Our Crooked Hearts(13)

“You’re hungry,” she said.

Marion fiddled with the zip of her jacket. Sometimes Fee’s looks made people shy. “I ate already. In there.”

“That doesn’t count,” Fee said dismissively. “You need food.”

We went back to her place, where there was always a Pyrex tray of something good in the fridge. That night it was picadillo, fragrant with the mint her dad grew on the back porch.

“I don’t really like meat,” Marion told us, before ripping like a Rottweiler through a plateful. Afterward she sighed, her smile changing the balance of her whole odd face.

“I can’t believe your dad made that. All my dad makes is highballs. All my mom does is put SnackWell’s on a plate.”

I got a mental image of her parents from that. The mom doing Tae Bo in a sweat suit, portioning her Weight Watchers points across the days. The dad clinking his shot glass twice against the bar for luck, like mine did, before dropping it into a pint of Guinness. I’d feel stupid later, when I learned how wrong I had it.

But right then we were full and warm and we couldn’t stop smiling. Marion handed Fee a CD and we lay on the uneven floor of her bedroom to listen, heads close and the music loud enough that we could feel it vibrating through the boards.

That was how it began. Food and music. The rest of it came later: the magic, the things that fueled it. We were angry before Marion came, even if we didn’t know it. At our dads, at our dead moms, at ourselves for being fifteen years old with lives the size of a pinprick, and no idea how to change them. But it was Marion who gave our anger form.

It started with the music. That’s not where it ended.





CHAPTER EIGHT



The suburbs

Right now

I sat on my bed, sifting through the cigar box.

There were familiar things, of course. A green-paste gemstone from my old paper dress-up crown, a ticket stub from the time my aunt took me—just me—to see Hamilton. A marbled guitar pick my dad had given me, strung on thin ribbon, and a fountain pen with a cobalt cartridge.

But I couldn’t remember where I’d picked up the flat black stone, roughly circular with an eraser-width hole straight through its center. Or the four-leaf clover, dried and pressed beneath a piece of Scotch tape. I looked closer; it was a five-leaf clover. I must’ve taped the extra leaf in. There was a ring of tree branch the width and thickness of a dollar coin, a stump of white candle, a rubber-banded hank of red hair. Mine? My mother’s? I ran a palm over my bleached head.

I was about to pack everything away when I saw the paper at the very bottom, folded to the size of the box’s interior. Just its grain against my fingers was familiar. Even before I opened it I knew it was a sheet from one of my old sketchbooks.

It was a pencil drawing, a pretty good one. In it a boy in jeans and bare feet cradled an armful of white gardenias, smiling with closed eyes. His freckles were rendered as a smear of stars.

I touched a finger to the drawing. The ruffled Degas skirts of the flowers, the boy’s dreamy smile. I’d captured that, somehow. But what had moved me to make—much less save—a drawing of Billy Paxton?

I checked the date. I’d drawn it the summer before seventh grade, just a few months before the Embarrassing Incident that marked the first and, until the other night, last time Billy and I ever spoke. His face in my sketchbook—distant, serene—clashed with my crystal-etched memory of the way he’d looked at me that day, hot-eyed and almost hateful.

I must have seen him from across the street before I drew this. Gotten his face caught in my head and exorcised it on a wave of white petals.

I studied the drawing, then each object I’d pulled out before it, panning for any clue as to why the box had been hidden. But there were no answers here. Just another mystery.



* * *



Why? While washing my face, getting dressed, eating a Pop-Tart from a box labeled HANK’S POP-TARTS, I asked myself the question. Why lock up a child’s treasure box? I kept bouncing up, pacing, sitting down again. Until finally I got sick of yelling at my mother in my head.

I had to face her now, today. Because right now I could still feel her slender fingers squeezing mine, pressing me back onto the bed. I could taste the weird sizzle of the gold. There was a flame in my head, I couldn’t let it burn out.

I set off through the heat feeling fragile as sugar glass. Biking across the back ends of parking lots, through dusty stands of Queen Anne’s lace. Bathing in the shuffle of passing radios and teetering along the rims of retention ponds, hoping nobody winged a Big Gulp at me out a car window.

I was glazed in sweat by the time I hit Woodbine’s downtown stretch. It was six blocks of stores and restaurants and coffee shops, plus a two-screen movie theater and the hilarious Lounge Le Bleu, where people who wanted to pretend they were in the city went to drink cocktails stuck with glow-in-the-dark swizzle sticks.

My mom and aunt’s shop was sandwiched between two fancy candy stores and just below a dance studio, so there were always footfalls shaking the ceiling. As I rolled up I could hear the tinny sounds of a recorded symphony drifting from the studio’s open windows.

But the Small Shop’s window was dark. When I yanked the door, it didn’t give.

The day was so bright I couldn’t make out its interior, even when I cupped my hands to the glass. I scanned the posted hours, though I knew them by heart. The shop should’ve opened at ten.