Rebel, Bully, Geek, Pariah (2 page)

“He punched the machine. . . .”

“Did you call this customer a name?”

I closed my eyes and let my silence tell him all he needed to know.

He sighed, a thin, tired sound. “Please turn in your name tag and clear out your locker.”

Apparently all hope had left this building, too.

It took all of thirty seconds to “clear out my locker.” One summer of watching people bag their own groceries hadn't exactly given me time to settle in at River City Market. All I ever kept in my locker was my purse, a postcard, and a hat—always a hat. Today it was a vintage newsboy cap that I shoved down over my curls. When I was little, my hair was straight and wheat colored, but after the accident it grew back all curly and kind of
orange. Mama called it strawberry blond. I called it Little Orphan Annie.

I peeled the postcard off the inside of the locker door—a night scene of Paris that I'd snagged from one of the overstock bins in the back room. I didn't have the faintest idea why the market would sell postcards from foreign cities, but I liked the tiny lights and the Eiffel Tower in the background all the same.

Someday
, I thought.

I shoved the postcard into my purse and tossed my name tag into the empty locker, too chicken to carry it up to the front office, where my former coworkers would all be watching. I'd had enough of people looking at me for one night. Then I slipped out the loading-dock doors and headed straight for downtown.

The city got decidedly seedier the closer you got to the river, and I shifted my purse strap into a more secure position across my chest as the evening shadows stretched into the street. I kept my eyes peeled for
HELP WANTED
signs. It wouldn't be hard to top River City Market, but at least there I'd been able to zone out and pretend I was somewhere else. I flew over Egyptian pyramids, climbed the Great Wall of China, and explored markets in Marrakesh—all from the end of the self-checkout lane.

Aunt Ellen always said I spent too much time daydreaming, and Grandma used to pat my head and say, “Only children are lonely children.” But Mama understood. She said I had inherited her wandering spirit, and she even bought me the corkboard in my bedroom, where I pinned up pictures of all the places I
planned to go. I know she secretly hoped the pictures would be enough—that I wasn't actually plotting an escape from River City. But she should have known better. She escaped once, too.

I wondered what Mama would say about me getting fired from my first job. I decided I wouldn't tell her until Sunday. Tomorrow night was going to be special, and I didn't want to spoil it.

I put a hand in my purse to feel the wad of bills at the bottom: everything I'd managed to save over the last two months—which wasn't much, thanks to a few too many new hats and a summerlong spending spree on travel magazines, but it was just enough for what I needed.

What I needed was at Pete's Pawn, and I had to weave my way through a cast of characters to get there: the tattoo-covered guy with the shaved head who always parked his butt on a folding chair outside the liquor store, drinking forties and acting like he owned the street; the guy in the suit who tried to make himself look small as he slipped in and out of the dirty-video store and stared too long at teenage girls. The usual crew on River City's main drag, who all belonged in prison.

I should know. I'd seen enough people in prison while visiting Mama.

I looked past the suit and the tattoo man, at the lights flickering on inside an old Italian bistro, the crosswalk signs blinking permission for crowds to rush through traffic, and I listened to the sounds of impatient car horns and the lady shouting down from her second-floor window to the owner of the Chinese market on the sidewalk below.

“It smells like oysters up here! What did I tell you about that?”

“Sorry, ma'am. New delivery today.”

I had to smile. I loved the hustle of downtown, even if I didn't like the hustlers.

I saw all of them, but they didn't see me. Invisibility was a talent I had perfected over the years. Don't make eye contact; keep the hat pulled low; step light. It's funny how many people say they would choose invisibility as a superpower, when really all it takes is practice.

I started practicing after the accident, back when I just wanted people to stop staring. Kids who didn't stare teased, and if they didn't do either, it was only because they felt sorry for me. And the pity was the worst of it. I made it all disappear by making myself disappear. But it's possible to get
too
good at a thing, and one day you wake up screaming inside,
Look at me! Look at me!
And that's when you realize you've forgotten how to be seen.

The clerk at Pete's Pawn saw me, at least. As soon as I pushed open the door, he looked me up and down with suspicious eyes. I didn't blame him. Most people who wandered into Pete's were either looking to steal or looking to sell something they'd already stolen. I made a beeline for the back wall, where all of the musical instruments were hung. Some of them were chained to the wall to keep them from being lifted by sticky fingers. But the one I was looking for wasn't all that valuable—at least not to this shop.

My eyes scanned past the stacks of guitars and piles of drums until I found the row of small stringed instruments and, in the
center of that row, the curve of blond wood I was after. I let out a small sigh of relief that it was still here.

Mama's violin.

I lifted the violin gently from the rack and blew a layer of dust off the top. The price tag, tied to the neck with a piece of thread, fluttered with my breath and landed faceup, balanced on top of the strings. The number on the tag caused me to gasp.

Four hundred dollars?!

Still gripping the violin in one hand, I reached into my purse with the other. My stack of twenties looked meager now—only two hundred dollars, which had been the price of the violin for the last three years. You'd think, after all that time collecting dust, the violin would have gone down in value, not doubled.

I carried the violin to the clerk to show him the offending price tag.

“I think this is marked wrong. It used to be half this much.”

He shrugged. “I don't set the prices.” He flipped through a magazine with sports cars splashed across the pages and deliberately ignored me.

So, Pete's Pawn is all about eyeballing anyone suspicious but can't be bothered with an honest customer. Nice to know.

I stared at him until he finally looked up.

“The owner sets the prices. Maybe he looked it up on eBay or something, and it's worth more than he thought.”

It
was
worth more. A
lot
more. But at four hundred dollars, I doubted “Pete” or whoever owned the place had actually done any research. If he had, he might have noticed the autograph carved crudely into the neck—might have looked up the name
and discovered that this violin had been played on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, in the hands of a woman people once upon a time thought could be a huge country-music star.

But that's the thing about stars—they all fizzle out, one way or another, and Mama's star had never burned bright enough to earn her a name outside Nashville. So here in Illinois, her almost-famous fiddle was worth only four hundred bucks. Four hundred bucks I didn't have.

The clerk went back to his magazine, and I retreated to the instrument wall. My eyes burned, but I didn't cry. I tried sometimes to bring on the tears, but all I ever got was a sore throat from straining. Apparently, crying wasn't something you could practice, like being invisible or polite.

But if I could cry, this would be the moment. Mama and I had big plans for tomorrow, and I was going to be empty-handed. I didn't have time to research another gift, and a card just wasn't enough.

Although, they probably did make a card for this. They made a card for everything else.

Dearest Mother,

Cheers to another year.

Thanks for staying sober.

Love, Sam

 

2

I STARED DOWN at the violin in my hands and cursed quietly, pissed at myself for wasting money on hats and magazines. Now I didn't have enough to buy back something that belonged to us in the first place. I counted my cash again, as if there would suddenly be an extra two hundred dollars in the pile, then shoved the whole wad into my back pocket. I wiggled my hand up under my cap to finger the rope-like scars beneath my hair—a nervous habit the hats were supposed to help prevent.

“You got lice or something?” a voice asked, startling me so much I almost dropped the violin.

I spun and stumbled back a step, knocking into the row of stringed instruments so that they banged together with the hollow echo of thin wood and the shriek of scraped wire.

“You break it, you buy it!” the clerk called from the front of the store.

I opened my mouth to answer the stranger who had sneaked up on me but was struck dumb when I saw she wasn't a stranger. Not completely.

She pointed a pale finger at my hand shoved up under my hat. “Lice? Bugs? You look like you're about to dig a hole in your head.”

I yanked my hand down. “I don't have lice.”

The girl tilted her head, a row of long dreadlocks cascading to one side. “Wait, I know you. Samantha, right?”

“Sam,” I corrected, surprised she'd even come close. Despite the fact that we were in the same class—both about to be juniors at Jefferson—the nearest we'd ever come to conversation was me coughing as I passed through her cloud of cigarette smoke every day on the way into school.

“Yeah, Sam.” She snapped her long white fingers, which were tipped with black nail polish. “Sam . . .”

“Cherie.”

“Cherry, yes.”

I scowled back at her. “No, not
cherry
. Cherie, with a ‘
sh
.'”

I noticed with some irritation that she didn't bother to tell me her name, but I guess when you're Andi Dixon you don't worry about people forgetting it.

“So why are you drooling over a piece of old wood, Sam Cherie?” Andi reached for the violin, and I reflexively smacked her hand away.

She lowered her voice to a hiss. “Watch it, little girl. I'm trying to be nice to you.”

I doubted “nice” was a word anyone ever used to describe Andi. Not back when she was the girl in designer jeans with the whole school wrapped around her perfectly polished pink fingernails, and definitely not now that she'd swapped all that pink
for her signature green army jacket and earned a reputation for flipping off teachers and cutting class.

“Sorry.” I squeezed the neck of the violin, feeling stupid. “It's just—it's special. It's sort of a family heirloom.”

“Ah.” Andi relaxed. “You're buying back something that shouldn't have been sold.”

“Well, I was.”

“Was? Change your mind?” Andi's eyes flitted around the shop, piled to the ceiling with other people's abandoned belongings. “See something you want more?”

What I wanted couldn't fit inside Pete's Pawn. It was a train through Europe; it was the ruins of Machu Picchu; it was a life unshackled by addiction.

My fingers traced the worn edge of the blond violin. Every year when we celebrated Mama's sobriety, I also secretly celebrated one year closer to the day when I could leave her alone without worrying about a relapse.

The longest stretch I'd ever lived with Mama was the first six years of my life, the six years when I'd learned to call her “Mama” and everyone else “y'all”—two words Mama had brought home with her from Nashville, along with an unplanned baby and a drug habit.

Mama's jail-parole-jail rotation started when I was six, and I spent the next few years in the custody of my grandmother and, when she died, my aunt Ellen. I still saw Mama all the time, though. Whenever she was on parole or in between rehabs, my world was full of supervised Saturdays at halfway houses and not-so-supervised Sundays giving each other mani-pedis on Aunt
Ellen's couch. Those memories were a checkerboard of light and dark, of here and gone, of one day Mama pulling me out of school for a shopping spree and the next day trying to block out the sound of her standing on the front lawn crying and shouting that Aunt Ellen was trying to steal her baby. It's confusing when your mom is both the scariest and most exciting person you know.

When I moved back in with Mama permanently at age thirteen, the seesaw finally stopped, and somewhere between the manic highs and the scary lows I met my real mom. This mom didn't let me cut school or buy me lavish gifts, but she still painted my toenails every Sunday.

She'd been sober a year by then, and we'd celebrated her one-year chip from Narcotics Anonymous with takeout pizza in our brand-new apartment. I'd given her a locket that had belonged to Grandma—one Mama had pawned for drug money years before. She didn't know that Grandma had bought it back, and then passed it down to me.

It became our ritual. Every year, on the same day in August: the NA chip, the pizza, and a gift of something precious that Mama had pawned. It was lucky for me that she'd pawned almost everything at the same two shops downtown.

“I never see anyone else my age in here,” Andi said, her eyes still combing the shelves. “Especially not on a Friday night.”

“You come here a lot?” I asked.

“I stop in from time to time.”

“To do what?”

“Whatever I want,” Andi answered, with a casual flip of her long dreadlocks. Then, as if to punctuate the point, her hand
slipped over to a shelf of knickknacks and palmed a cheap-looking snow globe. She tossed it in the air once, caught it, and with only the slightest glance over her shoulder at the clerk at the front counter, slipped it into the pocket of her oversize army jacket.

“Most of this stuff is junk,” she whispered. “But sometimes you find a gem.”