The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (24 page)

“I’m a volunteer at Mission San Luis. You should come up there sometime.” Travis was taller than Ava, and not bad looking, his baby face balanced out by his sturdy build. He had a dimple in one cheek.

Before she could say anything in reply, like “sure” or “maybe I will,” Suzi came up from behind, plowing into Ava and propelling her forward with her body and her crutches, causing her to bump into people who were making their way down the aisles and out of the church.

Ava protested, but Suzi kept pushing her in her aggressive way, like Ava was a soccer ball she was moving toward the goal. “Let’s go say hi to Buff,” she said.

Up near the stage, Buff was talking to an older couple, patting the woman’s rounded back, his face furrowed with concern. He had nice thick, light brown hair, parted on the side. And a suntan. Didn’t he worry about getting skin cancer?

“Buff,” Suzi interrupted, shaking his elbow. “Here’s my sister, Ava.”

Buff dropped his hand from the older woman’s humped back and turned his attention immediately to Ava. Wow. He glowed like a movie star. He clasped her hand in both of his. “So good to finally meet you.”

“Okay,” Ava said, glancing off sideways. Buff was sending her messages with his eyes that were too intense, and she couldn’t interpret them.

“You are just as beautiful as Miss Suzi said you were!”

“Okay,” Ava said, meeting his eyes briefly and then looking at Suzi.

“I never said that,” Suzi protested, her face crinkled with disgust.

Buff wrapped his football player arm around Suzi’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze, causing her to stumble with her crutches. Suzi’s face changed from disgust to pleasure. Suzi’s goal, Ava’d figured out over the years, was to get all the attention, in any situation, focused on herself, and she was so good at getting it that Ava didn’t bother to compete.

“Nice to meet you,” Ava mumbled, and began backing away.

“Wait, wait,” said Buff, dropping his arm from Suzi’s shoulder. There were other people, teenage girls and one eager “cool guy” type lined up beside Buff, waiting to speak to him. “Suzi and I would love to get you involved in our youth group—wouldn’t we, Suze?”

Suzi nodded and did another fake, eager smile.

“Okay,” said Ava. Thank God the word
okay
had been invented. There was some debate about the origins of the word, she remembered reading somewhere. Some people thought that it came from the Choctaw Indians, and others that it came from the African slaves in America.…

Buff was talking to her again. “So, we’re taking a youth group trip to Wakulla Springs next Saturday. Have a cookout, grill some burgers and brats, swim with the gators. What do you say? We’d love to have you.” He was like a force, the combination of his personality and his manly good looks. Either you let yourself be drawn into his force field or repelled. That’s how Otis would’ve described it, though he would probably be even more scientific, mentioning atoms, neutrons.…

“Can you come? Next Saturday?”

“Well …”

“I’ll drop by to pick you both up myself.”

“Cool!” said Suzi. “I can’t swim, though, with my knee like this.”

“You can sit on the beach, looking cute,” Buff told her. “So I’ll pick you both up next Saturday at eleven.”

The boy standing at Buff’s elbow couldn’t contain himself for another minute. He elbowed Buff in the ribs. “You gonna pick me up, too?”

“With your foot odor?” Buff said to the kid, and elbowed him in the stomach.

Ava took this opportunity to turn and start down the aisle, glancing around for Travis in the thinning crowd, but didn’t see him.

There was Nance, though, sitting in the chair watching her, looking small and forlorn and pasty pale. Why was she staring at Ava?

Ava walked right past her and out through the bustling lobby into the blinding sunlight and the blistering concrete and all the cars, looking for Travis. He was gone.

* * *

“Who was that guy you were talking to earlier?” Suzi asked her when they were in Nance’s car, racing home like they were going to a fire. “The one in the costume. I’ve seen him before. He’s bizarre.”

Ava didn’t want to give greedy little Suzi any more information, or ammunition, than she already had. “I’ve never seen him before in my life,” Ava said, remembering too late that Travis might be on the Wakulla trip and she’d have to keep lying. She was just as bad as Nance and Suzi. She was the liar filling in the pressed liar sandwich.

There was something else she’d been lying about. She had barely passed algebra last spring, and her mother had sent in her application to Rhodes College. But even though she’d told her mother she wanted to go there, she didn’t, and she wouldn’t. Ava had wanted to be so many things along the way as she was growing up; and maybe because of her mom’s encouragement, she’d been certain she could do any of them, although she’d never admit this to her mother. Her father
didn’t care what she did, didn’t expect her to accomplish anything, the way her mother did. She had no idea what she really wanted to accomplish, beyond being an Elvis fan and America’s next top model. But being a fan wasn’t a career and the model thing, if she did get it, wouldn’t last long. All she knew is that she wanted to eventually be a grown-up—finish college, just a state school, nothing fancy, and live on her own for a while, then get married and have a family. But this wasn’t anything she could ever say aloud to anyone. It was too ordinary, not flashy enough. More like a log cabin instead of Genesis Church.

* * *

Buff came for Suzi and Ava the following Saturday morning. He pulled up into their driveway in a big black SUV, the kind of car her parents always spoke scornfully of. He had called the day before and talked to her mother about the outing, and her mother later told Ava that he wanted to take his own car to Wakulla Springs because riding on the bus made him motion sick, and, well, since they were in the same neighborhood, he thought he’d just swing by to pick up Suzi and Ava. Her mom seemed to think it was okay, so it must be.

Buff came inside, in his polo shirt, knee-length madras shorts, and sports sandals, like something out of the Lands’ End catalog, and talked to her mother for a few minutes in a soothing, reassuring voice, promising that he’d have her “lovely daughters” back by five p.m.

Even though Suzi sat in the backseat on the way down to the park, she managed to insert herself into the conversation constantly. Buff asked Ava questions about her interests, her plans, her goals. She told him she got As in everything except math, which was mostly true. She told him she planned to go to Rhodes College in Memphis, if she could get in, but beyond that she didn’t know.

“I’m going to get a soccer scholarship,” Suzi announced, “to one of those Ivy League schools, like Harvard, and be an archaeologist.”

Ava let out a big sigh, and to her surprise, Buff winked at her.

“Must be nice to have it all figured out, Suzi Q,” he said. “But the Lord might have other plans for you!”

“Huh,” Suzi said, clearly doubting that anyone, including the Lord God almighty, could interfere in her plans.

Every time Ava glanced over at Buff, he was looking at her with that intense gaze that she didn’t know the meaning of. After a while she forced herself not to look at him.

At Wakulla Springs State Park, which was about half an hour south of Tallahassee, they met up with the other youths, who were disembarking from a big white bus with
Genesis Church
written on the side. After the cool car ride, standing outside in the heat under the live oak trees felt comforting.

Three of the girls, who looked to be around Suzi’s age, came rushing over to hug her and help her carry her swim bag and towel since she was on crutches.

Ava was pleased to see Travis climbing off the bus, wearing regular clothes and carrying a balled-up towel. He didn’t see Ava and headed straight for the river.

Ava tried to follow him, just because he was someone familiar to hang out with, but Buff was gathering up the remaining youth group members with his arms. “Buff hug!” everyone said, and Buff prayed aloud right there in the gravel parking lot for God’s guidance and protection and for everyone to have a safe and fun day. “Amen,” all the teenagers chanted, and then they let out a whoop that startled Ava out of her skin.

Somehow, Ava ended up sitting beside Buff on the river ride in one of the white metal boats with open sides and a canopy roof—and she was aware that many of the other kids, who all seemed to want Buff’s attention, were staring at her with unfriendly expressions, which she supposed meant they were jealous. Jealous! Of her! This included Suzi,
who, red-faced and sweaty, struggled up the aisle of the boat on her crutches and still managed to shoot Ava a nasty look.

Travis merely smiled at Ava as he passed, not making any effort to sit beside her. He plopped himself down on a bench in the front of the boat, beside another boy, and the two of them passed a pair of binoculars back and forth.

Ava had taken this forty-minute-long ride down the Wakulla River countless times—with her family and visitors from out of state, and on outings in elementary school. The pale green water was always super-clear. You always saw the same things as you floated along—alligators half submerged in the lily pads looking like chunks of radial tires, turtles lined up on logs, egrets, herons, anhingas, and ducks—black snakes dangling from trees. And you heard the same stories about all the movies filmed there—the most famous being
Creature from the Black Lagoon
. But it never got old, somehow.

Buff took pictures of alligators with his cell phone, he said, to send them to his three-year-old daughter, Angel. He was very considerate of Ava and kept asking her if she could see the animal the guide had just called out.

“Buff. Hey, Buff.” A young woman with a cleavage-revealing tank top tapped Buff on his shoulder. “Why didn’t Rusty and Paula and Angel come?”

Buff turned around with his whole upper torso and flashed his smile at the girl, who had long brown braids. “Hey, Amber. They had a birthday party to go to.”

“Who’s Paula?” Ava asked Buff.

Amber, the cleavage girl, answered the question. “That’s his wife. She used to be a Playboy bunny!”

For some reason, hearing this made Ava feel sick. Playboy bunny! Was that the kind of woman Buff liked? Did all men, even ministers, want to marry women who looked like that? Huge boobs, like Amber’s?

Buff was shaking his head at Amber disapprovingly. “That was before she got saved,” Buff told Ava. “That life’s behind her now. She’s been cleansed in the blood.”

Yuck, Ava thought. And without even thinking about it, she stood and walked up the aisle and slid onto the bench seat beside Travis.

Travis said nothing but companionably handed her his binoculars.

“Anhinga on your left,” intoned the guide, an African American man with a trim gray beard who gunned the boat’s motor to underscore every announcement he made. “Also known as the snakebird. Water turkey.”

* * *

Later, they all ate hamburgers and brats and chips and potato salad and brownies in a picnic shelter behind the Wakulla Springs Lodge—a white, two-story, Spanish-style building housing a restaurant, hotel, snack bar, and lobby where Big Joe, a huge alligator killed by poachers, had been stuffed and was now displayed in a glass case.

Ava sat alone at the end of a picnic table, eating a large, well-done hamburger, delivered to her by Buff himself, watching Suzi and her posse at another table. Even though she’d just started attending this church, Suzi already had a posse, as their dad would say. Suzi, whose only complaint about her social life was that everyone wanted to sit next to her and thought they were her best friend, ate her lunch and talked with her posse, pointedly ignored Ava, pretending Ava didn’t exist, not even caring that Ava was alone, even though she’d invited her.

Buff, too, was surrounded by chattering, laughing kids at all times, and after he finished cooking and eating he started throwing a football with some of the guys. The guys seemed to love him as much as the girls did. He was like the popular kid, only he wasn’t a kid.

The smoke from the grill gradually died down. Travis sat under a huge live oak tree, reading a book that appeared to be a fantasy book,
from the lurid cover. Why did guys like to read that kind of crap? What was wrong with the real world? Facts. True stories. Biographies. Ava had never liked made-up nonsense. She’d read the first volume of the Guralnick biography of Elvis five times.

Finally the group tidied their shelter and moved in a herd down to the changing rooms beside the lodge. Then they descended the tile walkway onto the narrow strip of sugar sand beach beside the river. Most of the kids threw down their towels and got in line to jump off the tall wooden diving tower.

Suzi’s posse had positioned themselves close to the water, surrounded by cypress trees like a little fort. Knowing she wouldn’t be welcome in Suzi’s group, Ava positioned her towel in some sparse grass under a cypress tree and sat down feeling hideously self-conscious in her pink and black zebra-striped bikini. People were always telling her how thin she was, how gorgeous, but she never felt like she was either, at least not for long. She was always, it seemed, preoccupied to distraction by some flaw she’d detected in herself, on her body, something she couldn’t stop worrying about no matter how much her mother told her she needn’t worry, that she was making another big deal out of nothing. Today it was the fact that her pubic hair was sticking out of her bathing suit on the right side. She usually remembered to shave down there but had forgotten this morning. But why was it sticking out only on the right side? Then she noticed a slight pooch in her stomach. She shouldn’t have eaten all those chips! She sucked her stomach in and it popped back out.

A shadowy figure loomed over her. Travis, wearing only swimming trunks and a baseball cap pulled down low over his face, clutching his towel and book. Ava couldn’t take her eyes off his chest—hairless except for a silky dark nest in the middle. He asked if he could sit by her, and she said sure.

He laid out his striped towel in the sand, smoothing down the
edges and sweeping off errant grains of sand. He arranged the towel so that it was precisely six inches away from her towel. Then he sat down like he was lowering himself slowly into a hot bath. He smelled like he’d used two bottles of sunscreen, but even so his skin was toasty brown, his arms dotted with enticing-looking freckles, and Ava had to restrain herself from connecting them with her finger. As soon as he was settled, he started in talking about the time when an alligator ate an FSU student at Wakulla Springs, a story Ava had already heard a hundred times. While Travis talked on, Ava took in the scenery. The diving tower was over to the far left of the beach, near the underwater spring where the river started, bubbling up from the deep caverns at exactly 70 degrees. Ava had always wanted to jump off the high platform, but had never had the nerve.