Girl Defective (5 page)

“Oops,” Nancy said. “I'm corrupting you again.”

“I don't mind.”

And I didn't mind the burning in my throat, or the dizzy hit that followed. I stretched my legs out and we lay down. The sky was vast and blue. The fresh-mowed grass felt yeasty under my thighs. I was thinking about Mia Casey, and then I started thinking about Ray and his kimono. Naked Ray, skin folds and rashes. I started to laugh. I didn't stop for ages. Nancy joined her hands and flexed her fingers. She rolled her neck like a boxer. “Want to go out Friday night?” She made it sound like a challenge. “I mean
out
out. You can stay at my place. Ray won't mind.”

“Dad would never let me stay over.”

“What's his problem? Ray's okay.” Her eyes slid sideways, meaning he definitely wasn't.

“We'll tell him we're going to the movies.”

“I'm a bad liar.”

“I'll lie for you. It's in the details.” She was silent for a moment. Then: “Your turn.”

The familiar prickle of anxiety soon passed. For once I had news. “Remember that guy you hit with the potato?”

“The pretty one?”

I nodded. “Dad's hired him. Why, I do not know.”

Nancy scoffed, “Bill the Patriarch. He wants a son to pass his knowledge down to. Gully's not up to the job. You better keep your eyes open.”

“He always does this and it's always a mistake.” I told her about the other surrogates: the one who had elaborate phone fights with his mother; the one who smelled like Subway; the one who couldn't stop staring at Carly Simon's nipples on the cover of
No Secrets
.

“At least this guy's cute,” Nancy offered. She turned on her side. She was sitting so close to me I could see her pores. “You should jump him. It'll give you the upper hand. And it will piss your dad off.”

I laughed.

“You like that idea?” Nancy squeezed my cheek like an Italian mama. “Monkeyface, what are you gonna do when I'm gone? Who's going to give you life lessons?”

“I don't know.” She was looking at me intently, and my face felt hot. I had a shock of yearning, wishing
that I
was
Nancy. The feeling was sharp and it carried a shadow. I was always on the edge of something that was never going to happen.

“Listen,” Nancy went on. “You can get anything you want from a guy. Most guys think about sex ninety-nine percent of the time. It's like the way the sea is—wave after wave. You don't have to do anything to make a guy think about sex. He's already thinking it. The patriarchy, kid. The only thing we've got over them is the choocha.” She pointed south with both hands and grinned like a maniac.

“I don't want anything from Luke,” I said.

“Dollbaby,” Nancy drawled. “You don't know what you want.”

We meandered back to Dad and Gully. I felt stoned. I couldn't muster up enough saliva to swallow my smile. I tried to keep a poker face while Nancy told Dad all about the Joan Crawford movie at the Astor on Friday night and how she had to, had to,
had to
take me. “Really, it's educational.”

Dad had that look. He liked Nancy, but he didn't trust her.

I held my breath.

“We'll see,” he said.

S
UMMER ALWAYS KING-HIT
me. One minute I'd be fully clothed and comfy; the next I'd have to think about tank tops and body fuzz. I dreamed of cold places: England, Tasmania, Alaska. But I knew they were only dreams. I was not like Nancy. I was a Martin, a resident bird. I barely even left the suburb. If I'd made friends at school, the prospect of Nancy mightn't have been so alluring. But I didn't fit in at school; I couldn't bring potential friends home. My dad was a boozer, my brother was a freak. It was safer to keep to myself.

I sweated through the first week of December. School was hot and noisy and endless. I drifted from class to class like a sea cow. All I wanted to do was lie under a tree or float away in a rubber dinghy. All week I kept seeing posters of Mia Casey. She was on the tram stop, outside the milk bar, on telephone poles. Just her face and nothing else. I had a second dream about her: In the dream she was lying below the surface of the water. Her dark eyes were open. She smiled at me, and a fish swam out of her mouth.

Friday lunchtime I surrendered to the pull of the
library, staking my usual computer. I checked my e-mails and Goldmine and ended up on Mum's website.

Galaxy Strobe is dead!

I gasped. Then recovered. My mother was not dead—the headline was just a teaser for her latest show. A GIF showed a close-up of her face. She had two black eyes. A line of blood crawled down from her right nostril and then crawled back up again.

Down and up, down and up.

A black box popped up on the screen.
Ask Me Anything!

I typed,
Do you ever miss your children?
And hit return. I imagined Mum reading my message. Her forehead would crumple; her heart would sink like a bag of boulders in a lake. It would dawn on her that her famous life was a crock. Her audience was nothing compared to her flesh and blood. She'd leave Yanni, her Greek collaborator, just as she'd left us. A note on a mantel, an acre of stuff. He would cry hot, salty tears over her abandoned costumes. . . .

I snapped back to reality. It was more likely Mum wouldn't even get to read my message. Yanni was also Mum's moderator, protecting her from trolls and spammers. With two clicks on the keyboard he would delete me. Gone.

Quinn Bishop had the computer next to me. She was the year-ten pariah, a surly, goth bitch who'd sooner sit on you than look at you. She was in the gifted stream
and was famous for throwing a chair through the science lab window. Quinn was big, both ways, and there was something bulldog-ish in her countenance. From the corner of my eye I checked her out: her hair (blue streaks on black); her Bad Brains T-shirt over her school dress; her spiked metal bracelet that looked like a pigeon deterrent. She swiveled to face me, glaring murderously, but her face changed when she saw what was on my screen.

Quinn drew herself up. “Galaxy Strobe is awesome.”

“She's not awesome. She's a bitch.” The words flew from my mouth. “She's my mother.”

Quinn stared from the screen to me. “I can see how she might be.”

“What—my mother or a bitch?”

Her lips curled into a smile. “Both.”

Feeling brave, I scooted my chair next to Quinn's and checked out what was on
her
screen. She kept her finger on the cursor, scrolling a stream of photos of people partying or fighting—it was hard to tell. There were band photos, dizzy lights, mad faces, a naked girl in a horse's head, a singer bent backward like Iggy Pop. I could feel Quinn watching me, testing to see if I was shockable. I could sense her smiling. I wanted to turn back. Then she shifted, blocking my view, and put her earplugs back in. A lost feeling came over me. Everything went quiet, just the echo of Quinn's
music and the air conditioner groaning like some mythical beast. I minimized my mother, and another face floated up in my mind: dark eyes, dark hair, three black tears . . . My fingers hovered and then, as if they had a mind of their own, they typed “Mia Casey” into the search engine.

There was an Associated Press article and a photo. The photo was in color, and color made all the difference. Mia looked real. She was pretty—not crazy-pretty like Nancy, but she looked warm, like you could tell her anything and she wouldn't laugh. I stared at her image for a long time, and then I printed the page and read it over and over as if that could change the facts:

Teen Drowned After Drinking

St. Kilda, Victoria (AP)

An Adelaide teenager who drowned in the St. Kilda canal had a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit for driving when she died. St. Kilda Police say there's no evidence of foul play in the death of 17-year-old Mia Casey of Burnside, SA. On the night in question Casey was seen at the Paradise Theater and walking along the Lower Esplanade. Witnesses recalled her uncommon outfit: bare feet, a silver dress, and a crown of flowers. It is believed she became disoriented by
alcohol and fell into the canal. Mia Casey had been staying at no fixed address in the St. Kilda area since November. She is survived by her parents and brother, Lucas.

It hit me slowly and spread like fire. I sat staring at the page in a dunce's trance. Lucas Casey.
Luke.
Dad's new employee was Mia Casey's brother.

The bell rang. Quinn leaned over me; she checked out what I was reading and made a snorting sound.

“She got gypped,” Quinn said.

I looked at her. “What do you mean?”

But it was too late. She'd put her buds back in and had signed off on our sorry excuse for a conversation. Quinn picked up her bag and clomped out of the library in her storm-trooper boots. I followed her out to the bright sunlight. Bodies zombied down the corridors to the next class, but suddenly I couldn't bear the thought of being indoors. I lay on the scratchy turf with the sunlight bathing my skin. Mia and Luke's faces floated before me, shimmering like a heat haze. I folded the article into a tiny square and tucked it into my sock, where it chafed for the rest of the day.

A
T THREE THIRTY I
negotiated the maze of group-huggers and pinch-faced pinkie-swearers to find Gully at the school gate—snout in effect. He smiled grimly. There was a wet patch on his shorts that he kept trying to cover with his hand.

“What's that?” I asked.

“Someone drew something on me. I washed it off.”

“Drew what?”

“A penis.” He said it like Sean Connery.
Penish.

“Who did it?”

He looked away, wrote something in the sky.

“Tell me who it was. I'll sort him out.”

He stopped writing to shout, “IT'S OKAY!”

“FINE!” I shouted back.

We walked, our bag straps slapping in sync. Gully started talking about the Bricker. It took me a while to link what he was saying to his memo, and by the time I made the connection, he was in another realm.

“It's entirely possible that the Bricker is an anti-Semite. He also hit Ada's Cakes and Bernard Levon, Tax Accountant.”

“But, Gully, we're not Jewish.”

“Maybe the Bricker only hit our shop to make it look like he doesn't have a vendetta against the Jewish community.”

“The brick was random.”

“Nothing is random.” Gully stopped walking; he thwacked his snout and drummed the side of his head with the heel of his hand repeatedly until I had to seize his wrist. Beneath the snout he had on what Dad called his “dazey-face.” The one where he stood too close and swayed, and his brow loomed like a slab of granite. And if he was silent, it was spooky; but if he talked, all you could see was the pink of his mouth moving, his eyes so earnest it hurt.

“Nancy's coming tonight,” I told him, trying to distract.

“Agent Cole, KGB.”

“Affirmative.”

“Tell her,
The red shoe is in the grass
.”

“I said she's coming—you can tell her yourself.”

Gully nodded, but he still didn't move.

“Come on. Friday night fish and chips, remember?”

Seconds passed. And then he smiled as if seized with happiness at the prospect of flake. He adjusted his backpack and walked, carefully avoiding the cracks in the pavement.

Two hours later Nancy and I were sitting on the back counter, swinging our feet and meditating on the Wall
of Woe. Dad's “display” had started as a cheap way of concealing rising damp and turned into a mosaic of the world's worst record covers:
Top of the Pops, Hooked on Classics
, the New Seekers, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Jimmy Shand's Scottish dance band . . . Some customers laughed, others left. I figured most would rather face rising damp than Barry Gibb and Barbra Streisand in matching white silky pantsuits.