A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (31 page)

Noveen has driven them in loops, through town and then up to the Ducktown woods, back through town, and now down the beach road. They are happy simply to be in motion, driving away from place after place but not toward anything in particular.

At least until she sees Melissa’s red Eclipse pul ed over on the sandy shoulder.

“Stop,” she tel s Noveen, pointing. Noveen obeys. The primer-painted Chevy, pul ed up close to the Eclipse’s shiny bumper, looks like something that the nicer car has crapped out. “I need a sec.” Noveen shrugs, her best quality her ability to rol with it, but she leaves the engine running. Liza jacks her unwieldy body up and out, lumbers down the path between the dunes.

She hasn’t been alone with Melissa since that awful day at the Richardson house. The day Liza fel out of love. Melissa is constantly surrounded by the cadre of fol owers who used to be Liza’s, too. They whisper and point and glare, and whatever story Melissa has invented for them, it’s clear that Liza is the bitch in it. She supposes that’s fair.

The ocean is a dark army green, no sun to spark its colors. If it were ten degrees warmer, if the charcoal humps of clouds weren’t rol ing toward them, this place would be packed. But now it is only Liza and Melissa and Melissa’s baby sister in a pink bucket seat. Melissa sits in a beach chair, close to the water. This is the second-to-the-last time they wil ever speak.

The coming storm sends wind that cuts through Liza’s T-shirt, but she is only the thin, chil ed outside wal . She is built around a furnace, and the cold can’t touch her. Nothing can touch her.

Melissa watches the waves rol in, barely glancing up when Liza comes to stand beside her. She lifts two fingers in a lazy salute, like this was old days. With no witnesses, Melissa accepts Liza in her old place as if it were normal, or at least inevitable. They watch the waves together as the baby in the bucket sleeps, and the baby inside Liza is stil and sleeping, too. It is as if both little girls are pretending not to be here, giving Liza and Melissa this moment alone.

Liza remembers being Liza. She remembers being Melissa-and-Liza.

From the outside it may have looked like Liza was charity. Melissa had the clothes, the money, the big house, the concert tickets, al the good drugs. But they both know it was a potluck friendship. Stone soup. Liza had the body, the face, the confidence, al the good pick-me-up lines. Liza brought the boys. It was almost equal.

“I miss you,” Liza says.

Melissa answers instantly. “Then why did you fuck everything up.” She speaks calmly, not playing to an audience. It’s not even a question. It is a flat statement of blame that acknowledges her own loss.

Liza squats by her ex-friend, trailing her fingers in the glass-hard grains of sand. The rain has packed down its usual powdery softness. “Big thinks the dad is that carny guy.”

“My carny guy? That would have been a cute baby.” After a pause Melissa peeps slyly at Liza and adds, “I told everyone at school you screwed some old pervo you met at the arcade for five hundred dol ars.”

Liza nods with more than a little admiration. It’s a good story. It accomplishes a lot, real y. “Thanks for at least making me expensive.”

Melissa looks straight at Liza. “Just because I’m not scratching your eyes out, like, right this second, it doesn’t mean that I stil don’t fucking hate you.”

Liza absorbs that, then says, “Just because of your dad and al , it doesn’t mean that I stil don’t fucking love you.”

It’s a very grown-up line. Liza’s kind of proud of it. Before the baby she wouldn’t have even thought of it. It’s close to an apology, and that’s what Big says adults have to do when they righteously screw everything up. Be sorry, and do better next time. In this case the being sorry is the best Liza’s got. It’s not like Melissa has another dad that Liza can choose not to fuck.

Melissa’s face twists, as if she is fighting the idea of crying. Liza feels like crying, too, but she isn’t sure how much that means. She cries at AT&T

commercials these days. Melissa gets it tamped down, and they stay there quiet beside each other. The waves rol in. Liza should go. Noveen wil be getting impatient.

Then Melissa pul s a joint out from behind her ear, her favorite hiding place. At school most days, she had one tucked there, masked by the fal of her long hair. She holds it up and says, “From a guy at the Phish concert. He handed it to me, said, ‘Christmas gift for the pretty girl.’” She smiles a tight-eyed smile, because Liza used to be the pretty girl. Her dart hits home, and as Liza flinches, as Liza’s hand goes to her swol en bel y, Melissa’s expression softens. “Oh, wel . Whatever.” She offers the unlit joint.

It is more than a simple tube of herbs in paper. What Melissa is holding toward her is an invitation to once again be Melissa-and-Liza. To visit the Liza that she used to be. If they smoke it up, they wil start talking. They wil laugh. Old threads wil reach and spin together.

The waves are hypnotic, and the baby inside is sleeping and stil . Liza’s out of love with Coach. He made sure of that. Al she has left of that imagined life is the baby, and here is Melissa, cracking open a door that leads back into her old one. What’s to stop her, real y? This baby inside her has finished making al its pieces. What’s one joint going to hurt, at this point?

Melissa’s little sister wakes and starts to fuss.

Liza stands and goes to the bucket seat. Rocks it. The baby’s eyes are open, a pale ice blue like Melissa’s. Like Coach’s. Her own baby might have eyes like that.

It strikes Liza that this child in the bucket and the baby sleeping so stil inside her are half sisters. They wil be in the same grade. They may look alike. They might one day be friends. Melissa’s little sister screws her eyes shut and truly wails. Liza unclips the buckle and lifts her out. She holds the squirming baby against herself, shushing, and inside, like an answer, her own girl wakes. Liza feels something connecting their movements like a guitar string, plucked and vibrating, running from the baby in her arms to the baby in her womb.

In that moment she understands that what Big says is right. It is time—too early, but whose fault is that?—it is time to put away childish things.

Liza waves off the joint. “You can’t be smoking that shit,” she tel s Melissa. “You have to look out for your sister.” She soothes the squirming outside baby, and inside, her baby spins and kicks an answer.

Melissa snorts. “Jesus Christ, Liza, how many times have we baby-sat stoned?”

Plenty, is the answer, but the difference is, now Liza knows they shouldn’t have. She has a real person in her, alive and whole, thumping its feet upward. The baby sister is a real person, too, thumping back, so that Liza is a talking drum, inside and out.

Liza says, “Real y, don’t. You have to drive the baby home.”

Melissa rol s the joint back and forth between her fingers, holds it under her nose, and sniffs with relish. The door slams shut between them. “I’m not stupid. I’l wait til I’m okay. Run along, now, Liza. I’m very busy and important.”

Liza knows what she should do. She should pick up the bucket and walk away. She can move the car seat’s base out of the Eclipse, into the Chevy. This is her own baby’s sister. She shouldn’t leave it here. She should drive it home to its bitch of a mother, say,
Your other daughter is
smoking pot down at the beach, and I didn’t think I should let her drive the baby
. That part wil be fun, and, more important, it’s what Big would do.

It’s what anyone’s mother would do.

Liza is almost someone’s mother.

“Don’t make me cal Claire,” Liza says.

Melissa’s face twists into a sneer, but her tone stays mild. “You’re pretty holy for a girl who fucked my daddy. You think my mother is going to take your cal ? Go away now, Liza. And next time I see you? When you aren’t pregnant? Rest assured I’m going to kick your big fat postpartum ass.”

Liza hesitates. She should take the baby. She knows it. But instead she kneels and settles her back in the pink bucket. She tucks the blanket around the fat legs.

Liza starts walking away.

The year she met Melissa, at Rich People VBS, Claire Richardson used the felt board to tel the story of that wise king, the two mothers, the baby who died in the night. Solomon offers to cut the remaining baby into halves. One mother says,
No, no, let her have it. Just leave that baby whole
.

The king gives the baby to that woman. He doesn’t actual y care who gave birth to it. He gives it to the one who wil lose everything to save it.

That’s what real mothers do. They save the baby.

Liza can stand to lose her friendship with Melissa. It’s already soured in her mouth. She can give up the remains of her childhood, too. She never much wanted it. What she can’t release is the thin shel that is
her
. The un-mother. The cool girl everyone watches, wants, the rebel girl who gets away with everything. That’s the thing that she decides to keep.

Every time she washes up here, she has to watch herself walk away. Every time, she knows that when she leaves that baby behind, she ceases to deserve her own.

Then Big’s hands grab her, pul her away, yanking her out of the waves of photographs, off the beach, settling her into her own chair in her room.

Big’s mouth moves. She is asking something, but al Liza hears is the sound of waves rol ing in. Over Big’s shoulder she can stil see Melissa, putting the joint to her lips now. She doesn’t know the “present for the pretty girl” is laced with PCP.

“Melissa!” Liza says, cal ing to her, trying to stop her. But Liza is in Noveen’s car now, they are leaving. Melissa is lighting the joint that wil take her brain away, steal hours, send her careening into the dunes with no idea of time and tides and little sisters.

Liza cal s again, “Melissa,” but Noveen is turning up the radio and Big is grabbing at her shoulders, pul ing Liza toward the now. She won’t see Melissa again, not for years.

Not until the day they have their final conversation.

On the beach Melissa breathes deep. Holds the smoke.

The ocean takes the one baby. God takes the other. Melissa and Liza have nothing left to divide between them.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Mosey

I WAS PRETTY sure I could find Liza’s tree house in my sleep, because I already was finding it there. Almost every night I dreamed about the day last year when I’d fol owed my mom down that crooked path. I’d wake up motion sick, like my bed had been sloshing me back and forth while I was sleeping.

When I was awake, I didn’t go there, not even in my thinking. It was like I was scared that Roger would read the words “Secret Tree House” off the worry creases in my forehead. Having Patti around made it less likely that Roger would smel the stink of me keeping something from him, so I invited her along al the time now. She always said yes, and she never even had to cal home and check if she could. I knew she didn’t have much money, so mostly we hung at me or Roger’s house. On Thursday, instead of Real Pitting, I got Roger to pick up a huge bag of Taco Bel , and the three of us took it back to my house and let Mrs. Lynch go early. We sat in the den watching court shows with Liza, eating Meximelts, and passing around a two-liter of Big’s gross generic soda that Roger cal ed Diet Brown.

Patti got me and Roger’s weirdo humor, and she had a high-pitched cackly laugh I liked. She fit with us fine, but seemed more comfortable when it was only her and me. Like, in Life Skil s, Patti talked my ear off. We literal y did not stop talking, because Coach was out Friday, and he didn’t come back at al the whole next week either. The Life Skil s sub put on films and then sat studying for the MCAT, ignoring us as long as we didn’t yel .

The only time Patti shut up was when Briony Hutchins found out Coach wasn’t coming back at al , and she came mooping into class al pink-eyed.

Patti and I eavesdropped while Briony wailed to her whole entourage.

“His wife is making him take early retirement! Both
her
kids who were any good at sports have graduated, so I guess she’s going to screw over our whole footbal team. And right here at the start of the season! Cheer is so going to suck now.”

When Roger was around, though, Patti got sidekick quiet, especial y at his house.

I understood it. At Roger’s house the cushions on the sofa matched the print of the easy chair. His dad was his real dad and lived with them. They had a cat with white feet named Socks. If me and Patti went over, his mom kept coming at us with snacks, asking, “What are you kids up to?” with this big, white smile. It was like she thought if she left us alone too long, Patti and I would leap at him and ravish him or stuff him ful of drugs.

Between the matchy cushions and his helicopter parents, Roger’s life freaked Patti right the hel out.

That next weekend Roger had to go to Biloxi and watch his bulimic cousin final y get married. Patti and me biked to the Great Clips, and I klepto’d like a total pro from al my practice, lifting a whole stack of ancient gossip magazines while Patti distracted the girl at the front. Then we holed up in my tree house to look at pictures of the hottest celebrity couples from three years ago. Roger texted us every fifteen minutes to tel us wedding stuff, like how the bride was spitting al the chewed bites of her lunch into a napkin and how the old people were bombed by 2:00 P.M. and doing the most embarrassing dancing in the history of time to “Louie Louie.”