Something Girl (4 page)

“I’m going to Bingo, hon,” she said. “I left a note for your dad. I’ll see you later, okay?”

She picked up her purse and went out the back door. After she left, I just sat there. I was still hungry, but I didn’t feel like eating anymore. I guess I wanted my mom to sit with me while I ate supper — even if she stared out the window. It wasn’t fun eating hamburgers by myself. So I just sat there like my mom and stared out the window.

Chapter Seven

As I stared out the window, I started to think. I remembered how my dad was nice to me and my mom sometimes. He wouldn’t yell or hit. We would go on a holiday and get along the whole time. For a while we would seem like different people, a normal happy family. In a way this was worse, because I never knew when he would start up again. I always had to be on guard to see when he started to
change. I had to be extra careful about what I said and did, so I didn’t set him off. I never sat near him, even when he seemed all right. The farther away I was, the more time it gave me to run in case I said the wrong thing.

I heard my dad’s client say goodbye in the hall. It sounded like Mr. Grant, one of our neighbors, so I poked my head through the doorway. My dad looked at me and smiled.

“Hello there, Froggy,” said Mr. Grant. “How’s school?”

“Okay,” I said. “Everything’s good.”

“Glad to hear that,” said Mr. Grant. “Well, thanks for everything, Tom. You’ve been a great help. I’ll have to think about this some more.” He shook my dad’s hand.

Everyone looked up to my dad — he was good at his job and he was on a lot of committees. He even coached a boy’s hockey team. I went to most of the games because I loved watching my dad while he was coaching. He was always calling out to the kids on the ice, telling them how to play better. They all
liked him. I tried to learn hockey, but I wasn’t very good.

Mr. Grant left and my dad closed the door behind him. Then he just stood for a moment with his back to me. Right away I started backing into the kitchen. My dad was being too quiet. If things were okay, he would be humming or whistling and moving around. When he finally turned around, his face had changed. No more smiling. It looked like a dead man’s face.

“Stuffing your face again?” he asked.

I looked at my feet and tried to figure out how to get out of there without setting him off. “Just hamburgers,” I said.

“Don’t like the food here?” my dad said softly. “Going to complain to your probation officer?”

When he got mad, my dad’s eyes looked black. They had no color and seemed to go on forever.

“I never complain to Ms. Lee,” I said. “I only tell her good things.”

A big weight was coming down on me — fear and more fear, and the feeling that it was going to happen again. It was going to happen and I couldn’t stop it. No matter what Jujube and Ms. Lee and Mr. Taylor said, no one could stop this.

But I tried once more to get my dad to think about happy things. “How was your meeting?” I asked.

“Fine,” he snapped. “Until the goddam phone rang. I almost had that sucker landed, and then the phone threw us off. It would’ve been an easy ten thousand bucks. But now he has to
think
about it some more. I’ll bet it was your fault the phone rang, wasn’t it, Froggy? It was one of your goddam friends.”

When I heard my dad say “goddam,” I turned into a black tornado inside, going round and round. Because when my dad swore, it was going to happen. There was no stopping it.

He yelled, “You think you own this house! You spend all your time on the phone. Your
mother has to work part-time so we can feed you. You don’t even go to school half the time.”

He looked huge and dark, like in nightmares. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t talk. When I got scared like this, a hand came up from inside and grabbed all the words out of my mouth. My dad started coming toward me and everything went into slow motion. I tried to run into the kitchen, but every step seemed to take five minutes. So I grabbed a chair and pulled it in front of me. My dad picked it up and threw it across the room. Then he grabbed my arm.

“Stupid,” he hissed. “No good. Nothing.”

He started punching me, and I tried to cover myself with my other arm. But my dad pushed my face into the wall so I couldn’t see what was coming next. Then he started kicking my legs and back. I felt like my gut was coming right out of me, as if I was turning into mush. I tried to pull free, but I couldn’t. All I could think about was getting away away away.

Suddenly, inside my head, I saw the fort Jujube and I had built. I saw myself crawling inside the fort and trying to hide. I saw Jujube coming to find me and talking about aliens. “Aliens, aliens, aliens,” I heard her say, over and over in my head.

Finally my dad stopped. He stood over me for a minute, breathing heavily. Then he turned and walked away. I heard him go upstairs, then back down again and out the front door. I don’t know why he stopped when he did. Maybe he just got tired.

I was lying on the floor, next to the wall. It took a while to start moving. I wanted to get out of there in case my dad came back, but my legs wouldn’t move. Each time I tried, a bright pain shot up my back. It was so bad I almost screamed, and once my head went black for a second. But after a while I just made myself. I got to my knees. Then I stood up. Then I walked to the downstairs bathroom and took a bunch of aspirin — around ten, I think. When I checked in the mirror, my
face looked okay. My dad hardly ever hit me where people could see it.

The painkillers helped, but I still had to move slowly. I walked out the back door, carefully, like an old lady. Then I got out my bike. Getting onto it was hard, but then I could coast. I used back alleys so I didn’t have to ride over curbs. When I got to the fort, I wheeled the bike into the trees and left it. I didn’t lock it. I wasn’t sure I could stand up that long.

I crawled into the fort and covered myself with a blanket. Then I lay there and tried not to moan. The pain was so big, it felt like it was everywhere. So I thought of a game I played when I was small. The game went like this — when my dad hit me, I would think of the pain as heat instead of hurt. Then I tried thinking of the pain as a nice heat, like a fireplace. I really had to think hard while I was getting hit, but I could usually make it work. Once I even laughed while my dad was hitting me, because it didn’t hurt. I only did that once, because then he hit extra hard.

But tonight the game didn’t work. The aspirin I had taken was wearing off, and the pain was getting bigger. Through the fort’s door, I could see stars coming out, shining like far-off spaceships. But they were just stars. There weren’t any aliens coming to save me from this pain.

Jujube’s voice started up again in my head.
You just let it happen
, she said.
Why don’t you want it to stop? Why don’t you tell someone?

What’s to tell?
I thought.
I don’t want people to know my secret. I’m so dumb my dad has to hit me. Stupid, no good, nothing girl
.

My back was hurting so much I had to lie with my knees up in the air. It had never been this bad before, and I was scared like crazy. I was beginning to think I could never make my dad love me. Sometime he might really kill me, like in the stories I heard on the news. I couldn’t figure out what to do, so I started to cry. The tears kept running down my neck
and into my ears, but I couldn’t turn my head because it hurt too much.

I think I passed out for a while because the next thing I knew, Jujube was there. She was sitting beside me in the dark, humming softly so she wouldn’t wake me up.

Chapter Eight

Moonlight was shining through the door of the fort. It lit Jujube around the edges so she looked like an alien.

“You all right?” she asked.

It felt as if the pain in my back and legs had gone to sleep. I couldn’t feel anything except a dull ache in my back. Still, I had a funny feeling something was wrong. I lay very still, trying to figure out what it was.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Pretty late,” said Jujube. “After ten, I think. Mom’s working the nightshift. I called your house earlier — your dad said you were out.”

Right away, I got worried. When Jujube’s mom worked the nightshift, a neighbor lady slept over at their house. If she noticed Jujube was gone, there would be trouble.

“Jujube,” I said, “there’s no point in both of us flunking school. Why don’t you go home and go to sleep?”

“I want to know how you are,” she said.

I couldn’t see her face, but I knew that tone of voice. When Jujube talked like this, there was no point in doing anything except what she wanted. So I tried to sit up, but a pain shot up my back as if two hands were tearing it apart. I fell back and held my breath, hoping the pain would go away. Then I heard loud groans and realized they were coming from me.

“Froggy?” Jujube’s voice went up into a high squeak.

I didn’t say anything. With all that pain in me, I was just thinking hard, trying to make it go away. When my back stopped hurting, I would figure out what to do next.

“I’m going to get Rick,” Jujube said.

“No!” I shouted, but she was already gone. I could hear her footsteps running away, and then there was only the sound of the river out there in the night. It was swishing around, slow and steady — kind of like the pain in my back.

Then, somewhere off in the night, I heard a whine start up. At first I thought it was a mosquito, but it got closer and closer, louder and louder. Finally I figured out what it was. I tried to get up, but the pain shot through my back again and I couldn’t move. When the ambulance pulled up outside the fort, its siren was the loudest thing I’d ever heard. Through the doorway, I could see flashing red lights. Then the siren shut off.

I heard Jujube say, “She’s over here.” Footsteps started coming through the trees.

“In here,” said Jujube. Suddenly someone lifted the metal sheet that made up one side of the fort. The inside of the fort filled with red flashing lights. A woman leaned over me. She smelled like soap, the kind my mom used.

“You all right, kid?” she asked.

I wanted to say yes. I wanted to get up and walk away. All I could think of was how much trouble this was going to cause. There was no way I could hide the problem this time. My dad was going to get it big-time, and it was all my fault.

“No,” I said. “My back hurts.”

“Let me check it,” said the woman. “Is anything broken?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “But I can’t get up.”

She started to poke around my back, and I lay there and groaned.

“Carlos, we’ll need the stretcher,” she said to a man standing outside the fort. Then she touched my cheek. “Did you walk here by yourself?” she asked.

“I rode my bike,” I said. “It’s in the trees.”

The man came back and the two of them lifted me onto the stretcher. I screamed when they picked me up, it hurt so bad — not just my back, but my neck too. Then they strapped me onto the stretcher, and the pain got a little better. It was a weird feeling when they picked up the stretcher. All of a sudden I was floating in the air without moving a muscle.

Then we were outside the fort and I was being carried through the trees toward the red flashing lights. I could see Jujube standing nearby, her face all sucked in. Rick was next to her.

“Hi, Sophie,” he said.

I was so embarrassed I looked away. He must have thought I was such a loser.

I don’t understand what happened next. Maybe I was tired, or maybe all that pain mixed up my brain. But suddenly I got this weird feeling that Jujube was right. The aliens had come, like she’d said they would. And
they were carrying me toward a spaceship with red and white flashing lights.

Then everything faded out like the end of a movie, and there was just darkness.

Chapter Nine

When I woke, I was lying flat on my back in a small room. The bed had steel rails around it, and there was a TV over my head. I could see another girl lying in a bed on the other side of the room. She was watching the TV above her head.

I was in a hospital. And it was the middle of the day. I could tell because sunlight was pushing through the window as if nothing could keep it out. It was giving me a headache.

“Well, it’s good to see you open your eyes, kiddo,” said a voice.

I tried to turn my head to see who was talking, but I couldn’t. Something was holding my neck in place. And I could feel something else, down between my legs. It hurt. Then I realized it was the tube for a pee bag. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even pee on my own. What was wrong with me?

“Don’t try to move your head,” said the voice. “We’ve got a brace on you.”

A nurse’s head showed up where I could see it — right over my face. She smiled down at me and straightened my blankets.

“Why can’t I move?” I whispered. My heart was pounding — I mean
really
pounding.

“Don’t worry,” said the nurse. “You’re going to be all right. Your neck and back need complete rest so they can heal. We want you to rest in this brace for a few days. Then you’ll be fine, just like before.”

“Oh.” I almost started crying, I was so
relieved. For a minute I’d thought I was going to be in a wheelchair.

“Now that you’re awake, I can go tell your friend,” said the nurse. “She seems to have moved into our waiting room for good. Won’t go to school or anything.”

With another smile, the nurse left the room. Then I heard running footsteps, and a different face poked itself over mine. When I saw Jujube, a grin took over my whole face.

“Oh, Froggy,” she whispered. “I’m so glad you’re not dead!”

“Thanks, I guess,” I said.

Something splashed onto my face and I realized Jujube was crying. “Well,” she mumbled, “when your eyes closed like that…”

I didn’t want to think about it, so I tried to joke her out of it. “When they stuck me in the ambulance, I got the weirdest feeling,” I said. “As if it was a spaceship, and your aliens were finally taking me to outer space.”

Jujube didn’t even smile. “Froggy,” she said, “your mom and dad are here. They went to get something to eat. I think your dad’s kind of mad. Ms. Lee said they can’t see you unless she’s here too.”