Throw Like A Girl (2 page)

Kyle held the phone away from his mouth. “Little privacy here.”

“It's my house too.”

“Nobody,” Kyle said into the phone. “Just Coyote Ugly.” That was his name for her.

“Who are you talking to, stupid Michelle?” Michelle was his girlfriend. She had big teeth. Kissing Michelle would be like kissing a piano. Plus she laughed at things that weren't funny.

Kyle kept the phone wedged into the couch cushions. He said, “Uh-huh,” or, “Yeah.” When he got to the end of their love chat, he lowered his voice even further, so all Iris heard was dirty-sounding
heh-heh
noises. When he finally hung up, Iris said, “You and Michelle make a great couple. You're both totally spastic.”

Kyle yawned and scratched deeply along the inside of his leg. He was skinny, like Iris, but parts of him were overgrown, his hands and feet and his head, stuck on the end of his neck like an onion on its stem. He said, “So, did you and Fat Rico do it yet?”

“Shut up, asshole.”

“Because you two would really make a cool couple. Of course, you'd have to get on top so he wouldn't smother you.”

Iris kicked him pretty hard in or near the balls and then she ran upstairs to her room and listened to him rage and curse and rattle the doorknob until he got tired of it and went downstairs again. When she heard her mother come home, she went down to the kitchen to get some orange juice. Her mother asked her what was new at school and Iris said, “Nothing.”

They got into trouble for the death threats. Everybody in homeroom seemed to know about it. Poodlebreath walked around looking like a doctor who had to tell somebody they had cancer. All the secret noise of the room, all the whispers and shuffling that went on around and under the teacher talk, lapped around them like a shallow ocean. They came and got Rico, then Barry, then Iris. She sat in the hall outside the guidance office for a long time. She decided she didn't like her hands. They were ordinary. She wished that one of them was a claw, or maybe a robot arm, like Darth Vader's.

The guidance counselor was Mrs. Hopper. She was about ninety years old. “Iris,” Mrs. Hopper said. “Goddess of the rainbow.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Iris. It was an old joke with her and the Hopper. They were practically Abbott and Costello by now.

“Why a guillotine?”

Iris thought about this. “For the blood, I guess.”

“I'm trying to help you here, Iris. But you have to let me help you.”

“Sure.”

“We have to take any threat to our students' safety very seriously. Were there other people involved? Do you belong to some kind of group?”

“You mean, like, a band?”

“Do you know what I pray every night, Iris? Dear Lord, please don't let me get shot by some little punk who's mad about his algebra grade.”

Iris considered the possibility that the Hopper had finally lost it. Hopper's eyes behind her old-lady glasses had a cracked, marveling look, as if Iris were a dangerous zoo animal.

“This is very serious business, Iris. We may have to call your parents or even the police. You might end up in a juvenile facility.”

“Yeah?” Iris wondered if they got to wear jail uniforms and sleep in cells.

“So if I were you, missy, I'd start talking.”

“I'll talk so much it'll make your hair curl,” said Iris.

Nobody had arrested them by the end of the day. They guessed they were still in trouble but they didn't know how much, because they had all said different things and gotten the story confused. Barry Hamsohn's mother came and picked him up. Iris decided to walk home with Rico. He lived pretty close to school and she didn't feel like going to her house yet, in case the police were already there. She thought that her and Rico could run away someplace if they had to. They could be stowaways on a boat and sneak out at night to get food.

“Fucking little pussies,” said Rico. “Hadda go tell their mommies.”

Iris agreed, but she was still thinking about boats, and what the best kind would be, and how you found out where they were going. She looked around her at the sidewalks and houses and trundling cars. One advantage of walking with Rico was that you had plenty of time to take in the scenery. Maybe it would be easier to break into somebody's house and hide out in the basement. She said, “What if we disguised ourselves? So when they came looking for us, they wouldn't know it was us.”

“Great idea. I'll disguise myself as somebody not fat.”

Nobody was home at Rico's house so they fixed themselves cereal with chocolate milk and played Grand Theft Auto for a while. Iris got bored and said they should steal a real car so they could learn how to drive. She was tired of everything being pretend. She bet her whole stupid life would turn out that way, a bunch of pretend big ideas that never happened.

Rico said he didn't know of any cars anywhere to steal, but they could watch the guy next door cut down his tree, and Iris said OK. There was a saw going; they could hear the racket from inside.

It was a bigass old tree all right, taller than the houses, and half of it had yawned right over onto the neighbor's garage. A man in a blue jacket and a hat with earflaps was up on a ladder, running a power saw that took bites out of the branches. When they fell they made a noise and then an echo,
BOOM
and
boom
.

“That's Mr. Ortiz,” said Rico. “It's his tree.”

“How's he going to get all the way up there?” The part of the tree that was still standing was really tall. The place where the rest of it had fallen over was like a giant splinter.

“Climbing ropes,” said Rico. “See?”

They watched as Mr. Ortiz tossed one end of a rope over a high branch and played it out until it reached the ground. Then he fastened it into a kind of sling and planted his feet on the tree's trunk. He used the rope to walk his way up to the first high branch and swung his leg over it. When he saw Rico and Iris watching, he waved at them.

“That is so cool,” said Iris. Cutting down a tree was a real thing. You could stand right there and watch it happen. It went from Tree to No Tree. “You think he'd let us help?”

“Like I could get my fat ass up that high.”

“We could carry the branches away or something,” suggested Iris, but Rico didn't seem excited about that, so they just watched some more. Mr. Ortiz tied ropes around one of the big limbs, and when he cut it off, he hitched the rope up and seesawed the limb back and forth until he had it where he wanted it to land. Then he let it drop. He had already cut all the small branches from the part of the tree that had landed on the garage. It looked like a cactus, with its bare, chopped-off arms. It was cold outside and Rico wanted to go back in, but Iris said they should stay at least until the next big piece of tree came down. Rico said they could see just as good from inside, and the cold was bad for his asthma.

“Dude, everything's bad for your asthma. Except eating.”

“Suck my dick, bitch.”

“Suck my dick, bitch,” Iris said right back. It didn't mean anything, it was just what kids said. But there was a little curdled thought in her head now because of stupid Kyle and his stupid ugly talk. Sometimes she got into a state of mind where she couldn't look at people without imagining them naked. Once she'd seen Rico with his shirt off because he'd spilled hot soup on his stomach. It was kind of awful. Rico had boobs that hung down like something melted.

Iris was about to tell Rico she was going home, if he was such a candyass that he couldn't stand a little cold, when she saw somebody walking toward them from a couple blocks away.

“Isn't that Jovanovich and his brother?”

“Oh shit,” Rico said. Jerry Jovanovich was one of the guys they sent the death threats to. His brother's nickname was Goombah. Nobody knew his real name.

“Maybe they're just out walking,” Iris said, unconvinced.

Rico said he wasn't sticking around to find out. He ran up the front steps and inside, and Iris ran too. They locked the door and watched out the windows as Jovanovich and his brother came into view. The brothers stood on the sidewalk outside Rico's house and yelled something, but Mr. Ortiz's saw was running and when they opened their mouths only saw noise came out.

“They know we're in here,” said Rico. He was wheezing because of the cold and the running. His voice squeaked and jumped. “We could call the police.”

“Oh sure. Like the police won't arrest us first.” Iris lifted a corner of the curtain. Jovanovich picked up a stick and thrashed at the shrubbery with it. Goombah had his hands in his coat pockets and was chewing on something that he spit out. He was one of those guys who shaved his head. “When does your mom get home?”

“Not till late.” Rico was still puffing and choking, so Iris ran and got his inhaler from his backpack. Rico jammed it into his mouth and slobbered a little, trying to get it going. Iris knew about asthma. It was when you couldn't breathe because your airways closed up. It would have made a good plague back in Kansas.

“Dude, you want me to call nine-one-one?” She didn't like the goldfish way that Rico's eyes were bulging. But Rico put the inhaler down, hacked a little more, and shook his head.

“Sometimes it takes—,” he began, but right then the house shook,
BOOM BOOM BOOM
, like a tree crashing right on top of them. It was Jovanovich and Goombah, trying to break down the front door, and Rico and Iris both screamed in high voices like little girls which even in the middle of being scared embarrassed them.

“Those guys are crazy!” Iris yelled. She ran to the front hallway. The door was the kind with wavy glass panels on each side. Jerry Jovanovich's face was flattened against the glass. His lips were turned inside out like some weird pink corsage.

“Get outta here!” she shouted. She couldn't see Goombah. “Back door! Go lock the back door!” She listened to Rico groan and hoist himself up and lumber off toward the kitchen. “Today, man!” She crept up to the door and put her fingers against the glass. Something hard, a rock or a stick, hit the door and she jumped back and shrieked.

“We're gonna call the cops!”

“Go ahead. See how fast they don't get here.” Jovanovich's voice sounded close but hollow, like he was underground. “What are you two pervs doing in there anyway, playing with each other?”

“Fuck off, Jovanobitch.” Iris listened for Rico in the kitchen. If Goombah broke down the back door, he'd kill Rico. All he'd have to do was punch him and he'd stop breathing. She'd have to run in there, find a knife or something. She wondered how hard you'd have to stab somebody to get a knife all the way through their clothes.

Rico trotted in from the kitchen. His legs rubbed together when he tried to move fast, and he was still wheezing. “I put the—huh—chain and the deadbolt on.”

Iris felt like she'd swallowed electricity. Her heart was spazzing out. When she tried to look at things they jumped around. Mr. Ortiz's saw started up again, a high, whining racket. “What if we call the cops and pretend we're somebody else?”

“They can tell who you are from your phone.”

“Shit.” She'd forgotten about that.

“Come on out, skank face! Bring your lardass boyfriend with you. We got something for you.”

“Bite me.”

There was the sound of something heavy being dragged across the porch. Dark shapes passed back and forth in the wavy glass. They were doing something with Rico's mother's flower planters. Rico's mouth hung open a little, like a drawer that wouldn't shut.

“Maybe one of your neighbors will call somebody,” Iris said. Though she already knew that Rico's neighbors weren't the kind who got excited about kids acting rowdy. It was one more thing that Iris's mother didn't like about Rico. Iris thought about calling her mother or even Kyle and telling them she needed a ride home, having the car scare Jovanovich away. But she wasn't ready for this to be over yet. What if nothing like it ever happened to her again?

She said, “We could go upstairs and drop stuff on them from the window.”

“We could shoot them,” Rico said.

“Oh yeah, right.”

“If you had a gun, would you shoot them?”

“Sure,” Iris said. She thought about Billy the Kid. “I'd probably have to practice some first.”

“My mom has a gun.”

“She so much does not.”

“Does too. It was my grandfather's.”

“Then it's old and it's no good.”

“It still has bullets, OK?”

The front door shook and rattled in its frame. Iris and Rico jumped. Rico put his mouth to the crack. “Hey Jovanobitch. You wear rubbers for hats.”

“Come outside and say that, you fat shit.”

“Uh-uh. You come in here.”

The door shook again, and then one of them was at the back door kicking, and Iris and Rico ran up the stairs. Iris ran. Rico was behind her somewhere. Once Rico told Iris that sometimes he slept on the living room couch so he wouldn't have to climb the stairs.