Hyacinth Girls (19 page)

I waited until after breakfast the next morning. Grandma sat in her chair, watching a talk show and sucking a cinnamon drop. There were only four days left until high school started and if this didn't work, my life was fucked. I doodled the number in my notepad. FOUR. I drew little red flames shooting off it, and then I scribbled it out. The commercials came on and I had to do it now.

“I've been thinking I could stay here with you,” I said. “I know you don't need my help, but I could stick around just in case.”

Grandma was still looking at the TV. The commercial showed a hulky man holding a laptop.

“I'm sick,” she finally said. “You can't live here.”

“It's just…I'm having some problems with my friends, so I don't want to leave. I can't go home.” I looked down at my notepad; the words wobbled on the page.

“I've got twenty percent lung function, which means eighty percent doesn't work,” Grandma said. “So your friendship dramas don't mean a lot to me.”

“Are you on a lung list?”

“What?”

“To get a new lung? A transplant?”

Grandma made a face and brought a tissue to her mouth, spitting out her candy. “I don't go on those lists. They're a load of crap.”

I watched her begin to search for her cigarettes. She ran her fingers along the side of the cushion she was sitting on.

“They call me Babyshits,” I said. “My friends.”

Grandma pretended not to hear. She put a cigarette in her mouth and flicked the lighter. I watched the flame.
Boom
, I thought. Let us both go up in smoke. We deserved it. A fire wiping out the last of our family. Heat like a wave. I would become ashes and rain down on the trees. And Grandma, with her cigarette, would be a murderer.

Grandma blew out smoke. “I'm terminal, you know? Do you know what
terminal
means?”

I nodded and I started to cry because I was terminal, too.

“Jesus Christ,” Grandma said. She looked at me and I knew what she thought.
Big surprise they call you Babyshits. You are one big baby
. I stared at her cigarette.
Boom
, I thought.
Boom
.

I wanted to be nothing, just mud underground.

I wished I'd been with my mom that day.

No wonder my dad killed himself—with a mother like her.

I was thinking it, but I was also saying it, and then I had the grinds so bad I couldn't even see her face. I ran out to the garage, sticking my notepad down the back of my shorts, then I grabbed the bike, threw my leg over the bar. I was pedaling blind, my eyes so blurry that I might've been in a bright place underwater, straw and kelp catching my eyelashes.

I wasn't supposed to be here. I could feel it inside my skin, all the way down to my smallest bones and my racing heart. I kept pedaling, but I wasn't going back in time; I was just a body on a bike, passing houses and a gas station. I hunched my shoulders and pumped my legs
until my throat hurt, until there weren't as many houses, just buildings and fences and auto repair shops and I wouldn't be able to find my way back, but maybe I could change my name, cut my hair, throw away my phone.

Then I could lie down and sleep, practice the stillness of being no one.

I realized where I was when I saw the trees up ahead. Mom's cemetery. I'd never been there on a bike and I always went with Rebecca, but it felt like the first time I actually wanted to go inside.

I pushed my bike through the gate and up the road. There were so many trees, and all of them were unlucky. They'd been planted here and they could never leave. Day and night, they lived. Swallowing tears and eyelashes, giving shade to no one. Roots that grew too deep touched the dead, tangling with buried hands and feet, hanging them in the world below.

At the edge of the parking lot, I dropped the bike, and suddenly I could smell myself, the dusty sweat that coated my calves, the wetness of my back. My shorts were bunched up, but there was no one around, so I tugged the damp fabric as I walked to the stone engraved with my last name. I didn't sit down or say anything to her. After two seconds, I was ready to go. But there was nowhere for me to go. I would have to stay here with the trees and the stones and the dead.

And I hardly remembered her. Except she had long hair that tickled me like feathers when she leaned down for a kiss. And when I stuck my tongue out to lick her stubbly knee, she smelled like milk, and patted my head, saying, “Good little cat.” I rubbed my hand over the grass on Mom's grave and started feeling sick. I'd never know her and she'd never know what I'd done to Robyn. I remembered the way Dallas and Ella had coached me after I squirted the paint.

“Just tell everyone Robyn said something sheisty.”

“Say she was going to kill you!”

“No, Ella. She should say something realistic.”

It was the most realistic thing I could think of and it felt true after what I'd done.
My mom died so she wouldn't have to look at me
. I opened my notepad just to see how the words would feel.

Your daughter hurts people. She threw the paint and sent the picture. Callie deserves to die like you
.

There was an ant on the ground, and I got him to crawl onto my hand. I couldn't even feel it as he crossed between my fingers, up my wrist, and toward my elbow. But I knew he wasn't scared. We were the same. Together our two tiny hearts were beating, and underneath us my mom was dead. It felt like nothing as I slid the paper under Mom's stone. The ant crawled away and I heard a lawn mower. When I looked up there was a man cutting the grass. I started to walk back to the bike and then I saw all the messages on my phone.

When I got back to Grandma's house, Rebecca's car was parked out front and I wished I was a nun. Then I could take a vow of silence and never speak again.

Rebecca was sitting on the couch while Grandma watched TV. But when she saw me, Rebecca jumped up. “Where the hell have you been?”

When Rebecca started swearing, you knew it was serious. I told her I'd been out on the bike, which was true at least. Her face was purple, and I wondered what Grandma had told her. But luckily for me, Grandma wasn't a snitch.

“You're too much for me,” Grandma said. “I'm not up to kids anymore.”

She didn't say it like she was sorry. She just wanted me out of there. And the stuff I'd told her about Babyshits was probably the last thing on her mind. Rebecca gave me a moony sad face like she was oh-so-sorry and for just a second I wanted to break Grandma's TV. Smash it with my fist into a billion smithereens. But instead I went to my room and packed.

I didn't say anything to Grandma, and when I followed Rebecca out to the car, she put an arm around my shoulder.

“You okay, Callie?”

When I didn't answer, she gave me a squeeze. “I know this is hard, but you shouldn't take it personally. You know she's in pain and she's not a happy person.”

The car was like an oven, and Rebecca shut me inside. I felt myself dissolving into nothing more than a slug: a lazy sleepy slug whose icky, sluggy insides started jiggling all sick when we pulled onto the road. My arms swelled at my sides, and my head bumped the window and then I tried to remember, was it salt that killed slugs? Could I sprinkle it on my arms and watch them shrivel up in front of me?

There were words in the oven, too cheerful and sharp. The lady was talking to sluggy.

“Why don't we stop and get ice cream somewhere? We can cool off in a diner for a while.”

The slug oozed slime. It wanted somewhere dark and quiet. No to ice cream: too sugary and cold for its slippery belly. No to diners: too bright for its squinty, sluggy eyes. Everyone would stare.

“I'm just trying to be nice,” the lady said. “I've been looking forward to having you back.”

The slug sank deeper into the heat, where all thoughts were single words.
Yes. No. No. Yes
.

But the lady wouldn't shut up. She wanted to shove the slug into a
space where it didn't belong. A space full of gym clothes and notebooks, band practice and bleachers, lip gloss and tights. Only three and a half days left. The sluggy slug curled up inside itself. It could try and cover its soft spots, but all it had were soft spots.

The first day of high school. Headband, earrings, ring. Ankle boots. Eye shadow and mascara.

None of it would help, but maybe DH hadn't told everyone yet. Maybe nobody would care.

The sluggy reality:

Outside the school, on a patch of grass, where everyone waited for the double doors to open, I couldn't find a place to stand. I wandered from the bike racks to a spot under a window and then over to the bushes, where I pressed my arm into a branch. If I kept moving, crablike, they might not notice me. But there were already a thousand boundaries I couldn't cross. Arms, necks, tongues, teeth, hair. Aliens. Familiar faces twisted into hectic shapes. If I got too close to anyone I would shrivel up and die.

“Squishies,” a bunch of girls shouted as they hugged each other. Two prinks we used to eat lunch with laughed and wrinkled their noses when they saw me. My sluggy insides started to dissolve.

I looked at my phone. There was a new message from a number I didn't know.

Warning! Babyshits poops her pants. GET A FUCKING DIAPER.

I ignored the text and played Mythical Maze on my phone, focusing so much I forgot where I was. When the doors opened, I followed the crowd to the gym, where a big blue-and-white banner hung from the ceiling.
WELCOME CLASS OF 2013
. My schedule was on the
M
table, and I grabbed it, then sat on the edge of a bleacher, feeling the vibrations of everyone else through my body. When I saw DH, my tongue curled at the back of my throat.

Ella noticed me first with a skeezy smile.

Dallas puckered her blister-pink lips. “Babyshits!”

I looked at the schedule on my lap.

“Babyshits! You know I'm talking to you!”

I started walking to the exit, but I knew what I wanted to do. I wished I had a knife so I could turn around and stab them. I wished they had asthma so I could empty their inhalers and lock them in a room with no air.

A boy near the door hissed, “Sleeping bag,” as I went past.

I didn't know what he was talking about, but I saw later that afternoon. Dallas had updated her status on Facebook.

So f'ing nasty. Going to have to burn my sleeping bag after lending it to Callie McKenzie. Let's just say someone needs a diaper. Smells rank.

Under that, Ella had written:

Babyshits!!! Strikes again!

Dallas had 582 friends. I wondered what I could write back. THE RUMORS ARE NOT TRUE. But I knew it wouldn't make a difference. Her words had already left a stain. For 582 people the shit was in the bag.

At school, a girl wouldn't stand behind me in the cafeteria line. A boy with emo hair crashed my chair as he walked past. Someone else
pretended to flick chocolate pudding on my ass. Each time it happened, I could feel something swelling in my chest that left no room for anything else. I made my eyes like a slitty snake's, and told myself I wouldn't cry. I tried to keep my mind focused on one thing. Like a gun. Would Dallas and Ella shoot me if they could? Would I shoot them? I knew in an upside-down world, I'd be the one laughing and waiting for me to cry. I'd be laughing and planning what to do next.

The toilet paper on my chair in biology? I could've done that. And when Babyshits turned red and tried to hide the roll under her desk, I would've watched while the class burst out laughing. Everyone was laughing—even Lily Trager, whose brother has Downs and is supposedly the nicest girl in our grade.

It could've been me who brought the black Sharpie to the girls' bathroom on the second floor of B wing. There was a mural of dancers in there, spinning and leaping across a rainbow background, and one day, someone drew black turds coming out of one of the dancers. I might've watched Dallas draw the arrow that labeled the dancer Babyshits. Or maybe I would've done it myself.

Every time I saw them in the hall, I felt like a wild dog. Ella's arms danced in the air as they shouted my name, and my whole body shook. I wanted to jump the fence, rip their throats, howl at the moonless sky. I scared myself. I wasn't like my mother. I had a dark center, the blood of a killer. And as I ducked away to hide in a lavatory stall I wished that Dallas had a nut allergy so I could swipe her with fingers covered in peanut oil.

In Spanish class, Señora Vallsay showed us a slideshow on the whiteboard. She'd gone on vacation to Mexico and wanted us to see her eating the food, walking the streets, standing in front of museums. Under my desk, I opened the note that someone had dropped in my bag. It was a quiz: “Are you the school's biggest loser?”

Please circle.

Everyone calls me:

a. amazing

b. beautiful

c. Babyshits

When I need a shit, I:

a. do it in my pants

b. do it in my diaper

c. sit on a toilet and remember to flush

Congratulations, you are officially the school's biggest loser. Why don't you die?

I didn't know why I didn't die. I waited for my breath to stop coming and my heartbeat to end. I was nothing. I watched the changing pictures of Mexico and wished I was anything else. The blankness of a sheet of paper. The lime-green of a fallen leaf. A plastic watch ticking on a boy's wrist. The Mexican burro with empty eyes who stood alone in the slideshow.

After the last picture, Señora Vallsay switched on the lights and said we'd introduce ourselves to the class in Spanish. I could suddenly picture myself saying the wrong name. I got ready for the snorted giggles, and the echoed hoot, but when I opened my mouth I could hardly speak. My throat clogged with mud, and for a moment Señora Vallsay looked in my eyes like she was reading me. Her eyes were clear to the bottom and they knew me, my suffering. She was half smiling, but she was also knowing me. And I finally whispered, “Me llamo Callie.”