Girl Unmoored Read online

  “No, it’s not,” I said pulling away.

  But Rennie grabbed my wrist this time. “You can’t sell stuff we found together.”

  I smirked. “Fine. I just found a new pair of sunglasses. With the tag still on.” They were in the passenger side of our car, probably M’s.

  “Like movie star ones?”

  I didn’t even need to nod. Rennie huffed. “All right. You can sleep over. But only because Jenny is going away this weekend.” It was sad for a second, the way she said it, like she wasn’t entirely sure it was true.

  But then she told me to bike over fast if we were going to get the cookies done by four-thirty, which I already knew. No one can be in their kitchen after four-thirty because that was when Mrs. Perry started making dinner. She went to cooking school with Julia Child, and there’s a picture of her with bobbed-out hair in a yellow dress, holding a cake and smiling big in their dining room. Hardly anyone else knew that the cake was made out of wax and was so heavy that Mrs. Perry got tennis elbow from it. At six o’clock, usually something like a whole fish with a head on it comes out the door.

  “She’s coming!” Matt Curtis warned us. He was half the size of most of us girls, but might be foxy someday.

  I got back to my desk and watched Johnny Berman rip it over to his seat. He was still panting when Miss Frane walked in. “Sorry, class,” she said, like we were sorry about it too. “Never a dull moment. Now, who’d liked to read their sentence? Oh, and before I forget, each of you needs to pick up their reminder slip for year-end conferences next week. Your parents should have marked their calendars off when I met with them in the fall, but just in case.”

  I looked out the window. Outside, dark branches were criss-crossing everywhere and it would take until after lunchtime before the sun finally started shining down on them. But every once in a while a branch might move for no reason and then if you looked carefully you could see a bird in there, jerking its beak around, searching for something.

  4

  Consanguinitas

  Blood relative

  Stinky people buy stinky things. That was what Rennie talked about while she skipped ahead and I pulled our wagon through the bumpy woods between our houses. The Perrys lived off of Route 88 too, but closer to Portland, and their road was paved and smooth and had a name: Thornhurst Landing.

  Pieces of Rennie’s voice kept falling back on me about Mr. Solo and where he lived and how we could sell him some perfume to put on before he taught us eighth grade next year. It was a well-known fact, even for us seventh graders, that Mr. Solo smelled. But he biked the same way to school as I did and unless you’ve tried biking up that hill yourself, you don’t know what you’re going to smell like.

  “Hey. Wait up,” I yelled to Rennie when she reached our dirt road. We couldn’t be Avon ladies on her street because she only had Mrs. Larry for a neighbor, who heads to Bermuda when the mosquitoes head to Maine.

  “You better go first,” Rennie ordered me, standing off to the side. So I yanked the wagon over roots that looked like they had come up for air a few million years ago and then changed their minds and gone back down again.

  When I stepped out onto our road, sun was beaming down everywhere, frying the shadow off everything, and the air was so heavy you could scoop it up and drink it like soup. I ripped off my sweater. All you really wanted was for those degrees to make up their mind. It wasn’t like spring was a big surprise every year.

  “Water,” Rennie gasped, fanning her tongue, looking down at my house.

  “No way,” I said. “M might be there.”

  “We have to get water from Mrs. Smeller then.”

  I nodded, even though the only thing Mrs. Weller ever gives you is orange Kool-Aid that tastes like syrup and makes you thirstier.

  Everything looked the same as it had yesterday. The swing set in the Christiansons’ yard had the same old rake leaning up against it, and the red pickup truck with ORD UCK on the back of it was in Mrs. Weller’s driveway again. Lately, I’d been seeing it there. Mr. Orso lived across the street from Mrs. Weller. All you needed to know about him was that he barked and watered his lawn every second.

  “Who is it?” Mrs. Weller asked in her scratchy voice when I knocked on her door. I waved at her eye in the peephole. If we were anyone else, she would have yelled, “Go away!” but after she saw it was us, she said, “Hold on,” and started flipping back the locks.

  Except what she should have said was, “Don’t be afraid, little children, it’s just me,” because there was a rolled up bloody piece of toilet paper hanging out of her nose. Big blotches of bright red blood had dripped onto her orange nightgown and there were smaller ones on her ratty old slippers, which probably used to be orange too. Rennie looked at me like we should make a run for it, but I stayed cheery the way Avon ladies are supposed to.

  “Avon ladies!” I said, as if all our customers had bloody torpedoes sticking out their noses. “Let’s talk beauty.”

  Rennie groaned.

  “How are you today, Mrs. Weller?” I asked, even though a blind person could tell she was bad.

  “Damn nose again,” Mrs. Weller said with that bloody torpedo bumping up and down on her lips.

  “Oh,” I said, really cheery this time, because the customer was always right.

  We hadn’t been Avon ladies since last year. Some people might think we were getting too old to be Avon ladies, but not her. “So what do you have, girls?” she asked, getting down to business.

  Rennie looked surprised, but I didn’t, because bloody nose or no bloody nose, Mrs. Weller was our best customer. She was always trying to look good, but the truth was she looked exactly like George Washington in a dress.

  And this morning, she looked like an especially grumpy George Washington. “We have a lot of great supplies today,” I said. But what she really needed was more Kleenex to shove up her nose.

  Mrs. Weller gurgled something and walked past us to get to the wagon. The smell of pot roast and stale baby powder lingered behind. Rennie pinched her nose, but I tried to keep my face pleasant!

  “Milk soap?” she croaked, holding up one of the tiny squares an inch away from the bloody torpedo. This was the bulk of our supply: little soaps and shampoos that Mr. Perry brought back from his trips. He was always giving them to Mrs. Perry, who just threw them into one of her drawers and kept using her fancy French stuff anyway.

  “There’s a special today. We’ll give you three soaps for the price of two,” I said, ignoring Rennie’s open mouth.

  Mrs. Weller dropped the soap back into the wagon and mumbled, “Smells like a frying pan.”

  A window slammed shut from somewhere behind me and when I turned around, I saw that it was mine.

  I took off. It had to be M, snooping around in my room. And this time I was going to catch her.

  I ran around to the front of our house, up the porch stairs, and opened the front door fast enough for it to slam against the wall. Then I took the stairs two at a time and turned into my room. And there it was: my shut window—sitting there like it wasn’t even open a minute ago. Everything else was just sitting there too: one white sock hanging out of the drawer, exactly how I left it.

  I walked over to my window and slid it open again. I could see Mrs. Weller down there, leaning into the wagon trying to smell something, and Rennie watching her with her top lip pinned up. Then I heard the toilet flush and M cough.

  I walked into the hall, crossed my arms, and waited. This time I was going to tell her to stop snooping around in my room or I’d tell my dad.

  Except everything changes when you hear someone throw up.

  She threw up three times. Then I heard the toilet flush again and M start crying. Hard. Like maybe she had slammed her foot into the door. Suddenly, I just wanted to go back outside and talk beauty.

  When I got to the wagon, Rennie’s lip was still pulled up and Mrs. Weller was smelling a small bottle of blue conditioner with Kennebunk Marriott on it.

  A
nd then I knew what Rennie’s face was all about. The torpedo had fallen half way out her nose.

  Rennie put her finger down her throat and gagged, but Mrs. Weller was too busy to notice. She dropped the mini bottle back into the wagon and picked up another one. I shot Rennie a warning look. You can gag all you want unless you need a combination lock.

  Across the road, Mr. Orso came out of his door and walked up to his car. He waved at us once, barking softly before getting into it. I waved back. He was our worst customer, if you could even call him that. He had never bought anything from us, ever.

  “Damn nose,” Mrs. Weller said. I turned around again. The torpedo had fallen out. A tiny speck of blood started dripping. “Wait here girls,” she said tipping her head back and walking into her house like Frankenstein.

  “Let’s go,” Rennie whispered.

  I frowned at the bloody torpedo and the next thing I knew I was bending down to pick it up.

  “Ach,” Rennie yelled, slapping her hands over her eyes. “Sick!”

  Even though she couldn’t see that I was only touching the part without any blood on it, you couldn’t blame her. Before M hijacked my life, I would never in a trillion years have picked it up.

  “What are you going to do with it?” Rennie groaned through her fingers.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said like I had a plan, which I guess going to find Mrs. Weller’s trash can was.

  I held the torpedo out as far away from me as I could and walked through the front door. Inside, it smelled like a million different things rolled into one, but mostly just plain old oldness. There were thickly brushed portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Weller hanging on the walls. Even though Mrs. Weller looked like George Washington now, she used to look pretty good once, like a younger version of him.

  The only trash can that I knew about was in the kitchen under the sink, so I turned into it.

  And stopped.

  Jesus was eating some toast.

  “Jesus!”

  He looked up at me with his big blue eyes and said, “Sorry, did I scare you?”

  I shook my head.

  He was sitting at Mrs. Weller’s kitchen table, and after he asked me that, he put his toast down and smiled. His nose looked a little bigger than it had on stage and his stringy blond hair stayed tucked back behind both ears, but anyone could tell it was him: Jesus Christ Superstar.

  “Uh-oh,” he said spotting the torpedo in my hand. “I keep telling her she should stay in bed when she gets one of those, but she doesn’t listen. Trash is over there.” He pointed toward the sink.

  Up on stage you might not be able to see how blue his eyes were, but sitting there at Mrs. Weller’s table, his eyes looked like perfect round blueberries. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt and sitting with his legs crossed like a girl.

  I opened the sink door and threw away the torpedo. When I turned around again, he was chewing on the toast. Smacking it, really.

  He smiled at me, then uncrossed his legs and sat up straighter.

  You would think a Jesus’s teeth would be perfect, but they weren’t. They were kind of yellow and not exactly straight.

  He pointed his crust at me. “You’re April, right?”

  “Apron,” I corrected him.

  “Oh yeah, sorry man. Apron.” He held his arms up like he was under arrest and a few blond strips fell out from behind his ears. “The neighbor’s kid. You have a brother or sister or something named Cricket, right?” He put his hands in his mouth and started picking something out of his teeth, way in the back.

  I shook my head. “Wrong house.”

  He groaned, concentrating. “Got it,” he said finally, pulling his hand out with something pinched in between his fingers. “Lettuce. Been driving me crazy.”

  I made a face. He stared at me. Then he stood and walked toward me. “I’m Mike,” he said. “Mike Weller.”

  “Mike Weller?” I asked. He looked nothing like Mrs. Weller.

  “Yip,” Mike said holding out the hand he had just used for the lettuce, then thinking better of it and holding out the other one instead. “Millie’s nephew.”

  We shook hands the opposite way, then I stepped back and saw that his jeans were dirty at the bottom and there was a hole right where the pocket should be.

  “I gotta go,” I said. “Nice to meet you.” I walked out the door.

  Rennie was sitting on the wagon braiding a piece of thick black hair straight down the middle of her face. She let it drop flat on her nose when she saw me. “Can we please go now?” she said. “I’m dying.” She stuck her tongue out and fanned it.

  “Yes.”

  Rennie jumped up so quickly the wagon almost tipped over. “Your house?”

  “Fine.”

  A peep sound came out of her after that. The wagon was going to be hard to turn, but I didn’t feel like helping, so I just kept walking.

  “Hey, Apron?” someone said.

  I turned around and there he was in the doorway.

  Rennie’s eyes went from me to the door, the one long braid still hanging down the middle of her face. “Look!” she said whipping her head back again so fast the braid made a thump. “It’s Jesus!”

  Part of a crooked smile happened on his mouth. “You guys saw the play?”

  “The other night, didn’t we, Apron?”

  “Far out,” he said. “I didn’t know kids came to the show.”

  “It was great, wasn’t it great, Apron?” Rennie gushed, with a big goofy smile.

  “Did you guys come on a field trip or something?”

  “A field trip at night?” Rennie asked him, like he was the one with the unicorn braid hanging down the middle of his face.

  “Right,” he said nodding to himself.

  He was going to say something else when Mrs. Weller pushed by him with a new torpedo up her nose.

  “Don’t you girls go anywhere,” she said shuffling up to the wagon.

  “Whatcha got in there?” he asked Rennie.

  “Beauty supplies,” she said trying to tuck that braid back behind her ear. “Do you need some stage make-up?”

  “Too bad we don’t have any then,” I said before he could answer.

  “We have some rouge,” Rennie said ignoring me. “And some movie star sunglasses.”

  “Back off!” Mrs. Weller waved her arms around like a seagull deflector. “I was here first!”

  We all fell silent. But when she started opening up little bottles and sniffing them through her torpedo nose again, a smile snuck over Mike’s mouth. He coughed a little and used his hand to cover it up, but Rennie had seen it too, so the same kind of smile started happening on her face. Mrs. Weller kept grumbling things like “uch, Pine Sol,” before throwing another mini bottle back into the wagon.

  “What do you think, Mike?” she asked straightening up this time with the oversized sunglasses on, the tag hanging down one cheek.

  “Gorgeous,” he said. “Audrey Hepburn all the way.”

  Even under those bug eyes you could tell Mrs. Weller was embarrassed about a boy telling her that. “How much?” she asked with the tag and the torpedo swinging toward me.

  I couldn’t look at Rennie. “$10.99.”

  We had never made that much money in one whole day of being Avon ladies.

  Mrs. Weller looked back up at Mike, who whistled at her like she was a famous actress, not a George Washington look-alike with bug eyes. Then she turned and walked in through her front door again.

  “Is she kidding?” Rennie asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Mike said. “She’s not really a kidder.” He looked over at me when he said that, like he had been meaning to tell me that all along. I turned away. People who looked that much like Jesus shouldn’t lie. Ever. And especially not to little old lady George Washingtons, even if it did mean our best sale.

  “Are you a movie star, too?” Rennie asked with her eyelashes flapping all over the place.

  For a second he had no idea what Rennie was talking a
bout. But then he tapped his chest and said, “No, um. I own Scent Appeal, the flower store? But my partner, he owns the flower store with me, was the choreographer for the play, so …”—and with that, he flapped his arms down. Then he looked at me with his blueberry eyes and a sad ping happened in my heart. Maybe he couldn’t help it that he looked exactly like Jesus.

  Still, he could have dyed his hair at least.

  Mrs. Weller walked back out with the sunglasses.

  “Here, Apron,” she said handing me eleven one-dollar bills soft as cotton. I reached into the wagon for our coffee can full of change and shook the coins until a penny popped up. “Thank you, Mrs. Weller,” I said handing her the penny, which was so bright and shiny you would think I was the first person to use it.

  “Bye now,” she ordered us. Then she spun on her slippers and walked back into her house.

  “Shabam!” Rennie said. “That was scary.”

  Mike laughed. “That was Millie.”

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Rennie blew on her braid, picked up the wagon handle and said, “It was nice to meet you. You were really great.” Then she walked past me toward my house. I waved once, then followed Rennie.

  “Hey, Apron,” Mike called after me. “Your dad’s the professor. And the expert on Maine, all things about Maine. The History of Maine, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I thought of telling him the real title of the book, but ran to catch up with Rennie instead.

  5

  Audi, vide, tace.

  Hear, see, be silent.

  On the way to the Meaningless Bowl, it looked like rain. Rennie kept asking M over and over again about the chocolate in Brazil. Through the window, I watched those dark clouds sail in. There were only three seasons in Maine: July, August, and winter.

  It had started raining lightly by the time we got to the soccer field. Most of us kept our hoods up, so no one did much talking while the moms unloaded the cars and the dads got ready to tackle each other in their sweat pants and tunics, either blue or green, which I had remembered to get at school after all. My dad was the blue captain. Mr. Perry and my dad used to be on the same team, but this year Mr. Perry was a green.