In Zanesville (28 page)

“Any,” I say finally.

At Red Rock, the boys learn how to farm whether they want to or not. All the grade schools take field trips out there so the
children can see a working farm and what happens to boys who won’t mind. I remember it was a lot cleaner than other farms,
and everything was labeled, not just hooks where tools were to be hung, but everything. The water spigot outside the horse
barn had a sign above it that said
OUTSIDE WATER SPIGOT.
The kid takes a step forward, pulling off his black cap and stuffing it into a pocket; he has a cowlick like a boy and sideburns
like a man. Gray eyes, no gloves.

“That’s a good brand,” he says.

Hector. It means something, but I can’t remember what. Drewrys, that’s the beer they drink. Too late to say it.

Cindy drops her gym bag, tucks in her shirt, and kicks up into a handstand. She doesn’t rest her feet on the building but
hovers sturdily in midair, demonstrating how you don’t arch your back except a little. “See?” She’s speaking to her hands,
but everyone nods, including me. “You have to reach up
through your feet. Imagine someone is dangling you by the ankles.”

Patterson breaks off from the handstand group to ask the Hector kid a question. “Can you get us lime vodka?”

He ignores her, taking his hat out of his pocket, giving it a shake, and putting it back on.

“Can you?” she asks again.

“You don’t want that,” he says to me.

Galen has Patti against a tree now, the one I was hiding behind earlier, and is kissing her madly, as a joke. She’s kissing
him madly back, also as a joke, but then all of a sudden she hooks a leg around him and he starts pushing against her in a
realistic, involuntary-looking way.

Patterson looks me up and down, head tipped to the side. “Cute scarf,” she says finally. “Is it purple?”

Imagine someone is dangling you by the ankles.

“Is it?” she asks again.

“Not really,” I say to the boy.

One of the Red Rock kids escaped on a tractor a few years back, driving across fields and through fences all the way to the
Mississippi, parking along Shore Drive and disappearing forever, either onto the interstate or into the current. That could
be this kid, in his faded farmer coat and black cap, bare hands on the steering wheel, hauling along at two miles an hour,
trailing barbed wire and posts. Another memory from the visit to Red Rock in sixth grade: a sign over a hook in the toolroom
that read
BOBWIRE CRIMPS.
It had struck me, even as a twelve-year-old, that a hayseed had written the sign.

Patti wrenches free from Galen, who stands there with a dazed, sleepy expression on his face as she collects her gym
bag. “Tell Felicia about the party,” she commands me, and then grabs Galen by the hood of his sweatshirt and pulls him away
into the night.

The boy looks after them uncertainly and then takes a step backward.
Wait, don’t leave.

“Nothing against your friend Fellatio, but do not tell her about the party,” Cindy interjects, wrapping her scarf around her
neck. She looks relaxed and clear eyed from being upside down. “Because not everyone can come—that’s basically what a party
is. Some can come and some can’t.”

“I’m pretty sure she already knows about it,” I say.

I can’t tell if the boy Hector is leaving or not. He looks like someone you’d never notice, not tall, not short.

“People can
know,
” Patterson explains. “They just can’t come if they’re not invited.”

“I don’t think you can stop people from coming to a bonfire in the middle of a closed park on a Saturday night,” I inform
her. My voice comes out sharper than I intended, and Deb and Cindy stare at me. “I mean, can you? It would be hard.”

They consider this.

“True,” Cindy admits.

Hector is fading away, out of the gym lights and into the darkness.

“We should wear our cheerleading jackets,” Cindy says suddenly, and they all nod. “Since there might be people there from
across the river.” She turns to me. “You can wear Gretchen’s last year’s. Everything’s the same but the cuffs.”

A cheerleader jacket! Belonging to Gretchen Quist, who is my same size, so I won’t have to twist my sister’s long, long arm
to get her peacoat and then keep my hands in my pockets all night, or wear my own crappy CPO and freeze.

“Three people can say they’re staying at my house. I’ll tell my parents we’re going to a party but not what it is,” Cindy
goes on. “And here are the three.”

She narrows her eyes, considering each of us in turn.

It’s all the way night now and Hector has disappeared completely, leaving just us here, five girls watching Cindy Falk button
her coat. Out on the street, a pizza delivery car creeps along with its dome light on, the guy inside trying to read something.
Felicia and I ordered pizzas a few times and had them sent to the house of the parochial school kid, the one we used to spy
on last summer through his bedroom window. Half-pepperoni and half-cheese, to make it seem specific.

“Maybe just two people,” Cindy says, lifting her black hair and settling it around her shoulders. “You and you.”

Gretchen and me.

“I couldn’t anyway,” Patterson blurts out. “I meant to say: I have church choir the next morning.”

“Perfect then,” Cindy says lightly.

Usually after we ordered pizza for the parochial kid, we’d walk over and sit behind the bushes across the street, waiting
to see what they’d do when it showed up. A couple of times his mother paid and they ate it. Those were the good old days.

There’s a one-sided fight going on when I get home, my dad sitting on a kitchen chair drunk, badgering my mother and my sister,
who are in there trying to make cupcakes for some high school thing.

“I’ll say this about that!” he keeps shouting.

“I hope you were at Yearbook,” my mother says. “That’s what I was telling myself.”

“This about that!” he shouts.

“What?” I ask her.

“I said, ‘
This about that!
’ ” Even louder.

“Not
you,
” my mother says to my dad. “I said, ‘I hope you were at Yearbook,’ and just ignore him.”

“Oh,” I answer. And then, even though it won’t do any good: “Please make him shut up.”

“
I’ll say this about that!
” Louder still, fists clenched.

“Dad!” Meg cries. She’s trying to frost a cupcake that isn’t cool yet, and the top keeps peeling off. “Get out of here! Everyone
in this house is sick of you!”

“Well,” he mumbles, unclenching his fists and staring at his palms. One of them has a long scar on it, from a childhood accident
with an old wood cookstove. “Look at that!” he murmurs, aghast, holding the melted palm out toward my mother.

“Oh, please!” my mother says.

“I have to take these
tomorrow!
” Meg cries, throwing the spatula across the room, where it slides down the side of the refrigerator on a trail of pink frosting.
She runs out of the room, up the stairs, and into our bedroom, slamming the door.

“Now why don’t you start throwing a fit,” my mother says to me.

“Can’t I even just walk in the house without being yelled at?” I ask, collecting the two ruined cupcakes on a plate.

My father bends his fingers over the stiff palm to make a fist and then tests it by pounding the table.

“Leave those alone,” my mother says, taking the plate from my hand and putting it on the counter.

“Goddamn it!” he cries, pounding again, and then sits back to glare at us.

“Why?”

“Because I just said it,” she answers. “You can eat dinner like a civilized person.”

“I ate at school.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, they fed us.”

“I’ll say
this
about
that!
”

“Fed you what?”

“Pizza.”

“
I’LL SAY
…”

“I
heard
what you said, you goddamned idiot!” she screams, standing over him with a cake-decorating tool, the one that looks like
a giant metal syringe. “Drive me crazy all you want—nobody has an ounce of respect for me! But look at what you’re doing to
your kids!”

Tammy jumps down from my father’s lap.

“See?” I say to him. “Even your own dog is sick of you.”

“You can get out of my hair too,” she shouts. “Now! Get upstairs.”

“What did I do?” I ask, collecting the cupcakes and heading out of the kitchen, past Tammy, who has stopped to lick the frosting
off the refrigerator.

Meg is sitting in bed with a book open and her eyes on the ceiling, trying to memorize something. There’s a line down the
middle of the bedroom, where my clean expanse ends and her rubble begins. I offer her one of the wrinkled cupcakes but she
doesn’t want it.

“Is she making the rest of them?” she asks.

“Trying to. She almost hit him with a metal thing,” I report. “These are good.”

“I wish she would hit him,” Meg says. “It doesn’t matter how good they are. They’re for a bake sale, so it only matters what
they look like. And they look like a mound of pink shit in a cupcake paper.”

“I think she’s putting white squiggles on the rest of them,” I mention.

“What?” Meg cries. “I don’t want anything on them!” She jumps up and runs out, slamming the door just as the phone rings.

The telephone is on my side of the room, sitting on the dresser with its cord in a neat coil next to it. Nobody downstairs
will answer because of the bellowing.

“Hello?”

Silence.

“Hello?”

Silence. Muffled sounds in the background, of cars, or of people talking.

Suddenly, I know it’s him, Hector, standing at the pay phone next to—where?—maybe the Dairy Mart, while Galen is inside shoplifting.
Standing on the Dairy Mart corner with his cap off and his cold hands in his pockets, the receiver pressed to his shoulder,
cars going past on Elm Ave. My heart begins pounding with the strangeness of it all; nobody has ever prank phone-called me
before, and I don’t know what to do.

Silence.

I set the phone back in the cradle.

In the dresser mirror, my face looks the same, but I feel something happening around me, some change as palpable as
weather. Stuck in the mirror are mementos from my childhood—red and yellow ribbons for various underachievements, a brown
corsage from grade school graduation, a curling and faded picture of me petting a deer in Wisconsin—which is now over. I wandered
through it and came out the other side.

It’s a stark feeling. Like getting to the last page of a book and seeing “The End.” Even if you didn’t like the story that
much, or your childhood, you read it, you lived it. And now it’s over, book closed, that long-ago deer you petted in the Dells
as dead as the one in
The Yearling.

I go across the hall and knock.

“What?” Raymond asks through his door. There’s a thumping from downstairs and then some surprised yelling and another thump.
If my dad gets frustrated enough, he’ll start lunging from his chair, trying to grab at my mom.

“I have a present for you,” I tell Ray, and he lets me in.

His room is smaller than ours, but better. It has a complicated closet, with slanted walls and a steeply pitched floor; a
four-poster double bed, which he’s run three pieces of clothesline around so it looks like a boxing ring; outlets on all four
walls, each with its own nightlight; and a metal box under the window with a fire escape ladder in it, the only one in the
house. We all seem to understand that if anything bad were to happen, he’s the one who should make it out alive.

“These are good,” he says through the cupcake.

He’s taken his bottom dresser drawer out, turned it over, and thrown an old braided rug over it to create a hilly terrain
for his army men, some of them standing up and some fallen over, all of them frozen in the throes of combat.

“It’s the Battle of San Juan Hill,” he explains. “All the men try to get up any way they can, but they’re shot down.”

“Where’s G.I. Joe when you need him?” I joke.

“He’s in the cave,” he answers, pointing to the space the dresser drawer normally occupies. Sure enough, G.I. Joe is in there
conferring with a bendable Tonto.

“Would you go down and get me some Jell-O?”

“Dad’s yelling,” he says, moving his men around.

“He won’t yell at you.”

He moves a man so his bayonet is just touching another man’s back. “Can’t you?” he asks miserably.

“No, I told her I already ate and she believed me.”

“She did?”

The hollering gets louder while he’s down there, which I feel bad about. There’s the sound of a scuffle, my sister crying
out and my mother’s shrill voice, berating my father, who bellows again. A minute later, Raymond comes back with a bowl of
red Jell-O and a dinner roll with butter.

“Did you get a cupcake?”

He shakes his head and kneels next to his brown braided hill, staring at his men. While I’m eating my Jell-O, he starts to
cry soundlessly, still playing, using the man with the bayonet to gently push all the other men over, until the whole army
is defeated, and then he crawls under the bottom rope and gets in bed with his clothes on.

“It’s okay,” I say.

He grimaces, crying silently with his eyes closed. “I know,” he whispers.

“Want me to tell you a story?”

He shakes his head. “Not right now,” he whispers, so quietly I can barely hear him.

Just then the phone rings. Out the door, across the hall, into our room, and I grab it on the second ring. My heart is
surging and stalling in my chest; I can’t collect enough breath to say hello. Silence again over background noise, this time
a distant, canned roar that sounds like television laughter. A television?

“Hello,” I say.

The clattering of applause, and then Stephanie’s voice in the background, demanding to turn the channel, followed by the phone
being hung up.

Oh.

Of course.

I look at myself in the mirror. Why did I think it was that boy? He doesn’t even know my name, and probably neither does Galen.
Plus, I look like this. The person who prank phone called me is the only person I would care to talk to right now, but for
some reason I can’t. It isn’t because Jed Jergestaad likes her and it isn’t because Cindy Falk doesn’t. It’s something else.