The Female of the Species (19 page)

I have friends.

There are people who like me, and I have discovered that I like them. Today I am wearing a child's toy on my head, walking around the school as if this were perfectly normal. When I turn my head the tips of my hair fall over my shoulder and I see the faintest shade of red shot through, enough to reflect the light. I touch my hand to it, rubbing my own hair between my fingers and thinking about the fact that somewhere in the school are two other girls with streaks exactly the same color as mine.

I feel a burst of warmth in my gut, like the fire from Claire's backyard didn't go out but was transferred to my insides, a place protected from the wind
and snow. A place where I can think about their faces in the fire's light and how they smiled when I talked, and answered me. How they listened and I heard them too and how we all slept on the floor in the living room, perfect trust sending our bodies into a deep unconsciousness.

“Hey, Alex, did you know that you're a slut?” Sara yells at me from the bathroom stall as Peekay checks her makeup in the mirror.

“This is news,” I call back.

Sara comes out, buttoning her jeans. “Well, it says so in Branley's handwriting on the back of that door, just FYI.”

“Congrats,” Claire says, expertly smudging her eyeliner with the tip of her finger. “You've been denounced in the bathroom. You're officially normal.”

I take her eyeliner from her and smear out Branley's accusation, telling Claire I'll buy her new makeup. She laughs, and Sara takes the pen, turning my nondescript smudge into a huge piece of shit that is startlingly accurate.

There's a code here that I never knew how to read until now, and it's more than just the high fives other girls are giving me in the hallways when they spot my tiara. Now that I'm out, I am seeing the way some of them talk to one another, not guarded and looking for
hurt, but open. The flash of teeth and the upward lilt in a voice when it's spoken by a mouth that's smiling; these are all things that were foreign to me.

I'm learning.

Spring means kittens. And we are drowning in them.

It's only April, and Rhonda says things will get worse before they get better, but that seems to be Rhonda's attitude toward everything so I take it with a grain of salt. When Park comes in through the shelter's front door with a box full of mewling babies, I try to tell myself my heart jumped into my throat because I like kittens—and that's all.

We agreed that we're just having fun for now, waiting out the last few months of high school with each other so that we don't have to be alone. Park got a decent baseball scholarship to a private school in Kentucky, and I'm headed to the Lutheran college, where preachers' kids get a deep discount. So there's already a countdown clock
on my new relationship, but I've been telling myself that I'm okay with that.

“Hey,” he calls as soon as he sees me, raising the box in the air. “We've got it backward, babe; you're supposed to be the one delivering pussy.”

I swat at his arm, but not too hard. “Where'd you find them?”

“Down by Lick Creek.”

“You sure there's no mom?”

He shakes his head. “Nope. Whatever asshole dumped them found it in his heart to set out a bowl of milk for them as a going-away present. They—”

“—just crawled through it and got wet, yeah.” I take his hand and pull him in the back, where we've set up a kitten room. It's lined with heated beds, and well stocked with bottles and replacer formula. Alex is cross-legged on the ground, a tabby the size of her fist tucked in the crook of her arm while he takes his bottle.

“Someone else is in line for your love,” I announce.

“Also, I brought kittens,” Park adds. “Hey, Alex.”

She glances up. “Hey. How many?”

“Three,” he says, and Alex sets aside the tabby she's holding, who screams in protest when she tucks him in with his littermates.

“One for each of us, then,” Alex says, reaching into the box and handing me a kitten. Park takes a couple of
steps back when she offers him a white one roughly the size of a mouse.

“Uh . . . I don't—”

“They need to get warm,” Alex says matter-of-factly, wrapping it in a heated towel and putting it into Park's hands. “Keep it close to your body.”

I sink to the floor with my kitten and Park kind of slumps in defeat next to me while Alex mixes fresh formula. I show Park how to hold the bottle at the right angle and pretty soon all three of us are cupping kittens in our elbows, the only sound in the room their frantic suckling as they fill their empty bellies.

I glance up at Park and once again remind myself not to get in too deep. He's adorable with the bottle clenched in his huge hand, eyes locked onto the kitten. I kind of love his hands. They're huge and knuckly, so very male. I was worried that the first time he touched me I would freeze up, only able to think of vomiting in Alex's bathroom and the heavy smell of rubbing alcohol as I dumped a full bottle on my crotch. But it wasn't like that. Ray Parsons doesn't even exist when Park's hands are on me.

But I don't think I'm in love. I don't think I was ever in love with Adam, either. I just had him for so long that the idea of someone else getting him made me feel like I'd been robbed of something that belonged to me, but
not something I couldn't live without.

I knew I was really over him when Branley dumped Adam right before prom tickets went on sale, and I didn't think twice before accepting the one that Park bought me. And maybe I imagined it, but I think there might have been a little spark of panic in his eyes when he handed it to me, like our let's-have-fun arrangement might be off now that Adam was available again.

The only reason Adam being free means anything to me is because Branley ditched him the second there was trouble between Alex and Jack, and now she's attached to Jack like a parasite. A really gorgeous parasite, true, but a life-sucker nonetheless. Jack can't get away from her. The day the guidance counselor announced his academic full ride to Hancock, Branley marched straight to the office and got her own application.

I wasn't in love with Adam. I'm pretty sure I'm not in love with Park.

Alex and Jack, they were in love.

I shift my kitten and he lets out a pathetic little noise that breaks the silence.

“He finished?” Alex asks.

“I think so.” I lift him up, his belly now round and full. “Time to pee,” I tell him.

“Uh . . . ,” Park says, glancing between me and Alex.

“You have to make them go to the bathroom,” Alex
explains. “They won't do it on their own.”

Park's eyes get really big and I laugh at him. “You're excused,” I say, taking his kitten from him and pulling a momma cat from the pile of stuffed animals in the corner.

“Holy shit,” Park says when he sees it, and I can't help but blush a little.

Rhonda sewed a line of plastic nipples on the stuffed momma cats, explaining to us that kittens will suck for comfort, even if they're not getting any food. And while it's certainly true that the orphans adore their new moms, it does make for some awkward moments in the human world.

“It's a titty kitty,” Park says, reaching for it, but I yank it away.

“Time for you to go,” I warn him, and glance back at Alex. “You okay on your own for a minute?”

“Yep,” she says, eyes still locked on her bottle feeder.

I walk Park out to the front, but he grabs my hand at the door. “Is Alex okay?”

“Doing better,” I tell him.

“Is she going to prom?”

“No. She doesn't have a date and she said she doesn't want to third-wheel us or Sara.”

“Like it would be hard for her to get one.”

I choke back a laugh. “Yeah, you should go mention
that to her; just make sure there aren't any needles nearby.”

“Tell her to go anyway,” Park says. “What else has she got to do? Sit in a room full of stuffed animals with fake nipples?”

“Fair point,” I say. “I'll see what I can do.”

In my mind there is a scale.

I do not know how many small lives add up to a big one, or if there is a formula to work it out. How many cats do I have to save? How many dogs? How many injured animals on the road do I have to drag to safety, their blood on my hands, their wild-smelling hair on my clothes?

I think if there is a number then it must be very large, and so I keep my eyes open as I drive, when I run, as I walk through the halls at school. I've scooted spiders out of the path of heavy feet, let a field mouse in through the front door in the middle of winter, swerved on ice to miss raccoons. Everything I can think of, anything I can do to make it better.

I want to tell Jack that I'm doing these things, try to show him that if I don't have regret, exactly, then at least I have guilt. I've put the words together, stitched them into sentences at night, hoping in the morning I will have the courage to spit them out like a string, the others flowing more easily after the first. But Branley is always with him, her normalcy so big and bright that I don't want to put myself next to her, my darkness in stark contrast.

So I let it go. I feed the kittens. I listen to Park and Claire in their happiness and I pick up the next orphan in the box.

And the scale tips a tiny bit more.

My free ride came in, a magic carpet in the shape of a piece of paper that people took pictures of me signing.

Mom and Dad are smiling more, my future solidified by the swipe of a pen, though I know Mom's is bittersweet. And I can't even tell her I'll come home a lot, because I won't. Park is going to Kentucky, Branley is following me because her hooks don't extract easily, and the only other person I'd bother coming back for is Alex, who I can't think of without a wash of guilt and the taste of vomit in my throat.

They made a big announcement at school because we haven't had anybody get a full ride since pocket change could pay tuition. They even had the marching band follow me around playing the fight song during one of
the class changes. It was awkward and embarrassing and kind of awesome at the same time, and as I walked past the poster that has the senior countdown on it, I swear I choked up. Which doesn't make any sense because all I've ever wanted to do is leave, and I've got a new fight song to learn anyway.

Then I passed Park and he pretended to punch me in the gut and we wrestled each other down to the ground, and the band circled around us, still playing, because they didn't know what else to do. Which was so goddamn funny Park and I started laughing like idiots and then Peekay called us both assholes, and Park grabbed her ankle and pulled her down with us. She held her instrument in the air as she fell and screamed, “Not my trumpet!” which was equally hilarious.

It was a great fucking day, and I could pretend like there were tears in my eyes because I was laughing so hard. Nobody knew it was really because now that I get to leave there's a part of me that's going to miss this place, and nobody knew that when I passed Alex our eyes met, and I saw tears sitting in hers, too.

You do not just tell Alex Craft she is going to prom.

I'm pretty sure Alex has never done a single thing in her life that she didn't want to do, so finding a way to get her to prom is like casually suggesting to my dad that maybe he should consider Islam instead, just for variety.

Sara still needs a dress, so I told her we were taking Alex with us, hoping that somehow racks of dresses will have the same effect on her that depressed dogs in cages do. But Alex sits silently in the store, watching without comment as Sara parades around in a bunch of dresses. Open torso, slit to the hip, cut to the breastbone, skirt so short you can see the curve of her ass. Finally she puts on a deep purple one with an open back and Alex speaks up.

“That's the one,” she says.

They're the first words out of her mouth since she got in the car, so Sara actually listens. I've been spouting out compliments and advice for the better part of an hour. My arms are weighed down with a magenta “maybe” and a flamingo-pink “possibly,” but it's Alex's solitary comment that gets Sara's attention.

“Why?” she asks, brow furrowed skeptically as she glances over her shoulder at Alex.

“You've got great back muscles,” Alex says.

“I do, don't I?” Sara agrees, checking herself out in the three-way mirror. “So what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Let's see those back muscles, girl.”

Alex actually laughs, but she waves Sara off. “I'm not trying on dresses.”

“Why not?”

“She
claims
she's not going to prom,” I say.

Sara stops admiring herself and turns to glare at Alex. “Don't even tell me it's because of Jack Effing Fisher.”

“Not entirely,” Alex says. “I just don't want to go.”

Sara crosses her arms, and I'm very glad I'm still half-hidden behind a pile of dresses in my arms. “Because of Jack Effing Fisher.”

“I—”

“Listen.” Sara comes down the three steps from the
elevated mirror to stand in front of Alex, skirt swishing as she walks. “Last year when Alice told me I was just her experiment before she left for college, I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Like, totally and actually die. But did I do that?”

Alex looks her up and down slowly. “Apparently not.”

“I didn't want to go to school because she'd be there. I didn't want to go to practice because she'd be there. I didn't want to be a camp counselor, because she'd be there, too. So I had a choice: I could either not do
anything
for the rest of my life, or I could suck it up and act like it didn't bother me. And you know what? If you pretend long enough that it doesn't bother you, pretty soon it actually doesn't.”

“She's right,” I say, craning my neck over the pile of silk and satin in my arms. “Remember how I was about Adam?”

“Yeah,” Sara agrees, hands on her hips. “Pathetic.”

“Thanks a lot,” I shoot back.

Sara reaches over blindly and pulls a dress out of my arms, the flamingo-pink one with slashes in the torso. “So you're going to put on a dress, Alex Craft, and on Monday you're going to buy a prom ticket.”

“I don't think that's my color,” Alex says.

“Then pick your own damn dress,” Sara says, and punches her in the arm.

Alex punches her back, and I bet anything they're both going to have bruises, but it doesn't matter because Alex is going through the racks, sliding hangers aside to give each dress a once-over before moving on.

“Thanks,” I say to Sara.

“For what?”

“I've been racking my brains trying to think of a way to talk her into going to prom. I never considered just yelling and punching her till she caved.”

“Well, if nothing else works, we'll just leave a trail of cheeseburgers up to the country club,” Sara says.

“I heard that,” Alex's voice soars out from the racks.

“Don't tell me it wouldn't work,” Sara calls back.

Alex emerges with a few choices and we riffle through them, Sara sending her into the dressing room with firm instructions to make sure we see
all
of them, no cheating. I lean back in my chair while Sara tells me about the girl she's bringing from Waterloo, and I'm not thinking about Adam or Park or anything.

And it's really, really nice.