him again.

“I know someone in Chicago,” I said. “You could stay with him. He wouldn't mind. He loves helping kids.”

“That's okay,” he said. “I'm used to being on my own.” He grabbed a dead hickory leaf and rolled the stem between two fingers. “Who do you know?”

“ Uncle Bread.”

“ Uncle who?”

“It's Fred, really, but when I was little I called him Uncle Bread and he liked it so much I kept doing it. He lives in Chicago. In an apartment. On the third floor.”

“I don't know,” Danny said. “I don't even know him.”

“He's a teacher. He teaches fourth grade. He cares about kids. Really cares about them. Even the ones the other teachers don't pay attention to, who read indoors at recess, or have only one friend, or maybe none. The ones who would rather play video games than basketball. The ones who don't stand out enough and get ignored or left behind. All of them. He would really like you,” I added.

“I wish I had a teacher like that.”

“The kids love him. Everybody loves Uncle Bread,” I said proudly. “Except Mama. Uncle Bread doesn't believe in pageants, which gets her all riled up. And she doesn't like that he moved to Chicago to teach poor kids in the ghetto when there are plenty of Missouri kids who need help. And also, she's not crazy about his being gay. She says there are classes he could go to, pastors who could pray it right out of him.”

Danny laughed. “Don't tell that to
my
gay uncle. He's a lieutenant in the Houston Fire Department. Nobody messes with
him.”

I felt a flare of jealousy that Danny's uncle lived in the same city with him.

“Wouldn't your uncle ask me about my parents?” Danny asked. “He would probably call the police if he knew I'd run away.”

“No, he wouldn't. Not if I told him not to,” I said.

Actually, I wasn't sure about this.

“I don't know, Liv. I think teachers have to tell. I can't take the chance that he'd report me. I'd have to go back,” he said.

I felt a shiver, hearing him say my name.

“You don't have to say you ran away. You can say you're seventeen and a high school graduate. Seventeen's only two years older than fifteen.”

“He's not going to believe I'm seventeen. He's not going to believe I'm fifteen,” Danny said.

“Maybe he would,” I said.

Danny pulled something crumpled from his jacket pocket and smoothed it out against the hickory log. It was a bus schedule. I watched him study it. I wondered if the lines in his forehead really did make him look taller, or if that was just me wishing.

“The bus to Chicago leaves tomorrow at six forty a.m.,” he said. “It gets to Chicago at seven fourteen p.m.” He was quiet for a while, thinking. “Would your uncle mind if I got there at night?”

“He wouldn't like you walking around,” I said. “He'd want to meet you at the station.”

“What's his last name? I'm not calling him Bread.”

“Tatum, same as me. Fred Tatum. You can call him Fred.”

“Mr. Tatum,” Danny said. He stuffed the bus schedule back in his jacket pocket. Then he sat, a little hunched over, his hands dangling above the leaf-covered mud. “It would be nice to have a place to stay until, well, until...”