A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

  But I hadn’t gone two steps before I saw Roger, real Roger in the actual flesh, standing ten feet ahead of me by the library. He was hard to miss, glowing white in his Calvary uniform shirt with the button-down col ar and monogrammed logo. He peered back and forth, searching for me in the crowd.

  My arm was lifting in a wave when this junior named Charlie who went to church at Calvary spotted Roger, too. He threw back his head and hol ered, “Gay Ray Got-Wood, in da house!” He made the last word into a hoot that carried al the way to space. Even down the hal , I saw Roger flush a mad, dark red clear to the roots of his hair.

  Roger’s real name was Raymond Knotwood, but he was short and pale and had a huge vocabulary and sucked at sports, so of course the guys at Cal al cal ed him Gay Ray, which was retarded because the last guy caught being gay was a basebal god who shot deer on the weekends; it was a huge scandal, and now he went to school in Pascagoula. The Cal guys didn’t like to think a guy like that would turn out to be gay. He’d been too much like them. Gay Ray Got-Wood’s initials would be GRG, but everyone had my friend pegged so wrong that I cal ed him those initials backward. RGR. Roger.

  Roger stepped toward Charlie with his hands coming up and his eyebrows coming together, just as Charlie licked his hand and gave Roger a massive cathead. He whanged Roger’s forehead so hard with his wet palm that I heard the smack al the way down the hal .

  Roger’d completely hate for me knowing he got catheaded, like somehow me seeing it with my girl eyes would make it sting for so much longer. I ducked sideways out of sight, jumping right through Coach’s classroom door. I fisted my hands and pressed them up against my eyes.

  “Mosey?”

  I whirled around.

  Across the mostly empty room, Coach Richardson was looking at me like I actual y existed. I don’t think he’d ever said my name before, except at rol cal . I hadn’t ever rated even the uncancerous lesser leer he saved for flatties. Now he was actual y smiling, his teeth so perfect they looked like they had been made up total y out of spackle.

  I burbled, “Oh, I…um, I don’t actual y have Life Skil s now,” which was insane, because of course he knew that. Some kids pushed in behind me, heading to their desks.

  He didn’t give me any flak, though, just said, real serious, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, how’s your mom doing?”

  My eyes narrowed. This was maybe the first time he’d ever asked me a direct question. A personal one anyway. He was Claire Richardson’s husband, after al , and Slocumbs plain did not exist to him.

  When I didn’t answer, he added, “We’ve al been so concerned, since we heard about the stroke.”

  I walked over to his desk because I didn’t want to yel back and forth across the room about Liza now that the kids in his next class were filing in.

  “She’s doing okay," I said.

  He nodded, encouraging, like we were having some kind of conversation and he wanted me to say more, which was super weird. He’d taught my mom Life Skil s, too, when it was plain driver’s ed and home ec existed and sex ed didn’t. A lot of my teachers had had my mom, because they’d al been teaching at PRH for about a hundred years, which proved Roger’s hypothesis that death was the only sure way out of Immita. I’d gotten a lot of stink-eye when they’d read my last name off the rol at the start of the year, most of al from Coach. He’d paused after my name, looking me up and down with a gaze so cold it was like he had lizard eyes, then never bothered looking at me again. Every rol cal after that, he rushed past me, cal ing the next name on the list while I was stil saying “Here.”

  Wel , he was a busy guy; he had tons of blouses that needed to be looked down, and every day he had to come up with a fresh new excuse to hug cheerleaders. It was time-consuming, being supercool, joking around with the sports guys and letting them pick on the scrubs. My mom, though, back in the day, she was friends with his daughter before she got pregnant and al the bad crap went down. Back then Liza would have rated his attention. He’d probably liked her the same as he liked Briony.

  The last kids were wandering in and flopping into their seats. Janie Pestre and her friend Deb were already sitting on the far end of the front row. I could see them in my side vision, looking at me. Deb poked Janie with her elbow and then said, “Hey, Mosey,” like we talked every day.

  I gave them a little nod.

  Deb poked Janie again, like egging at her, and Janie gave me a smile that was al pointy teeth, sharp and overfriendly. “We heard about your yard. What did the cops say? Was it a murder?”

  “I’m not sure that’s appropriate,” Coach said, but he leaned in, and as he said it, his face flashed a look that was like hunger. Just for a second, but I got it: He hadn’t real y cared how Liza was. This was what he’d wanted to ask me. The room was ful now, and as I glanced around, I saw he wasn’t alone. Everyone had hushed to hear what I would say, staring at me like I was cake and they deserved a piece.

  I looked down at the big zoo of crap on Coach’s desk, stacks of health pamphlets and report binders and a col ection of bobblehead guys in footbal helmets. Near the front was this hinged picture frame that opened like a book. Fifty mil ion years ago, he’d caught some impossible pass to win a col ege game. He’d cut the story and picture out of the paper and framed them, and it stil sat on his desk. It was a little sad. He looked like the Stay Puft Marshmal ow Man version of the boy in the picture, stil trying to be cool in button-fly Levi’s with his bel y pooching over the top. Him having that pic was like if I was forty and stil had some old A-plus paper stuck on the fridge, al brown and curled up at the edges.

  Staring at that picture, with everyone in the room craning toward me, I had this weird déjà vu feeling, like way back before this frame was al dusty, fifteen years ago, my mom had stood here, in this spot, twirling a strand of her hair and using her pretty to wheedle Coach into giving her the one practice car with an A/C that worked. I felt like my mother’s teenage ghost owned the room, and standing in her footprints, I owned it, too, now.

  Like it was something Liza had bought for us.

  I made a hard, mysterious face and dredged up some CSI memories to get the right vocab and the Horatio tone. I tossed my hair back and said,

  “I can’t talk about it while it’s…an ongoing investigation.” I real y needed some sunglasses to whip off, but it was good enough for them. Four or five conversations started buzzing in the room behind me, everybody wondering how much I knew, and me not giving any of them, especial y Coach, a damn thing.

  Coach leaned in a little closer. Too close. His breath smel ed like peppermints. He dropped his voice so only I could hear and started to ask me another question.

  But I didn’t have any real information, and anyway, even if I did, he’d never once been nice to me. I started talking real y loud and perky over him.

  “So, Coach, I was hoping you would write me a pass to spend study hal in the library. I want to work on my Scarlet Letter report for English.” It was real y a two-page reader response that any person with nine working brain cel s and Wikipedia could do without cracking a single book, including the actual Scarlet Letter. It was already finished, stuffed in my pink Trapper Keeper, waiting for its due day, the way my homework always was.

  But I wasn’t that girl anymore. I was someone new, shutting Coach down in the middle of a question, lying to get a pass I didn’t need, standing in this spot where Liza used to stand.

  “Sure, let me get my pad,” he said, subsiding, and the interested light was gone from his eyes. He was once again looking through me, like I was the same old Mosey Slocumb, the one girl at Pearl River who was too plain to perv on. He turned his back on me to open a battered-up briefcase on the stool behind him.

  The kids were mostly talking to one another now, leaning across the aisles to whisper. Only Deb was stil watching me, wide-eyed and interested, like Mosey Slocumb getting a hal pass was newsworthy. Yesterday, with Olive and that pack of assholes stomping around our grass, I’d purely hated it, but I’d
been me then. Now that I actual y was just The Girl with Human Bones in Her Yard, I kinda liked it. Al at once I wanted for her to see I’d changed. I wanted someone to witness me doing a thing Mosey Slocumb wouldn’t ever, ever do.

  I stepped up close to the desk so my bel y was almost pressed against that newspaper story in its special frame. I waggled my eyebrows at Deb and put my hand on it. She raised her eyebrows, like to say, What? My hand clicked the frame closed into a book, and I slid it to the edge of the desk and stuffed it right down the front of my pants. I almost yipped out loud and had to turn the noise into a cough to cover; the back of the frame was metal and ice-cold.

  It had happened so fast. Deb stared at me with her mouth dropped wide open. I stared back, shocked, too, but I told myself that I hadn’t real y stolen it yet. The frame was stil in his room, after al . Just accidental y down my pants. I put a “shhh” finger against my lips. Deb snapped her mouth shut, choking back the giggles, and gave me a big thumbs-up.

  Coach found his passes. He scribbled on one and then turned and held it out to me without even looking at me, saying, “Bel in one minute.” I took it. Now I didn’t see how I could get the frame back, and anyway, served him right.

  I walked careful out the door with his footbal memento pressed cold against my bel y, completely stealing it, as easy as if Liza real y was my mom. Hel , she’d stolen a whole baby. Thinking that put my little teeny thieving in perspective, and I realized I was more excited than scared anyway, and dying to show Roger.

  He was stil in the library doorway, craning around for me. I kept my eyes forward and marched toward the end of the hal like I wasn’t seeing him there. That gave him time to find me and arrange himself al leaned and cool in the doorway and be the one to say, “Yo.”

  I turned al surprised and then grinned at him and said, “How on earth?”

  He shrugged. I could see that his forehead was red from where Charlie gave him the cathead, but he’d wiped the suck away. “Simple. I told Mr.

  Lex I needed to go the library to do research for debate. He wrote me an off-campus pass, and I told the secretary here it meant this one, not the branch.”

  “Pretty slick,” I said. “Come in here, I have to show you something.”

  His eyes got bright behind his glasses, and we ducked into the library.

  I paused to drop off my pass at the front desk, and then we hustled back to this dark hole of a room behind the biographies. It had a smal round table in the middle, and against the wal was a thousand-year-old microfiche machine that looked like a headless R2-D2.

  “So what’d you find?” Roger said, library-quiet, but real intense.

  I pul ed the frame out of my pants, Roger’s eyes widening as I did it, and I opened it up on the smal table. “I stole this.”

  He bent his head over and started to read the actual newspaper story, interested. “Is it about your mom?”

  “No, it’s about footbal . Why are you even reading it? Roger, listen: I total y stole this.”

  He looked down at the picture. “Why?”

  I said, “I don’t know. Isn’t that so not like me, though?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But, like, you stole it from your mom or—”

  “Oh, my God, can you stop with my mom?” I said, exasperated. “Forget my mom. This is Coach Richardson’s framed thingy, and I stuck it down my pants.”

  He waved that away. “Okay. Wel , next time put something useful down your pants. Like a pizza. Mosey, I need you to focus.” He made a peace sign with his fingers, then pointed it at my eyes and then his own. “We’ve got to find somehow to trace your mom’s route. It’s the only way we’re going to find out who you are.”

  “Unpossible, Roger.” My voice had gone al sharp. I took the frame from him and put it in my backpack, saying, “She was out there for almost two and a half fricken years.”

  He shook his head. “Yeah, but she had to get you pretty early on, when you were little. Because by the time she came home, the two of you were bonded and crap.”

  I shrugged, but it was mad, like my shoulders jerked up and then dropped. I’d only just stopped being me, and he was al hot to make me someone else before I’d even caught my breath.

  “It was fifteen years ago, and they had only just invented e-mail. It’s not like they had blogging back then or she had a GPS app and could tweet her location from her iPhone every fifteen minutes. She hitchhiked around in loop-de-loops, righteously effed up on fifty kinds of drugs. If we were serious, we’d have to try and go in her path. You think your mom is going to be al cool with that? If you and me blow town in the Volvo, you be Sherlock, I’l be Hot Watson, and we’l sleep by the side of the road and live on chips and gas-station-brand Cokes until we find my real mom, baking cookies in, like, Iowa and pining for me?”

  His face flushed a dark, dul red, and he cut his eyes away and mumbled, “We could maybe fake a school trip or…”

  He petered out, and I felt like Lowly Worm. He was always so careful to keep that I’m-a-boy-and-you’re-a-girl distance in between us. He never let me get al huggy or treat him like my stuffed rabbit, and now I’d seen al the way back into his head, to where he kept his secret reasons why. This whole investigation, it wasn’t real y about finding where I came from. It was about me and him, maybe on the road, sharing al kinds of secrets and a sleeping bag, and I had just peed on it.

  “Not that that wouldn’t be super great,” I said, lame like.

  “Whatev,” he said, trying for cool but with his cool gone. There was this awful teetering moment, and I felt like I’d busted something up, bad. He wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I felt exactly like when I’d found my mom’s secret sex vibrators al over again, except with Roger, so it was worse.

  I had this lump coming up in my throat, and he started to stand. I knew if I let him walk away now, we might stil be friends, but this thing where we were a team, him and me versus everybody, that would be over. I grabbed his arm, because I couldn’t stand it, and he stopped and went into that kind of stil ness he always got when I touched him.

  I took my hand away and said, fast and quiet, “I searched Liza’s room.” That paused him. I spoke again, like the last six seconds had been some weird, unaccountable blink of nothing. “I’m being al hateful and acting like you are Detective Suck, but it’s me, Roger. I’m the suck. I mean, I’ve been trying to make you quit it, and I keep saying I don’t want to know anything. But then, this morning, I snuck into her room and tore through al her things.”

  He stuffed his hands in his pockets, leaning toward me from the waist, more like his usual Spocked-out self. “What did you find?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said, but I said it too quick, and I felt my own cheeks pinking, because of course what I’d found was a total y unrelevant pouch of perv toys. Maybe I would tel him that at any other time, but not right now. Not while he stil had a little of the secretest piece of him showing on his cheeks as two red spots.

  He said, “Nah, you found something.”

  I pul ed the picture of Bunnies out of my back pocket. “This was the most personal thing I found in her whole room. Don’t you think that’s weird?”

  “Mmm,” he said, like real thinky.

  I went on. “She lived in that same room almost for her whole life, but there’s nothing there even from when she was a kid. I think I know al about her life, because she way overshares, but most of the time her stories have these big fat morals tacked on. Drugs Are Bad. Keep It in Your Pants.

  Skipping Causes Cancer. Those kinds of stories. Nothing real y…you know, personal.”

  He was looking at me now with his eyebrows raised and a crafty smile growing. “Come on.” He got up and walked away, fast, leaving his stuff in the little room. I got up and fol owed as he race-walked through the stacks on a mission. He stopped in the nonfiction, dropping to sit on his butt on the floor between two tal shelves.

  He ran his fingers along the spines of a long row of books that were al the same height?
??tal , thin spines, but in different colors. He pul ed out two of them that were side by side and held them up, one in each hand, covers facing me. They were yearbooks from fifteen and sixteen years back.

  The years my mom was in school here at PRH.

  He said, “Here’s the thing. Your mom had to have friends in Immita. It was before texting, so what if she sent them snail mail, maybe postcards, from the road? She could have told some local chick al about you.”

  I stared at him. It seemed real y long-shotty to me, but I didn’t want to bust his happy when he was looking at me like we were in on this together, me and him, a team, and that weird moment in the microfiche room hadn’t happened.

  I fingered the picture of Bunnies. My mom never kept anything, not even a picture of Big and me on her nightstand. No souvenirs from the years she was on the road. No bring-home-to-meet-the-fam-style boyfriends. She gave away every foster dog as soon as it was wel and ready, even Bunnies.

  The only thing she’d ever kept was me.

  I didn’t think Roger’s plan to investigate my mom’s high-school years would tel us who I was, not in a tril ion years, but I didn’t care about that anyway. What I wanted now was to know who she was.

  I plopped down on my butt beside him. “So we use the yearbook to figure out who her friends were back in the way back back, and then we talk to them.”

  Roger grinned and said, “And search their houses.”

  I ignored that and grabbed the book from her freshman year.

  Roger started flipping through the other one. “Was she in any clubs?”

  I snorted. “Just the kind where you need a fake ID. Can you imagine my mom in Junior Boosters?” I turned the pages, scanning for mom pics while I talked.