Everyday Psychokillers Page 4

  Then I was back to the bug, trying to imagine tearing at veins in my arm, imagining myself bite and how my arm would bite back with pain, and my teeth would jump away, and that’d be it. I could imagine leaning toward my arm, and I could imagine an arm torn open, but connecting the two was unimaginable. I could see it like a movie, away from me: me, in a gruesome photo with my arm, I could see, but add the notion of the pain and I’d shrink. I could not actually let myself imagine it.

  Ted’s girlfriend was CiCi, and when CiCi swooped into town with her great blowing hair, I wouldn’t even stop off at the triplex; I’d leave a note on the kitchen table in the morning before I left for school, which was hours after my mother was at work at the track. “CiCi’s in town,” said my note, each time. After school I ran right by the triplex; I wouldn’t even bring my horn home to practice so I wouldn’t be slowed down, and I ran by as if it wasn’t even where I lived, as if triplex had not become the word that meant I lived in only one of three parts. I passed it and then walked some, so I wouldn’t arrive breathless. Along the way I pulled a leaf from a eucalyptus tree, cracked down its vertebrae, smelled it. I thought about the scorpions that lived in the crevices of the bark of those trees, so I plucked leaves quickly, teasing out the danger of it, the thump in my stomach that went along with tugging at the branches.

  I walked past the stucco church and then past the sprawling one where boys from my bus stop gathered on the expanse of sidewalk and pulled their cardboard boxes from their hiding place. Boxes must have been stashed all over town, everywhere boys went. I walked through the stand of eucalyptus that shaded the picnic tables in the park, cut through the kids’ playland, which had a dumpy little merry-go-round and a pretty good sandbox, and one of those tall shiny slides that got so hot you couldn’t use it in the summer, and through a flap in a corner of the chain-link fence that separated the park’s property from the apartments’.

  “Hey, baby,” CiCi said when I walked through the door. She wore blue overalls and sneakers and she looked great. She sat on the counter that divided the kitchenette from the eating area, and Ted sat at the table, in the chair. She made him look even older than he was, but at least he wasn’t ugly and bald. Ted had a beer and CiCi had a big plastic cup with a bendy straw. She leaned against the wall and held the cup between her knees. She smoked a cigarette with one hand and held a magazine with its pages folded back in the other.

  “I have ten dollars,” I said. “I want to buy Julie a birthday present.”

  “I know where let’s go,” said CiCi. “Finish your beer, Ted.”

  CiCi and I rode together in the back of the Chevette and Ted drove, our chauffeur, CiCi said. In gestures like that I could feel her including me, I could feel a tiny relief at not having to decide whether to ride like an extra jacket in the far corner of the backseat or lean up between them and try to hear their conversation. I hadn’t even anticipated it, and there she’d saved me from having to decide if they wanted my head there between them.

  The straight, barren road ran along the canal with its immobile water. We passed my bus stop and then we passed this one vibrating yellow building we passed every time we got in the car and went anywhere. The building was all by itself, windowless, with one tiny door. A series of animals cut from plywood were tacked on the side in a line: a red crab, a pink pig, a green alligator, and a green-and-brown chicken, all the same size, each as big as Ted’s little car. Then we drove past a couple orange groves and a few abandoned appliances, and into the busy part of town, crammed with billboards like a giant had spilled a giant deck of cards. Lots of the billboards advertised Seminole cigarettes, but we weren’t quite in the area with all the cigarette trailers.

  CiCi braced one knee against the back of Ted’s seat and stuck her other foot out the window.

  “Get that out of my face,” Ted said, but she left it there, rolling her eyes about him to me, confidentially, the way she might flirt with a buddy of his, testing her ability to make him feel something. Her sneakers bounced around the footwell on the floor. Her legs were everywhere I looked in the backseat, coltish. The wind made it too noisy to talk, so I watched her hair swirl around her soda and thought about what I might tell her about later, in a quiet moment between the two of us. I tried to think how I could get them to let me spend the night, and then there’d be hours and hours.

  “Did you know,” Ted said, slowing down, “that Seminole means runaway in some translations?” He parked in front of a quiet series of little shops: a flower shop, a haircutting place, and a gift shop, which is where we went in. Ted walked behind the racks of tshirts to the narrow area with bongs and pipes and a curtain that led to the back storage room. He went behind the curtain. CiCi and I looked at the rows and rows of stickers displayed on dowels, all variations of hearts and rainbows, unicorns and yellow stars, some translucent so you could stick them on a window. They had a glass case of leather wallets and snap-pouches and bracelets, stamped with animal designs and dyed in shades of green, blue, or red. They had a rack of posters I flipped through—various motorcycles, rock bands, and one of a gray Arabian horse galloping along a blue ocean with its mane flowing. The girl riding the horse looked a lot like CiCi, except with blond hair instead of chestnut. I showed it to her, thinking she’d say Wow, that really does look like me except for the hair. Instead, she said, “It’s nice, but posters get wrecked really fast.”

  Then there were a whole bunch of little boxes you could buy: decoupage papier-mâché ones and wooden ones, some painted, with carvings, some inlaid with sliding lids. I picked out a smooth wooden box, mahogany I think, a dark reddish wood, with a lid that fit into place without hinges so you couldn’t tell what part was the lid without looking carefully. The rounded edges of the box made it feel like a warm worn stone in my hand. I didn’t like any of the earrings so I decided I’d think about what to put in the box later. It cost seven dollars, but it was a really pretty box.

  I couldn’t decide how to buy something for CiCi, though. I’d have to do it right in front of her, for one thing, and for another, it might be saying Why didn’t you bring me a gift, or it might be showing off about money, which I was already worried about with the box for Julie, whether it was extravagant or presumptuous to spend so much of my savings. People didn’t seem to get each other nice presents in this town. I deliberated in front of the rows of stickers and finally I bought just the wooden box from a guy with alligator clips clipped to his hair and feathers from them floating near his beard. He put the box in a little printed paper bag, spending a long time folding the lip before smiling at himself and handing it to me. Then CiCi and I went outside and sat on the curb.

  She’d come all the way from Tallahassee. It felt like a long time since I’d seen her. It always did.

  I tried to decide if I should tell her about Rhonda, who I’d been thinking about again because she used to be Julie’s best friend and now Julie was my best friend. I wanted to tell her something important. I wanted to seem wise, but I didn’t know if I could pull that off with someone like CiCi, who had been through a lot in her life but was going to start college, definitely, she said, in January.

  One way I thought about telling CiCi, one version, started with how, when I started the school, it felt enormous. It was a big school, but I was very caught up in the particular way it felt enormous to me, which was every day, I saw people I’m sure I never saw again, and every day, I saw people I’d never seen before. It felt like living in a city, or the way I imagined living in a city would feel if you were never allowed to go inside your apartment, everyone trapped out there in public the whole time, surrounded by strangers. Plus, the town being what they call a transient community made for even more strangers.

  The only kids who really knew each other for long were the Seminoles, and those kids all knew each other and knew who was cousins with who. They had a lot of power in the school, those kids. Everyone wanted to be liked by them. They were louder, stronger, bigger, just healthier than most of the kids
, fed with owning the place in the weird way they did, rooted with history, and righteous with the irony of actually belonging. In that school, as in that crappy little city, the Seminoles were powerful, if only because they all knew each other.

  So except for the Seminoles, lots of kids every day I might never see again, not just because it was a big school but because maybe they’d just stop coming. A kid was absent a few days and the teacher just marked it, and the kid was gone for a week or so and the teacher thought “fucking truant,” and in a week more, maybe she called home, and then if there was no answer or the phone was disconnected or someone answered who didn’t know the kid, well, you still didn’t know anything. It could be a wrong number or some random person in the house or they could have gotten behind on bills and the phone was out or they could be just outside barbecuing for god’s sake or they could have moved, or even the kid could be really missing, could be abducted, and the parents might be at work and not even know it because perhaps the kid ran away, or was spending some time at a friend’s and they forgot they said okay. You never knew. You sent a note about it to the office, I think, so there’d be a record you called.

  At that school, even if you kept feeling like a new kid, no one else thought of you as a new kid after a month. History was tiny like that, immediately given, making everyone wobbly. Memories were made of social incidents, of stuff happening, not time spent. You remember when Kathi and Renee had that fight, and you remember when Mrs. Tucker told Adam, well…. Even if it happened in the morning, by lunch it was like Atlanta burned and you few lived through it. This in a school where you have one week to study Mythology and four of those days it’s Greek, and with special permission you can stay late for a few afternoons to learn, out of the goodness of your science teacher’s heart, about Egypt Entombed: An Ancient People and Its Mechanical Flying Machines. The world comes in Units, in filmstrips, on single sheets of mimeographed paper. First period, second period, third period. “Write me back by fifth!” says Rosana or Traci or Paula and slips you a letter she calls a note, written in pink ink, folded into an intricate origami of diamonds. If the world is a tumble of Units, and you only just met everyone you see all the time, and after a few months you know your way around better than most people, and at any moment any one of the people you know could disappear, you can brace yourself against it, and you can put up a front, but in truth, you’re wobbly, and except for the Seminole kids, everyone was.

  “It is very important, CiCi,” I imagined myself saying, in a deep glowing voice, “It is imperative, CiCi, that you keep coming back.”

  I wanted to mention all this before I tried telling her about following Rhonda. In the weeks before I tested into those smaller classes—which instantly made the world seem more contained, more comprehensible, if only because you walk from class to class with the same kids, because in most of your classes it’s all the same kids—but before I tested in, I had to consciously stop myself from trying to keep track of the people I saw each day or I’d get lost along the breezeways from class to class. I’d have gotten lost anyway, whether I kept track or not, except that I found Rhonda. You might have heard how many amazing mechanisms animals have for finding their way around the planet, all their pheromones and sticky residues and the magical triangulations they use with the moon and the sun.

  Later I spent so much time examining her photograph in the yearbook that it’s hard to remember what it was like to know her face in quick profile glimpses, just enough to know she was indeed the same girl, the girl I thought she was, as I noticed her appearing in one and then another of my classes, sitting in various places in relation to me in each one, seven classes, each with a good forty kids in rows of one-armed desks, and Rhonda appeared several rows ahead of me and to the left in one, and two rows ahead of me but far to the right in another, and dead center of the room in the next, with me sneaking glances every few minutes to be sure, and sure, it was her, there, in every one.

  I learned her name from roll, and it never crossed my mind that perhaps she recognized mine. In fact, I am sure I thought of myself as a ghost, pacing the way I gathered my notebooks at the end of each class so I could slide into the mass a few steps behind her and follow her hair, which was long, and brown, never very combed and hung to the belt loops of her jeans, tapping her waist silently as we moved through the breezeways, a tough but quiet girl and her terrified shadow. I imagine I’d have learned my way around more quickly if I’d looked up from following Rhonda for long enough to see where we were going, but as it was, we were almost into the second month of school and I was even on the same schedule of going to the bathroom between the same classes as she did, waited in the same line, saw our feet under the stalls.

  In the triplex one evening, I cut my thumb pretty badly while making dinner so my mother took me to the emergency room for stitches. I’d cut it low, where it joins the palm, and while I was sitting on the edge of a squishy table with the doctor or some nurse or someone looking at it and getting out the needles and thread, a great commotion took place on the other side of the curtain and I could see one of those rolling trays for people, what do you call it, a gurney, rushing by with people all around it, lots of those green and gray colors everyone wears along with white in the hospital, and clear plastic shining under the fluorescent lighting and rushing in a blur, and then a couple nurses muttering in its wake that it was awful, the girl’s face was half torn off, that her lip was missing. I remember that specifically, about her lip, and I caught them saying her name. I asked the doctor, or the nurse or whoever it was sewing me up, if that was right, if it was Rhonda’s name they were saying. The doctor or nurse, I don’t even remember if it was a guy or a woman sewing me up, I swear, but the doctor or nurse or whoever slipped outside the curtains to find out for me and came back and said, really sad, or at least wary, because I kind of remember the voice, what it sounded like it was feeling when it said, “Did you know that girl?” and I said, “Yes, we go to school together.”

  So I was quite shaken, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know who, really, to say anything to, and the next day, after the pledge of allegiance and after the moment of silence we did every day and after the intercom announcements when there was no mention of Rhonda, I thought maybe she was okay and she’d just be absent for a little while. I felt very tight in my stomach at the thought of getting around school without her, and my hand hurt a lot in its bandage. I’d have no excuse, this far into the school year, for not knowing my way around. And I was afraid that, without her, I’d forget even which class came next. I had yet to use my locker, just carried this enormous pile of books and my purse around with me everywhere. No one used bookbags. It was bad taste. It showed you were planning to carry a bunch home, I think. My locker wasn’t close enough to Rhonda’s to get to it and back without getting lost.

  But halfway through first period English, we were doing word-search puzzles if we were done reading the chapter, and the intercom came back on, spitting for a bit while someone messed with the microphone far away in the offices. Our teacher looked annoyed, sitting at her desk, looking up from the papers she was marking and marking. She kind of moved her head around and her fuzzy mouse-colored hair jiggled, a kind of half-conscious, sleepy response to broadcast static. The purple letters in their grid on my word-search sheet started to look a little swimmy, and then the principal came on and announced that Rhonda, a student at our school, was indeed dead, that she’d been, he said, the victim of a hit and run vehicular accident in which she was run over by a white van (which sounded at first like white man, which also ended up true) and that this happened as she walked home from a friend’s house. Innocently, he said.

  I think you could hear wails go up around the school, a girl here and then there, many doors away, raising a kind of series of howls. The school was like an ocean and sounds broke the surface great distances apart, these girls calling, in a way, to one another. In a way to God, too, but it’s hard to say.

  In the st
iff, numb days that followed, I talked to a lot of girls for the first time, because for the first time I knew something to say to them. I told them about being in the emergency room when Rhonda came in, gesturing in a self-deprecating manner to my wrapped thumb. I said I knew right when a girl came in that it was someone I knew. I said I just felt it. I said this weeping. I said I’d felt an instant connection to her as soon as I switched into this school, because we had all the same classes together and I don’t know, I said, there was just something about her. I said we walked from class to class together. I said that I was filled with guilt. If only there had been one more doctor! The doctor who was stitching up my hand! If only I hadn’t been in the emergency room there might have been one more doctor to save her!