So Much Pretty (19 page)

“Oh, shit.” She was embarrassed she had no tampons, and the other suit in her locker looked different than this one. Not a racing suit.

“It’s okay,” Wendy said, smiling at her. “I’ve got some in my locker. It’s not a big deal. And no one will say anything if you come out with a different suit on. If you’re worried about it, say your other one had too much drag.”

Alice was worried about it. She grabbed her spare suit and a plastic bag for the bloody one and walked into one of the stalls. Wendy came back from her locker and gave her a tampon over the gray metal door.

“Dunn has these on hand in his office, too,” Wendy told her. “Though I don’t think he needs them, being nine months pregnant and all.”

Alice wished Wendy wasn’t a senior and that they were going to the same school. Something about Wendy reminded her of Gene. The way she didn’t say a whole lot and was no-nonsense and funny. Too bad she’d graduate before Alice even got to high school. She was worried about having friends after Theo left.

“I’d rather be at practice during my period than sitting in class,” Wendy said, and her low voice echoed against the tile walls around them. “You feel energized, not all tired and crampy.”

Alice came out of the stall wearing the new suit. Wendy raised her eyebrows and looked like she was trying very hard not to laugh. “Wow!” she said. “Cute. It has a
frog
on it!”

“Well, this is my old suit,” Alice explained. “I’ve had it since fifth grade.” She felt like she was going to cry, standing in her bright green child’s bathing suit with this older girl who was being so nice to her. She groaned.

Wendy looked into her eyes and smiled, and Alice could see that the girl had felt embarrassed before, too, but was strong from it, that it had made her nice—a little different than nice. Wendy could laugh at the suit and laugh at the way things like that made you feel, but she wasn’t laughing at Alice. Maybe she was laughing at everyone who cared about embarrassing things.

“Oh, Jesus, don’t even worry about it,” Wendy said. “It’s okay. If anybody says something, just tell them it’s your lucky suit.”

Alice smiled then, and Wendy White’s laughter echoed against the tile, leaked out, and hovered over the blue pool and the bodies of their teammates cutting through the water.

Alice

HAEDEN, NY, MAY 2008

B
Y NINTH GRADE
, Alice had cut the frog off her little girl’s swimsuit and sewn it onto the side of her black TYR racing suit. The girls she swam with when it still fit had gone off to college, except for Megan, who was a senior now. Mr. Dunn had dropped sixty pounds. The girls still called him fat, but most of them didn’t know how he looked before which had been almost obscene. Alice was now tall for her age and had well-defined back and shoulder muscles. Long arms and legs. A graceful, light way of moving. And she had cut her hair very short.

Her face had become more delicate, classic, but her high cheekbones and strong straight Roman features were still dusted with freckles. She was never very conscious of the way she looked, but she did put black mascara on her blond eyelashes the day she went to meet Stacy Flynn in the field outside the elementary school where the hoop house stood—where the butterflies were eating their way out of their cocoons. The sky was cloudless, and as she got closer to the school, she could smell the flowers that the team had planted for the garden; lavender and rabbitbrush, sea pink, burning bush, aster, columbine, and bee balm.

Alice had looked inside the hoop house. It was lush and warm and fragrant, filled with a diffuse green light. A separate world from the sprawling concrete of the school and parking lot and the mud and scalped grass of the fields. Wendy White, who used to be on the team and never went to college, sat sleepily inside, her skin damp from the humidity. Several butterflies fluttered above the plants surrounding her, lighting on them and closing their wings and then moving on. Alice didn’t know if Wendy
had come for the opening or if she had walked up from the Alibi, decided to take her break among the flowers. She looked like she was beginning to fall asleep, and Alice didn’t disturb her. She knew how it was to sit and think, and it would only be a matter of time before the kindergarteners burst into the garden, running on the stone paths between the flowers, startling her and stirring the butterflies in all directions until the sound of their bodies striking against the tight green plastic arc of the hoop house pattered like rain.

She walked outside, eager for Flynn to arrive. She wanted her to write about the flowers and the butterflies, not the swim team or the kindergarteners. Some cars pulled into the parking lot, and she watched parents and little kids get out. They started running toward the butterfly house to meet her and to be in the paper.

Alice did a cartwheel while she waited for them, then stood on her hands and started walking in their direction. Three little girls ran to her in their jeans and flip-flops, and when they got close, she tucked into a somersault and then stood on her feet in front of them.

“Are there more hatching?” one of the girls asked.

“They don’t hatch,” Alice said dryly. “You entomologists will have to do a little more research.”

The other two girls were doing cartwheels on the grass, showing off for her. She smiled at them and looked up to see the group of swimmers approaching just as Wendy came out from beneath the green plastic canopy, brushing her sweaty hair from her forehead and smiling, making her way around the short bodies rushing forward to see the butterflies’ new house.

“No
way
!” Megan shouted, seeing her. “I thought you were working until seven.”

“I am. I came for a little break ’cause I thought Kenzie and Beth Ann would be here.”

“Yeah, right, you came because the team is here! And you want to get your pretty face in the paper!”

Wendy laughed. Only a few of the girls knew her from swimming. Most knew her as a waitress. Alice came over and bumped her fist against Wendy’s. And Wendy said, “Hey, Captain. Awesome butterflies.”

Before Alice could say anything to her Megan said, “How’s your cowboy, anyway, Wen? Nobody ever fucking sees you anymore. You’re always playing golf or something.”

Wendy laughed and put her arms around Megan.

“Are Crystal and Kenzie taking swimming?” Megan asked her.

“Hell, yes. Like you have to ask.”

Flynn’s car pulled into the lot near the elementary school, and the girls watched her stub out a cigarette with her low mud-covered boot, then grab her camera and notebook off the front seat. Alice had known Flynn from the other stories she’d written, and she thought the woman was really funny. She always seemed tired and unfriendly until she started interviewing you. Alice liked Flynn. Before they ever met, she had imagined Peg, the reporter from the
Short & Sweet
, acting that way. Alice and her parents actually called the
Haeden Free Press
the
Short & Sweet
. And for a minute when Alice saw her coming toward them, she missed Theo.

“Al,” Flynn said, “sorry I’m late.”

“No problem,” Alice said. “This is a good day to take pictures of the butterflies.”

A boy wearing green gardening clogs ran out of the hoop house, laughing, and his friend chased him through the field to a stand of trees. Flynn quickly and with no expression took pictures of them as they ran past, then looked back up at Alice. “This thing is great. What made you decide to built it?”

“You have to see the
inside
,” Alice said, eager to get to the real story. “We did it because our team and the elementary school have to do all these bake sales all the time, to get money to do things, and I really hate baking and sales. So I thought why don’t we do a swim-a-thon instead and then give half our money to the
kindergarteners for science projects—they never have money for anything fun. So we ended up doing a butterfly-a-thon to build a butterfly house. Some money went to the fifth-graders for this project, and then our money goes to support the team so we can keep winning.” The swimmers laughed and clapped. “Right?” Alice said to them. “Right? They’ll have to fly us somewhere
really
far away to find anyone who can beat us.”

“That’s right, motherfucker,” Megan said.

All the girls laughed, and Flynn raised her eyebrows and nodded with a big smile. “Nice language for the newspaper,” she said. “So how many miles did you guys actually swim?”

“We swam a combined one hundred miles,” Megan said. They could hear chatting and squealing from inside the hoop house.

“All butterfly? How much did you make?”

“Three thousand two hundred and eighty-seven dollars,” said Alice a little impatiently, “and yes, all butterfly.” This was Alice’s event, but also, how could they have built a science project for freestyle?

“You could have gone door-to-door and asked everyone in town for two bucks,” Flynn said.

“Not everyone has two bucks,” Alice said.

Flynn smiled, wrote something in her notebook. “Good point.”

“And training pays off. Look at Wendy.” Alice put her hand on Wendy’s shoulder. “Butterfly was her event when she was on the team.”

Wendy looked shyly at the reporter and smiled, shrugged. Alice noticed that all the girls were bigger than Flynn. Strong and broad.

“Why aren’t you swimming anymore?” Flynn asked Wendy.

“I’m working.”

“Okay,” said Alice to Flynn. “Now you have to come inside and see these things, because they are amazing. And that’s the real story.”

“Wait wait wait.” Flynn put her pen behind her ear. “I need a picture of the team.”

The swimmers stood in front of the hoop house, mugging for the camera, making muscles. Wendy stepped away from them, stood back and watched them.

“Quit it,” Flynn told them. “You got to get closer together. You.” She pointed at Wendy. “Crunch in there. I want everybody in the picture.”

Megan squeezed Wendy to her side and then shouted, “Ten and
oh
!”

“As in: oh! I just got my ass handed to me,” Wendy said quietly.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Flynn said.

“Make sure you put that we are ten and oh,” Megan told her.

“I will.” Flynn snapped a few pictures of the girls laughing, then a few of Alice by herself, her smile bright and eyes shining.

Alice loved the butterfly house. The smell, but especially how the butterflies moved. She watched as Flynn entered the garden and her smile grew wider. Alice could see that the place made her happy. She loved the way everyone looked excited when they first saw the garden. People thought butterflies were beautiful, but really, they were strange, so strange, and almost ugly, resting and working, hovering camouflaged as one thing—so they could one day be another.

Wendy

B
UT WHY INSULATION
?
No. Think. Think. Think
. She knew houses. She could feel her way along. If only there were a light, she could figure out where she was from the spacing of the joists. It was a small space. As soon as there was some light, she’d be fine. She knew how houses were built.
Oh God. Please don’t let me be behind a wall. Jesus. Crazy. That’s crazy. It was impossible, what that would mean—behind a wall? Not possible. In a basement. That’s it. A basement or a shed. Holy Jesus fucking fuck
. “Hello? Hello?”

Then footsteps and whispering.
Oh, thank God. She must have fallen asleep. She was asleep. This was a dream. Was she really calling for help?
She called again, then there was laughing.
Okay. There was laughing, so no one could hear her
. Or she wasn’t really calling.
Maybe she was sleeping. Maybe she was dead
. She thought she might be dead, in between worlds. Her back and her arms and legs hurt. Her hands hurt.
Do hands hurt in the afterlife? No. Can’t be
. She couldn’t look at them, it was too dark.
This could still be a dream
, she thought because she couldn’t really see. Or she could be blind.
Oh, Christ, please, God, no. Don’t let it be blindness
.

“Please,” she yelled, “somebody please help me. I don’t know where I am.”

Footsteps coming forward, getting louder.
Someone was coming, thank God
. “Please!” she yelled, screamed, hoped she was yelling, hoped she was not dead. Her throat burned. Sounds got louder, sounds were right at her ear, right above her, and this couldn’t be right, she was dizzy now. Right above her head.
Was she just waking up? Waking up right now after an accident, maybe she’d been in a coma since the accident, when did this happen? Right above her head, footsteps, and then they, them—someone—one foot tapped like someone waiting for something. Right above her. She could feel it. The creak of a floor, the creak of a ceiling above her. Of boards on the other side of where she was. She heard laughing. Four, five voices. Maybe all the same voice. Voices from the Alibi! She got hurt, and someone must have brought her to the Alibi to recover. Thank God, thank God, thank God, that was it. Oh, please, that’s it. And she was not blind and they didn’t know she was awake and it wasn’t that bad or they wouldn’t be talking or maybe she was drunk but didn’t remember drinking
.

The tapping was right there at her head. Then more voices.
Doc Green? Someone must have known she was hurt and couldn’t find a real doctor right away. Must have been near the dairy and Doc Green was already there. That was it! No. God! Was it Doc Green? Was she dead?
She tried to stand again, hit something hard, and fell forward. There was laughing. There was laughing when she fell, like someone heard it but they must not know what it was. Where she was. What had happened. They didn’t know she was there.

EVIDENCE
P47910

4/16/09 9:02
P.M
.

Sgt. Anthony Giles

Epic Themes in Monique Wittig’s

Les Guérillères
(The Warriors)