Girl Unmoored Read online

  Rennie had run straight over to her mom and Eeebs when we pulled into the Falmouth Middle School parking lot. M followed her and hugged Mrs. Perry like they were long-lost friends. Then the two of them stood next to each other until Mrs. Perry walked away and went to go talk to another mother instead. I stayed two mothers away from M and watched Rennie walk over to Seth Chambers’s mother and start talking to her.

  Seth Chambers and some other eighth grade boys were biking around the field, but Eeebs kept standing there, holding a green tunic in his hand, waiting for someone to get hurt so he could go in. Mrs. Perry was never going to let him play touch football, though, and everyone knew it except him. “They’re like animals out there,” Mrs. Perry complained last year, closing her eyes and shaking her tight curl. “I’m just not going to let Ebert play until he’s at least fifteen.”

  “Good idea,” another mother had said.

  Eeebs never put his tunic down, though, which was blue last year too.

  Finally the rain stopped and the birds started singing. Some people, like M and Mrs. Perry, unfolded their blankets and lay them on the wet grass, and Rennie and I passed around the football cookies. I knew almost everyone, but I kept my big hood up so I didn’t have to talk much. Right before halftime, it started raining hard enough again for one of the dads on the green team to make a big T with his muddy hands, and for my dad and the others to make a huddle.

  After that, my dad came over and told all of us that it was a tie and that we could go home. My dad went over to M and helped her pick up our blanket and put it in the bag. I heard him say, “I’ll meet you in the car. Where’s Apron?” even though I was standing right there. M didn’t answer him, though, or maybe I just didn’t hear her with that rain beating down on my hood. Everyone started walking fast to their cars, except me, who took my time. Rennie didn’t even say good-bye.

  Before I reached the parking lot, I heard some loud voices behind me. When I turned around, I saw two men, one blue and one green, standing across from each other in the middle of the field. They were moving their hands around fast. Then the blue man punched the green one in the stomach. When the green man crumpled over, his hood slid off and I saw that it was Mr. Perry. The blue man turned around and started walking off the field.

  And when he got up to me, still standing there watching, he said, “Let’s go, Apron.”

  6

  Pistrix! Pistrix!

  Shark! Shark!

  I thought my dad would save it. It looked like he might, his hand extended out like that. But he didn’t.

  “Sorry,” I whispered.

  He shook his head and leaned down for my tray.

  I should have seen it then—all the other things about to come crashing down. But instead I watched Juan Busboy—it said so on his tag—walk up to me with a mop. “It’s okay,” he nodded. “I take care of it, no problem.”

  My dad slapped his hands on his pants and stood. “I’ll get you another one. We’re not paying twice.”

  Since the Meaningless Bowl, my dad had been in his office grading papers. He didn’t tell me what happened with Mr. Perry, and I didn’t ask. Rennie and I made enough money for a combination lock, but now I needed to get to the store to buy it. When I told my dad I needed a new lock for my bike, he looked at me crooked and said he just bought me one. “I know,” I answered. “But tornado season is coming up. My bike could get blown away.” He told me Maine hadn’t had a tornado since 1972, the year I was born. But then he told me he’d try to get me there by the end of the week.

  Which meant seven more days of M trying to kill The Boss.

  I stepped back and watched how quickly Juan Busboy wiped up the spaghetti with just a few twists of his mop. After he dropped an orange danger cone with Maine Med Cafe onto the wet spot, he winked at me and left. I sighed. At least M wasn’t there yet.

  Carlos Manager must have told Barbara Cashier not to charge him again because she brushed my dad away without tapping on her register. I could see meatballs all over the place when he handed me my tray and said, “Try to watch it this time,” before walking his red head over to the water fountain. I hadn’t had a sip of water since last week when we studied amoebas in Science. After watching those hairy little cells banging into each other under the microscope, I decided I was never drinking water again.

  I went to go save our seats inside the handicapped section, which was the last place I wanted to sit, but it’s quieter in there. Grandma Bramhall says my dad has been agoraphobic since he was a boy, but when he hears that he just shakes his head. “Your grandmother’s starting to lose some of her marbles, Apron.” Which might be true. Lately she’d been forgetting things. And the little people were back, too. They were there when she went down to get some juice in the middle of the night, sitting at her kitchen table, or standing there doing nothing at all. The little people had started coming last year, but then stopped all of a sudden during Christmas. “It might be a busy time of year for them,” Grandma Bramhall said, her head shaking back and forth. “Who knows?” But my dad just rubbed his hands. “Dennis,” she said, still shaking, “You can put me away if you want, but I swear on your father’s grave, those little people are nice as pie.”

  Grandma Bramhall’s head never stops shaking. Ever. If you didn’t know about her, you might think she was saying no every second or trying to get a mosquito off her head, but she wasn’t. It was just her neck plugged in wrong. “The head’s nothing to worry about,” my dad promised. “It’s been shaking like that since before you were born. This little people thing could be the beginning of the end, though.”

  Now, my dad sat across from me and cracked open his paper.

  President Reagan Promises to Keep AIDS out of America was the headline. There was a picture of President Reagan under his promise too, looking as handsome as ever. Grandma Bramhall kept a picture of him in her bedroom, right next to Grandpa Hub. “He was in the movies, you know,” she’d wink and shake.

  “What is AIDS?” I asked. I knew it killed you, but only gay people.

  A corner crinkled down and he studied me for a moment. “A very bad disease.”

  I nodded at the front page. “But only for um, some men right?” I wished President Reagan was talking about nurses’ aides though, then M would be long gone.

  “No. Not only for some men, Apron. There’s an entire continent of people dying from it. Men and women. Kids. What do they teach you in that school?”

  “Everything,” I shrugged, leaning down to get my Latin dictionary.

  “Doesn’t sound like it. Maybe I should come in and talk to Miss Frame.”

  “Frane,” I corrected him.

  “Frane,” he repeated to himself. Then he flicked his paper back up.

  I put the book on my lap and looked at those meat-balls. None of them were getting any closer to these lips, so I started squeezing my peanut butter muffin into a ball. Across the room, a girl was reading. She didn’t look anymore handicapped than I did. There were no crutches anywhere and her long blond hair came down past one shoulder. University of So Maine it said on her sweatshirt.

  I waited to see if she noticed my dad, maybe she’d taken Latin with him or knew about, “Maine Matters,” the column he wrote about Maine. We were going to be rich beyond belief and buy a new house as soon as he published the book, Maine Matters. She didn’t even look up, though.

  A nurse walked into the handicapped section, but it wasn’t M so my stomach sat down again.

  At the beginning, I liked M. She used to come into my mom’s room and say, “Can I get you somethings, Mrs. Bramhall?” And my mom would smile like nothing hurt and say, “How’s the search going?” Then M would sigh, “Not so good yet,” and my mom would say, “You’ll find Mr. Right someday.” But M would shrug and say, “He’s having to come in eight more months,” which was when she had to go back to Brazil. It used to be funny. But that was before she decided to make Mr. Right my dad.

  A loud siren made me jump. The emergency room w
as right next to us—all those people bleeding or dying while just one wall away we were eating meatballs. When the siren blared again, M walked through the door.

  She put her hand on my dad’s shoulder. He smiled and said, “Hey there,” and stood to kiss her.

  “Hi, Aprons.”

  “Hi.” I thumbed through the dictionary until I found it: Blandae mendacia linguae; the lies of a smooth tongue.

  My dad pulled out a chair for her and they both sat. “So what did they say?” I sucked in my smile and tapped my foot and waited for the good news: hardly anyone gets asked to stay another year as a nurse’s aide, she had told me that herself, all wrong in English, and now her year was up next month.

  Instead of answering out loud, M put her hand up to my dad’s ear and whispered something, which even if you’re from Brazil is the rudest thing you can do.

  My dad’s face turned weird. He stared over my head and M looked down at my muffin ball. Sneering. Like Jenny Pratt.

  Before he said anything, my dad glanced at me and that’s when I saw it—a flash, a tiny tick of sad crossing his face.

  He turned to M with a half smile. “Welp,” he said. “Whadda ya know.”

  She blinked at him. I’d never seen her look so nervous.

  “What do you know,” he whispered to himself.

  Bad news pulled down on me like a shade. I looked at my dad’s newspaper and saw a picture of a skinny African girl wearing a pot on her head and a baby on her back. Nobody ever smiled in newspaper pictures.

  “Apron,” my dad turned to me clearing his throat. “Margie’s gravitas.”

  “What?”

  He nodded toward my dictionary. “Gravitas,” he said. “Look it up.”

  M lay her head on his shoulder and squeezed his arm.

  I flipped through the pages and moved my finger down slowly. I wanted it to mean sorry. Sorry that she had ruined everything for so long; sorry she hated American girls; and sorry, but she wouldn’t even write to us. Gravitas.

  But it didn’t. Pregnant. That’s what it meant.

  I looked at my dad. He waited for me to say something, but I couldn’t get my throat working. So he blinked his eyes off mine and started sliding his newspaper back and forth with one finger making it look like that African girl was trying to walk off the page. When his finger stopped, you could see that girl was still there, though. Stuck like me.

  7

  Mea culpa.

  Oops.

  The church smelled like leftover tears. Sadness was tucked into corners and hidden under beams and pasted so thick on the walls that it was hard to breathe.

  My dad and M were getting married during dodge ball. I know, because we were still waiting for M to walk down the aisle when the bells rang eleven times, exactly when we had gym class. My dad and M had to get married on a Friday because the church was booked up solid from now all the way through summer, and Grandma Bramhall said they were just lucky that Reverend Hunter would marry them in the first place. Grandma Bramhall didn’t like M any more than I did, you could tell by the way she called her “the girl.”

  We were supposed to be done by noon because a real wedding was in the church tomorrow and they needed to start setting up for it. My neck kept itching and my butt was digging into the pew. On the other side of the aisle, Nurse Silvia was sitting with a lady I didn’t know, but who was probably a nurse because they stuck together like glue. Nurse Silvia worked in the kid’s department, but she was from Brazil too, and even though she was the one who brought M to America in the first place, I kind of liked her. She was short but pretty and she always had brown lip gloss on. She waved to me when she sat down, so I waved back.

  Finally, after about a year of me turning my bracelet right side up and then upside down again, someone started walking down the aisle because both Reverend Hunter and my dad shifted their eyes back there. It turned out to be Grandma Bramhall, though, wearing a brown skirt with pineapples on it and a yellow button-up shirt. She waved a flat hand up to my dad, or Reverend Hunter, you couldn’t tell, and then sat down next to me.

  “This is craziness,” she said giving me a butter-scotch drop. I unwrapped it quietly. After I put the ball of melting happiness in my mouth, Grandma Bramhall took my hand inside her boney one and said, “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do,” with her eyes closed. But with her head shaking like that, it looked like she was secretly asking the Lord not to forgive them. Sometimes I heard people whispering about her behind her back, but I couldn’t imagine Grandma Bramhall’s head staying still like everyone else’s. You might think she can’t read a book, but people can adapt to anything. Just look at how monkeys turned into humans.

  “Where is she?” Grandma Bramhall asked loudly, not whispering like everyone else. Even with pink lipstick on she had my dad’s exact same face minus the freckles.

  I pushed the butterscotch into my cheek and said, “I don’t know.”

  My dad waved to someone else back there, which turned out to be Mr. Haffenreffer and his wife, who was wearing the same bright pink dress with yellow flowers and green stems on it that Mrs. Perry wore sometimes, plus a matching headband. They sat down behind us and Mr. Haffenreffer leaned his face in between us and said, “Nice to see you, Mrs. Bramhall.” His breath smelled like old coffee.

  Grandma Bramhall nodded and said, “Nice to see you, too,” without turning around. Then she lifted her chin up toward my dad and cleared a frog out of her throat.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Mr. Haffenreffer said, getting way too close to my ear and rubbing the top of my head like a boy. “Exciting, huh?”

  It was lucky for him I wasn’t a boy, because if I were, I would have slugged his pasty white face and shattered his big round glasses. But all a redhead girl sitting next to her grandmother could do was shrug and move away. I looked up to make sure my dad wasn’t watching, but he was having his millionth conversation with Reverend Hunter.

  Before any more of that breath hit my face, the music started playing from somewhere loud and high. Mr. Haffenreffer sat back and Grandma Bramhall and I both turned around, but my eyes crashed right into Mrs. Haffenreffer’s, whose mouth was so tight it looked like you needed a key to open it. She gave me a little nod, but you could tell she didn’t want to be here any more than we did. Which made me kind of like her.

  Someone we didn’t know was walking down the aisle. I looked at my dad to see what he was going to do about that: the wrong bride walking up to him. But he just stared at her, bouncing up and down on his toes like he does when he’s nervous.

  I looked back at the bride, getting closer. Turns out it was M. Her hair was pulled up into a bun and she had a white veil hanging down over her face. Her dress was so big and frilly you would never know there was a little whatever growing in there. She was carrying dark red roses tied up with a yellow ribbon, and even though both of her nurse uniforms were white, I had no idea that M could look this good. But when she got up to Grandma Bramhall and me, she looked over and there was her same old mean face with rouge on top. Then the back of her dress floated up next to my dad, who took her hand and the two of them turned to face Reverend Hunter together.

  “Dearly beloved,” Reverend Hunter started, “We are gathered here today to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony.” It was the same thing people said on TV. I would have given a million dollars to be able to change the channel on this, though.

  I looked at Grandma Bramhall’s watch. Everyone in my class was running around, dodging rubber balls or throwing them. Even if you hit someone so hard they cried, you didn’t get in trouble, not even Johnny Berman, because that’s dodge ball. But I was stuck inside this soggy church, wishing someone would smash a ball into me and get me out for life.

  I looked past my dad and M, and up to the rug on the wall with the picture of Jesus hanging on the cross. Pieces of blood were dripping out of his hands and down his feet. He had been hanging like that since my mom’s funeral. Since forever. Just hanging there. Not savin
g anyone. Not even himself.

  Reverend Hunter kept blabbing on in one long sentence. My cheeks burned and I looked down at my mom’s hospital bracelet. I hadn’t taken it off since she died. But now, I slid my finger underneath it and started pulling.

  Reverend Hunter stopped talking so Grandma Bramhall and everyone else could say, “We will.” But I clamped my teeth down as hard as I could and kept pulling, like I was trying to unplug something big enough to turn off the whole world. The edge of the bracelet was starting to dig into my skin. I looked up at Jesus again. He could have saved Nutter at least.

  A snap happened. My arms flew apart so fast I hit Grandma Bramhall right in her chest.

  “Uh!” she groaned, loud enough for everyone to hear, including Reverend Hunter, who stopped talking.

  “Sorry. I’m sorry, Grandma Bramhall. Are you okay?” My jaw was hard to get moving again, but my hand went right to her heart and started rubbing out the dent I just made. Grandma Bramhall kept looking straight ahead and blinking, and then her head started slowing down.

  I rubbed her chest harder. “Grandma Bramhall, are you okay?”

  Mr. Haffenreffer and his breath poked in between us again, but this time I didn’t shrug away. He squished his eyebrows together and looked at me and said, “What happened, Apron? Why did you hit your grandmother?”

  “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry. Are you okay?” But Grandma Bramhall stayed staring straight ahead. Then she started gasping.

  “Apron, what did you do?” my dad said, walking down the steps back to us. M looked at me with such meanness on her face that for once anyone could have seen it, if they were looking. But no one was, because everyone was looking at us. Even Reverend Hunter put down his bible and started walking toward Grandma Bramhall, whose head kept getting slower and slower.

  Mrs. Haffenreffer came around and knelt by Grandma Bramhall. “Are you having trouble breathing, Mrs. Bramhall?” Grandma Bramhall tried to croak something out. Nurse Silvia and the other lady, who was definitely a nurse by how she kept saying “Okay, everyone, give her some room,” were standing there now, too.