Don’t Let Me Go(4)

“Are you a social worker?” Mrs. Hinman asked.

Rayleen snorted, and then said, “No, I’m not a social worker. I’m a manicurist. You know that. I work at that hair and nail salon down on the boulevard.”

“Oh. Yes, of course. Of course you do. I’d just forgotten.”

And then, frustratingly, they moved off in the direction of the stairs to Mrs. Hinman’s apartment. And, though they continued to converse, their voices now came through Billy’s door as nothing more than a muffled buzz.

? ? ?

Nearly two hours later, Billy looked out his glass door on to the gray winter day. Looked down on to the porch to see if the girl was still there.

She was.

He could have looked sooner. He’d thought of looking sooner. But he knew she would be, and he knew it would frighten him to see that she was.

He made a mental note to ask, for a second time — that is, if he ever got up the nerve to talk to her again — why she didn’t sit inside.





Grace



There was just no getting around it. Curtis Schoenfeld was a giant stinkhead. Grace had known it for a long time, and so she wasn’t quite sure why she’d listened to him, and why she’d let it hurt her feelings, what he’d said.

Why had she even believed him?

She sort of had, though, and that was just the problem.

You know how sometimes the nicest person in the world will yell at you and hurt your feelings because you’re doing something like talking too much when they’re trying to think or worry (or both)? Well, stinkheads are just the opposite of that, Grace supposed, because every now and then they will open their stinky mouths and say something horrible that might even possibly be true.

It was at the Saturday night meeting, the one in the church. Except not the church part of the church, not the religious part. It was the room where they did quilting lessons and had potlucks and stuff, and Sunday school, except this was only Saturday.

Some people even called that meeting the kid meeting, because lots of the people there were new in the program, and babysitters cost money. So people just brought their kids along. And it was a very big, very long room, so that the meeting people could sit on one side and have their meeting, and the kids could sit on the other side and be kids.

The kids had to be quiet. The meeting people didn’t have to be quiet.

That F-word guy was sharing. One of the guys Grace didn’t like. He seemed mad at everything, so that when he met you, he was already mad at you, and he didn’t even know you yet. And every other word that came out of his mouth was that one Grace would not be likely to mention (but it started with an F).

“I mean, really,” she’d said once, complaining about him to her mom. “Every other word. Get a dictionary.”

It’s not like she exactly cared. She knew the word. She’d heard it before. It just seemed rude.

So Grace was on the other side of the room with Curtis Schoenfeld and Anna and River Lee. Anna and River Lee were playing pick-up sticks, but Curtis couldn’t play, because he was in a wheelchair, and he couldn’t reach down that far. He had that spinal thing, that spinal-something. He always said spina-something, but Grace knew he was just being lazy or stupid and leaving off the “l” at the end, because everybody knows it’s spinal, with an “l” at the end. He was older than Grace, maybe even twelve, which is why she thought he should know these things.

So Grace wasn’t playing pick-up sticks, either, because Curtis couldn’t. How nice is that? Which is why Grace thought, after the fact, that it was a particularly bad time for Curtis to go and be a poophead to her.

And she wasn’t shy — also after the fact — about sharing that opinion.

So, anyway, he leaned his big head over to her (he had a big head and a red face, that Curtis) and said, “I heard your mom went out.”

Grace said, “Curtis, you big moron, she did not go out. She’s sitting right there.” And she pointed to the meeting side of the room.

He laughed, but it wasn’t like a real laugh. It was more of a fake laugh, like an idiot laugh. First it just squeaked out of his stinky lips like a balloon when you stretch the end (the end you just blew into, that is) and let air back out. But then later he changed it on purpose, and then it sounded like a donkey making that donkey noise.

Grace usually tried not to talk about Curtis like he was a total poophead, because you’re supposed to be extra nice to someone who’s in a wheelchair, but Curtis Schoenfeld just kept pushing it too far. Sometimes you just have to call a poophead a poophead, she firmly believed, no matter what he’s sitting on.

“Not out of the room,” he said, “out of the program. She’s out. She’s using. I can’t believe you didn’t know.”

Then the room got kind of spinny for just a second, and she could hear all those F-words firing off like little pops from a toy gun, like little firecrackers, and Grace remembered thinking how she had been extra-sleepy lately, her mom. That was in the one second before Grace decided to decide it wasn’t true in any way.

So she gathered herself up big and she said, “Curtis Schoenfeld, you are a total boogerhead!”

The F-words stopped. Everything stopped. It got real quiet in that big room, and Grace thought, Ooooops. I think that might have been just a little tiny bit too loud.