I had plenty of stalkers at school, too. Most kids stil hadn’t given up on getting the grisly scoop out of Boneyard Girl. Worse, every time I turned around, Patti Duckins was peeking out at me from behind a bank of lockers or around a corner with her eyes al slitted up and glarey. I figured she knew I’d stolen the dog and was plotting some awful Duckinsy revenge involving a switchblade and my face.
By lunchtime Friday I was flat paranoid. I went skulking into the cafeteria, sticking close to the wal like a sewer rat. Janie Pestre and her friend Deb tried to flag me over to their table, but I didn’t feel like being mysterious for them that second. I saw Briony watching me, too, but I looked away before she could so much as wave. I sat down at an empty, square table.
I was brown-bagging, like I did every day now. Big pretended it had to do with nutrition, but I wasn’t stupid; she’d gone al Food Revolution because home-packed lunches were cheaper. Big did her main grocery shopping on Saturdays, and these days when we ran out of something, we stayed out until the next week. Today she’d packed me a dregs lunch: bologna sandwich with no cheese, a yogurt, and a bag of tired-looking baby carrots. She’d put in my old Ninja Turtles thermos from grade school, too, probably ful of whatever was left of the orange juice.
As I stared down, distracted by the pure awfulness of my Friday lunch, Patti Duckins slid into the chair right across from me. I jumped, and this humiliating, squeaky noise came out of me. Patti snickered, then peered at me from under her shaggy Duckins bangs.
I said, “Bogo is ours, now,” and my voice came out al high and pathetic.
Patti looked puzzled for a second, but then she shrugged, as if she didn’t know who Bogo was or didn’t care, one. She didn’t talk, just kept staring at me with this weird look on her face, part crafty and part suspicious. Like I’d come over and flopped down at her table instead of the other way around. Final y I gave her a WTH glare, and she said, “I thought sure you’d be sitting with your friends.” She jerked her thumb over to where Briony Hutchins and Barbie Macloud were watching us, whispering behind their hands.
I snorted. “Briony Hutchins is so not my friend.”
“Wel , them ones, then,” Patti said, nodding toward Janie Pestre’s table. “Whatever ones. I watched you al week, sure you’d be pointing your fingers at me, laughing with some bunch of crappy assholes about how my house was and my old grampa.”
“I told you, we weren’t there to spy on you,” I said.
“Maybe that’s so,” she said. She sat there. If she didn’t care I’d taken Bogo, then what was she doing?
“Twelve minutes to the bel . You should go get your lunch,” I said.
Duckins kids got free-lunch cards, so she could be lording it up with a corn dog if she wanted, but she shook her head, flushing. Maybe she’d left her card at home and was too embarrassed to say. Maybe she’d sold it. I wanted to eat, but it seemed rude since she didn’t have anything, so I pushed half my sandwich toward her. It was cut on the corners the way Big always did. “Want half? It’s super gross.”
She scowled at the sandwich and then at me, her mouth scrunching up like she was trying to figure if I was looking down on her or trying to poison her. She left the sandwich half where it was, not picking it up but not pushing it away either. “I cal ed my cousin. Noveen. The one who’s married to that Chinese fel ow. I asked her about you.” I must have looked surprised, because her frowny mouth turned down even more fiercely, and she added, “What? I go see Noveen a lot. You think because my old grampa’s prejudice, I must be just as ass-backward?”
“Oh, my God, you are so freakin’ touchy,” I said. “Did you specifical y sit down here to be al weird and yel at me for stuff you make up and say I’m thinking?” I could feel half the cafeteria staring at us now, like we were zoo animals and they were hoping to see a fight, or at least some poo getting flung. Patti didn’t even notice them—she was focused so hard on me. Or maybe she was used to people staring.
“I’m not ignorant,” she said. “Or a racist.”
“Okay already,” I said.
“I’m not,” she said, like I’d argued with her. She tilted her chin up so she could look down her nose at me and added, real sly, “I gave a black guy a BJ once. His dick tasted just like a white boy’s.” Then she busted out laughing at the expression on my face. “You never did that, huh? For your boyfriend?”
I had no idea what she meant for a second, and then I said, “Roger? He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s Roger,” I said. She was looking al speculative, like trying to decide if Roger was available, which was plain vile. She didn’t even know him a bit, but the boy had al his teeth, so that must make him a catch by Duckins standards. I said, “He’s not gonna be your boyfriend either,”
so fierce it surprised me. She shrugged like it was no skin off her nose and changed the subject.
“Noveen, she says your mom was the coolest person she ever knew,” Patti said. “She said Liza Slocumb’s kid wouldn’t have come out to my place just to make fun.”
I felt my cheeks flush, but not embarrassed. It was a hot rush of pink pride fil ing me. “I am Liza Slocumb’s kid,” I said.
“Your mom, she stil cool?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that.
“You know my mom is sick, now,” I said. “She got hurt. She…my mom’s real sick.”
Patti said, “Naw, I didn’t know. I’m real sorry. Noveen, she told me some wild-ass stories about Liza. You anything like her?”
“Some ways I’m like.” Patti’s weird country way of talking was rubbing off on me.
“Not so wild,” Patti said, “I know because of you jumped when I said I sucked off a black boy. Which I was kidding, but look, you jumped again.”
I wasn’t sure if she was kidding or not, but I said, real stubborn, “I’m a lot like Liza, though.”
After a second she nodded and picked up her half of my sandwich and started eating it in quick, smal nips that told me plain she was hungry.
She talked right through the food. “So what do you do with that guy who ain’t your boyfriend?” I felt myself straightening up, and she grinned with her mouth ful . “Or mine neither.”
“I’m his best friend.” I said, thinking, Or I used to be. This week it was more like I was his science-fair project.
She nodded, very serious, and said, “He don’t go here, though.” She said it like she was making me an offer. It took me a second to get it. Final y here was someone at my school trying to make friends with me, and it was a Duckins. So surreal. But then Liza had been friends with a Duckins, so it must be doable. The fact that Patti was trying at al made me sorry that I’d stolen her book instead of being straight with her.
“Yeah. I don’t have a friend here,” I said.
She looked at me, not saying the obvious, but I heard her al the same. I pushed the bag of baby carrots to the center of the table, so we could both reach. We each grabbed a handful and crunched at them, not talking.
Final y I said, “You want to maybe go see a movie Saturday?” I was supposed to go with Roger, but it might do him some good to see how it felt to get stood up. She didn’t answer, though, and I felt a blush rising. Because seriously? Rejected by a Duckins? Roger would bust something laughing. I sounded huffy when I said, “Or not. Maybe that sounds dul , since I don’t go around, like, doing multicultural wiener taste tests.”
She grinned, getting the joke, which kinda surprised me, and not taking it mean, which surprised me more. “Noveen said she and your mom used to hang out in her tree house, listen to music, look at trashy magazines.”
“Yeah,” I said, and it occurred to me maybe she’d hesitated because she didn’t have money for a movie. That kinda put my dregs lunch into focus. With my mom’s medical bil s and the paying for the pool we didn’t even have yet, I thought things were tight at home. But it was nothing like what tight meant at hers. I said, “That’d be cool. You could come over after lunc
h on Saturday if you want.”
She nodded and gave me a quick smile, a little shy, and then said, “PE,” just as the bel rang. She got up and slouched off, leaving me sitting there wondering what Big would think. Maybe she’d be happy to see me hanging with a person who didn’t have the right equipment to impregnate me. More likely she’d crap herself, because Liza had made friends with a Duckins and they’d both had babies that same year. It was out of my hands, though, and al I could do was hope to God that when she came over, Patti would wear clothes that had been dropped at Goodwil by some long-skirt Pentecostal instead of a charity-minded hooker.
When school let out, I saw Roger waiting in his Volvo across the street. I stopped dead at the curb, thinking I should zig out of sight behind the bus, but he’d already spotted me. He waved, and I glared back, half tempted to breeze right onto the bus anyway. Before I could decide, he held up a greasy paper sack and waggled it in the window. He’d already gone by The Real Pit, and my lunch had sucked. I decided that forgiveness was the better part of valor, especial y if he was going to ask for it with pul ed-pork sandwiches.
I grudgingly crossed, using Patti Duckins’s resentful-style slouch so he knew plain he wasn’t completely back in my green graces, and got into the car.
Roger pul ed out of the school lot as I dug in the bag and saw he’d also gotten me baked beans and a spork. I opened that up first and dug into it.
I said, “You’ve been a total douche al week,” with my mouth ful , then added, “You’re lucky Patti Duckins ate half my lunch today, or I probably wouldn’t even be speaking to you.” I kept my voice super casual, but I was watching him in my side eyes to catch his reaction.
There wasn’t one, though. It was like he didn’t even compute that I’d eaten with a Duckins. His were al bright, like he had a fever, and his cheeks had two pink spots in them.
He said, “Can you read while you eat?” He had a manila folder stuffed ful of copy paper in his lap, and he grabbed it and thrust it at me.
“Everything came clear when I was reading the old city papers.”
I ignored the folder until he set it on the seat between us so he could get his hand back on the wheel. I took a huge bite of the sandwich and said around it, real crabby, “Blahblahblah. You’re a douche, and P.S., Patti Duckins is making BFF noises at me. Hey, wait, where are we going?”
He’d turned the wrong way for my house.
“Try to keep up, Tardina Tardmore. We are going to the Richardsons’ house to interview Claire. You have to keep Claire busy taking pictures so I can sneak off and search Melissa’s old room. Did you forget to bring your mom’s camera?”
“I didn’t ‘forget.’ I just didn’t bring it.”
“Damn it, Mosey! Okay, you’l have to take the pics with my iPhone, then. It’s even more important to get into Melissa’s room now. Like, vital.
Which you would know if you would look in the fricken folder.”
When I didn’t bother to answer or reach for the folder, he blew air out his nose and stomped down on the gas, saying, “I’m trying to ease into this here, but you aren’t helping. I know where Liza stole you from, Mosey. I know who you are.”
I stopped chewing. I looked at his face, his eyes lit up, his cheeks burning, and I believed him. The hunk of sandwich in my mouth turned into a big glob of wet cardboard. He glanced at me, and then he put his blinker on and turned in to the first gas-station parking lot we came to. I spit the sandwich lump into a napkin while he shoved the car into park and flipped the folder open. He started pul ing out these printouts of old stories from the Moss Point Register, setting them down in a line on the dashboard. He had circled al these lines and highlighted others.
“Look at this, you were mostly right. Melissa did take the little sister to the beach. And she got high and the tide came in and sucked the baby away in the car seat. But she didn’t drop acid. She just smoked it up. No big, right? I’m sure she’d babysat plenty stoned before. Except this time the pot was laced with PCP. That’s some seriously bad shit. It’s amazing she didn’t pluck her own eyes out or pick up her car and start throwing it around.”
I didn’t see where he was going. “Who would do PCP while babysitting?”
“Nobody,” he said. “Nobody, right? Not on purpose. I bet she had no idea the pot was laced. Here’s where it gets weirder.” He pushed a printout at me. “Look here, this is an interview with the last people to see that baby. This couple, the Grants, were walking on the beach. It had been storming on and off al day. No one was there except Melissa, standing in the surf, barefoot, jeans rol ed up, holding the baby. It was asleep, and Melissa smiled at them and then set the baby in the car seat. She had a beach chair and umbrel a set up for herself, real close to the surf.
“The Grants headed back to get their car, like an hour later, because it looked like another storm was going to rol through. They saw the umbrel a getting sucked back and forth in the waves. The beach chair was gone. Then Mrs. Grant saw this thing, like a bright pink hump bobbing up and down way out in the water. Al at once she remembered that the baby seat had been pink, and this hump, it looked the right shape to be the car seat, if it was floating away out there, upside down. It doesn’t real y say, but if you read between the lines, it’s pretty clear the Grants kinda lost their crap about then.
“The man Grant wanted to swim out and get the baby chair, but it was a red-flag day, with a wicked undertow because of the storms. Not even any surfers. His wife started crying and wouldn’t let him. She figured there’s no chance the kid was alive by then. The car seat was upside down and way out there. Also, she thought maybe Melissa had the baby on a walk and the tide only got their stuff, and if her husband went out there, he could drown for no reason. She lost her shit and went tearing to the beach highway to flag down a car.”
“But where was Melissa? Who got the baby?” I said.
“There was no baby. That’s my whole point. Are you fol owing me? The cops find Melissa naked in the dunes, wonked out on PCP, shivering and crying and not making any kind of sense. They take her to the hospital, and the coast guard goes out and finds the car seat, and there’s no baby in it. The straps aren’t even buckled.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, and now he had every bit of my attention. “You’re saying they never found the baby’s body? Like, not ever, ever?”
“Not ever, ever. The Grants only saw Melissa, alone on the beach that day. So everyone thinks the tide grabbed the car seat and the undertow sucked that baby way out to get eaten or wash up in—I don’t know, Cuba. But come on, that kid was only a month and change older than you. They never found a body, and then here you are? Come on.”
I blinked at Roger’s earnest face, because I understood what he was saying, in my brain. My brain got it, but it didn’t make any sense anywhere else. It was like he was tel ing me about some movie he saw a long time ago, one ful of actors I didn’t like. Nothing to do with me. Nothing I’d even pay to see. But I heard myself say, from real y far off, “Right, because if I’m not a misplaced, inbred Duckins, I must be the royal Richardsons’
missing princess.”
I thought my try at sarcasm came out pretty hol ow, but he laughed and said, mock solemn, “Oh, yes, Anastasia. How freaky would that be? You could make Claire buy you a car.”
I shook my head, because it was too unpossibly unpossible and also vile, to think that I could be a Richardson. I exhaled and said, “No way, Roger, because how did I end up with Liza?”
Al at once Roger looked shifty. “This is the part you won’t like.” His eyes went so wide that I could see whites al the way around, and his voice dropped low, and he talked real y fast. “We know Melissa and Liza hated each other after Liza got knocked up. And I bet lacing pot was one of your mom’s best life skil s by then. What if Liza gave Melissa that pot and took the ba—”
I interrupted, “Bul shit.” My voice sounded real y loud in the Volvo. “Liza’s not evil. And why would she take Melissa’s sister? She was
stil pregnant then.”
“I’m not saying she’s evil, but come on. They never found a body. And here you are.”
I knuckle-punched his arm, hard as I could.
“Ouch,” he said. “You done?” I wasn’t. I hit him again, same spot. “Ouch! Okay, I get it. You don’t like it. But how can we at least not check it out?
How can you not want to know?” He waited, but I didn’t hit him again. I stared at him, panting, and final y my head moved itself in a little bob like half a nod. Instantly he put the car back in drive and pul ed out, heading for the Richardsons’. I sat beside him, feeling like every breath of air I pul ed in was made of cold shards of glass. It couldn’t be true. Liza would never. I would not let it be true.
“This is why you’ve avoided me the whole week,” I said, and my voice sounded hol ow and real y far away. “Because you were finding al this out, and you thought I’d freak.”
“Wel , yeah,” he said, eyes forward. “And here you are, freaking.”
“I’m not freaking, because it’s total bul shit and my mom isn’t like that,” I said, too quavery for even me to believe myself.
I blinked this real y long blink, it seemed like, and then we were pul ing up in front of Claire Richardson’s square, white house with its Tara’d-out slaveholder-style pil ars. I thought it looked like pure ass, but it was the biggest house in Immita, right near the downtown on a short street lined with wil ows.
Roger turned the car off and rummaged in the glove box for his iPhone and handed it to me. “While you take the shots, I’l pretend I need to pee and then try to find Melissa’s old room.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. Roger was already getting out of the car. I fol owed, unable to help myself, but my legs felt thick and heavy. Stil , my blocky feet moved forward, and there we were, on the porch.