Chapter Fourteen
Wren

I rip my shirt from my cracked laundry basket and assault my nose with it. It smells like yesterday and all the yesterdays before that one. Smoke, grime, the ever lurking threat of Principal Zinberg.

But most of all Mareck. 

“Mmm...regret,” I mutter in a half-sleep haze. I soak the shirt in wet puffs of the cotton candy body spray Mareck swiped from the Piggly Wiggly. When I’m done, I don’t dare take another whiff. Just put it on and try to avoid the way it feels like a crusted diaper on my skin.

What is, is, as Jerr-Bear always says.

I leave my room after fishing out my Catholic school girl skirt I got at Goodwill and head to our tuna can of a bathroom, a small sliver of room where I take record showers and glare at my face in a mirror that I’m not entirely sure is made out of glass. It has an accordian door, a rather ludicrous choice for a bathroom. And no matter how hard I try to get it to click against the jamb, it always pops open just enough to be indecent. 

We have one rule in the apartment: keep all eyes off the bathroom door.

I put on the faucet and splash at my worn out face. I bite my tongue and attack my dry hair with a brush because I ran out of the detangling spray Mareck five-fingered at the big Wal-Mart in Junction. Make up takes roughly five seconds now because I have it down to a science: kohl-lined eyes, mascara, rouge on the cheeks, glittery lipgloss. With my Insane Clown Posse tee, I achieve the look that makes most mothers look twice.

My own, however, has bigger fish to fry. 

“Hiya in there! Don’t want to be late for my 6 AM with Mr. Porcelain,” Jerry says, keeping to his own morning routine. He stays true to the bathroom rule and glues his face to the wood-paneled hallway wall with a newspaper in his hand. His back is doughy in his wife beater and his hairline could use a good trim, but I regrettably love him because I feel sorry for him, just like Mom does.

“All yours, Jerr-Bear.” I slide past him, and my cheek practically scrapes the hung pictures on the wall. The “befores” as I like to think of them. Before Jerry. Before the ICP t-shirts. Before my father closed his eyes for good.

I swipe a pudding cup from the fridge for breakfast and lick the lid. The formica bites my back as I watch Mom shuffle her bunny slippers into the kitchen.

“Good morning.”

“That’s the rumor.” 

“Early shift today?”

“Yep. Greasy bacon and wandering hands. Friday’s special.” Mom sticks her head into the refrigerator in a way that reminds me of my favorite poet. Plath had gone and stuck her head in an oven instead. Much more effective and far less chilly if you ask me. 

“Wren, think you might be late,” Jerry says, his bathroom meeting now adjourned. He’s dressed to repair air conditioning units, so he kind of comes off like a 1950’s milkman. 

“Jerr, you gotta make that green looking all spiffy like that? Dang, son. Be sure the ladies aren’t home alone if you know what I mean.” I elbow him into his pillowy side, and Jerr lets out a burnt-cheeked giggle.

“Oh, Wrennifer,” he shakes his head. He grabs his lunchbox and kisses Mom’s cheek at the refrigerator. I imagine it must feel like ice.

“Sleep well, my queen?” he asks Mom as he starts packing his powdered donuts. I look back at my pudding cup because looking at Jerry’s hope makes me sad. I know what my mother really thinks. Sure, Jerry does well and was nice enough to let us move in after getting evicted from our trailer at Sunrise Estates. But he’s no Brad Pitt and treats her a little too well. Not exactly my mother’s type. I swallow down another glob of chocolate and the fear that always sits criss-cross applesauce in my throat. 

“Can’t sleep with you always on my mind,” Mom says and grabs him. She gives him a real kiss this time that’s likely to set Jerry’s whole face on fire. Good, I think. Another day.

Because Natalie Reynolds is a lot of things, but she certainly isn’t stupid. When Jerry had reluctantly come to Double Dee’s with a few of his heating and cooling buddies, Mom had zoned in on him like a black widow. One guy was ruthlessly trying to get her number, but she shocked them all when she nodded at Jerry and said, “Who says good guys finish last?” He pocketed her digits like the golden ticket and returned for her at the end of her shift in his bright orange mini-van with the abrasively smiling A/C guy plastered on the side.

The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

“I hate to break up the family reunion, but I got a life to live, homeslices.” I pop my pudding cup in the trash and salute with two slightly sticky fingers.

“Wren, come home. After school. I want to talk to you.” The fear uncrosses its legs and sticks its feet into the sides of my throat. Moving. Again. I can read it in the thirty-seven years that have set up shop on my mother’s face. Maybe I was wrong about the whole “not being stupid” thing. 

“Yeah. Yeah, sure.” I air kiss at Mom and Jerry and grab my bag. I make a quick run to my room and grab for a small bottle of glue underneath my mattress. I take a quick sniff, let the feeling of weightlessness run through me, then cram the glass bottle into my knock-off Timberlands.

As I put on my coat to keep January as far from me as humanly possible, I think about my name, the way it sounds when it comes out of people’s mouths. The meaning: “a small songbird,” the reason Mom chose it.

Most likely, the reason I’m trapped.

Outside my legs sting with cold, but I fight through the urge to go put on some tights. I’m not going to be like all those other suckers, slave to expectations regardless of how un-hypothermic their extremities might currently be.

I warm them up by running down the apartment staircase, past the Flores’ apartment and its belly stabbing smell of eggs and fried meat, to where the frozen grass edges the parking lot. I see a wobbling bike and its rider heading to the handicap space in front of me.

“There she is, Miss America!” Mareck says, and he’s all sound. His pants are lined with zippers and chains, pat-pat-patting against his legs. A thick one hooks from his wallet to his pants. He kisses me hard on the mouth, and I lick the taste of chocolate from my lips. I find pure anger starting to elbow out the fear in my throat.

“Just when I thought you couldn’t get any sweeter,” he says and grabs at my face with his eyes. They’re an ungodly blue, and he measures my own two with them. ”Hey, knock it off. I told you The Mule’s just on her period. She’s a liar, and you don’t need to listen to her.” He lets the bike slam to the ground, my bike that he “borrows” on a continuous loop. He holds me hostage in a bear hug.

Here’s the problem: Leslie Buell or “The Mule” (as most of White Smoke calls her due to her unfortunate barn-like stature), has been spreading a rumor that she’s “hooked up” with Mareck. I know that phrase can span a multitude of sins, but I don’t get clarification from Mareck. I don’t ask what really happened because I don’t want to know what I already know.

I’m all alone.

He releases me, and I hug my coat even tighter. It’s too thin and the faux fur trim is scorched off in places where a tweaking Mareck took a lighter to see if it would burn. Jerry keeps trying to buy me a new one, but Mom’s strict about me not taking him up on any offers. Less guilt makes leaving easier, I guess.

I climb up on the handlebars and bite through the pain of cold metal through worn skirt. Mareck wobbles onward onto Tully, and a backlog of cars pile up behind us. He’s a mad Pied Piper, screaming the Beastie Boys on the top of his lungs and offering up one of his less honorable fingers. I almost fall off. Twice. There’s anger there, but then there’s also the jolt that jump starts my heart each time I feel like I’ll fall to the pavement. My whole existence with Mareck has been like that, a constant undercurrent of loathing lifted in waves every time he shocks me. And that’s why I never leave him. He’s the only one who can bring me to life. 

But sometimes, he says he might leave. He might head to Little Rock with his brother, Travis, and join the Bloods where his cousins rank on top. “White Smoke ain’t no place for these good looks,” he says, a smile bright against his milky brown skin. Half black, half white. He hasn’t had the easiest time here where little minds seem to rule the roost. I get that. But I swallow down the possibility like a chalky horse pill and pray my stomach acid obliterates the idea.

Here’s to hoping.

A car ride would be a neat five minutes to school but we get there thirty minutes later, six minutes late. We skid up to the front of the building, and I jump off, don’t look anyone in the eye. It feels like a play, like I’m Juliet or the one I like better, Ophelia, and I’m taking my crazy to the stage. But none of the other stragglers applaud, just gape like fish even though they see me do this dance every single morning.

“Late,” Principal Zinberg says, and he hands me and Mareck tired slips of paper from his pocket. Detention slips. They smell like sweat and boxer shorts.

We cattle call in with the rest of the last minute crowd and head to the locker we share. It’s Mareck’s, and it’s against the rules to share lockers, but besides the soiled detention slips for arriving late or banning random attempts at religious freedom, no one really gives two squats about anything at White Smoke.

“Spanish, right?” Mareck says, and his blue eyes flash across my face. They’re not a grown up’s. They belong to a little boy, and that’s what I like about the bits of blue and grey flecked tight into a ring. They make me remember we’re still kids.

I nod, and Mareck kisses me on the mouth–another broken rule–and heads to his homeroom. I take the books I need and launch them into my empty backpack. I slam the door shut, and as I turn around, whose ugly mug is mere inches from my nose? Buell the Mule’s.

Her face is nearly touching mine when she says, “See you around.”

I hold tight to the words piling up behind my teeth. One detention slip is enough for today.

#

CLASSES ARE MATCH-STRIKE fast because of my system. I sit in the back, which is the best place for people watching even if that means having to take in Jeremy Hunt shedding his dandruff with his long, dirty fingernails. Take for instance, Señora Howser’s class. She’s up there muttering in gibberish, smacking her doughy hand with an unsharpened pencil while I examine the back of Claudette Pinski’s bubbly blond head. I match her up with Mr. Dandruff and draw in the blue-lined margin of my notebook what their baby would look like.

I know it’s a weird thing to do, but I’ve got a thing for babies. Like Mom says, babies are what happen before life up and smacks you in the face.

So really, classes are just a blur of poorly drawn babies and dirty hair until it’s lunchtime, and I find my phone without even realizing what I’m doing. It’s cheap, like drug deal, prepaid burner cheap. Mom didn’t even want me to touch the thing (“money’s tight” being her favorite two words of all time), but she hates that I love Mareck and broke down and bought it on the off chance he bops me over the head and tries to cut me up into little pieces. I told him that part when we were camped out in his brother’s truck, shoving pork rinds into our mouths while his brother, Travis, scored off some itchy white trash couple tripping for crank. He laughed a little too hard.

I take the phone and go to the bathroom, not the one on the ground floor where the seniors are packed sardine style but the one in the basement off the cafeteria that hardly anyone uses. I walk into the forbidden wheelchair stall that’s unspokenly reserved for Melissa Stowe who lost a leg in a four wheeler accident last year. I lock it, slide my back down the cold tiled wall.

I text Mom: Can we talk now?

I stare in front of me, at the frank lime green streaks of paint covering the stall wall graffiti. It dings at me, the burner. No, not yet, Mom writes back.

That confirms it. I don’t know how I know, but I do. Because when I read it, that simple-worded strand, it reminds me of when we left Texas after Dad died. How our whole lives became mere blips on nobody’s radar.

The door slams open. There are two sets of feet, and I can tell they belong to two preps because they’re fitted into ballet slippers, a silver pair and a purple. Their ankles are long, slender, and I think of my own in my dirty boots–thick as bricks. A genetic anomaly for a string bean.

“You can’t be in the retard stall,” a lazy voice says from one of them–maybe the silver pair–and I roll my eyes.

“Just leaving,” I say and pop open the stall door, barely missing a short one with red hair. The girl’s eyes go wide, and I know she’s a freshman, which automatically means fun, and the fact that she’s obnoxiously pretty will make it that much sweeter.

“Out of my way,” I growl, and the girl backs up as I preen myself in the mirror. I do it for the girl’s benefit–so she remembers my face–and for my own, too, so I can see what she’s wearing and remember it for later when I’m lying in bed.

I do this thing where I think of the clothes I see The Preps wear and imagine what they’d look like on me. It’s also a weird thing to do.

They huddle, the two of them–the other one taller but wider-eyed–and I laugh, a loud obnoxious laugh and try not to think about my fickle mother, my dead father, the boy who’s never loved me. 

My damaged heart.

#

THE MOST HORRIBLY PATHETIC thing about The Mule is that she’s the most popular girl in school. And she really plays the part, like puts a ridiculous amount of effort into it. She’s one of The Preps and has this purse she claims is a real Louis Vuitton, but all it looks like is a bottle of mustard and a diaper full of poop threw up on it. Her mom is the assistant manager of the Dairy Queen, and her dad is the sheriff, so there’s no way that bag is real unless they’ve both lost their marbles. Which, by the looks of The Mule, I figure could be true.

“You’ve got this, you know. I mean look at you. You’re short, but you’re a scrapper. She gets that,” Mareck says, rubbing the last centimeter of Chapstick against his lips. He texted me while I was in homeroom fifteen minutes before final bell. Fifteen minutes before we were both supposed to be in detention together. But Buell was calling me out, face-to-face, and the thing has to be settled.  

“Sure,” I say. He was supposed to have met me in the girl’s locker room during lunch. We sit across from the shower stalls and pick at our food–another pudding cup for me, a bag of chips for Mareck. But he didn’t show, and this is the third time in two weeks, and we just don’t talk about it. I don’t want to be a harpy, and I don’t want him to be a liar. But then I think about the thing my psychology teacher’s dropped on us more than once: reality exists regardless of whether you believe it or not.

After dodging Zinberg in the hall, we go outside and trek around the building to The Yard, me on the bars of my bike while Mareck heel-toes it along a patch of cold, dry earth. The Yard is basically a square inch of pavement reserved for the seniors. They can smoke out here and sit around making out or talk about keying the teachers’ cars, but a lot of times it’s used for a fight so they chain it up once the last bell rings. I jump over the gate.

The Mule is already there with two of her cohorts, Donkey and Horse Face. Those aren’t their real names–one’s Alice and the other starts with a “w” (Wanda maybe?)–but it’s a lot easier to keep track of enemies when you label them appropriately.

“Little Wrennie. We were just talking about you. Ready to get the beating of a lifetime?” I have to admit, looking at The Mule, I believe she’ll be doing just that. The Mule’s tall–five-ten maybe–and her hands are kind of manly. The nails are painted though, a bright cherry red, and the sweater is knitted, navy with a tiny whale sewn into it above her right breast. I snapshot a memory for later.

“Cut it out, Leslie,” I say. It comes out soft like I’m talking to a kitten. I hate my life.

“Cut it out, Leslie? That’s all you got? You know what that jerk told me?” The Mule says, and she moves her beautiful blue sweater into my personal space. “He said you’re nothing but a prude, and he just uses you for your money.” She takes a step back to look at my face, and I give The Mule a full shot of me laughing. My money?

“Yeah, okay. That right Mareck? You all on me so you can hang out at my mansion?” My arms go wide like Jesus welcoming the little children, but when I turn around, Mareck is gone. And so is my bike.

“That’s just awesome,” The Mule laughs in my ear, and I think about all of it: my bike, Mareck strumming through my life with picky fingers. My mother’s deep desire to flee and what she always says before we close up shop and head to the nearest Motel Six. Don’t worry. It’ll all work out.

And then before I know it, my fist is in The Mule’s face, and there’s a sharp pain currenting up my shoulder until it snaps inside my brain. I look down at my jacked up boots, a line of plaid skirt edging my knees and think, Maybe it will.