Stranded (9 page)

MAYBE I SHOULDN’T HAVE FOUGHT MY COUSIN.
Maybe I should have abandoned my Mrs. Steve Allen aspirations because he was a cold fish, pretty nasty with his “yank her hair” business. In Mrs. Boogman’s minivan on the ride home, I told Natalie she could have him.

He still controlled a percentage of my hormones, and he had only to express doubt in her regard and my heart would be fully his again, even if he
had
acted as if my cousin was on his who-he-had-done-it-with list. I was sure his calling her Li while we wrestled meant something. Maybe
he
had gotten Natalie pregnant, as I had begun to half believe because of how insane he seemed to make her. To be fair, if I were shipwrecked with Steve on a deserted island, I could see myself thumping
my
head on a coconut tree every time he wandered
into the compound. He brought out the inner Gilligan in me, too.

Poor Boog. Somebody should have been in love with him. He never stroked
his
imaginary penis or took sides in a girl fight.

Natalie and I were buckled into the backseat of the minivan being chauffeured to Nana’s and away from Mrs. Boogman’s house, where we had chosen to be so disruptive. Mrs. Boogman eyed us in her rearview mirror. Perhaps she believed one of us was about to start frothing at the mouth. I think her money was on me.

“Steve’s family owns the Allen John Deere dealership,” Natalie said, defending the honor of her boyfriend. She seemed to be admitting that she had big plans for her and Steve’s future. I wondered how Bearded Boyfriend fit into the picture. Natalie could be strange and was beginning to seem like she had more secrets than I could count. Mrs. Boogman whipped out her decoder ring to follow the conversation too. She watched us rather than the road and nearly thumped a plastic garbage can as she turned onto Lynn Street. When she pulled into Nana’s drive, Mrs. Boogman pursed her lips to say something but then paused, her hand on the steering wheel.

“Thank you, Mrs. Boogman,” Natalie and I said in unison.

“Uh-huh,” she grunted.

She left tire tread on the pavement as she pulled away.

“Nice impression you made, Kelly Louise.” Natalie turned on me when we were alone.

“I think she was more afraid of you.” I followed behind her into the garage.

Inside, a box of green booties sat by the kitchen door in an area squared off by carpet remnants. The booties were the kind worn by doctors on television shows. A white card in Nana’s handwriting read: “Please use.”

“She’s kidding,” I said.

“No, Kelly Louise, she’s
not
.” Natalie yanked off her coat and shoes and slipped a pair of booties over her feet.

She confirmed my fears about what they would look like—as if she might start dancing and singing like a leprechaun whose cereal was magically delicious. There was no way I was going to put them on my body. Natalie tugged a pair from the box (like Kleenex) and handed them to me.

I gave some thought to what I could do with them instead of covering my socks—smother unicorns,
maybe, or throttle her. All kinds of terrible consequences seemed to lurk around the corner if we didn’t resolve at least a few of our differences.

I had kept Natalie’s secret, but little by little, my mental health and clear skin were being affected. I couldn’t predict the next time I might start throwing things, or what kind of strangeness was going to blurt from my mouth in English class, or how weak-kneed I’d behave anytime a boy batted his long lashes and acted nice instead of mean, which Steve was. I could see myself sitting in Ms. Duncan’s room, my hand in the air and me saying that the plate tectonics surrounding the Pan-African landmass were a result of my cousin having a baby in a cornfield. Natalie’s situation was too close to the surface to keep a lid on.

Katy once tried to hide that she secretly lusted after Peeps Easter candy even though everyone else thought it was disgusting. Because of the lie, she vomited on her biology textbook.

Natalie stepped around me and went into the kitchen. I followed at a distance and hoped it would allow me to escape Nana’s inspection. Having stumbled on such a travesty as disposable shoes, Nana was likely to check for them. Nana was peeling and laying
vegetables naked on a cutting board by the sink. A pot simmered on the stove; the kitchen smelled of garlic and rosemary.

“You two are home earlier than expected,” she said, her back to us.

What if Natalie and I had been lured to Boog’s house and the scene we made was part of an elaborate entrapment scheme? I remembered a police car
had
been parked in the Boogmans’ drive.

Maybe Natalie was right. Maybe I was an idiot. It’s amazing how fast a good blast of emotion will make you feel embarrassed ten minutes later.

Nana seemed so cheerful and distracted as she cooked, at peace with herself, that I felt guilty subjecting her to my recent bad behavior. She was a surprising contrast to Mrs. Boogman, who might be helped by brain vitamins, which have a calming-focusing effect, too. Grateful to see Nana in a healthier condition and relieved she was busy with something besides scrubbing and scouring, I tiptoed to the hallway. I stood a good chance of making it to Natalie’s and my bedroom if Natalie kept her mouth shut.

“It’s Kelly Louise’s fault,” Natalie burst out before I had gotten four feet, committing the unthinkable crime of disturbing Nana while Nana was in a Zen state. I hoped Nana would give her a good talking-to.

“
What
is Kelly Louise’s fault?” Nana asked, still innocently peeling away.

“She misbehaved and Mrs. Boogman had to drive us home.”

“Oh my heavens.” Nana dropped her carrot.

Natalie described the catfight and what happened to Gene Chizik, making it sound as if he came off the wall because of the shoe throwing rather than the flimsy nail the Boogmans used to hang him. Natalie implied I had rocketed into some kind of madness that frightened even Loogy. She told Nana that she thought I was imbalanced and might need psychiatric help. She knew Nana harbored worries about my behavior, and she preyed on the poor old woman’s poor mental health and paranoia.

I tried adding a few clarifications to Natalie’s tale, including that she had pinched me first, but I sounded dishonest, even to myself. The problem with being sexily unpredictable your whole life is that when you want to sound serious and believable, people don’t necessarily notice.

Nana was so shocked and appalled that her eyes didn’t focus on either of the two of us but bored into a shelf above the kitchen table that held a family of pottery squirrels.

“Kelly!” She let out a groan.

Some people’s names get extended when they are in trouble, but Nana chopped me in half, completely amputating the “Louise” side of my personality, which is my better side, Katy agrees.

“It wasn’t my fault,” I said.

“Whose was it then?” she demanded.

“You act like
she
has never done a bad thing in her life.” I pointed at Natalie.

“Your cousin has grown to be a responsible”—Nana sailed into the litany of what made Natalie perfect and untouchable in everyone else’s eyes. I had heard the comparisons, but I didn’t think Nana really believed them.

I was hurt that between Natalie and me, Nana had picked me as the one to distrust. I might have seemed undependable, but what had I ever really done wrong besides steal one prom dress for an hour and sexually harass my math teacher? It didn’t seem fair that Natalie got away with being such a liar and I got labeled and accused and made to button my shirt an extra button every day.

I rushed to my bedroom and slammed the door. I hoped Nana would follow and give me the idle hands/devil’s tools lecture because then I could tell her about Natalie without feeling guilty, but Nana left me alone to settle down.

Maybe I was crazy—as nutty as Nana with her obsessive-compulsive cleaning. Maybe there was something in the local drinking water that was affecting my cranial cell structure. A claustrophobic sense of pinkness surrounded me, so I shoved and tore at the walls until I cleared a space for my poster of dead Heath Ledger in
Brokeback Mountain
, pushing in the tacks so hard I broke my only unbitten fingernail. I experienced a sense of joy at the thought that Natalie would now have to sleep in the same room as a dead man who once played a homosexual in the movies. I searched in my closet for a belt that would make her squirm with thoughts of lesbians.

Five minutes later, Natalie returned to the room and calmly removed poor dead Heath and replaced him with her poster of a puppy nuzzling a kitten. Instead of tacks, she used gummy stuff to protect the wall surface, the way I’m sure Nana would rather have had it done. I tried to burn her with my eyeballs, but she was so cool she neutralized the attack.

She approached her desk, arranged a palette of colored markers in a fan in front of her. Whenever I used a marker, it stained my fingers, and somehow at the end of a project there weren’t enough caps to go around. I had to choose which was going to be the sacrificial
lamb and left to dry out in the plastic bag I kept my writing utensils in. So much organization seemed like a trick on Natalie’s part. Considering how long I had known that she had abandoned Baby Grace, how mean she had been when she spoke as if Kenny and I were related, how unkind she was to Heath Ledger, it was strange that I was only now beginning to fight so hard against her delusions of goody-goodiness.

I guess I could be a little dense.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

I sensed she wanted me to speak first.

“I have to make signs for the vigil the youth group is organizing tomorrow night.” Natalie showed me a white piece of poster board with “We
you, Baby Grace” already drawn in purple.

She started a second sign that included a picture of what was supposed to be a fetus. Underneath she wrote, “Baby Grace, U had a right 2 life.” It was sad, really, how poor an artist she was.

“You should help make a couple,” she stated.

“Me?” I was shocked.

“Yes, you. You know what Nana says about idle hands.”

“You’re a fake,” I shot back at her with feeling.

“Why are you so negative?” She switched from writing in blue to green, closing the blue pen before
setting it down. “Do you ever go a day without criticizing something or acting like Heaven isn’t good enough to suit you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like what you say about my turtlenecks. About how they make me look like Speed Racer.”

I told her that was the advice a city girl gives a country one. Then I returned us to our main point.

“I’m talking about how evil
you
are.”

“You shouldn’t be disrespectful.” She faced me, her signs forgotten. “You make a lot of extra work for Nana.”

“You’re a murderer.”

She capped another pen.

“I’m not a murderer, Kelly Louise, and you can’t tell anyone you think it.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Aunt Francine says we have to keep what we know about Baby Grace a secret.”

“Mom said that?” I asked.

Mom had asked me not to say a word to Natalie about Baby Grace. I wondered how long Natalie had known I had knowledge of the secret. It explained why she had needed me to be so perfect, why she had been watching me so closely.

“I’m not a monster,” Natalie said.

I admitted she was more of a pest, but she did harm to others, and Nana would never understand.

“I didn’t mean anything to happen. People will hate all of us if they find out,” she told me.

“Would they?” I asked.

“You know they would, Kelly Louise.”

According to Katy, every girl should practice her game face, especially if she is, like Katy, planning to be a professional poker player. At first I thought Natalie was bluffing. She explained that she thought she had been ill, that Baby Grace was like a sickness. But she was over it now. I heard an echo of what Mom had told me to believe.

Nana opened the door and crooked a finger at me. Apparently she had decided, because Natalie and I were quiet, that I had settled down and was sane enough to lecture.

“Come help me in the kitchen.”

“Not right now.” I waved Nana away—a mistake. Nana didn’t like being waved at.

Natalie dropped her head and buried her face in her hands. A confession had come out of her faster than vomit had exploded from Katy, but it hadn’t cleared any air between us or told me what I wanted to know. I preferred my conversations with Katy—crazy on purpose.

On one of their recent shopping trips, Mom must have given Natalie the same pep talk she had given me on the night of the soda stain, about not blaming ourselves and Natalie putting her troubles behind her. I knew Mom loved Natalie, but I was surprised by how much she had begun to treat Natalie as if she were blameless of doing anything terrible.

Meanwhile, Nana insisted I follow her. I might as well have been Kenny Stockhausen with his police escort. She reached for my elbow.

“I have something I need you to do,” Nana said.

“I’m coming.” I followed, turning to glance at Natalie a last time before I left our room. She scribbled on her sign, her back to Nana, but she wasn’t as good at composing herself as she thought because her hand shook and the heart/fetus began to look like a kidney bean.