The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (27 page)

“It’s evidence,” Rusty said, and snatched up the photograph. “Probably some little girl she killed. One of her victims, right? The police will want to see this.”

For some reason, her saying this ridiculous thing made him want to kiss her. “Come here,” he told her, and opened his arms.

Clutching the picture, she dropped down hard on the bed beside him and rolled over next to him. Rusty. Rustifer. Beatrice. She smelled like herbal something, like she’d just taken a shower. He wrapped his arm around her neck and brought her down close and they lay side by side and kissed, and kissed, and kept kissing, her showing him how to do it. It was pretty nice, very nice, but not nice enough. After a few more kisses he rolled over and pulled her underneath him. Oh, yeah. This was nicer. Much nicer.

“What the hell? What are you doing?” She struggled underneath him. He couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.

“What do you think I’m doing?” He tried to kiss her again, but she struggled again and he let her go.

She slipped out from underneath him and sat on the edge of the bed, her back to him. Her shoulder blades, under her thin T-shirt, looked like a child’s. “I need to collect more evidence,” she said.

“You’re taking this game a little too far,” Otis said. “This is a game, right?”

“I’m serious, jerk!” Suddenly, with a grunt, Rusty hurled the picture across the room and it smashed against the wall. “This is not a game!” She whirled and lunged at him, pinning him to the bed, pulling his hair, scratching at his face, slapping and punching at him in the same random way Suzi used to attack him when she was little. Rusty didn’t feel much bigger than Suzi had then.

Otis shoved her off him and scooted off the bed. She rose to attack him again, but he pushed her back on Mrs. Archer’s bed, maybe a little too hard. His cheek stung where she’d scratched it. “You need to see a psychiatrist.”

“I’m not seeing any more shrinks! You have no idea what my life is like. How dare you!”

What was she talking about?

He ran out of the house, leaving Rusty screaming after him, calling him names. He walked home in the suffocating heat, wondering how he’d gotten mixed up with such a maladjusted individual. He touched his cheek where she’d scratched it and his finger came away bloody. To think he’d told her he loved her!

He did love her.

But science was calling him. Science was reliable. Science was his true love.

Buff’s house was so different from Suzi’s house. In Buff’s house the furniture all looked and smelled new, and in the living room everything was blue and white, in the kitchen red and white, in little Angel’s room pink and white. Everything matched! Buff’s house had soft wall-to-wall carpet in all the rooms, even the bathroom; and the bathroom sinks didn’t have dried toothpaste globs and lone hairs in them and old eye shadow and blush containers spilling over on the counters. At Buff’s house there were dried flower arrangements in every room and a bowl of fresh fruit on the dining room table. There were family photos everywhere—of his family, not their dead relatives. Huge framed photos, taken outdoors, the kind where everyone in the family wears a white shirt. In all the pictures Buff looked so handsome, an older brother of Orlando Bloom. Paula’s blond hair hung down in perfectly straight curtains. Rusty’s wavy reddish brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Baby Angel had no hair. Except for Angel, they looked like an orthodontist’s advertisement.

The whole setup—the family and the house—made Suzi angry because she knew that the reason they looked so perfect and that their house looked so perfect was because they didn’t have two teenagers with Asperger’s throwing fits and hoarding things and a stinky old granddad (she loved him, though!) and a dad who never came home
and a mom who slopped around looking hideous and making nasty remarks and claiming to be too tired to do anything but hide in her room and read. If she lived in a house that looked like Buff’s house, she’d bring friends home with her all the time. As it was now, she was always embarrassed when Mykaila and Sierra and Sienna came over, and she ended up apologizing over and over until they told her to shut the hell up.

Of course, Suzi knew that everything wasn’t as dandy at Buff’s house as it seemed. For one thing, Rusty had become a total reject misfit who wouldn’t even babysit her own little sister, or maybe couldn’t be trusted to babysit her. And there was something way wrong with a married man, a minister for God’s sake, who was obsessed with Ava.

Suzi might have found Buff’s obsession with Ava to be hilarious and
only
hilarious if not for two things: 1. Why Ava? What was so great about her? And 2. the fact that Ava wouldn’t have any part of Buff. Ava hadn’t been back to church since that one time, and after the Wakulla Springs trip she’d refused to go to youth group. She didn’t have an appreciative bone in her body. She was waiting for Elvis to rise up from his tomb and marry her. Did she not realize how
cool
Buff was? A hot minister! How cool was that? Maybe Buff would divorce his wife and marry Ava! Although nobody in their right mind, once they realized how annoying Ava was, would want anything to do with her. Of course, Ava was gorgeous to look at, prettier than Suzi, even, if you just
looked
at her.

Suzi could probably get Buff in big trouble if she told people about his obsession with Ava, and maybe she would, but she’d tell when she was good and ready. Her mother would
spaz
and she’d never let Suzi go back to that church again if she knew. Suzi couldn’t bear the thought of that. She liked going to Genesis, she’d accepted Christ as her personal savior and planned to start reading the Bible, very soon. Her knee was healing, mostly because of her physical therapy, but surely all the church members—and Buff!—praying for her had helped.

When she closed her eyes at night she imagined Buff, like in his
sermon, standing in that big green field, holding out his arms, and her running toward him. He would envelop her in a hug, but it wasn’t the loving fatherly kind, it was the other kind; and when he kissed her it was like Orlando Bloom kissing Keira Knightley in
Pirates of the Caribbean
, not like Davis slobbering on her at the skating rink. She’d broken up with Davis by texting him, which she knew was tacky, but she didn’t care. She’d moved on, in her mind anyway, to bigger and better things. Buff just needed more exposure to her and he’d catch on to what he was missing. Her. Not Ava.

But Paula had called their house last night and asked
Ava
to babysit. What a joke! Ava, babysit? She couldn’t even take care of herself. It was disappointing that Buff had told Paula to call the Witherspoon house and ask for Ava, not Suzi. Her mom had answered the phone and tried to get Ava to talk to Paula, but Ava said no, she wouldn’t, and left the room. So her mother, flustered yet again by Ava’s rude behavior, just stood there holding the phone like a mutant.

“Give me the phone,” Suzi told her mother. Then she got on the phone and told Paula that
Ava
couldn’t babysit but that
she
could, even though she’d never technically babysat before, and that’s how it happened that on Friday night, instead of hobbling through the mall with her buds, she was at Buff’s house, playing Nancy Drew. Buff wasn’t there, which was a bummer, but she could at least nose around and collect information about him. Just how far would he go in his ability to surprise her? He was a married minister obsessed with Ava. What other quirks lay below his shiny surface?

And she was entertaining Angel, whom it was so easy to love. As requested, Suzi fed Angel some gluten-free noodles and meatless, sugar-free tomato sauce. And steamed carrots and broccoli all cut up. Naturally, Angel turned up her nose at the entire dinner. Suzi tasted it and pretended to love it, just to get Angel to eat more of it, but it tasted like crap. Cardboard crap. Angel ate enough, with a lot of coaxing, to earn a yogurt pop for dessert. Since she wasn’t playing soccer right now,
Suzi really had to watch what she ate. But tonight was special, so Suzi had one, too.

While they sat at the kitchen table and chewed and sucked on their yogurt pops, Suzi listened for sounds coming from Rusty’s room, but heard nothing.

Paula had rolled her eyes when she mentioned that Rusty was holed up in her room, grounded all weekend. Suzi wanted to ask what for, but you couldn’t ask that sort of thing. You need to ground her until she’s twenty-one, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t say that either.

Paula and Buff had gone for a Parents’ Date Night with some other church couples, all smiles and seeming eager to be off on their own. Buff was as friendly to Suzi as usual, giving her a hug, smelling like richling cologne. They’d be back by ten thirty, Paula promised. She wore a low-cut shirt, revealing the top of her round balloon breasts. Implants! A minister’s wife! Suzi was pleased to notice that Paula had a rather large behind, even though she exercised nonstop and seemed to eat only cardboard.

After dinner she and Angel played store (Angel’s idea) and then school (Suzi’s idea) and then Angel said she wanted to watch
Veggie-Tales
. Suzi got her into bed around seven thirty, read her a couple of wholesome children’s books, the best one called
When Jesus Comes to My House
about Jesus dropping in on a little boy for a play date and the two of them building with blocks and having a snack together. Finally Suzi turned out Angel’s light, feeling competent as all get-out.

All this time, Rusty had not made a peep in her room and hadn’t come out once to see what was going on. There was a light on in her room—Suzi could see it under the door—but no sound at all. Maybe she’d snuck out and was causing trouble with her friends. Or, scratch that, she didn’t have any friends. Suzi stood outside her door, listening as hard as she could, hearing nothing. If Rusty wasn’t in there, Suzi would go in and nose around, see what she could dig up. She knocked.

“Yeah.” She was in there.

“Hi, it’s me, Suzi, the babysitter.” She liked calling herself this.

“Otis’s sister?”

“Right.” Suzi had never been referred to as Otis’s sister before in her life. How would Rusty know Otis?

“Need something?”

“I’m just bored.”

“Sorry, the booze is locked up,” Rusty said. There was a rustling, then a creaking sound, and the door popped open a few inches. Rusty, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and no makeup on, looked almost normal, except for the nose ring. She wore pink pj’s with elephants on them. “Why, if it isn’t the preppy, popular Miss Witherspoon.”

Suzi made vague noises of protest, her face flushing. On the surface, being called popular was great. But the way Rusty said it,
popular
sounded like something worse than shallow and foolish, which it was, but how was it Suzi’s fault that other people liked her? “Just wanted to see if you were really in here,” Suzi said.

“Ta-da!” Rusty said.

Suzi looked over Rusty’s shoulder but didn’t see anything interesting in Rusty’s room—no cigarettes, booze, illegal drugs, nasty books. The room was neat and clean, without even any pictures on the walls. No computer, no electronics visible.

“Come in, I guess, if you want,” Rusty said. She stood back from the door.

Suzi hobbled into the room and Rusty quickly shut the door behind her.

“Sporting injury?” Rusty asked her.

Suzi told her how it happened, and surprisingly enough, Rusty actually listened as if she were interested.

She motioned for Suzi to sit down on one of the twin beds, which she did. Rusty plopped down on the other, lying on her side in her baggy pink pj’s, head propped up, staring at Suzi with her big blue eyes. It was a mysterious room, not what she’d been expecting. All white, no
other color to balance it out. No personality. It was like an institutional room, like a room in a crazy ward.
Girl Interrupted
. The white bedspreads had nary a wrinkle in them.

Rusty must’ve noticed her looking around. “I used to have all kinds of shit in here, but I took it to the Goodwill.”

“Why?”

Rusty shrugged. “I want as little of my actual self in here as possible. It’s my way of protesting.”

“Dang,” Suzi said. “That’s harsh. On yourself, I mean.”

“They can make me live here, but they can’t make me enjoy it.”

Suzi admired Rusty’s zealous self-denial and wondered if she could strip her room bare this way. Nope. No way. She needed her comforting things. Her room was the polar opposite of Rusty’s room. She and Rusty were opposite in every way, when you thought about it, but here they were talking. It was like a social miracle. Never would’ve happened outside this room. Rusty was two grades ahead of her but seemed way older. And she was easier to talk to than a lot of people. She didn’t bother with meaningless chitchat, so Suzi decided to forgo it as well. “Why aren’t
you
watching Angel?” she asked Rusty.

“I’ve been deemed irresponsible.”

“How come you hate it here so much? Your dad’s so cool!”

“You go right on thinking that. I know him, and he ain’t cool.”