The Unraveling of Mercy Louis (10 page)

“First chance you get and you sell me down the river,” Annie says.

“What?” I say.

She crosses her arms over her chest. “Don't play dumb. You've always wanted me to be someone different. So you and Beau and Evelia planned to throw me a little party, whitewash the dirty girl.”

She has a way of saying a thing with such sneering conviction that it becomes truth.

“Annie, I'd never—”

“You think I did it, that's what this is about. You and Beau both.”

“No, I don't—”

“I don't want to hear it!” she bellows toward the ceiling, the veins in her neck rising beneath her skin, tiny trapped rivers of blood. When she looks at me again, her eyes glisten. “You were all I had, Mercy.”

Then she slams the door so hard, the brass knocker gives a single clap. She thinks I've told her secrets. And why should she trust that I haven't? I've judged her a thousand times, spent hours praying for her salvation.
At last,
I thought when Beau announced the Purity Ball.
Someone else to help save her
.

A
S SOON AS
Mama is in bed these summer nights, Illa flees the house. She gets in the car, cranks the AC, and heads for the seawall. She turns over in her mind the conversation about Charmaine, the knowledge of her mother's friendship with Mercy's mom warming her. But it also makes her sad. If Charmaine had stayed, maybe Illa and Mercy would have grown up playing together. Maybe instead of Annie, Illa would be the friend Mercy couldn't live without.

She wanders without a particular destination in mind, her school-issued Canon tucked comfortingly in the passenger seat. Dozens of times, she parks the Accord and scrambles outside to capture a promising shot: brown pelicans in V-formation cruising low over the water, watermelon-colored thickets of oleander tall as houses, the abandoned Pleasure Pier ablaze with a violent sunset, a fisherman in a floppy hat casting line from the end of a jetty, a smoky bank of thunderheads piling up at the horizon, the Gulf churning from the pull of a coming storm. The photo contest deadline is still a couple of weeks away; she probably won't be able to get a great shot, but she hasn't given up entirely. It's something to do, at least.

One evening, Janis Joplin singing about heartbreak on the radio, Illa ventures away from the coast into the industrial maze that is downtown Port Sabine.
Blighted,
a magazine had dubbed the downtown after the explosion. The word stuck with Illa so that whenever anything bad happened, she blamed it on Port Sabine. Like the terrible fight she had with Mama after Jay left them. “Good riddance,” Illa said of her stepdad, a pit bull of a man, all shoulder and no hip. Her mother snarled: “You don't have any idea what it means to be just another bitch without a man in this town.” The bite of the curse lingered in the air, shocking Illa because her mother usually spoke with a hushed gentleness, as if inside a library or church. She shook her head, a thin line of snot dangling from her reddened nose. “I was alone when your daddy died. I've seen what that life is like. You know what I remember about those days? Food stamps and bad men and a job so hard it nearly killed me.” She paused. “You're thirteen, though. You'll understand soon enough.”

To escape, Illa went for a bike ride through the neighborhood. After a few minutes, she was pedaling down deserted streets, darkened windows like eye sockets in the wan faces of paint-peeling homes, grass grown knee-high over concrete paths leading to locked front doors. Even the streetlamps stood lightless in some places, the city having cut power to the empty blocks. Illa stopped pedaling, brought her feet down on either side of the bike. For a minute, the sounds of her breathing filled the air, but soon even that faded against the silence. In the months since the explosion, to cope with the fines, the refinery had laid off hundreds of workers. Illa's eighth-grade class had shrunk to half its size. She looked down the street and counted the real estate signs that had popped up on lawns: eleven in total, the families gone before the houses sold because the market was bust. Everyone was leaving, not just Jay, and Illa had the feeling that she and Mama were being left behind.

How did Janis manage to get out?
Illa wonders as she steers the Accord farther inland. Did it require months of saving and planning, or did she just steal some of her mama's money and get on a bus? Maybe she's not the best model for escape, though, her tragic end somehow foretold by her bad beginnings in these swamplands.

Driving past Park Terrace with her window rolled down, Illa sees people playing ball on the park's old cracked court. When she rolls to a stop at a traffic light, she looks closer and sees that it isn't just people but Mercy Louis, summoned from an overactive corner of Illa's imagination, charging up and down the court as if she owns the night. As Illa idles at the light listening to the banter echoing up from the court, she considers driving into the park to catch some of the game. She scans the crowd for Annie's telltale blond ponytail; no way will Illa venture down there if Annie Putnam is lurking about. When the light changes, the driver on her tail blasts the horn.

“All right, all right,” she mutters, goosing the Accord so it leaps forward into the intersection. Better not to venture down. She'd be radically out of place sitting alongside the players' girlfriends, the pretty, brash Chicanas and black girls whose neon tank tops she can just make out in her rearview mirror, bright dots moving like Christmas lights in the dusky air.

Illa decides to go to Sonic for a diet limeade. Something about the roller-skating carhops and chemically bright, unnaturally sweet beverages cheers her, and she can scope out her classmates from the safety of the darkened car. In Port Sabine, Sonic is the place to promenade, strut, preen. Rising ninth-graders with dreams of high school dominance make their debuts at the drive-in, the girls done up like pageant contestants, wobbly in too-high wedge heels, the boys in ball caps and shit kickers.

Illa places her order, then slumps low in the seat to watch the social pantomime unfold. There is something predictable and easy about the way girls throw their french fries at boys whose shoulders seem perpetually raised in the posture of the offending male—
what'd I say?
The girls are masters of pouting and feigning injury. This Sonic dinner theater makes Illa feel at once superior and wretched. She doesn't want admission into the Sonic crowd—these are the girls who “get into trouble” and then get stuck in Port Sabine; each year a couple of big-bellied girls are banished to the pregnancy trailer to get their GEDs, and those are the ones who don't drop out altogether.
The fruits of abstinence-only sex ed,
Lennox says sardonically. But she's begun to feel that she would give almost anything to have one of the students recognize her and call her over. Do they even know a name to call her by other than Strange Stark?

On this particular Wednesday, the crowd is entirely female except for Ronald Tucker, a tenth-grade pipsqueak with a squishy, childlike face who might as well be one of the girls for all the attention they pay him. Illa recognizes most of the crew—Abby Williams and Marilee Warren and some nameless freshmen members of the Stingarette drill team who are doing their utmost to look as much like each other as possible. Without boys around, the girls are restless, looking past each other, surveying the parking lot for traces of testosterone, tossing hot-curled hair, rubbing glossed lips together to keep them wet and shining.

Over the drone of idling engines, snatches of conversation land near enough for Illa to hear: “ . . . such a fucking joke . . . think she's fooling . . . dunno, sometime in August . . . Annie Putnam is such a . . .”

At the mention of Annie's name, Illa sits up, straining to hear more, but it's hopeless with the big four-by-four trucks growling on either side of her. Soon, though, the truck-driving bubbas get their colas and burgers and disappear back onto the highway, taillights glowing red in retreat. With only the crickets and the skid of roller skates on concrete to compete with, the girls' high-pitched voices carry piercingly through the night.

“I'm going to go just to see her try to keep a straight face when she's saying the pledge.”

“Hate to break it to old Beauregard, but Annie's given away her
gift
so many times she's like the fucking Santa of sex,” Abby says.

“Not even a monthlong purity festival could change the color of that girl's soul.”

“Now, y'all, stop,” Marilee says cajolingly. “She's not a bad
person
.”

“Annie's not a person,” Abby says. “She's a snake.”

“Whatever, it's a good excuse to eat free steak,” Ronald says. “I'll pretend Annie's the Virgin Mary if it means I get me some filet.”

“You're probably not even invited,” one of the younger girls says.

“Whole town's invited, at least all the high school families,” Ronald says. “Invitations go out this week.”

“Oh, joy,” Abby says, picking intently at a scab on her knee.

Illa's confused. A Purity Ball for
Annie
? Annie isn't a Sonic girl—probably sees herself as too cool for it—but anyone with eyes in her head can see that Annie has a body and knows how to use it. Her bedroom eyes, the way she slinks hippily through the hallways.

A carhop skates up to Illa's window, balancing a diet limeade the size of a small child on her tray. Illa pays, tells the girl to keep the change. Annie is a lot of things, but she isn't a bullshitter, so why this farce of a ball? Has Mercy finally converted her best friend? The thought sends jealousy frothing through Illa.

“Think Annie'll join the virgin club, too?” Abby says. “Now that Marilee's been demoted, maybe Annie can be treasurer.”

“Oooooh, busted,” Ronald says.

“Shut up, Abby,” Marilee says.

“What? You're damaged goods now, sweetie. Want to be a hypocrite, too?”

“You said you weren't going to bring it up,” Marilee stutters. “You said you forgave me . . .”

“Yeah, well, I changed my mind.” Abby gives Marilee a steely look. “Should've thought twice before messing with Wyatt if you cared what I thought. Not to mention being dumb enough to get caught.”

Marilee stalks off toward the street, stumbling in her high heels, face pinched. Illa puts the car in reverse, then loops around the parking lot and back onto the road. As she passes Marilee, she considers giving her a ride but stops herself. Better not to get involved. Her only interaction with Marilee was at a virgin club meeting last spring when she handed Illa a flyer about
how to be a crusader against the abortion genocide
. Illa had gone to the meeting to see if Mercy would be there, but she wasn't, and the president, Tiffany Barnes, spent the bulk of the lunch hour taking roll. Apparently, the most important part of the True Love Waits club was showing up.

Illa surprised herself by returning to a couple more meetings, hoping that a club dedicated to abstinence would involve at least a
little
talk about sex. It didn't, but Illa took some comfort in being surrounded by other girls who were just as inexperienced as she was. After roll call, Tiffany opened by quoting Matthew,
I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
One of the girls asked how you know if you're looking
lustfully
or just looking, and Tiffany described how lust felt: your heart would beat fast, you'd feel tingly or short of breath. You might start focusing on the person's body, imagining yourself touching him.
Fight those thoughts!
she warned.
They're dangerous because they could lead to action!

Illa thinks of all the times she's watched Mercy—on the court, in the locker room, in class, that day in the shower—heart thumping like a bass drum, stomach fluttery to the point of sickness. And what about Lennox? They talk all the time, but whenever he leans near her to scrutinize something in the rough draft of the paper pasted on the layout board, she has to grip her pen extra tight to keep her hand from shaking. Whenever she tries to let her feelings blossom into fantasies, just to see where they'll take her, she freezes up. Not from squeamishness but simply because she doesn't technically know how a crush is supposed to transition into something more—a date, a kiss,
sex.
How do people go from behaving normally to ripping each other's clothes off? There's something inherently confusing in the logistics of it. She's overthinking it, and that's her problem: she doesn't know how to just
act.

Fat raindrops plash against the windshield, unsettling its coat of dust. Somewhere over the Gulf, thunder speaks. Through the window, the air smells of wet asphalt and earth. If the whole town is invited to Annie's ball, that means Mama, too. While Illa doubts her mother will want to go—she hasn't wanted to do anything social in the last three years—Illa can't risk the slim chance that Mama will accept the invitation. She usually lets Mama check the mail, since doing so guarantees she'll see sunlight once a day, but Illa decides that for the next few weeks, she'll get to the mailbox first in case the invitation lands. That way, she can squirrel it away upstairs to ensure she won't have to roll Mama into that party in front of the whole town.