Outside In (7 page)

Pammy stood in with a pretend bat, and pretend-swung it.

“Hum, babe!” called Lucy. “She’s no batter, no batter, no batter.” She squatted behind Pammy like a catcher.

Aimée glanced over at me, then stuck her leg up in the air and threw a pretend pitch. “Strike one!” Lucy announced.

The boys looked over from the basketball hoop, and Sandy raised one eyebrow at Lucy.

I giggled. It was fun to be weird. “Ball one!” Lucy said.

“Aw,” said Aimée, and stared Pammy fiercely down from the “plate.” This was a different Aimée from the one who played elf.

“If he likes me,” I said, “why doesn’t he ask me to play basketball with them?” Because of Pete and Sandy, I answered myself. Maybe if Lucy and I walked over there together…

“Strike two!” Lucy said. Across the circle Pete body-checked Sandy, almost knocking him off his feet.

“Why would you even want to?” asked Lucy in a low voice. “When you can play invisible ball with Aimée and Pammy and me?” Then she called out, “Ball two!”

“How do you know?” Aimée yapped at Lucy. She had forgotten to be shy, I thought, amazed, all over a pretend game of baseball. “How can you call balls and strikes from way over there?”

“I have special vision,” Lucy replied, her head high.

Over at the basketball hoop, Pete gave a snort worthy of Faux Pas.

Pammy laughed and swung her “bat.”

“Ball three!” Lucy said.

Pammy jumped up and down and wriggled around. “Three balls! My pants can’t hold ’em!”

Aimée looked amazed at first, then nearly wet her own pants laughing. Sandy and Dave were giggling, too. Pete dribbled the ball, his shoulders shaking. Then he slammed into Dave. Dave, caught off guard, hit the pavement.

Pammy yelled, “Whack! Good-bye, Mr. Spalding!” and ran for first base. I pretended to catch the ball and flung myself after Pammy, trying to tag her. Pammy slid into second base.

“Aw!” Aimée stamped her foot and trudged back to the “mound.”

Dave came walking over. “What are you playing?” he asked me.

Lucy said, “Hey, it’s Pete Asconti’s brother!”

“Is he in trouble or something?” Dave asked. Witty, for him.

“Not with me,” said Lucy, flirting. Pete ought to be in trouble.

“Whoopedy-doo for you,” said Dave. “Hey, Pete,” he called over. “Lucy
wants
you.”

To me he said, “By the way, you’d better stay out of our bushes.” Was he mad at me because Lucy was flirting with him about Pete? Was he mad at Pete for playing rough? Was he mad at Lucy? Lucy turned away, her face dark red.

Pammy stepped up and stared into Dave’s face. “They’re my bushes just as much as yours,” she said.

“What do you think you’re playing?” Dave asked her.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Aimée answered, sticking out her tongue. Dave dropped his chin and looked sideways at me, as if to ask, Did I hear what I thought I heard?

“We’re just playing a game,” I told Dave. I didn’t like his act. Pete was a bully to him, so he was going to bully the little girls—and me!

“What game?” asked Dave.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“It’s an
invisible
game,” Aimée said.

“Played by visible people,” said Pammy. “Can’t you see us?”

“Yeah, I see ya,” said Dave, nodding.

“Say,” said Pete, suddenly coming up behind me, “where’d you say your sister’s from? The loony bin?”

Sandy cracked up, of course, but Lucy whirled and glared at Pete.

I didn’t want her eyes to look that teary. “Shut up!” I smacked Pete’s arm, more practiced than Lucy at defending little kids against big mouths, more practiced at defending myself.

But Lucy was on the case. “You,” she said to Pete, “can keep your asinine comments to yourself.”

“Oh,
really?
Who died and made you queen?” He tried to grab her chin.

“Keep away from me!” Lucy said. She slapped his hand aside, but he just clutched her arm and went for her chin again. I grabbed
his
arm and aimed a sharp kick at his behind. Justice at last, I thought. But Pete got hold of my foot before it reached its target and used it to dump me on the ground, right on my tailbone.

“Hey!” yelled Lucy and Dave. They knocked Pete off-balance and pushed him away from me. I jumped up and—

“Cut it out!” screeched Aimée. “Chérie, make them stop!”

I put my arm around Aimée. “Forget those Ass-contis,” I said.
“We’re
the visible ones.”

It was astounding how Aimée sucked up her sobs and smiled. She handed Pammy an imaginary baseball. “I’m up,” she said.

Uncle Joe’s voice came out of the Ascontis’ backyard. “Pete, keep your distance,” he said.

But Pete pointed his finger in my face. “You watch your step,” he said. “Marvin Road kids don’t
have
to play ball here.”

“Yeah,” said idiot Sandy, always on the wrong side.

Dave said nothing.

Aunt Bonnie came down the Rankins’ driveway and said, “Boys?”

Dave turned his back and shot a basket, but Pete started to walk past his mother. She caught his arm. “What was all that about?” I heard her ask. I didn’t catch his reply.

“Some charming friends we have,” Lucy said to me.

“Yes, see how much they like us?”

Lucy turned toward the Ascontis’ house and snapped her fingers. She looked like some kind of a witch with her broom-colored hair and her little yellow glasses. “I prefer him invisible,” she said. But Pete wasn’t about to disappear.

Away from Home

July 1968

W
HEN
I
THINK OF THE SUMMER OF 1968
, I still get a knot of nerves in my stomach.

It was the summer when one girl appeared in my life and another disappeared, and at the beginning of the summer I’d never heard of either of them.

It was the summer that I went to Washington and found out more about some presidents than I ever wanted to know.

It was the summer that Dad went to a big helicopter meeting in California and came home to find things much changed.

It was the summer that Pete Ass-conti got himself in trouble at the little kids’ Parks and Rec camp. He’d yelled at some kids who were messing around when he was teaching them baseball (Aunt Bonnie told Mom they were lying down with their feet in the air when they were supposed to be playing outfield—tee-hee). So they’d moved him up to the junior high camp, where Dave went with his goony friends from school, Nathan and Ziggy. It was the same camp Mom just casually went and signed me up for,
second and third sessions, without my consent, because she wanted me out of the house. Aimée got to go to the one Pete had just been fired
from
. I had to go to the one he’d just been hired
to.
Dave would be there, all but ignoring me the way he had been all summer.

“Just for a few weeks, Chérie,” Mom said. “I’m not going to be driving to the beach or going on picnics or making lunches at home. It’s going to be dead boring around here.”

“Why? What are
you
going to be doing?” But she wouldn’t say. Something she didn’t want me to know about, plainly. Instead she cajoled and convinced and practically begged and pleaded and all but promised to pay me to go. And I
would
have gone on July 19, the first day of the second session, if I hadn’t woken up that morning with my period—and cramps.

“Awful in summer,” Mom said.

She brought Aunt Bonnie in to see me when she came over for coffee. “I’m dying,” I said, rolling my eyes.

Aunt Bonnie rolled hers right back. “You’ll live.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, fake snotty.

“And you’ll have to keep your lips sealed about whatever you see here today.”

But camp or cramps or Mom’s dark secret were not the reason I’d hate July 19, 1968, for the rest of my life.

I set myself up in Dad’s TV-watching chair in the living room, reading
The Saturdays,
one of the books Dave had brought me.

In the kitchen Mom cleaned up from breakfast and began hauling paint cans out of the basement to the back steps. Aunt Bonnie came in.

“What are you painting?” I asked.

“Your house,” she said. “How many days do you think
it’ll take before your dad and Uncle Joe notice your house is cherry red?”

“We’re painting the house, Chérie,” my mother said in a tense, exasperated voice. “Now you know the big secret. Promise you won’t tell Dad if he calls.”

“Cherry?” I asked. Aunt Bonnie showed me a little square of cardboard painted a deep, sweet red. I smiled and sank back in my chair. “Shouldn’t be too long before they notice,” I said.

Mom had the radio on good and loud in the kitchen, as usual. I ignored it, especially when Glen Campbell and Dionne Warwick and Simon and Garfunkel went off and the nine o’clock news came on.

Although I tried to read despite the distraction, the news came through to me clearly: Saigon first, Washington second, something or other about a town budget vote nearby, and then the weather, which was muggy and hot and making my head hurt as well as my stomach.

I put my feet on the arm of the chair. Dad’s old blue sweatshirt was on the couch, and I put it on, cozied down inside it. Now I felt cold and clammy. Strange business, cramps.

The ten o’clock news came and went, not much different from the earlier version. I dozed, and read, and listened as Mom and Aunt Bonnie banged ladders and cans and sang.

It was eleven when the report came on the first time. “Police are looking for clues to the whereabouts of a thirteen-year-old Claybury girl, missing since dusk last night,” the radio said.

Over the thumping of the ladder being moved, I hadn’t
even heard the news come on, that newsroom sound of musical notes, the same one, over and over, and typewriter keys that signaled the switch from the music and ads. “Wendy Boland, a Claybury eighth grader with brown hair and blue eyes, was last seen along a road near her home. Listeners with information about the girl or a green station wagon reported to have been seen in the vicinity are asked to contact the Claybury police.” The announcer went on to the news from Hanoi, and I realized that a thirteen-year-old was the most important news story, the top of the hour.

Mom came to look at me. Speckles of red dotted her hands, and there was a red smear on her neck as if she were wounded. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Does your head hurt?”

“A little,” I said.

Mom sat with me for a minute, drinking a glass of water.

“Mom, you’re not climbing up any ladders, are you?”

She gave me a slow smile. “I’m taking care of our baby, Cher,” she said. “Bonnie’s going to do the high spots.” She got a bottle of soda for Aunt Bonnie and headed back outside.

I tried to read. The twelve o’clock news came on. “Chérie? I’m just running out for turpentine,” Mom called.

The radio said, “A Claybury girl”—had they found her, so soon?—“is missing. Thirteen-year-old Wendy Boland, missing since five o’clock last night, was last seen near a neighborhood park. The girl, reported to be five feet tall, with long brown braids and blue eyes, was last seen at the same time that a neighbor observed a green station wagon in the area. Those with information are asked to contact the Claybury police.”

I sat staring at the illustration in
The Saturdays.
Mona, a character in the book, was thirteen, like Wendy Boland. I wondered who was taller: me or Wendy? I was five feet two, and it was four months before I would be thirteen. Suddenly I didn’t want to be.

I walked slowly outside. The back of the house was cherry red from two-thirds up to the roof and one-third down to the ground. Only the middle was still gray. Pigeon gray? Clay gray?

“Aunt Bonnie? Where’s Claybury?”

“Claybury, Connecticut?” Aunt Bonnie said from the ladder. “It’s where Uncle Joe’s school is. It’s, oh, four or five towns, hmm, east of here. Past New Haven. Why, what’s happening there?”

I shrugged. “Just wondering. It was on the radio.” Hadn’t she heard? No. They’d been clanking the ladder around. And the radio was inside anyway. For me.

“What about it?” asked Aunt Bonnie.

I shrugged again and went back inside, deposited myself back into Dad’s chair, picked my book up from the arm where it was lying on its face.

In the kitchen the Beatles were singing “Eleanor Rigby,” a creepy song that Dad liked, about some woman who had died. I closed my eyes. Mom came in, called, “Are you all right?” to me, and set about making lunch. Soon Aimée would be home from her camp.

“A Claybury eighth grader is the target of a county-wide search. Last seen at five o’clock last night, Wendy Boland”—I went into the kitchen, turned the radio down, turned it up again—“brown hair and blue eyes. Witnesses or anyone with information should call”—down again, up again—“the driver of a green station wagon—” I slammed the off button and ran up to my room.

The sun was dull on the Ascontis’ maple trees.

When I heard the newspaper truck, I got up and went down to fold. “How do you feel?” said Mom.

“I’ll live,” I said.

“Cramps go with the territory,” said Aunt Bonnie.