Anh slipped off her gloves, the lab completed before I’d even had a chance to start. “One side of her was painted blue and other side was—”
Yellow, I thought. Only I must have said it out loud. Anh looked at me, analytical eyes asking all kinds of questions. I turned away. Began clumsily collecting up the tools, knowing I was stuck with the dishes since she’d done all the work. I shrugged as if I wasn’t at all surprised before I answered the question on her face. “Just a hunch.”
That afternoon, I was still thinking about Emily when I felt the light tug on my sleeve.
“Hey, are you okay?”
I withdrew my arm. I didn’t like being touched, but Marcia Steckler was an “artist,” and they tended to be touchy-feely like that.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I pushed my glasses up my nose for the six hundred and ninety-seventh time. They slid back down again. I thought about taking them off, but I was unfocused enough as it was. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?” “It’s okay.” Marcia stretched gracefully. “I’m distracted too.
Opening night is this weekend. Algebra is the last thing on my mind.”
She looked like a dancer. Her loose cotton tank drifted over pale willowy limbs. How was she so comfortable exposing so much skin?
“Algebra needs to be on your mind for another fifty-three minutes.” I glanced pointedly at the clock.
She leaned close as if she was ready to confess a secret and I pressed back into my chair.
“I’ve got a sixty-nine percent in algebra. If I don’t get it up to a passing grade, the principal can pull me from the show.
And if Principal Romero doesn’t, my mother will.” “So we’d better get to work.” I flipped through the textbook, eager to put a pencil in her hands to keep them away from me. She seemed nice enough, but you can’t always judge a person by the parts they choose to show you. Touching someone, getting close, always reveals the darker parts they don’t want you to see. And I really didn’t want to know any of Marcia Steckler’s deep, dark secrets. “You know, the play’s the thing and all . . .” I mumbled.
“Hey, you know Shakespeare?” She beamed, spine pulled straight as though someone had tugged a string at the back of her head. “No way!”
I answered with a sour smile. Why did everyone assume that because I was good with equations, I was only onedimensional?
“Methinks thou doth protest too much, Ophelia.” I rolled a pencil across the desk. “No more stalling. Time to do some algebra.”
6
For the most part, Mona wasn’t hard to live with. She slept all day and worked all night. And we generally agreed on all the rules.
The first rule (no bad grades) was easy. I’d always done well in school.
The second rule (no trouble) was a broad umbrella encompassing a dozen overprotective restrictions. Like, don’t hang out with the neighborhood kids, don’t wear skanky clothes, and stay out of the principal’s office. These were easy too. I wore whatever T-shirts and jeans Mona brought home from yard sales and consignment shops. The sizes always ran too big, and covered too much, which was fine by me. And I had no interest in hanging with the neighbor-hoodlums anyway.
Mona and I shared the third rule, which was good for both of us. I didn’t need a boyfriend; touching was complicated. But for my mother, it was also dangerous. Butch, the bouncer at Gentleman Jim’s, made sure all the patrons respected the only rule at the club. He liked to brag about the time he’d broken a man’s arm for trying to touch my mother while she was working. He’d given me self-defense lessons in the alley behind the club when I was old enough to make a fist, and he drove her home each night after closing. I’d hear his van crunch over the gravel, the click of the locks, and know she was home safe when her bedroom door shut.
Butch never came inside. There hadn’t been a man in our trailer since the year after my father left, when Mona had brought one home from the club. They’d both smelled like booze and sweat, but her cheeks were flushed for the first time in months, and she was smiling. She’d gone to her room to change clothes. The man sat down on our couch and reached for me. My stomach twisted with the wrongness of his taste, and the cloying, putrid-sweet smell of him. I twisted out of his grip and screamed “Don’t touch me!” My mother had come flying out of her bedroom, and kicked him out. She pulled me tight to her chest, saying “it’s okay” over and over. I felt the hole open up inside her, wider and deeper than before, like I was eating it away myself. It was the last time I touched her.
Her door was still closed now, and I could hear her soft, breathy sounds through the thin walls. She’d only been in bed for a few hours and slept like the dead. I reached into the ceramic Santa Claus cookie jar. It was full of cash—our grocery money and rent for the month. Thursday nights were busy at Jim’s. She rarely noticed the few missing bills I took on Fridays. The way I figured it, the money belonged to men who bought bits and pieces of my mother away from me every day. I was only taking back what was rightfully mine.
The problem with the rules was, while they were designed to get me into a good college, they didn’t tell me how to pay for a good college. But Mona didn’t seem all that concerned. For the last three years, she’d scattered college brochures all around our trailer. Georgetown, Tech, GMU, and Hopkins— top-rated schools, all within a tight radius of home. My own wish-list put more distance between me and Sunny View, but the problem of cost and deferred student loans only grew with every mile I imagined myself out of state. I told myself I didn’t care what school I got into, as long as I got out of Sunny View.
On Sunday I wanted to give a little something back to her. It was Mother’s Day. She didn’t celebrate her birthday—she was the oldest dancer at Jim’s and we never knew how many birthdays there’d be until she was out of a job—but Mother’s Day made her smile. She’d wake up early and let me bring her coffee in bed. Then she’d ask me about school and we’d talk about my grades. Her eyes would shine a little.
I pulled the trailer door shut quietly, locking the dead bolt behind me, and headed toward a collection of tables on the next street. Friday was yard sale day in Sunny View, and the trailer park was buzzing as people wandered, poking through boxes, and kids headed to school.
A girl with magenta streaks in her hair leaned against a lamppost, smoking a cigarette while she waited for the bus. It was the same street corner she slouched at in the evenings while she waited for men she probably didn’t know to pick her up. We gave each other tight awkward smiles, like we sort of knew each other, both of us probably grateful we didn’t.
TJ looked at the ground when I walked by. He sat on the edge of the rusted weight bench that was chained to the axel under his uncle’s trailer, his knee brace dangled over his lap. A stack of free weights was padlocked to the bench, and he kicked it with the toe of his sneaker. As usual, neither of us acknowledged the other. Maybe it was too much like looking in a mirror, seeing another version of ourselves stuck where we didn’t want to be. As soon as Vince’s Camaro blew around the corner, windows down and music blaring, TJ threw on his backpack, scooped up his brace, and bolted off the bench. Vince reached across the passenger seat and threw open the door, and TJ jumped inside like he couldn’t get out of the park fast enough. I couldn’t blame him.