Anywhere But Here (50 page)

They rode away, handling their bikes roughly, standing up and pulling. I watched the lights on their handlebars draw jagged paths through the dark and then I closed my eyes against Hal’s back.

The last night of summer, Benny and I slept outside. Benny stood there, scuffing his sneakers on our porch, at midnight, when he
was supposed to. We took a blanket and a box of Graham crackers and walked across the yard to the hickory tree. Benny had climbed out his bedroom window and left it open. It was easy for me to get away. During that summer, Ted often stayed late, watching television with my mother in the living room. I crawled out of the downstairs bed, when I couldn’t sleep, and woke up in the tight, cold twin bed across from my grandmother in the attic. Anyway, my mother wouldn’t miss me. She was a heavy, greedy sleeper and nothing woke her.

We settled the blanket on the tall, uncut grass and opened the box of Graham crackers, passing it back and forth. We felt hickory roots under us. There were so many noises; some were insects, some were the highway, and some we didn’t know. It seemed busy outside, like daytime, except for the dark.

It wasn’t cold. The alfalfa field had been plowed and the corn was all picked, but there was a rich smell, like hay, that seemed to come from the ground. Even though school was starting, the air still smelled like summer. And the sky that night washed low and near us. There were white traces, as if the stars had moved and left trails of themselves, chalk dust on the black.

I chewed the end of a weed. I wasn’t tired.

“You shouldn’t care, you like school. You’re good in school,” Benny said.

“I don like it.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“You have a lot of friends,” I said.

Since Theresa and I made friends, other girls didn’t talk to me at school. When they invited me to their birthday parties, they didn’t invite Theresa. And I was afraid of boys. An older boy had come up to me on the playground and teased me, and I’d hit him so hard his lip bled. He’d told and I’d been in trouble with the Mother Superior again.

“I’m afraid of them at school.”

“You have some friends.”

“Theresa.”

“You get nervous,” he said.

“Yeah, I get nervous.” I felt relieved and happy, having said
that. It seemed unimportant now that I’d ever been nervous and I couldn’t imagine feeling afraid again.

“S’cause of your mother.”

“What?” I’d never thought of that and it seemed awful, all of a sudden, for us to talk about her that way. And it was such a night, I didn’t want anything wrong.

“Your family’s different.”

“No,” I said. “She’s fine. It’s just me.”

“Shhhh.” He put his hand on the inside of my wrist, where the pulse is, and he went to sleep like that, his fingers on my arm. Everything outside seemed wonderful to me, and falling asleep took a long time. I kept sliding down in the dark and then my eyes opened again. I don’t know what was more amazing: that our land was so changed and beautiful at night, or that it was familiar. It was our old barn, standing crookedly, casting a pure black shadow, and they were our houses in the distance with their porch lights on, but the sky was shining as I’d never seen it and each stalk of long grass seemed to hold an identical stem of moonlight on its side.

I woke up first and watched the daylight come into the sky. I propped up on an elbow. I heard the six-fifty train. I had never seen a sunrise and I’ve never forgotten that one. I must have moved, because Benny woke up, cranky because he felt cold and sore from sleeping on the ground. He ran home, dragging the blanket behind him. But I was happy. I felt incredibly light, walking over the field. I ate the last Graham crackers from the box. I felt I’d discovered something new that would change me and that my old problems, being nervous and afraid, were gone; already they seemed strange and silly to me.

The fall before we moved to Carriage Court, I wanted to go trick-or-treating with Benny, but my mother said no. She offered to take me in the car; she and Lolly would wait by the curb while I ran with my bag to the doors. But I cried and so she finally let me go.

Theresa Griling came, too, she was the only other girl. Their father had driven back from Florida and they were home again. None of us ever talked about when he was gone. That was when
they took Netty away, at the end of the summer when he came home. At the railroad tracks, we all started running across the plowed frozen fields in one line. I could feel the hard ridges through the rubber soles of my tennies. After a while I didn’t know where we were. The band of my mask hurt my chin and I had to hold up a bunch of sheet with one hand so I didn’t trip.

Then there were dim streets where we didn’t know anybody and the boys pressed up to the screen doors first. They were down to the next houses before Theresa and I got our bags open. But the heavy drop of candy in the paper bag was a pleasure, it seemed we were making progress. When we ran, the hard candy knocked on the sides of the bags and the bags banged against our thighs.

Later, we lost the boys and sat on a curb where we couldn’t even find a street sign. I don’t know how long we stayed there. But finally, the boys came back out of the fields. New guys were with them, riding wobbly circles on bikes. Some of them were smoking.

“Where’s Benny?”

“I dunno,” someone said. “Went somewhere with David.”

“He’s supposed to stay with us.”

“Who says?”

“My mom.”

“Her mom says.” The smokers giggled, cigarettes dropping in the dark.

We started running again, Theresa and me in front this time and the guys on bikes bouncing over the fields. Then they came right up next to us, almost hitting us with their wheels.

“Watch out.” I didn’t know yet what they were doing, I didn’t know I couldn’t say no, that they didn’t care. “That’s my foot.”

They pushed us down in the dirt and we both screamed. One pulled up my sheet and grinned at me. He had a crew cut and pimples and dirty hair on his upper lip. There was nothing in him that I recognized.

The other guy was pressing down Theresa’s shoulders. He leaned over and kissed her, making fake smooching sounds like farts.

“Stop it,” I screamed, kicking, before he did anything. My ears
were cold and humming. I had a headache like one jagged line. He bent down and clamped his hands over my wrists and he was sitting on my legs. But when I looked up, I thanked God, because there was a circle of boys and I saw Benny. “Benny. Make him stop.”

I was so relieved to see Benny I closed my eyes, but then when I opened them again, he was talking to the guy next to him as if he hadn’t seen me.

“Benny!”

But he didn’t look down at me. He wouldn’t. Then, all of a sudden, I felt it. A cold blade against my cheek, under my hair, on my neck. It was a scissors. The guy was cutting my hair. I heard the scissors clicking, the short, snuffling noises the hair made when it came off. Benny knew about my hair, he knew I’d been growing it all my life. It was unusual. Everyone said that about my hair. It was pure black. It was going to be one of the things that would help me get on television. My grandmother said it was so dark you could see other colors in it. I started to cry, but quiet. I didn’t even care about Benny helping me anymore. It was too late. My hair was half gone. I just wanted it to be a dream, but I knew it was true. I just wanted my hair back, that was all I wanted and all I could imagine ever wanting.

The two older guys got on their bikes and rode away. That was the way they were, older kids, worse than lawless. They could just come out, get you alone and hurt you and then ride away. The rest of the guys, our guys, the guys we knew, started running across the uneven field. Theresa staggered up, she was crying, too, but she started following after them.

“Stevie,” she was yelling and running, “Stev-vie, you’re gonna be in troub-bel, I’m telling Da-ad,” but she was falling forward, tripping and then getting up again, heaving harder, and I doubt her brother even heard her, she was so far behind.

I just stayed on the ground till they were far away. There was noise from trucks on the highway somewhere, but I couldn’t see it. Then somebody was running back towards me. It was Benny, but I didn’t want Benny then. He stood ten feet in front of me and screamed.

“Come on. Get up. You want to stay here all night, that’s your business, but I’m supposed to bring you home.”

I’m not going to say anything, I was thinking, I knew I didn’t have to. There was nothing anyone could do to me now because I didn’t care.

“Please, will you please come on. Just this once.” Benny knelt down in front of me, moving his hands, wanting me to look at him.

I was trying to collect all my hair from the ground. The pieces felt light and soft and it was hard to see them in the dark. Mostly, I was doing it by touch. Benny scratched under his sock, but I didn’t care what he did. He took off running then, yelling so the rest of those guys didn’t go without him. I let him. Let them all go. I was wadding the hair in my hand and then dropping the balls in the bag with my candy. At least they didn’t take my candy. The hair wadded up in balls, it was neat, it just made these puffs with air inside. When I reached, my knee touched the scissors. They were still there, little rounded elementary school scissors, the same kind I had at home. They lay open, a thin blue metal. I wasn’t going to touch them.

“Come on, you coming or not, last chance!” I thought I heard Benny but I wasn’t sure anymore. I was lowering my head to the ground, it was almost there, then there. My head felt intricate like an ant farm. I thought I could hear blood moving in tunnels.

But in a while my joints got wrong. My arms felt twisted in the shoulder sockets. I knew I’d better get up. It had been a long time, the trucks were still running somewhere and there was nobody else around, there hadn’t been anybody for hours maybe. I’d have to do something myself. So I started walking with my bag towards the lights, the nearest lights, which were far away.

Ringing the doorbell, I almost fell asleep and a man came and let me in to use the phone. The kitchen gleamed bright and I didn’t even have to think about the number. It was there, the first thing I knew. My mother answered and when she heard it was me, she started screaming. I couldn’t listen to it and the phone dropped down so it was just hanging, knocking against the wall.

The man who lived there picked it up. I sat in a kitchen chair.
When he put the receiver back on the wall, he told me she was on her way.

“She’s got the address and all. It won’t be long for you now. You’re pretty far from home, you have to be careful on Halloween, you know, the things you read.”

A chair skidded back on the linoleum and he was across from me at the table, wearing black plastic glasses, with corn-colored hair. My eyes slumped to sleep. I didn’t want to bother with anything, talking, nothing. It seemed she would be there as soon as I opened my eyes.

“Would you like an apple?” Something in his voice made me lift my head and see his hand lingering on one of the apples in a bowl between us. They were red, streaked with beads of other colors, beautiful all of a sudden. I wanted one but I was afraid. I couldn’t decide what to do and then lights washed in the front window and I recognized the sound of my grandmother’s brakes, like a voice. I thanked God it was my grandmother’s car. I ran out with my bag in my arms and got into the backseat. Then we were all inside, my grandmother driving, my mother in the front bending over and looking at me.

“Oh God. Oh, my God, give me strength.” She was kneeling on her seat then and pulling the short hair out from my face.

“What have they DONE to you? Who did that, tell me right now, who did that to you. Gram, would you look at her? They’ve ruined her hair, they’ve just ruined her. I can’t believe it. How could you let them do this to you?

“You were the one, you had to go out. You were so smart, you thought you could keep up with the big kids, well, look at you now, just look at you. Sure, now you cry. Well, you’ll have to live with it. It’s your head, not mine. How could you let them DO that to you? Couldn’t you run and call home? Couldn’t you call me? Tell me, Honey, what happened?”

I was lying with my face pressed into the crease of the seat, eating my own breath back like another person’s. I could taste the vinyl. I knew my mother would go on and on. She’d just keep yelling and yelling and pretty soon all we’d hear was her voice going up and down like a siren.

It was all noise. She was mad, she hated my weakness and wanted to beat it out of me and then she’d knock her hands against her own chest, killing the air there, too. I felt dry. I was a piece of wood. My grandmother just drove. We did things while my mother felt. We were still. Furniture. She took up the room in the car, sucked all the color out of us, eating the quiet for herself and all we heard was her collection, and we hated it. We could have punctured the air with our hate, it was that sharp, it had been turning for so long.

In the house, my mother marched right to the bathroom and called me. “Ann, come in here a second.”

My grandmother grabbed my arm before I went. “Listen here, you, don’t you worry. Tomorrow, I’ll take you to the Harper Method and she’ll give you a good cut. It’s good to get rid of that heavy hair, anyway. It’ll look real nice short.” We stood in front of the bathroom. I gave my grandmother my bag of candy before I went in.

In front of the mirror, my mother combed my hair. She closed the door and locked it.

“I mean, it’s what MADE you special. It was your crowning glory. You talk about going to California and auditions for television, well, let me tell you, other kids are cuter. Your hair was what you had going for you. Without it, I just don’t think you’ll stand out.”

She shook her head, pulling a strand of my hair up and letting it fall back on my face, but even then, she couldn’t resist looking at herself in the mirror and sucking in her own cheeks.

“People say my eyes are nice.” I looked up at my mother.

“Who?”

“Lolly said and the ice skating pro said so too.”

“Oh, Honey, they were just saying that. Ted said that, really, because he likes me. Your eyes are green, but some kids have a deeper, richer green. Your green is kind of ordinary.”