A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (3 page)

Roger’s text said, Tel Big tree = Jesus. I thought about that for a second. It was crap, but it was crap that might work. Big was way serious about respecting other people’s religions, even Baptists’. Mostly because it gave her the right to not have one.

I put the cel phone under the table and tucked it between my leg and the chair. I waited there until Big came back in to put the coffee cup in the sink. Before she could say a word, I said, “You can’t take out that tree. It’s her
religion
, Big.”

Big cocked her head like a robin to fix me with one bright black eye. She said, “A tree isn’t a religion. It’s an object.”

“She’s a druid,” I said.

Big made a scoff noise, but it sounded like she had to force it. “Liza the Lorax, she speaks for the trees. Spare me. She’s only a druid because it gives her an excuse to be mystical and wear a lot of white.” Big was so flustered she said it like Liza was stil my whole mom, the one who knew that white made her black eyes shine and her pale skin glow gold. It made me flinch, because that mom was gone, and Big swal owed hard, like her throat hurt her. She blinked it away and said, “You sure are suddenly pro-druid this convenient morning, Mosey.”

I flushed, busted. When I was little, watching Liza prance off into the woods wrapped in a sheet with a bedrol and a foster dog, I’d always wanted to go, too. She never let me, and I was dumb enough to believe she was out there being deep and spiritual, sacrificing heaps of apples and grapes to the pine trees. I’d fol owed her one time, wanting to know how to be deep and spiritual, too. I’d learned hel a more about druidism than Big needed to know. I never told anyone, not even Roger, what I saw that day. I wasn’t about to start now, when I was trying to use it to save the wil ow.

I said, “Yeah, it’s retarded. But you wouldn’t let some godless heathen slap ham and mustard on some Catholic guy’s Communion bread.” Big cocked her eyebrow at “godless heathen,” but she was the one who let my mom exile me to Calvary to save me from my own predestined high-school sluthood. Too bad on her if she didn’t like me picking up the lingo.

Al she said was, “Don’t say ‘retarded’ like that. It’s not nice.”

“Big, you know that tree helped make her wel before!” That was too true for Big to smack down. Liza had been a clean and sober druid since I was a toddler. Before druidism Liza was a speed-freak atheist who bundled me up and ran away with me when I was only a couple of weeks old.

She’d hitchhiked across the country, reading palms and washing dishes for cash, al with me strapped to her back like a papoose. Before
that
she’d been a high-school free-love pothead who got knocked up at fourteen.

I knew because she told me. I couldn’t stop her from tel ing me, because she thought I should learn from her and Big’s mistakes. She was a wreck on
my
fourteenth birthday. While I blew out my candles, Liza sat, arms crossed, looking at me from head to toe. “You’ve outgrown that T-shirt.

It’s too tight. You don’t need to look a grown-up kind of pretty.”

I snorted. Maybe the shirt was old, but al it showed was that some merciful fel ow flatty in the Sears lingerie department had sold me a trainer with a little padding.

Liza leaned across the table, pushing her face closer to mine. “Just so you know, sex at fourteen feels about as pleasant as a hard case of constipation. Don’t you let a boy so much as round first base this year.”

“Oh, my God, I’m not having sex,” I said. I wished that my outgrown T-shirt had those words on the front. I’d wear it every day, so Big and my teachers and our neighbors and the kids at school would stop waiting for me to swel and pop into the shape of a porn star, new huge boobs ripping my top open, bleached-blond hair pouring off my skul in waves, slutting out like some whorey version of the Hulk.

Big picked up the knife and started slicing the cake, saying, “Hush it, Liza. It’s her birthday dinner.”

Liza passed me the first slice and said, “Yeah, and I lost my virginity less than a month after my fourteenth-birthday dinner, out on the track field at Pearl River High. I lay down in the long-jump trench with that asshole Carter Mac. He had a lubricated condom, which I cannot recommend putting on while kneeling in a sandpit, Mosey. That sand stuck to the—”

“Who wants ice cream?” Big interrupted, at about volume nine. I went ahead and started eating, because there was no stopping Liza when it was Story-with-a-Moral time. She’d even named me to keep my legs together: Mosey Slocumb, so I’d mosey real slow toward al the stuff you can’t take back. Though sometimes I wondered if the real moral to her stories was that she was hel a cooler than I’d ever be.

Liza said, “I went around for the next month thinking penises must be made out of emery board, and she needs to hear this, Big, if you want the girl to do any better than us. You had me when you were fifteen, too, so it’s not like you spent
your
fourteenth year doing needlepoint and thinking about Jesus.”

“Oh, my God, I’m not having any sex!” I hol ered around a huge bite of cake.

Liza said, “Keep it that way,” and Big said, “Time to open presents!”

It wasn’t exactly a Very Brady Birthday, but it sucked a lot less than my fifteenth. That was almost three months ago, right after Liza came home from the stroke-rehab center. She slumped in her wheelchair at the kitchen table while Big sang the birthday song alone and off-key. Liza gummed at her cake like she didn’t have teeth. Brown, suck-covered crumbs fel out of her mouth and stuck to her pajama top, until I wished I’d asked for anything but chocolate.

If Big real y believed that a pool would get my mom back whole, she’d kil more than a tree to make it happen. She stepped toward me now, leaning down and talking low. “Medicaid is not going to pay for any more physical therapy, Mosey.”

“Ask them again,” I said. Under my thigh I felt my phone buzz as a text landed in it.

“I’ve spent two weeks’ worth of lunch hours on hold, waiting so I can ask again and be told no again. I’ve fil ed out every form they’ve got. They won’t pay.” My mom was a bartender down at The Crow before her brain event, and bartenders don’t get health insurance. Big’d taken a loan out on our house already, to pay some of the hospital bil s and for Mrs. Lynch to come sit with Liza during the weekdays now that I was back in school.

The only good part of us being so broke was, Big couldn’t pay my tuition at Calvary. I’d started my sophomore year taking the bus to Pearl River High, back with al the kids I’d gone to middle school with. I stil had to leave the house in a knee-length skirt every day and change into jeans in the girls’ room. Big worried there was enough of my mom left to catch wise. At Calvary they cal ed Pearl River a “hive of vice,” and that was the only thing a Baptist ever said that both Big and Liza believed wholeheartedly. Liza thought if I went to Pearl River High, I’d be stoned by the end of homeroom and pregnant before third period. Like she was. Homeschooling was out, because Big worked al day and Liza said al she could teach me was how to make a perfect dirty martini. The second that Big grudgingly admitted Calvary gave me a better shot at col ege, my mom had pul ed a total coup and prepaid a year of tuition.

Under my leg my phone buzzed again. Roger, the only good thing I got out of that year at Cal, was texting up a storm.

“Maybe we can borrow a pool? Just please don’t take out the wil ow,” I said.

Big drew herself up as high as she could, which was only about five foot three, but I could see how her narrow shoulder bones braced. “Tyler’s coming to do it this morning. A wil ow tree can’t give me your mom back whole, not even if she prays to it.”

I thought it was more likely my mom would get so het up that a chunk of her brain would burst again and we’d lose the rest of her. But I didn’t say so. It was pointless to fuss when Big’s shoulders got al squared up like that.

“You’re gonna do what you’re gonna do,” I said, “but kil ing the wil ow is wrong. And it sucks. And it’s wrong.” Big didn’t unbend even an inch, so I pushed my breakfast away, and then I palmed my phone and stomped off to my room for my backpack. As soon as my door closed behind me, I flipped the phone open. Roger’s first text said, Wil ow > Pool? And the second said, R U DED?

I texted back, Sorry, Big fite. I am ful of lose. Pool > Wil ow.

Meet me in ur tree house.

I texted, School, fool.

He sent back one word: Skip.

I looked at that word. I was tempted, but skipping was a Liza thing. I didn’t do Liza things. If I got caught, Big and probably half my teachers would go ahead and assume I was already failing out, smoking diet pil s, and meeting senior boys in squads of ten behind the trailers. I thumbed in, Hel z 2 the no.

His reply came back so fast he must have had it pretyped in: I won’t let u get caught.

He didn’t understand, because skipping was super easy for Roger. He looked younger than he was because he was so short, and he had a great big head and round eyes like a bush baby. He said “yes, ma’am” and “no, sir” and held open doors for old ladies and passed out
Are You
Truly Saved?
tracts in the park during Youth Week. Plus, he was a Knotwood, and his mom ran the Calvary Booster bake sales, and his dad owned a car dealership in Pascagoula. Teachers never watched him hard enough to catch him perpetrating evil.

I flipped my phone shut without answering. I grabbed my heavy pack, slung it on my shoulders, and walked through to the living room. Liza was slumped in her chair, pointed at the super-loud TV. Big sat in the center of the ancient sofa, her slight weight pul ing the saggy cushions into a smile-shaped curve. With the two big front windows right behind her like eyes, it looked as though the whole damn living room was giving me a vile, gloaty grin, watching me tuck my tail under and creep obediently away while Big kil ed the wil ow.

Big was barefoot but dressed now in her polyester-blend bankbot uniform. I guessed she planned to go to work after Tyler took the tree out, like it was a regular day.

I tried one last time, giving her my best pleady eyebal s. “Don’t.”

“You are going to miss your bus and end up with a tardy if you don’t scoot,” Big said. She was sure that would light a fire under me. I never got tardies. Just like I never hooked her beers or snuck out to meet boys or even turned in a paper late. Never.

My eyes went al narrow. “Oh, yeah. If I got a tardy, the earth would fal into the damn sun.”

“Language!” Big said, but I was already stomping out the door. I paused for a tick on the stoop to let Big say, “Don’t you slam the—” before I slammed the door and cut her off.

It felt real y good. The sound rang in my ears, and my feet didn’t seem to want to walk me to the bus stop. Instead, before I could think it through, I ran around the side of the house, through the wooden gate, and into the backyard. I sprinted as fast as I could, my heavy pack slamming me in the spine with every step, and got behind the big oak tree in the far corner.

I clambered up the wooden rails nailed to the oak tree’s backside and poked my head through the hatch. Roger was already there, grinning because he’d heard me climbing up. He’d pul ed the old pool-chair cushions out of the built-in toy trunk and made himself a nest. He spent a lot of his skip days tucked away high in my backyard, reading Ayn Rand and sending me smug texts about not having to dress out for gym.

“I didn’t think you would do it,” he said as I scrambled al the way in and shucked my pack.

My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears, and I thought I might puke. I tried to sound cool, though, as I said, “Rats. I was about to text you to bring chips.” I yanked my Baptist-costume skirt down over my knees, prim like.

Roger rummaged in the cushions beside him and pul ed out a Big Grab of Cheetos.

“Who’s your daddy? Say, say, say it,” he chanted, and waited til I had rol ed my eyes and said in the flattest voice possible, “Roger is my chip daddy, oh, yeah, hol er,” before he passed them.

I opened the top, but then I couldn’t eat even one. My throat felt like it had screwed itself closed.

“OMG, what am I doing?” I said.

Roger said, “The right thing. When your mom sees that tree is gone, you need to be here.”

The oak was in the back left corner, so huge that Liza used to worry its roots would warp our fence and let one of her foster dogs out. The tree house had a big cutout window that gave me a good view of the wil ow, growing smack in the middle of our yard.

There was another window aimed back toward my house. The oak was so tal I could see a good piece of the road and a couple of our neighbors’ houses. The oak’s leaves were turning red and gold, but they were stil on, and I didn’t think anyone would see us peering out. Even so, my hands were shaking and my palms were leaking clammy sweat.

“I’m going to get caught. And then I wil puke. And then I wil be dead because Big wil kil me,” I told Roger.

“Don’t think about it,” he said, total y at ease. He reached for my backpack and unzipped it, pul ing out my civics book. “Here, study while we wait.”

I opened it and tried to concentrate. Most times I found it real soothey to put facts away in tidy bundles in my brain so I could unpack them al out onto a test and then get it back two days later with an A or at least a B on it, sometimes with a
“Good job, Mosey!”
note. I was a regular on the dean’s list, but the exclamation point always looked surprised to me.

I heard a car coming, and I dropped the book and craned out the front window to see if it was the Mighty Un–Butt Crack’s truck.

“Excel ent studying,” said Roger. “You should eat the relevant pages. Seems like you’d get more of the test material in you that way.”

It was only the Wheatons’ station wagon with those vile fake oak panels on the sides. If I left now and sprinted the woods track, I could catch the bus on Marlin Street, down farther on its route. Tyler might not show for hours, if he even came today. Big hired him because he worked cheap, he had his own tools, and he knew how to do al the stuff most families had husbands and dads to do. He’d snaked out our clogged toilet, built my tree house from a Home Depot kit, tarred our roof, and put a new battery in Big’s old Malibu, but he came when he came.