​​​Chapter Twenty
Wren

I walk all the way home. I let the cold work through my skin and bones and don’t even flinch when a kid in a bright green car drives by and gives me the finger. My mind is as numb as my body is. As numb as my heart.

Mareck stole my bike. 

Mareck stole everything.

I walk-run for a little bit until I’m on Shepherd, and there’s a lot of after school stragglers hitting the arcade, the pizza shop, standing and smoking outside of Floyd’s Gas Stop, getting high off the fumes. There are massive canvas flags, stained red with razorbacks because everyone loves football, and a guy with a gut the size of a ‘roided out watermelon fingers them like they’re fine china. I walk past him into Floyd’s because I always like it here. The bathroom overtakes the smell of gasoline when you walk in, and there’s this display of lamps, replicas of the one from A Christmas Story. Fishnet legs lighting up a room. The absurdity is everything that’s right with this world, and if I had the cash or could swipe one without guilt swallowing me like a snake, I’d be able to stare at it every night until my eyes hurt. But I don’t have the cash. I don’t even have my stinking bike.

I do have dirty change rattling in my coat pocket and choose a Pay Day for the sheer irony of it although I’m not even sure I’m using that word correctly. Mrs. Brentwood went into this whole spiel about irony once and the devastating way Alanis Morissette pretty much just slaughtered the word and then someone piped up with, “My mom said Alanis used to date Dave Coulier, so I reckon her judgment has always been pretty fried,” and from there, I zoned out of Lit class and drew what I imagined Alanis Morissette and Dave Coulier’s baby would look like. It wasn’t very pretty.

“Which one you thinking, baby?” A voice strikes hard at me like a stone from a sling. I rise on tiptoe and search the next aisle. Mareck is with something redheaded and giggly. As I crouch down, I clutch the PayDay like a throat.

I stretch up again to watch the top of the giggler’s head cock with the life changing decision of Bugles or CheezIts. Mareck comes up from behind her. Gooses her. The sound she makes ice picks my ear. I get a better view hip to hip with the soda fridge and see Mareck touch the girl’s sweatered back. She’s a prep, a freshman prep. And then she turns, and her face is gorgeous, and I realize this at the exact same moment Mareck does except that his lips kiss the giggler’s and mine just stupidly tremble. 

It’s The Redhead from the bathroom. 

I bet they’d make a beautiful baby.

I leave with the unpaid for Pay Day in my hand, but I’m not stopped because I reek of unfiltered pathetic, and no one wants to catch a whiff of that.

Outside someone whistles at me. It’s long and drawn out and belongs to a man around my Grandpa Glenn’s age, and I lick my lips at him. I hate when I do things like that, but there’s a switch somewhere beneath my breastbone, and when one of Mareck’s dirty fingers flips it on, there’s just no stopping me.

I lift my skirt a little, show off a pale strip of leg, and the old man’s face grows a smirk. I stand there for a second then reach between my ribs to finger the switch and shut it off. I turn and snap tight the silver buttons running up my brown coat. I rub the bare spots in the fur out of habit. When the man’s lost interest, I walk a little further from Floyd’s and fish my glue bottle out of my boot. It fits snuggly against my skin and has walked with me like a friend all day, hand-in-hand while I nursed my anger and put my fist through The Mule’s face. The last image causes me to take an extra long whiff.

A gap widens through my thoughts, a nice comfy spot for Dad to saunter in, and he sits down, elbowing Mareck’s brittle bones and The Mule’s much more substantial ones out of the way. He asks, “Wrennie, what happened?”

“I could ask you the very same thing,” I say. I walk, and it’s hell to walk. It’s getting colder, and I realize nobody thought to grab my backpack I left in The Yard.

Fantastic.

“You could,” Dad says, and there he is in front of me, head in his hands. Sympathy card, but I won’t let him play it. Walking in these boots is a blister waiting to happen, but I have no other option. I could jam out my thumb, but with my luck I’d be picked up by Principal Zinberg and have to suffer through his silent farting and spiel on pants being more suitable for the cold. I guess he isn’t all bad considering I’m not locked up in some federal prison right now. He almost seemed...empathetic.

I walk heel-toe for a while with my arms spread out like an airplane. I’m honked out, and receive a “Watch it, stoner!” from a beat up minivan. Dad waits for me to look him in the face, his chin up now, eyes horrified as I dance around a mailbox like it’s a pole.

“Don’t worry. I don’t take my clothes off for money. I do it for free,” I say.

“What are you proving?” he asks. He’s dressed like I remember him. Jeans, gray hoodie, and his faded leather jacket on top. The heart on his hand looks like it’s bleeding.

I lie sometimes when I talk to him, but then I think of Mareck, The Redhead, even The Mule and The Kid in her stupid Cornerstone club– all of them fitting comfortably in their niches when I’m crammed tight and can’t even move to breathe.

“That one day someone, something will try to hurt me, and I won’t even be able to feel it,” I whisper. The last look is how it usually goes, his eyes closed because that’s how I remember him mostly now from the time he hovered angel high above my head. I was the one who found him in the tree.

I put the tiny glass bottle of glue in my thick sock, jam it down into my boot. I have two more in the hidden drawer of the jewelry box Mom bought me the day I got my period. It’s floral patterned and smells funny because Mom found it at a garage sale, so it belonged to someone who was okay with that smell, and the whole notion is perplexing. In fact, everything’s perplexing because I’m gliding, skating across the street until I’m stepping on the sidewalk and climbing up the apartment stairs. God is my friend today because Mom’s not here yet. I sneak into our apartment unscathed, commandeer a pudding cup and let my hungry belly lead me to my room.

Mom does come home at some point, and I yell something about being sick, about leaving me alone even though that’s the last thing I’d ever want. And maybe that’s because I figure one day, it will probably come true.

I dream snippets: me alone, Mareck laughing, The Redhead stealing my glue. Mom’s not there, not even Dad, just me and these faces, balloon-like, asking why I’ve made a mess of myself and me too high to answer.

So I sleep, not really sleeping because my mother and Jerr-bear finally go to their room and challenge the paper thin walls. Mom’s hushed tones, Jerry’s not-so-hushed crying. It sounds like death, and I almost wish it were. 

Because breathing? It hurts like the devil.

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