Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (16 page)

In my room I walked back and forth from wall to wall thirty-three times. As I paced, the light moved incrementally over the shag. I figured if I used Jesus’s age any evil spirits in the room would be blasted out the window.

When my mother called me down to lunch, I went, but I could not eat any of my cheese sandwich and potato chips. I just stared at the food until the tiny holes in the bread looked huge and the chips made a grease stain on my paper plate. At first the grease spots looked like the chain of Caribbean islands, but after I stared long enough they looked like the freckles on Jill’s collarbone.

In my room I set up all the objects I had crushes on, starting with an empty Avon perfume bottle shaped like a puppy. Always before, when I’d touched it and smelled it, I felt a small expansion, as if part of my
heart were warm Silly Putty. But this wasn’t working. None of my other crushes—like the silk scarf with huge pale-pink roses or the spoon with the filigree handle—had any effect on me.

Finally I took my book on burial rites off the shelf and stared at the front cover. It was the only thing I had that always worked. I’d checked it out of the library three times in a row and I never intended to give it back. I’d decided if the librarian, a skinny lady who always had red lipstick smudged on her teeth—which made it seem as if she’d been eating live chickens—ever said I couldn’t check it out anymore, I would wait until it was checked back in, take it off the shelf, sneak into the bathroom, throw the book out the window, and then go around outside and pick it up. Who else in Roanoke could possibly need the
Big Book of Burial Rites
as much as I did? Who would pore lovingly over the description of widows, sometimes girls as young as sixteen, throwing themselves into the flames of their husbands’ funeral pyres?

Now, though, I was afraid to open it. I was afraid that it too might have lost its power to comfort me. I traced the letters on the cover with my finger and lay for a few minutes with the weight of the book on my lap.

I couldn’t help myself. I opened it up to
Chapter Six
and stared at the photograph of the
rogyapa
, or body breaker, who used a sledgehammer to disassemble a body so vultures could freely eat the organs. The caption read:
The rogyapa’s cheerfulness makes it easier
for the soul of the deceased to move out of purgatory and into the next life.

I flipped back to the chapter about the
sokushinbutsu
monks who spent years trying to mummify themselves. First they ate only nuts and seeds, then bark and roots, and then, for the last month of their lives, they drank poison tea. Finally each monk locked himself into a stone tomb, barely larger than his body. In the tomb there was just a breathing tube and a bell. Each day while he was still alive, the monk rang the bell; when the bell stopped sounding, the tube was removed and the tomb sealed. Three years later the tomb was opened and, voila, there was a tiny mummified monk! The living monks carried the body to the altar and worshipped it as a Buddha.

I closed the book and went downstairs to see if I could find some nuts in the kitchen cabinet. I ate a handful of walnuts. On Monday I could buy a bag of sunflower seeds at the Hop-In. Roots and bark would be easy to come by up on the mountain. Only six more years until I’d be locked inside a crypt in the lotus position, my body so lean and untasty even the maggots would not want me.

My father came downstairs into the kitchen. He was on his way to his second job at the psych center. When we lived in the rectory, I’d often see him walking across the lawn between the church and rectory in his black surplice and white robe, his silver pectoral cross swinging around his neck and a smile on his
face. Now he worked not only nine to five at the VA hospital, but also at the psych center most nights. He looked tired out all the time, distracted. He wore his blazer with the frayed lapel, a wide pink tie, and bell-bottom jeans.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” he said, grabbing the keys off the hook on the wall and heading out the door.

I got out the Fred Flintstone jelly glass, my hands shaking as I poured the milk up to the top of his hairdo. My beautiful friend was gone. I stared at the green wall phone.

You had to believe really hard to make anything happen. It was like God—you believed in Him to make Him exist.

Call me
, I mouthed, shooting out a beam of light to wherever Jill might be now.

All weekend I’d lain across my bed with my head tipped back—exactly as Jill had—staring up at the ceiling, sending out
SOS
signals from my brain to hers. Several times in the night, I stood in the dark kitchen and commanded the phone to sound. By Monday, as I got dressed for school, I’d convinced myself I would never see Jill again, that she’d been sent to the orphanage in the country. I’d never seen the actual building, just the metal sign on the highway that read
DANDYLOCK GIRLS’ HOME
. Maybe she’d gone
berserk like the runaway girls in made-for-TV movies, cutting off chunks of her hair with a switchblade and screaming swear words. In that case, I figured, she’d be down at the reform school in Richmond.

I’d been at Low Valley Junior High only a few months, but I’d heard stories about girls who disappeared. Kids said one girl was a prostitute now in Atlanta, and another had run away with an old man to France. An eighth-grade girl who’d disappeared the year before had shown up one day in home economics, just as our teacher was going over how to ferment pickles. The girl told everyone she’d spent a year at a private school in New Orleans, but Jill said everyone knew a guy on the football team had knocked her up and she’d been sent down to relatives in Florida while she was pregnant. It was not unusual for girls to disappear, to turn into stories, but it was rare for them to come back, to change back again into girls.

As I suspected, Jill’s seat in homeroom was empty, and the teacher, knowing we were friends, asked if I knew where she was.

“No ma’am,” I said.

The intercom crackled to life and the principal, Mr. Powers, told us, in his intense Southern accent, that anyone participating in a food fight in the cafeteria would be suspended and that our football team, the Mighty Eagles, were still undefeated and, on a side note, that the new smorgasbord restaurant out in Salem was delicious.

The door flew open while the principal praised the potato salad and there was Jill, waving a note for the teacher. She wore her favorite cheesecloth shirt, blue cords, and a pair of new fur-lined clogs. She took her seat and smiled at me, mouthing
I missed you.
I was so happy I felt I might float out of my chair and up to the ceiling.

She opened her notebook, the one with the to-do lists, and wrote furtively, every now and then glancing up to smile.

“We got split up!” she said to me once the bell rang and we were out in the hallway. “I don’t even know where Beth is!”

“That’s terrible,” I said.

“I’m with a brakeman and his wife out by Tilden Lake. I sleep in their dead daughter’s bedroom!”

Everyone knew Tilden Lake was haunted.

“Is that the girl who comes out of the lake asking why the fish ate her eyes?”

Jill shivered.

“I have to sleep in her room!”

“That’s creepy.”

“She was a cute little girl, I have to give her that. There are pictures of her up all over the house.”

In our first-period class, Jill asked so many questions about Chairman Mao—
Did he have false teeth? What was Mao’s opinion on foot binding? Did he believe in dragons?
—that our social studies teacher had to tell her to let somebody else have a turn. In
health class she seemed idiotically interested in the five food groups. Even in English, which was her most hated subject, she wrote a poem about a girl waiting for a soldier in a bus station.

       
Little girl. Little girl.

       
Who will catch you?

       
You sit on

       
the bench beside the mother

       
with her baby

       
and the black lady

       
reading her Bible.

She seemed to be set at a higher speed than usual, fluttering her fingers, cracking her neck, pulling her legs up under her body. At lunch, she quickly lifted out of her bag a ham sandwich, an orange, and a homemade brownie wrapped in plastic. I could tell by the careful way she set each item on the table how much the food meant to her.

“Now that the police are searching,” she said, “it’s only a matter of time before they find my mom.”

It was pretty clear to me she was using words to make a little ledge for her to stand on. I nodded, but I didn’t think her family would be coming together anytime soon. If her mother hadn’t come back by now, she was probably out in California. Or she might have passed out of her human form into a small mummy sitting lotus-style in a cave someplace.

Jill’s eyes kept sliding down the length of the table to where Dwayne sat with some of the boys from the bus. Dwayne was talking about sacrificing frogs to pagan gods and using black magic to communicate with Duane Allman. On the bus that morning, without Jill there to protect me, he’d dared me to pull up my shirt, and when I refused he called me a lezzbo. He called poor Pam “Kool-Aid face” because of her birthmark and dared her to French kiss him. I had no idea why Jill would have any interest in him, but on her way back from the trash can she slowed in front of him and jutted out her skinny hips.

During gym, we played volleyball, the girls’ class against the boys’. Jill stood in the front by the net, across from Dwayne. He stared at her, and I could tell that Jill was discombobulated. Something about his gaze made it impossible for her to think. Mid-game, after he’d spiked the ball so hard it knocked off Pam’s glasses, he spoke to Jill, but I was too far back to hear what either said. The girls’ gym teacher, Mrs. Popsic, kept squatting down, clasping her hands together straight out in front of her, and shouting, “Got it!” whenever the ball came near where we both stood. Mrs. Popsic was the cheerleading sponsor, a middle-aged lady with short hair. On game days she helped the girls decorate the football players’ lockers, taping construction paper signs—
GO GET ’EM EAGLES
—to the painted metal and placing candy bars on top of the jocks’ textbooks.

After the volleyball game, the locker room rang with girls’ voices. I hated the large white-tiled room with the multiple shower spigots because: (a) I hated to be naked in front of anyone but myself, and (b) I’d once seen a prison movie where inmates got stabbed in a room that looked exactly like that one. Blood clinging to white tile was not an image I’d ever forget. The only way you got out of taking a group shower was to go up to Mrs. Popsic and say
P
. This meant you could use one of the half-dozen private showers. I said
P
once a month because I didn’t want the other girls to know that P had not visited me yet.

After we showered—which for Jill and me just meant running into the room, sticking our butts into the spray, and then running back out into the locker room—Jill pulled on her four-leaf-clover underpants and white bra. She was the slightest bit ahead of me development-wise. While I had the smallest swelling around my nips, as Jill called them, and a few stray black hairs between my legs, Jill had a puff of hair under each arm, and her breasts, while small, were definitely there. I worried that Jill was going away from me, transforming from a girl who was willing to listen to my Disney records and even occasionally play with my dolls into a teenager who wanted to read
Tiger Beat
, talk about Bobby Sherman, and write the names of boys over and over in her notebook. Her eyes would deaden and she’d be another zombie girl roaming the hallways of Low Valley with shiny hair and an add-a-bead necklace.