Flannery (20 page)

28

I fling the front door open and I am about to yell my head off at Miranda.

Hazel-green eyes
?
Motorcycle rides
?
Making magic?

That is so obviously me, and it's up there for everybody to see. It's up there in cyberspace forever. I plan to go straight to the basement to get the ice pick and slam it right through the computer. I'll show her
tulip-tender
! What does that even mean?

But then I smell chocolate. Miranda is in the kitchen stirring something on the stove. I can tell, even from the front porch, that Miranda is in a very happy mood. She's got the Canadian opera singer Measha Brueggergosman playing on the iPod and she's lip-syncing, half-dancing while she stirs, jabbing the mixing spoon in the air to punctuate the beat, then leading the invisible orchestra, splattering melted chocolate all over the windowpanes.

I drop my schoolbag on top of the shoes and that's when I see the gold spray-painted army boots.

Tyrone O'Rourke is in the kitchen. What is Tyrone O'Rourke doing in my kitchen?

Guess who's here? trills Miranda. She thinks I will be happy.

I am not happy. I am stunned that he would dare to show up here.

Okay, let me back up a bit.

Yesterday I ran into Tyrone O'Rourke with Dave McGrath and Sebastian Rowe and Jordan Murphy in the mall. They were giggling and their eyes were very bloodshot and they were loping through the aisle of mirrors at Sears, gently banging into each other and finding this extremely funny.

All I could think about was Tyrone kissing me. I felt my face getting red. Seeing him coming up the aisle I could feel that kiss again, almost as if it was really happening right there amid the small appliances and ironing boards and the mirror aisle of Sears in the Avalon Mall.

Hey, said Tyrone, and he patted my back. How are you, Flannery?

I was terrified he was going to mention the kissing. Or not mention it. Or do it again. Did the kissing mean anything? Had he just kissed me out of pity, or curiosity, or mockery? Or did he understand now that our fates were intertwined for life?

All of this passed through my brain in a matter of milliseconds. Okay, we bumped into each other by accident. But there he was. And there I was! And we had kissed. By a waterfall. And he had shown me a very personal piece of art. A piece of art he had not revealed to anyone else in the whole world.

I was holding a bottle of floor cleaner. It was neon lemon, the kind with the picture of the bald guy who has an earring. It suddenly seemed like the floor cleaner was the strangest object in the world and unbearably heavy. How had it got into my hand?

I remembered what it was like when Felix was three, and I used to piggyback him. When he finally got down off my back, I would feel as though I was going to float to the ceiling. Standing in the aisle with Tyrone and his friends, I felt hot and floaty.

I thought about Tyrone's lips and how he'd tasted like the dope he had been smoking and there had been the smell of fresh falling snow. The tip of his tongue touching mine.

I was suddenly overcome with the idea that if I spoke I would tell Tyrone O'Rourke that I was in love with him.

I wanted to say absolutely anything at all that wasn't
I love you
Tyrone O'Rourke
. I wanted to say, Can I do your math homework for you? Can I wash your floor with this yellow stuff? Can I help you graffiti all of downtown? Can I shine the chrome on your motorcycle? Can I kiss you again, right here, right now, in front of your goofy ultra-stoned friends?

I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

Tyrone patted me on the back again, several hard little slaps.

Okay, kid, he said. See you in the food court in a little while. We got to check out some music.

Food court, I said. Okay. Food court. Gotcha.

I ordered a plate of fries in the food court and got two little fluted cups of ketchup and sat down with my bag of yellow stuff and that's when I saw Amber and Gary Bowen and the other guys from Gary's band and their girlfriends. They were several tables over. They were laughing and talking and Amber was blowing the paper sheath from her drinking straw up into the air. Gary was trying to steal her fries and she was pretending to keep them away from him.

I know she saw me sitting by myself.

Tyrone came up behind me and slammed his lanky body into the swivel chair next to mine. He let it sway back and forth. Dave and Sebastian dropped into the two other chairs. They go to Gonzaga and I only know them a bit.

I didn't look over to see if Amber was watching, but I could feel her eyes.

Ha! You're not the only one with a boyfriend, Amber Mackey.

This is the life of a girlfriend, I thought. You're at the mall and the boys fill up the seats all around you and you're like one of the guys, except you're something better. You're a girl with all the guys around you.

I was sure everyone in the food court could see how popular I was. Even dipping my French fry in the ketchup was done just so: dip, dip, dip. Every gesture I made, every giggle and sigh, was utterly false. I was acting so that Amber could see how I was totally cool simply enjoying my French fries with the boys.

But suddenly the three boys looked like they had suffered an electric shock. They sat bolt upright and then they jumped up all at once and took off in three different directions, running. I mean, one minute they were there at the table loafing around, joking, laughing, and the next minute they had flown out of their chairs.

They were knocking into people, making them drop their bags. Sebastian actually stumbled over a woman in a wheelchair. Their abandoned swivel chairs swinging left and right with mad whines and squeaks.

Tyrone was galloping down the escalator, weaving through the people who were just standing still on the steps. When he got near the bottom he actually leapt over the rail.

That's when the security guard showed up at the table. He had a moustache and he was as pale as an uncooked cod fillet. His arms were crossed over his chest.

He asked me to come with him. He put his hand on my arm and hoisted me right out of my chair.

Hey!

With his other hand he pressed a button on a radio speaker attached to his shirt and it crackled with replies and two other security guards came running over to my table.

So, three security officers. Big men in blue shirts and black pants with a blue stripe down the legs.

Then it occurred to me. Something must have happened to Miranda. A panic set up in my forehead that felt like a knitting needle through my right eye. It was Miranda or it was Felix. Something terrible must have happened. A car accident, a heart attack.

What's happening? I asked. I wanted to cooperate, I was gathering my things, ready to follow as fast as I could.

You are being arrested for shoplifting, the guard said. And he reached inside the hood of my jacket and took out a package of earphones.

What I felt, before the shame kicked in, was the most acute sense of bewilderment.

Here's what bewilderment feels like. You have gone to the very edge of what is possible, but the edge hasn't stopped you. You keep on going. There's the word “wild” right in the middle of bewilderment, and that's where you're headed. And then you're surprised to find you've gone too far.

I remembered Tyrone patting my back.

That was the end of bewilderment.

Enter shame, stage left. Wow, shame is a hard one. Shame tingles all over and
poof
you go up in flames. The fastest-burning flames there are. Shame incinerates.

They walked me through the food court, a security guard holding each of my elbows, the third one walking behind like I was going to try and make a run for it. The food court is a noisy place but it had gone completely silent. Everybody, maybe a hundred people, looked up from their burgers and didn't say a word.

Except Gary Bowen, who said, quite loudly, See, I told you she was a welfare loser.

Amber didn't even look in my direction. She was the only one in the whole food court not looking at me. She was trying to poke her straw through the cover on her oversized cup of root beer. She had the straw in her fist, and she was stabbing the lid over and over until the straw sank in deep.

The manager's office was somewhere in the basement. I'd never been to that part of the mall. I hadn't even known it existed. We went down two sets of stairs and then a long corridor with fluorescent light and lots of doors, and actually it was scary, going down there with three men I didn't know. It seemed illegal. If I was really a shoplifter of in-ear sound-isolating wireless headphones that went for $115.99, did that mean I was stripped of all human rights and freedoms, or whatever? I was trembling all over.

It was crazy how afraid I felt. After all, it was just the mall. It was just some stupid security guards. The hallway down there was cinderblock, painted glossy white, and there were exposed water pipes, and some wrappers from takeout were spilling out of the flap of a garbage bucket. I couldn't hear the noises of the mall. It felt like we were deep underground.

Finally we came to an office and there was a man behind a desk and I was brought in and told to sit down in a chair. The man was reading a piece of paper that he held up before him. His mouth was hanging open just a little as he read. Very carefully, he placed the piece of paper in a pile to his right. His hair was a springy red afro. He had a gold signet ring on his left hand and one ear was pierced.

He looked up and spoke to one of the security guards, Did you bring those moose steaks?

Yeah, the guard said. They're out in the truck. I'll bring them in on the break.

Thanks, man, the guy behind the desk said. The wife has a crowd coming.

Any time. I got a freezer full of it.

Who's this? the guy behind the desk said.

Monitor Seven, answered the security guard, and then he and the other guards left.

The man behind the desk turned to the computer next to him and typed and then there was a paused video on the screen. He turned the screen so I could see it.

We'll have to wait for the police, he said to me. They're the ones who press the charges. Could take a while. We might as well watch some TV.

He made a phone call. He seemed to be personal friends with the chief of police. Called him Johnny.

Yeah, shoplifter. Girl. I don't know, sixteen? When can you get somebody over here? We can wait. You're welcome.

The man put the tips of his fingers together like they were a church steeple in front of his chest. He made his chair rock and it squeaked. He was obviously comfortable with just sitting there making me scared and
un
comfortable.

Now we wait, he said. Then he pressed the Play button on the computer.

There I was, in black and white, with my bottle of floor cleaner in my hand. There was a spot of glare on the bottle, like a star. The camera was above, so you couldn't see me blushing. It was a strange view. It felt like I was the guardian angel of myself who had forgotten to take care of me.

And then, the handsome Tyrone and his crew. And you could see, in spite of the angle, how happy I was to see him. The mirror aisle. Round mirrors, mirrors with big gold frames, long skinny mirrors. I was surrounded by mirrors and there was my face all over the place and what a grin. Oh, this girl had it bad.

You could plainly see Tyrone putting the earphones into my hood. You could see everybody, or bits of everybody, from all angles, because of the mirrors — and you could see us all, very clearly, from above.

And you could also see I had no idea that Tyrone had put the earphones in my hood.

The boys all turned to walk away, and when they had their backs to me, I did this stupid little wave. Wiggling my fingers. I wave goodbye even though they can't see me.

This girl, standing in the aisle of Sears with a bottle of floor cleaner, was the biggest idiot I had ever seen. No wonder nobody was in love with her.

The man stopped the video and rewound it. We watched it again. Tyrone patting my back as though assuring me all was well.

And then the manager picked up a snow globe on his desk and shook it.

This thing plays music, he said. He twisted a little key at the bottom of the snow globe and set it down on the desk. It took me a minute to recognize the Christmas carol “Jingle Bell Rock” because it was slowed down and sounded like a funeral dirge.

The two Christmas elves in the center of the snow globe had linked arms and were surely supposed to be dancing a jig. But they turned around very, very slowly in the whirling snow.

It looked like they couldn't let each other go. They could have been me and Miranda. Both of us unlucky in love, stuck to each other forever.

Care to tell me the names of your friends, young lady?

I said, It seems I don't have any friends. And I knew that that was the truth.

Those guys, he said. He moved his chair toward the computer and tapped a key and the video played again. He stopped it on my grin. He shook his head.

You're free to go, he said. I hope you have a Merry Christmas.

I've got homework, I tell Miranda.

Don't you want to have a cup of tea with Tyrone? Miranda says.

No thanks, I say.

I'm here to work on the Entrepreneurship project, Tyrone calls out from the kitchen. Isn't that due around now?

It's
done
, Tyrone, I say. I am bending down to untie my boots. I am trying not to cry and I take off up the stairs and close my bedroom door and get in bed and pull up all the covers. It's so cold I can see my breath. I can hear the oven door screech.

After a while there's a knock.

I'm coming in, says Tyrone. I leap out of the bed and jump into the chair at my desk and the door opens and I already have a pen in my hand, as if I've been writing away.

I've got homework here, Tyrone, I say.

I'm sorry, he says. About the earphones. I just couldn't risk getting caught myself, Flannery, because of my graffiti art. They'd have me then, on all those charges. I knew you wouldn't be charged. I'm really sorry.