Authors: Jennifer McMahon
My Tiki Girl
Table of Contents
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Jennifer McMahon
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
eISBN : 978-1-101-04348-6
[1. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 2. People with disabilities—Fiction.
3. Emotional problems—Fiction. 4. High schools—Fiction. 5. Bands (Music)—Fiction.
6. Jazz—Fiction. 7. Homosexuality—Fiction. 8. Family life—Connecticut—Fiction.
9. Connecticut—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M225375My 2008 [Fic]—dc22 2007028276
Published in the United States by Dutton Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
www.penguin.com/youngreaders
For all the Dahlias
and Maggies out there
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my agent, Dan Lazar, and to my editors, Mark McVeigh and Maureen Sullivan.
Above all, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the writers, artists, and activists whose strength, courage, and determination have made books like
My Tiki Girl
possible.
1
All the girls
in tenth grade hate Dahlia Wainwright. They say she’s a witch and that if you touch her, you’re cursed. They say she’s so fugly the boys have to put a bag over her head to bone her. But as far as I can tell, Dahlia doesn’t waste her time with boys. And the truth is, the girls hate her because she’s prettier than any of them and it’s not that
all dressed up with blue mascara
kind of pretty like Sukie Schwartz or Heather Tomasi. It’s the kind where she could be covered in mud or stung from head to toe by bees and her beauty would still turn heads. The girls hate her because the boys all want her. The boys hate her because they can’t have her. So Dahlia hangs out alone between classes, sneaking out to the soccer field to rest her back against the goal and smoke. Today, during lunch period, she’s right where I knew she’d be: braced against the white goal frame, the net behind her like a spiderweb, while she watches to see who might wander in.
I had walked into the cafeteria, and the first thing I saw was Sukie Schwartz holding court at a long, rectangular table. I heard the buzz of their talking, laughing, teasing, and it mixed together in this sickening way with the gray-meat smell of overdone hamburgers, perfume, sweat, new sneakers, and floor wax. I hurried to the nearest exit before Sukie could catch my eye, and now I’m hobbling my way out to the soccer field where a single girl stands smoking and reading.
I say hobbling because I am a Frankenstein girl. The bones in my right leg are held together with screws and a metal rod. I walk with a stiff-legged limp. I used to use a cane, but don’t anymore. My father says I still should, that I haven’t healed completely from my last surgery, but he’s not the one who has to deal at school. I mean, the movie-monster limp is bad enough, right?
Dahlia, I’ve learned from the gossip, just moved from Delaware. I’ve lived here in Sutterville, Connecticut, my whole life. It’s where I lost all my baby teeth. Where tiny hamster, gerbil, and bird skeletons lie in rotted-out cardboard coffins beneath the oak tree in our backyard. Also where, if some future archaeologist goes digging, they’ll find the remains of a plush toy: a gray terrier named Toto I buried after the accident.
Sometimes it seems like my life is divided into two halves. I call them BTA (before the accident) and ATA (after the accident). I don’t say this out loud or anything, but it’s how I’ve got things arranged in the file cabinet inside my brain. It’s been less than two years since the accident, so the ATA file is pretty small.
If I were giving you a tour of
my
Sutterville, I’d show you the Elff Soda factory where my dad is sales manager, the big blue Colonial house we live in, the town pool where I used to go to swim and flirt with boys with my ex-best friend Sukie Schwartz, the Paramount Theater where I had my first kiss with Albert Finch during some sci-fi movie, and the bench in front of Tip of the Cone where my mother and I would sit and eat our brownie sundaes with mint chocolate chip ice cream and extra nuts whenever we had something to celebrate.
I’d also show you an intersection three blocks from the junior high, and it would look like any regular four-way stop to you, traffic moving north and south, east and west. But it’s not just any old intersection. It’s where my mother died.
“Hey,” I say to Dahlia as I limp straight toward the net. She keeps reading and smoking her sweet-smelling, crackling cigarette all the way down to the filter before crushing it out under one of her worn combat boots.
The truth is, in my old life, my best-friends-with-Sukie life, I would have thought a girl like Dahlia was a total freak and probably made fun of her behind her back, rolling my eyes at her clunky boots, Salvation Army wardrobe, and pinup girl lipstick, which is way too dark for her complexion. But in my new, ATA life, things are different. I have no friends. Not real ones anyway. No one gets me. I spent all last year being the freakiest girl in our class and everyone walked around me carefully, holding their breath like I was made of smoke—one wrong puff and I would disintegrate.