Loser's Bracket

  Oscar says, “So see? According to our resident alien, not only are there no heroes, but even heroic acts are suspect.”

  I’m heading back to the Howard’s and almost get hit twice because my body’s on my bike, but my head’s floating somewhere in the stratosphere with Judas and Adolph Hitler. Traffic hazards aside, what I love about the book club is that you always walk away with something in your brain that’s never been there before, and it’s the only place in my life where I trust that people mean what they say, except for my therapist, of course. And, I mean, this Seth guy is a trip.

  Chapter

  Seven

  “Wanna go shopping?”

  Nancy made a whole meet. All by herself. No Walter sweet-talking me, no showing up after the last race, no “That was really great but I gotta go.”

  “Shopping would be cool.” I notice her loose neck-to-ground clothing in this heat, devoid of ventilation. She’s not dressed for shopping. She’s dressed for shop lifting. “But Nancy, last time . . .”

  “Don’t be silly,” she says. “Last time I was dirt poor. I got us what we needed. Walter is working two jobs. We have money now.” She holds up her wallet, which hangs on a piece of twine around her neck. “This is legit. We’ll buy some things. I haven’t bought anything for my baby in forever.”

  It’s Nancy and she’s doing her best; if she gets caught, I’ll disappear out a side door.

  When Nancy “shops” alone, at any store that ends in –mart, she waits outside until just the right family comes along; then strikes up a conversation with one of them, appearing to be a member instead of a rotten robber. She grabs a cart and follows them down an aisle or two before peeling off and loading up.

  When I’m with her, she introduces me to one of the greeters as we pass by, which she thinks makes her seem more normal and friendly, and makes them less likely to alert store detectives. Back in the days when I was in on it, we agreed that if she were caught, I would be horrified and she would weep with apology and hand everything back. I would run out of the store in tears screaming how I hated her, and the store detective would feel sorry for her and we’d get away with whatever she had stashed under my clothes. These days she’s on her own.

  It’s been a risky profession, but she’s never spent a night in jail, for that at least, so I guess you could say her skill set fits this particular chosen vocation.

  She says, “Pick out a couple of tops you like.”

  I don’t say I’m a girl who gets “tops I like” at Nordstrom’s, but I can snag a couple of tank tops to work out in and no one will even notice, so I say okay and head to sportswear.

  When I catch back up with Nancy, she’s standing outside a dressing room fighting with a store employee over whether or not the skirt she just tried on was ripped before she went in there. All evidence says truth lies with the employee, but my money is on Nancy. She’ll cry and threaten and debate and intimidate until this minimum wage indentured servant figures a way to give it to her at the drastically reduced price she was willing to pay in the first place.

  Which is exactly what happens.

  In the parking lot she transfers some items from a hiding spot any store clerk would really have to be dedicated to find, into the oversized bag that holds the torn skirt.

  I never get a good answer, but I have to ask yet one more time. “Nancy, why do you do this shit? You said you had money.”

  She looks truly consternated. “I don’t know, baby. I do have money . . . it’s just . . . it’s so easy. It seems like such a waste.”

  “If they catch you, you could go to jail.”

  She stuffs the bag into the back of her ratty car. “Hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Chances increase every time,” I say.

  “So I spend a couple of days in the hoosegow,” she says, nodding toward the backseat. “Whaddaya think all that is worth? I mean really worth. What I paid for those blouses of yours would cover the cost of the material and whatever they pay those poor China ladies or Vietnams. You think the people what own that store wear this shit? I’m just evenin’ up . . . puttin’ a little balance back in the world.”

  Like I said, no good answer. I guess if I’d lived with the Howards full-time from birth this wouldn’t seem so normal, but it is what it is, as they say.

  “Let’s get a coffee.”

  She glances at her wallet.

  “You can buy with your savings. There’s a Starbucks a block over.”

  “They don’t like me too much there,” she says.

  “Why not?”

  “Look at me, Annie,” she says, holding her arms out crucifixion style. “Nobody wants me in their place.”

  Sometimes she worries about her appearance—and maybe her hygiene—and sometimes she couldn’t care less. She’s a full-sized lady, as they say, but no bigger than a lot of people since she’s been with Walter, but this must be one of those days. It might help if she were a little pickier about the clothes she steals. “Tough,” I say. “We’re going to Starbucks. It’s on me.”

  The Starbucks employees don’t even blink when we come in. That’s just how Nancy feels when she goes anywhere. There are times I want to skin her alive; she makes promises I know way better than to believe, and she whines and snarls and judges her way through life. But if you could see the look on her face when we walk through the door, the trepidation that says, “Please don’t look at me and if you do, please don’t turn away,” well, you’d buy Nancy a coffee, too.

  “You got a boyfriend yet?”

  “Nope. No boyfriend.”

  “Baby, you’re a catch. What are you waitin’ for?”

  “Nancy, I’m seventeen. I have plenty of time to get a boyfriend.” What I don’t say is if I did have a boyfriend, I wouldn’t tell her because she’d be telling me how to keep him, and that conversation is gross.

  “I had my way with the best-lookin’ boy in my class when I was fifteen,” she says.

  “Nancy, that can’t be. You dropped out after sixth grade. You’d have been twelve.”

  “You always think you’re so smart. I was fifteen when I got out of sixth.”

  Jeez. “That would have made him twelve.”

  “Okay,” she says. “I get my times mixed up. But . . . Annie, I don’t want you to be alone, is all. It hurts so much. . . .”

  I know most seventeen-year-olds have already gone through their first half-dozen boyfriends, and there were a couple of guys I was pretty excited about in eighth grade, but neither of them made it into high school, and I’ve read enough to know if you grew up like I did, there’s a pretty good chance your mate selection skills might be, like, primitive.

  “Speaking of boyfriends, who’s this guy Sheila was with?”

  “Sheila don’t tell me nothin’. Hell, I thought she was with that dyke.”

  “Yvonne is her friend, Nancy. This was some guy named Butch.”

  “Never heard of no Butch,” she says. “Why?”

  I’m hesitant to tell, but . . . “He knocked Sheila around pretty good, and I found some marks on Frankie.”

  “You tell CPS?”

  “I was gonna call my old caseworker, but Frankie would end up someplace completely unfamiliar, and nobody’s going to keep him for long. He’s back at our place now, but the Howards’ license is specialized just for me.”

  “They could lose it,” she says. “Foster parents are mandatory reporters.” One place Nancy is an expert is the workings of children’s services. “He could come with me.”

  “C’mon, Nancy. I can’t come with you, and I’m your kid.”

  “Let’s talk about something else. I wanted this day to be about you and me. What about Thanksgiving this year? You going to make it, or you gonna follow Foster Pop’s rules?”

  “I haven’t missed one yet, and I’ve been grounded every time I was caught.”

  Nancy holds a gala “family” Thanksgiving dinner every year at Quik Mart. Yeah, the convenience store; and it’s way more bizarre than
it sounds. I’ve had to sneak to it every year, because if you think Pop balks at my connecting up at my public sports events, well. . . . Marvin thinks it’s the coolest thing ever, which gives an indication of just how strange things get.

  “It’s in November, Nancy. Why are you asking me now?”

  “It was all I could think of to change the subject,” she says, and stands to get another sugar. “I think you should keep up this swimming thing, by the way. It looks like a lot of fun.”

  “If it looks like so much fun, they have Masters’ swimming.”

  She looks down, appraises. “You think I’m putting this body in a swimming suit?”

  “If you did it every day, that body would look really different,” I tell her.

  “I s’pose,” she says, and stares out the window.

  It’s times like this that I just wish I could take care of my mother. I remember her screaming out the stories of her own childhood in times when she was tired of my whining—how she had to hide from her uncle and a couple of her cousins, how her father used to swing her around by the hair to show his friends how tough she was. I mean he lifted her off the ground and swung her around and around like a sack of potatoes. And if she cried or yelled, he dropped her. When I think of that, my throat closes over with hopelessness.

  I feel guilty.

  “You busy?” Pop stands in the doorway to my room where I’m stretched out on the bed reading the back cover of Bastard out of Carolina, a book Maddy said I’d hate, but would relate to.

  I say, “Not really,”

  “Time to talk?”

  “Sure.”

  He sits at the foot of the bed, takes a deep breath. Uh-oh. “Momma and I have been talking about . . . your family.”

  “The Boots.”

  “The ones and onlys.”

  “What about them?”

  “We’ve been pretty lax about contact. I know, you see them in public—at games and swim meets. I think it’s more frequent than that.”

  I freeze inside, but hold his gaze.

  “Well?”

  “I run into them sometimes. Mostly Nancy. You know, she’s all over the place.”

  “I think it’s more intentional than that.”

  I shrug and look away.

  “That’s what I thought. It needs to stop, Annie.”

  I hesitate. “Or what?”

  “I haven’t wanted to go there,” he says, “and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t force me to.”

  “Pop, it doesn’t even affect me anymore. I know when I was little and they’d send me home, I’d come back a little shit, but I’ll bet you can’t even tell when I’ve seen them now.”

  “Remember back at Hoopfest when you bludgeoned that girl on the court because Nancy didn’t show? Remember all the times you’ve come back from an event and gone straight to your room, wouldn’t say hello or sit with us? After all we’ve done?”

  “I go to my room because I don’t want to have this very conversation.”

  “Annie, I’ve told you, I won’t be lied to.”

  Then don’t ask me questions. That one stays in my head.

  “I know you went to Sheila’s.”

  Dang! “How did you know that?”

  “It doesn’t matter how I know. It matters that I know.”

  “We ordered pizza.”

  “Mmm-hmm. How did that end?”

  I surrender. “The pizza ended on the floor. But I wasn’t the one to come uncorked.”

  Pop stands, palms the back of his neck—a warning sign. “I don’t want this to turn into one of our epic struggles, but you’re going to be a senior in high school. You can’t go out into the world lying to people.”

  “Actually, people do it all the time.”

  I’m lucky this time. Pop really doesn’t want to get into this all the way, and he’s learned that threatening me is about the best way to assure I’ll do what I’m not supposed to.

  Back in the day, when Nancy screwed up yet one more time and I got sent back, I was a handful. I hoarded food, disappeared things that were really important to Momma and Pop, threw temper tantrums that scared even me. They responded with “time out,” which was basically “go to your room,” then started taking things away when I didn’t straighten up—my iPod, books, games, whatever, until the only things in my room were my bed, my dresser, and me. When I was like that, they just couldn’t cost me enough. They won all the battles, but I won the war, because what they didn’t understand was, they could throw me out into a snowbank and nothing would have changed. My insides were so crazy mixed up that all I could count on was my own stubbornness.

  “I don’t like those struggles, either, Pop,” I say now.

  He takes a deep breath and stares out my window. He really should send Momma on these missions. Or better, Marvin.

  “I’m going to leave it at that,” he says, “because I promised Jane I wouldn’t lay down an ultimatum unless I have to.” He pats me on the knee and walks out.

  Pop has a way of laying down an ultimatum without laying down an ultimatum. I get it; if I keep hooking up with my family, I could be on my way out. That’s the only card he has left to play.

  “If you wanna keep favored child status,” Marvin says, “you have to take the good with the bad.”

  Marvin had waited five minutes after Pop left before coming in to commiserate.

  “What’s the good?”

  “Serious? iPhone, car, allowance, dictator dad too busy to follow up on his ‘dictates’ most times . . .”

  “How did he know about me going to Sheila’s place?”

  “Who knows? He’s caught me sometimes when I thought there was no way. I suspect he may have spies.”

  “What?”

  “Who knows? He talks to you more than me.” He considers that a second. “Thank God.”

  “He talks at me.”

  “You know the other thing he’s worried about with you, don’t you?”

  “Which other thing?”

  “That you’re kick-ass,” he says. “You know, violent.”

  “I’m not violent.”

  Marvin smiles. “A little aggressive, maybe, but yeah, no bodies lie dormant in your wake.”

  “Marvin, ‘bodies lying dormant in my wake’ would be dead. Can’t you just say dead? And where did you get that he thinks I’m violent?”

  “Same place I get all my information . . . through the heat grate in my bedroom. Fancy house like this one shouldn’t have built-in walkie-talkie, but it does. If you lay your ear right next to it, you can hear Mom and Dad talking in bed.” His face reddens. “Unfortunately, that’s not all you hear.”

  “You listen to your parents . . .”

  “Collateral damage,” he says. “I only listen when I think my hide is on the line. For a small fee, I’ll work in your behalf.”

  “How’d you get so smart?”

  “Ginkgo biloba,” he says. “Hey, everyone thinks guys my age are stumbling into puberty trying to figure out what to do with our di . . . private parts. I know exactly what to do with my private parts; I just don’t know who to do it with.” He smiles wider. “Except for, you know, myself.”

  “Way too much information.”

  He laughs. “Remember the kitten?”

  “The one you had for a week? Yeah, what does that have to do with anything?”

  “Remember how Dad said he got it for me so I’d learn responsibility?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s not why he got it.” He deepens his voice, imitating Pop. “Marvin, it’s time you learned to get serious. It is incumbent on you to take care of this little fella. Your room will be his home. His very existence depends on you. Welcome to my world.”

  “But he was here a week. He ran away, right?”

  “Yeah,” Marvin says. “In a basket on the back of my bike to Jenny Peterson’s house.”

  “Why? He was darling.”

  “Do you know what a kitten does when he sees something moving under
the covers?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “He pounces!”

  OMG! “Pop gave you that kitten to . . .”

  “. . . keep me from, how should I put this . . . practicing.

  I say, “That’s just cruel.”

  “I’d wake up in the morning . . .”

  “I don’t need to hear this.”

  “. . . rise to lock the door . . .”

  “Did I say I don’t need to hear this?”

  “. . . one move, and whack!” Marvin smiles with the satisfaction of having told a story he thinks is funny while grossing me out.

  That’s Pop’s grotesque idea of a sense of humor.

  “Anyway that’s not all I think about,” Marvin says. “I think a lot about how to outfox my dad, but mostly that leads to dreams of bulking up in the gym to get his hopes up, then turn out for high school drama. Unfortunately, us drama dudes are memorizing soliloquies when we could be doing push-ups.”

  “They aren’t mutually exclusive, you know . . . drama and push-ups.”

  Marvin makes a muscle, only the muscle doesn’t make. “Yeah, I know, I know.”

  “Listen,” I say. “If you hear through the heat grate that my eviction is imminent, you’ll let me know, right?”

  “’Course I will. But you gotta know, you’ve got the very best firewall.”

  “Really. What’s that?”

  “Mom.”

  Chapter

  Eight

  Two days after the non-ultimatum ultimatum from Pop, Leah offers me a ride home from book club, so I throw my bike into the back of her pickup and hop in shotgun.

  As we’re pulling up to the house, she says, “Hey, listen, I was over at you guys’ practice the other day watching my little sister.”

  “You won’t be able to watch her there for long,” I say. “She gets faster by the day.”