Panic(42)

Mom told me to go away. She told me to play outside.

Boom, boom, boom.

She was at the door. Locked. From inside, she heard a shriek of laughter. Somehow she fit the key in the lock; that must mean she wasn’t shaking. Strange, she thought, and also: Maybe I could have won Panic after all.

She pushed the door open and stepped inside.

There were three of them: Krista, Bo, and Maureen, from Lot 99. They froze, and Heather froze too. She was seized momentarily by the sense that she’d entered a play and had forgotten all her lines—she couldn’t breathe, didn’t know what to do. The lights were high, bright. They looked like actors, all three of them—actors you see too close. They were too made up. But the makeup was horrible. It looked as though it was beginning to melt, slowly deforming their faces. Their eyes were bright, glittering: doll eyes.

Heather took in everything at once: the blue haze of smoke. The empty beer bottles, the overflowing cups used as ashtrays, the single bottle of Georgi vodka, half empty.

And the small blue plastic plate on the table, still faintly outlined with the imprint of the Sesame Street characters—Lily’s old plate—now covered with thin lines of fine white powder.

All of it hit Heather like a physical blow, a quick sock to the stomach. Her world went black for a second. The plate. Lily’s plate.

Then the moment passed. Krista brought a cigarette unsteadily to her lips, nearly missing. “Heather Lynn,” she slurred. She patted her shirt, her breasts, as though expecting to find a lighter there. “What are you doing, baby? Why are you staring at me like I’m a—”

Heather lunged. Before her mother finished speaking, before she could think about what she was doing, all of the rage traveled down into her arms and legs and she picked up the blue plate, crisscrossed with powder like it had been scarred by something, and threw.

Maureen screamed and Bo shouted. Krista barely managed to duck. She tried to right herself and, staggering backward, managed to land on Maureen’s lap, in the armchair. This made Maureen scream even louder. The plate collided against the wall with a thud, and the air was momentarily full of white powder, like an indoor snow. It would have been funny if it weren’t so horrible.

“What the hell?” Bo took two steps toward Heather and for a moment, she thought he might hit her. But he just stood there, fists clenched, red-faced and enraged. “What the hell?”

Krista fought to her feet. “Who in the goddamn do you think you are?”

Heather was glad that they were separated by the coffee table. Otherwise, she wasn’t sure what she would do. She wanted to kill Krista. Really kill her. “You’re disgusting.” Her voice sounded mangled, like something had wrapped around her vocal cords.

“Get out.” The color was rising in Krista’s face. Her voice, too, was rising, and she was shaking as though something awful was going to detonate inside her. “Get out! Do you hear me? Get out!” She reached for the vodka bottle and threw it. Fortunately, she was slow. Heather sidestepped it easily. She heard shattering glass and felt the splash of liquid. Bo got his arms around Krista. He managed to restrain her. She was still shrieking, writhing like an animal, face red and twisted and awful.

And suddenly all of Heather’s anger dissipated. She felt absolutely nothing. No pain. No anger. No fear. Nothing but disgust. She felt, weirdly, as if she were floating above the scene, hovering in her own body.

She turned and went to her bedroom. She checked her top drawer first, in the plastic jewelry box where she kept her earnings. Everything was gone but forty dollars. Of course. Her mom had stolen it.

This didn’t bring a fresh wave of anger, only a new kind of disgust. Animals. They were animals, and Krista was the worst of them.

She pocketed the twenties and moved quickly through the room, stuffing things in Lily’s backpack: shoes, pants, shirts, underwear. When the backpack was full, she bundled things up in one of the comforters. They would need a blanket, anyway. And toothbrushes. She remembered reading in a magazine once that toothbrushes were the number one item travelers forgot to pack. But she wouldn’t forget. She was calm, thinking straight. She had it all together.

She slid the backpack onto one of her shoulders—it was so small, she couldn’t fit it correctly. Poor Lily. She wanted to get food from the kitchen, but that would mean walking past her mom and Bo and Maureen. She’d have to skip it. There probably wasn’t much she could use, anyway.

At the last second she took the rose off her dresser, the one Bishop had made her from metal and wire. It would be good luck.

She hefted the blanket in her arms, now heavy with all the clothing and shoes it contained, and shuffled sideways out of the bedroom door. She’d been worried her mom would try and stop her, but she shouldn’t have been. Krista was sitting on the couch, crying, with Maureen’s arms around her. Her hair was a stringy mess. Heather heard her say, “. . . did everything . . . on my own.” Only half the words were audible. She was too messed up to speak clearly. Bo was gone. He’d probably split, since the drugs were nothing but carpet crumbs now. Maybe he’d left to get more.

Heather pushed out the door. It didn’t matter. She’d never see Bo again. She’d never see her mother, or Maureen, or the inside of that trailer again. For one second, she could have sobbed, going down the porch steps. Never again—the idea filled her with a relief so strong, it almost turned her knees to water and made her trip.