Our Crooked Hearts(7)
I rubbed the ache away and went to my room, where I couldn’t smell the vinegar.
CHAPTER FOUR
The suburbs
Right now
I didn’t see my mom again that day. She must have felt better, though, because when I woke up the next morning she was gone. It was the first Monday of summer. I was grounded, carless, and alone.
By ten a.m. I was standing in the bathroom in an old bikini, painting bleach onto my hair. I’d had the stuff for a while, but not the guts.
It seemed like the thing to do after my first breakup. Plus Nate had been kind of gross about the redhead thing. She’s a girl with hair, Amina had snapped at him once, not hair with a girl.
Truthfully, though, I’d gotten the idea to bleach it a long time ago. Probably around the thousandth time someone gushed over how much I looked like my mother.
My scalp burned as I sat on the edge of the tub in a shower cap, eyeballs pickling with fumes. After rinsing out the toner I stared at myself for the longest time.
Even wet, the hair was an old-fashioned platinum. Set against it my brows were two dark slashes, my healing lips the mouth of a video game assassin. I had my mom’s straight nose, her belligerent jaw, but with the new hair I looked like my own self, too.
The bathroom mirror was three panels. I could see myself from three angles as I leaned toward my altered reflection. Glass greening, features blurring, my nose grazing the mirror’s cool surface.
Something rippled in its left-hand panel.
I jerked my head toward it and for a moment I was looking at a stranger. My heart lurched, then I was laughing at myself. Thinly, a little nervous.
I thought I’d stopped thinking about the girl Nate and I saw in the water, her nakedness and her uncanny gaze. But she must’ve been bobbing in the back of my brain. Because for an instant I could have sworn it was her face in the mirror, her pale hair, reflected back at me.
I felt uneasy after that, or maybe just restless. I’d told Amina I was grounded, and around noon she sent a photo of herself holding up a plastic ice-cream spoon with a face drawn on it. Meet your understudy, Spoon Ivy! For the rest of the day she and our friends Richard and Emily sent pictures of themselves posing with Spoon Ivy at the Dairy Dream, the skate park, in Richard’s car. At Denny’s they posed her next to a coffee carafe, because they found it hilarious that I’d been fired after just a month waiting tables there, for sneaking extra shift meals. The last photo showed Emily’s Saint Bernard, Claudius, with a mouthful of mangled plastic. RIP Spoon Ivy.
That bitch got what was coming to her, I replied, then headed out to check the mailbox. Maybe I’d get lucky and there’d be a magazine.
I could feel my thirsty hair bristling under the sun, drinking in humidity and releasing the acrid scent of ammonia. I was reading an article on my phone as I trudged over the concrete, so I almost stepped on the rabbit.
It was stretched out in the middle of the drive on a grease patch of blood. There was its body, strong legs splayed. And there, a few inches away, was its head.
I jerked back, closing my eyes, but the sight of it stayed. The cartoon points of its ears, the slow violence of that sever.
It was too clean to have been left by somebody’s dog. Could one of our block’s terrible children have done this? I thought of Vera, a death-obsessed eight-year-old I’d babysat for once and never again. Or Peter, who had a face like a cherub and once tried to sell his mom’s engagement ring door to door. He was definitely the kind of kid who lit ants on fire.
Or Nate, I thought reluctantly. Pressing a palm to my stomach, to the unease roiling there. I remembered the burn in my shoulder when he yanked me back in the woods, the way his expression curdled when I laughed at him. In those moments, at least, he seemed capable of retribution. But could he have done this?
No way, I decided. For one thing, he was a vegan. Basically. I mean, he ate burgers sometimes. But he did call himself a vegan.
Still, there were rumors about him, and the blazing trail of angst and exes he left in his wake. The kind of shit that used to make me feel smug about being the one he wanted, as much as I cringed about it now. One of his exes shaved her head after they broke up. Another wore the same black hoodie every day for weeks, sleeves drawn down to her fingertips. People claimed she’d pinpricked his name over her wrist with a safety pin, but people were assholes.
I took a photo of the rabbit. It looked less sinister on my screen, all the blood and dread squared off, flattened away. What would Amina do? I asked myself, and texted it to Nate.
Do you know anything about this?
I was back inside, considering whether to call my dad about the rabbit, when Nate sent a string of replies.
Wtf is this
Why are you sending me this effed up photo?
ARE YOU SERIOUS WITH THIS
Go to hell Ivy
My head pulsed like he was right there, yelling at me. I was still untangling my response when I saw my mom’s car through the window, pulling into the drive. Her tires just missed the bunny.
She stepped out in a black sack dress, hair piled high and lit redder by the sun. Her eyes were hidden behind big white-framed sunglasses, so I couldn’t make out her expression. But I knew when she saw the rabbit.
She hunched. Shoulders curling forward like she’d been socked in the stomach, hands catching her knees. Just as rapidly, she straightened. The way her head twisted toward the house made me think of a predator scenting along the breeze.