I reached up and touched my hair, to touch the barrettes, to pull the hair from my face. My hair had doubled in size, and it blew around my head, out of my control. I slipped one butterfly from my hair and then the other. I bent down in the wet mud, careful not to get it on my new coat. With a strong stick I started digging.
When the hole looked big enough I dropped the two barrettes in and quickly covered them up. Still kneeling beside the burial spot, I pulled my hair back with one hand and flipped a hair tie around it with the other. I tugged it all into a tight ponytail.
I was me again. The old me, the one I was used to.
I saw my bus in the far distance across the flats, just rounding the corner by the Johnsons’ farm. If I ran I would just make it.
Chapter 11
After almost a whole week wearing my new coat, it didn’t feel new anymore. Taylor didn’t feel new anymore, either. We were friends. We claimed the very end of one table in the cafeteria for ourselves.
“Do you think this weekend you could sleep over at my house?” Taylor asked me. She brought lunch from home and was opening various wrapped items and setting them out before her.
Somewhere in the back of my head I thought I was supposed to ask Taylor to my house next, since I had been to her house once already. But I didn’t want to. I liked Taylor’s house, even if I didn’t feel completely welcomed. Her house had what mine was missing. It was where I wanted to belong.
I even had a dream about it one night that week. I couldn’t remember it all, but it was sort of my house/Taylor’s house, and I was sleeping in my dream, which is always strange. Mrs. Tyler was saying, “Wake up, sleepyhead. Wake up,” in this soft voice. I woke up in my dream, but I knew I was still dreaming, and in my dream I knew Mrs. Tyler wasn’t talking to me. When I really woke up I had real tears in my eyes and my pillow was all wet, but I don’t remember crying in my dream.
“So can you sleep over?” Taylor repeated. “I already asked my mom if you could.”
“Sure,” I said. I was having the chicken taco boat, applesauce, carrot sticks, and milk.
“Don’t you have to ask your mom first?” Taylor asked. I answered, as I always did before I was ready to explain, “She’ll let me.”
“Good, because this is my weekend with my mom. And Richard is going away for business. Not that you wouldn’t like Richard, because he’s the best.”
Taylor took a slip from her bottle of V8. “But when it’s just us girls, it’s really special. I really want you to come.”
I could tell she meant it. Taylor said things just as she felt them, sort of like Cleo.
“It will be so much fun,” Taylor said.
“Your mom said I could come over?” I had to ask. “Sleep over?”
“Of course, silly. Why?”
“I don’t know I thought maybe she didn’t like me,” I ventured.
“Who cares what she thinks?” Taylor said, flipping her hair off her shoulder.
Yeah, who cares?
I thought, and I pushed away the feeling of hurt that was threatening to sting me. Who cares?
“What did you do last weekend in New York?” I said, to change the topic.
“My dad took me to a movie and we went out to dinner, and that’s really depressing because you look around and there’re all these other kids eating out with just their dads, ordering Shirley Temples, and you just know they’re divorced, too.”
Taylor was opening her dessert. Four cookies wrapped in waxed paper.
“But the divorce was really the best thing. They both say so. I want my mom to be happy, and she’s so happy with Richard.”
Taylor offered me two of her cookies.
“Thanks,” I said.
“My mom always packs me too much to eat,” Taylor said, biting into her dessert. “Why do you always buy?”
My mouth was full. The cookie was more crumbly than I had anticipated, so after I took a bite I had to shove it all in my mouth or else have it fall onto the table.
“Mmmfff.” I tried to swallow.
“Got milk?” Taylor laughed as she handed me my container.
If I laughed the cookie was going all over the place. I thought that would be more unsightly than either of my two previous choices. I breathed in through my nose slowly and took a swig of milk. My cheeks were stuffed full and milk dripped on my chin.
Taylor was hysterical. “You should see you!” she squealed.
I finally swallowed. I wiped my face. I looked at Taylor and said with a big smile, “I looove the chocolate glaze.”
We both nearly burst with laughter.
As soon as we gained control of ourselves, Taylor said, “Got milk?”
“I looove the chocolate glaze,” I said on cue.
And just like that we had a history. Two lines only we two understood.
And then I said, “I didn’t really tell you the truth before, Taylor. I don’t have a mother.”
Taylor stopped laughing and looked at me, waiting for me to finish explaining. She didn’t know that I was already finished.
“What do you mean? Are your parents divorced?” “My mother died when I was three.” It was my standard response.
Unless someone went further—and they usually never did—I never elaborated. Most people said a polite “Oh, I’m sorry” and that was it. But just in case, I had a prepared second response.
“How did she die?” Taylor went further.
“It was an accident.” I had to use my prepared second response.
Taylor’s face looked twisted. She didn’t say anything more. She did something more amazing. I was just about to carry my tray to the garbage, and she reached out and touched my hand.
“I don’t even remember her,” I said, like lines from a play.
“Oh,” Taylor said sadly. She shook her head back and forth. “An accident,” she said softly to herself.
“Let’s go out,” I stood up. “There’s only a little bit of recess left.”
“Okay.” Taylor stuffed everything into her bag.
Most of the kids had already finished and left. The only full table still sitting was the table of boys. They were usually the first to throw their food across the table, shout, yell, leave garbage all over, and run outside. Then I saw the cafeteria lady watching them with her eagle eye from a swivel chair by the door. The whole boys’ table must have gotten lunch detention. Peter sat at that table.
As we passed by the boys on our way out, Taylor said loudly, “Got milk?”
“I looove the chocolate glaze,” I answered back equally as loud.
“You guys are so ditzy,” Peter said to us. He tried to blow his straw paper at us as we scooted by.
“So are you,” Taylor and I said at the exact same time. Peter leaped from his seat like he was going to chase us.
“There will be absolutely no communicating!” The cafeteria lady swooped down from her observation perch.
Laughing wildly, we ran for the door before she could give us detention.
“Quick, head for the hills,” I said, laughing. I felt the rush and fear of being chased. Taylor was right behind me.
As we stepped into the cold air and it was quiet, I realized I had let Taylor think I meant “an accident,” like a car accident or something. An accident—I had let her think I didn’t have anything to do with my mother’s death.
But it was an accident
, I told myself, so I hadn’t really been lying.
Chapter 12
Friday there was an assembly. The auditorium was loud, filled with the noise of kids talking and teachers trying to talk over it. Everyone was up and down, sitting and then standing, signaling for friends. Classes filed down each row. Boys leaped over seats to be next to or away from someone, or to sneak out altogether. Peter was just ahead of me in my row, sidling down the aisle.
I spotted Taylor with her fourth-period social studies class, the only class we didn’t have together except for Spanish. I waved my hands around but she didn’t see me. She was moving along the seats four or five rows behind. The lights were starting to dim, so I pulled my seat out and sat down.
It got pitch-black in the auditorium, and slowly the sounds from the audience quieted. Eventually the
Shhs
and
Shushes
and
Be quiets
stopped, too. African drumming music rose into the air. The lights onstage came up on two white-gloved hands that seemed to move without a body. As the music got louder, a large, colorful mask became visible in the darkness. Then someone started screaming.
At first I thought it was part of the show. But soon there was an uncomfortable rustling from the people around me, voices whispering, and I had a feeling that something was not right. The music kept on playing, and the hands and mask moved around on the stage in their native dance. More and more hands appeared, but the screaming didn’t stop. It turned into loud sobs and crying, one shriek then another.
The din from the audience was louder now. Disorder was erupting. I turned to Peter, who was sitting next to me.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
“I don’t know.” He didn’t even have to whisper; everyone was talking now. “I think someone got scared.”
Just then we all saw Lynette Waters being escorted up the aisle by Mr. Salinger, the principal, followed by Lynette’s two friends and a teacher. Lynette was crying and had her hands over her ears. A sliver of bright light pierced the darkness as the back doors were opened to let them out, and then all was dark again. The music, which had stopped, suddenly began, and the masks and hands began dancing once more.
“What the heck was that all about?” Peter said to me when it was nearly quiet again.
“Lynette knows things other people don’t,” I whispered back.
“I think she’s just retarded from being hit by a truck.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Say what?” Peter asked.
A loud “Shhh” came down our way. Peter made a funny, mock-angry face back into the blackness where that sound had come from. It made me giggle. (Funny, because I am definitely not the giggling type.) I clamped my hand over my mouth, and we both turned to watch the stage.
By the end of the day, the speculation had stopped and no one even mentioned the screaming incident anymore, though Lynette didn’t return to class before the school day ended at two thirty-five.
This was the day I was going to Taylor’s for a sleep-over. I had my overnight stuff in my backpack; my toothbrush, a comb, a handful of hair bands, pajamas, clean underwear, socks, and a fresh T-shirt.
Mrs. Tyler wasn’t waiting at the door this time. She wasn’t even home. After knocking and ringing, Taylor let herself in with a key that was hidden in a fake rock with a secret compartment.
“She said she might be working,” Taylor said.
“What does she do?” I asked, stepping inside. I pretended the house was familiar already; that I lived there, too.
“She’s an interior designer but she doesn’t get paid, yet.” Taylor flung off her shoes in two different directions. One hit the wall. “That’s why she’s so fussy about the house.”
“I’m home, Mom,” Taylor shouted. “Here’s my coat!” She threw it on the floor.
“I thought you said…” I felt a quick panic.
“No, don’t worry. She’s not here. I’m just being wild and free,” Taylor said. Then she quickly straightened out her shoes and hung up both our coats. “But not that free.…”
“Let’s have a snack on the couch in front of the TV before she gets home,” Taylor said. Her eyes widened. Her eyebrows lifted. I was learning that was Taylor’s sign for misbehavior.
We plopped down on the white leather couch, our hands holding big glasses of milk and the entire box of Chips Ahoy between us. Taylor threw me the controller with the glee of a prisoner just let out of jail.
“You pick,” she said.
We dunked the cookies in the milk and flipped through every channel.
“Hey, what was that?” Taylor said and pointed. She wanted me to stop on MTV.
“I’ll go back,” I said, but as I deftly pushed the button on the controller I knocked my glass over and milk spilled onto the seat beside me, one cookie floating in the puddle it created.
“Oh, no!” I cried at the exact same moment we heard the front door swing open.
“Hello? Taylor? It’s Mommy.” It was Mrs. Tyler’s voice. “Are you home?”
In the single second, Taylor leaped up from her spot and then sat directly down again into the pool of white. When her mother turned the corner into the living room Taylor was smiling pleasantly, the spill completely covered.
“Taylor, you know I don’t like you eating in here.” Mrs. Tyler frowned when she saw the glasses and the empty cookie box.
“Oh, sorry, Mommy. I know,” Taylor said. “But we are being so careful.”
“Hello, Gabby,” Mrs. Tyler said as she turned to me.
“Hi,” I said. I was so afraid of what might happen next. I was wondering how much milk Taylor’s jeans could absorb if she had to stand up.
“Well, I’m going to change,” Mrs. Tyler said. She headed down the hall to her bedroom. “Please, don’t make a habit of this,” she called back.
“We won’t,” Taylor shouted. Then she quickly jumped up. The milk was gone, for the most part. The cookie was stuck to the seat of her pants.