The Witch (7 page)

“So . . .” All her questions began with a so. “Does Lance have a girlfriend? I mean a real girlfriend.”

Could you have a fake girlfriend? Never mind. He allowed himself a glance at Shawna's nest-like crotch, visible beneath the layer of filmy fabric. He saw where this line of questioning
was going. You didn't need an entire functioning brain for that. He said, “Lance is still out there looking for true love.”

“Really?” The pinkness that was Shawna rolled and rippled beneath the pinkness of her pajamas. She sat with him awhile longer before she wandered away.

They visited a half dozen more girl-houses. It was pretty much the same story. The girls got the roses and Lance got the girls. It was a little depressing, even though Lance tried to cheer him up. “It's only the low-hanging fruit of flirtation. Shooting the breezy breeze. Chitchat love.”

“Uh-huh.” Lance was just being nice. There had been no sign of the shoe girl, but Royboy also seemed to have dodged the other girl who was mad at him. So he guessed he was breaking even, though it didn't feel like it.

“How we doing on roses?” Lance asked, and Royboy checked out the back of the van.

“Low,” he reported. “Down to about an eighth of a tank.”

“All right, let's say, one more stop. This hasn't been a total waste of time, now, has it? We're getting you out and about. Increasing your social visibility. Providing practice in the conversational arts.”

“I don't have any conversational arts.”

Lance didn't bother arguing with him. “So you're the nonverbal type. Strong and silent and solvent. That's not nothing. Grab that bucket, would you? We might as well do one big rose dump.”

They parked the van in front of what looked like the girl equivalent of their own rented house. A little shabby and saggy, like their own, but with better curtains and no old newspapers on the porch. Lance rang the bell and ran through a list of names under his breath: “Alexa, Alissa, Amber, Andrea . . .” The
door opened and a girl with a round face looked out. “Angela! How's the party girl?”

Lance stepped through the open door and held the roses out. Angela didn't take them. She sniffed, a long, soggy sound. “Are those because of Mr. Whipple?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Mr. Whipple died. Our cat.” She regarded the roses bleakly. “He wasn't even sick or anything.” She sniffed again, her nose turning pink.

“Aw honey, I'm so sorry. I didn't know.”

“We took him to the emergency vet and they gave him some fluids and shots and all, but his kidneys shut down. We had him since he was a little, little kitten.”

“That is so sad. Poor kitty.” Lance, recalibrating, all sympathy. Royboy tried to look sad as well.

“We still have all his toys. His catnip mouse. His furry bunny.”

Lance offered the roses again. “Why don't you take these to cheer you up. Is anybody else home?”

“Yeah.” She called up the stairs. “Lance and some guy are here.” She blinked moistly at the roses. “These are pretty. We could make a little wreath or something for him.”

“You could,” Lance said, giving Royboy a look that meant they wouldn't be staying long.

Two more girls came down the staircase, both of them looking subdued, bleakly mourning. Royboy gave Lance a discreet shake of the head. Nope. Nope. “Hey Lance,” one of them said. “The cat died. It sucks.”

“I know. But I bet there's some other little kitty out there right now who's waiting for you to bring him home and love him. Or her.”

“That's a nice thought, I guess.” Both the girls plopped down
on the couch next to each other and stared at them. “Did you want a beer or something?”

“I think we're out of beer,” the second girl said.

“We don't really need anything,” Lance said. “I can see you aren't up for company right now.”

Angela came back in then, with the roses crowded into a too-small jar. “This was all I could find.”

One of the girls on the couch said, “Did you bring these? What's the occasion?”

Lance said, “Oh, it's just something Roy and I thought—”

The girls interrupted, galvanized. “Roy? He's Roy?”

“
The
Roy?”

All three of them were looking at him in a not-friendly way, like he was the one who killed their cat. Royboy shook his head at Lance: No clue. “I don't think I'm
The
Roy,” he said.

“Buddy, you better hope you're not.”

Lance said, “Maybe we could back this up a little. What's my bud here been up to? He's sort of cloudy on the details.” Royboy nodded, trying to look humble and at the same time injured at being unjustly accused of whatever it was he did.

The girls weren't having any of it. “He has some nerve, showing up here. What's he trying to do to her, pretend it was all some big joke? It's not like she gets out much.”

“Through no fault of her own,” another girl said, loyally. “Men just don't make the effort with her.”

“Her who? What? Guys! I mean, you're not actually guys, sorry.” Royboy tried laughing this off. Ha ha. “Who?” he asked again.

“Laura. Don't tell me you don't even remember her name. Laura, your fiancée? Of course the getting married part was a little over-the-top.”

“I am going to marry her. I just don't remember that much about her.”

“So not funny,” remarked one girl, shaking her head.

“Did she hit me the other night? I mean, I'm sure I deserved it.”

“That happen to you a lot? Getting punched out? Yes, she hit you.”

Royboy was relieved. He was at least in the right house. “I remember her hitting me. The other stuff, not so much.”

“The old ‘I was way drunk' excuse,” sneered another girl. “Not very original.”

“I don't remember if I was way drunk.”

Lance said, “See, Roy has some brain issues.”

“Now that is original.”

“Seriously. It's like amnesia, but in small doses.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The result of getting smashed up by a car when he was a kid.”

The girls looked at one another, wondering if they were getting scammed, or were required instead to feel bad on his behalf. One of them said, “Should he be out walking around loose? Allowed to reproduce?”

Royboy said, “That's a little harsh.”

Lance tried again. “See, he's looking for the girl of his dreams. He found her but he lost her because he had one of his memory lapses.”

“Well she sure remembers him.”

Who? Who? Royboy was about to say, when the front door opened and all three girls began making furious motions with their hands, pinching and cutting at the air. What the? A girl with her dark hair in pigtails stood in the entry. It was her! The
shoe girl! Waves of rainbow-colored love pulsed from Royboy's inner core.

The shoe girl scowled at Roy. “Hey,” he said. “Nice to see you again.” He thought she looked pretty, even if her expression was not so friendly. She looked like a little brown bird would look if you turned it into a girl.

“She can't hear you,” Angela said, scooping and swooping with her arms and hands. The shoe girl did the same, looking agitated. “She says, ‘Did he have sex with the,' I think she called her, the witch. Or maybe it was the other thing.”

“No! But did we, I mean, her and me . . .”

“This is such an unusual situation,” Lance remarked.

Angela said, “She wants her shoe back. You were sleeping on top of it and she couldn't wake you up.”

“Oh, sure.” Royboy nodded. “Not a problem. But why did she run off?”

Angela relayed this. The shoe girl spoke. She had a deaf voice, a little rusty. “I was afraid.” Then she reverted back to sign language, which Angela translated as, “Embarrassed.”

“Overwhelmed, maybe,” Lance suggested, “by Roy's powerful love vibe, and his proposal of marriage, which was heartfelt but perhaps premature.”

Once this was translated, the girl nodded. Roy said, “Ask her if she wants to get married.”

“Baby steps, Roy. Baby steps.”

Laura! The name rang like a doorbell, and from somewhere in a back hallway, Royboy's memory roused itself to answer. “We talked about stuff! I know we did, how did we do that? Hey, Laura!” He stooped to peer into her face. She looked wary. Confused. Well, so was he.

Royboy straightened again. Stepped up to the plate. “Lance, help me out here.”

“What Roy means is, she made him breathe a new air. He's a changed man. He's smitten. Something like that?”

“Yeah,” Royboy said. “Go on.” Angela was translating as fast as she could, whipping the fingers of both hands into lines, circles, shapes.

“How can we understand these things? Two separate souls, circulating around each other like electrons around the nucleus of an atom.”

“Not electrons,” Royboy objected.

“Two incomplete halves made whole. Finding each other against all odds. Is it destiny? Enchantment? Scientists fail to find explanations. Poets keep trying. Our boy here, he might suffer from a small, hardly noticeable intellectual deficiency. But his heart is an off-the-charts genius. Did we mention he has a little money?”

Royboy turned to Angela. “Teach me some of the whaddyacallit. Signs. How do you say ‘Hello'?”

“It's like a salute,” Angela said. “Hand up to the forehead. That's it.”

Royboy saluted. He watched Laura's hand waver, then slowly, slowly come up to return his greeting. Hello. Hello. Destiny? Enchantment? Magic? Mistake? Shall we
dance?

Her mother liked to stand at the bottom of the stairs and shout up at her. Her mother had knee problems from being totally gross and fat and she didn't climb stairs unless she had to. “Janice! Jan-
ice
!”

Janice let her mother go on for a while, then she opened the bedroom door and looked out. “What?”

“Don't what me. Turn that noise off, nobody wants to hear it. I need you to take Nana's supper to her. You are not wearing that. I don't care. You turn right around and put on a real shirt.”

Janice took her time. When she got downstairs, her mother gave her one of her looks. “What?” Janice said again.

“What do you do up there all day anyway?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, you can do nothing downstairs.”

Janice didn't bother answering. Her mother didn't really want her hanging around downstairs where they'd have to put up with each other. She was just being her usual hag self. Janice
went into the kitchen and sniffed at the plastic container on the counter. Dark beads of moisture bubbled up under the plastic lid. “What's this?”

“Chicken and noodles.”

“It looks like dead worms.”

“Nice. It's your supper too.”

“I don't want any, I'm on a diet.”

“You don't need to be on any diet, you need to not eat chips and soda and all that greasy crap. Go ahead, don't believe me, someday you'll wake up with three or four extra inches on your hips and wonder how they got there. Now heat this up on the top of the stove with a little water, put it in a bowl for her, and make sure she's eating. Then come straight home.”

Only her mother would make chicken and noodles when it was a hundred degrees outside. Her mother was the last one to be talking about what to eat. Her butt was as big as a garbage truck.

Her mother tied a plastic bag tight around the plastic container, then put it in another plastic bag. You could have shot the thing out of a cannon and still been able to eat it. She flapped her mouth some more as Janice was leaving, about how Janice wasn't as smart as she thought she was and it was all going to catch up with her someday and Janice said, “Yeah, sure.” Her mother made it sound like she'd be glad if something really horrible happened, just so she could say she was right.

Janice opened the kitchen door and went down the back outside stairs. Their tenant in the basement apartment, Mr. Grotius, had his air conditioner blasting. He was probably sitting right in front of it in his old-man underwear. It was the hottest part of the day. Nana always ate her dinner way too early. The sky was
flat and gray with heat, like another sidewalk reflected overhead. It was only June and already Janice was bored with summer.

Once she'd reached the alley and turned the corner, Janice took off her cotton shirt and tied it around her waist. Her mother wouldn't let her wear tank tops outside the house, which was so ignorant. Janice texted Marilee to meet her at the A&W and Marilee texted back OK. It wasn't like there was some big hurry to get to Nana's. Nana didn't think about eating until you put the food right in front of her.

Janice got to the A&W first and stood in line to get a root beer float. She sat down with it at a table in the front so she could see Marilee coming. The cool inside air made her bare arms prickle. The vinyl seat was cold too and she hiked up the legs of her shorts so the skin of her thighs was right up against the cold surface. She shifted her weight from one side to another, experimentally.

“What are you doing?”

Marilee had come in without her noticing. “Nothing,” Janice said, getting busy with her root beer float.

“Well it looked extra queer. I don't know what I want. Split some fries?”

Janice said maybe she'd have a few, and Marilee got up to order. There was nobody interesting in the place. Like anybody interesting lived in the whole stupid town.

Marilee came back with the fries on a tray. She'd already squirted ketchup all over them.

“I don't want ketchup,” Janice said.

“Then get your own.”

“You could of just put the ketchup on the side.”

“Big honking frigging deal,” Marilee said, picking up a fry
and wagging it. They were best friends, but they were the kind of friends who had a lot of fights over stupid things when really it was all about who was hotter, Janice or Marilee. Marilee had prettier hair, straight and blond, but Janice was further along in the boobs department.

They might have gone on fighting, just because they were bored, but right then Richie Cruz and two of his buddies came in. Janice and Marilee agreed that Richie was hot. But really he was cool and smooth, like ice cream, like you could lick him all over. He had a curvy mouth and green eyes and beautiful black hair and all that was just from the neck up.

Janice's mother said that under no circumstances was Janice to have anything to do with Puerto Rican boys, who were even worse than any other kind. She said they acted like they owned every woman on the street, those Ricans, them and their wolf whistles. Which Janice thought was completely stupid; who ever heard of a wolf whistling?

“What are you doing? Don't look at him,” Marilee ordered.

“Like he would care what I'm looking at.” Richie was sixteen and they were just little punks that he ignored.

“You're looking right at his ass.”

“Then he can't see me unless he turns around.”

Marilee hissed at her to be quiet. One of Richie's friends was staring straight at them. He laughed and said something to Richie. Janice felt her face going red. Her ears buzzed with shame. “Real suave,” Marilee remarked.

Janice ducked her chin. “What's he doing now?”

“Richie? Nothing. Anyway, I am not looking at him!”

Maybe Richie had girls checking out his ass all the time and was used to it. She felt so majorly stupid, she wanted to get up and run out of there, but that would be even worse. She stared
at her knees and hoped the boys weren't going to sit down, and then she hoped they would, and Richie would check her out, his amazing green eyes finally turning her way, and she would speak up and say, “See anything you like?”

Marilee kicked her under the table. Janice looked up to see the boys headed for the door with their food. Richie was already past them, his beautiful head silhouetted against the glass, but his friend, the one who had laughed, turned around and grinned and did something dirty with his tongue, wiggling the tip of it between his teeth. Marilee and Janice both said, “Ugh!”

“That was nasty,” Janice said.

“Totally.”

“What do you think he said to Richie?” She had a sick feeling about that.

“Oh, probably, ‘There's a little slut over there who wants to give you a blow job.'”

“Shut up.”

“Well you do. You would.”

“Oh sure, like you wouldn't, if he wanted you to.”

“I would not,” Marilee said, and it was her turn to go red in the face, a blotchy red because she had such pale skin. One of their arguments that circled around and around had to do with Janice being a slut and Marilee being a stuck-up prude. There was a lot of stuff she didn't tell Marilee anymore.

Janice ate another french fry, even though it was cold and covered in ketchup. What was the point of arguing about Richie? Neither of them was ever going to say two words to him.

“I have to get to my grandma's and back home before my mom wets her pants.”

“Your brother's outside,” Marilee said, pointing.

“Oh, perfect.” Her brother Jason was two years younger, and
a complete brat. They got up to go and Marilee asked what she was doing tonight and Janice said nothing, maybe they could hang out, text me, and Marilee said she would. They weren't really mad at each other but Janice thought that someday they might be.

Jason and two of his little punk friends were riding their bikes down the stairs of the post office, trying to smash their brains in. “Hi freak,” he greeted her.

“Bye freak.”

“You're supposed to be at Nana's. I'm telling Mom.”

“Go ahead, asshole.”

“I'm telling Mom you said asshole.”

“I am so, so scared.”

“I'll tell her you took your shirt off.”

Janice gave him the finger and walked on. The chicken and noodles were heavy and it was hard to keep the plastic bag from knocking into her bare leg. It was still hotter than sin outside, the kind of aggravating heat that made you want to scratch all your itchy parts into a rash. She looked up and down the street for Richie and his friends, but of course they'd gone. Still it was something to have seen him, like getting close to somebody famous, and if he came into the A&W once, maybe he'd come in again.

She had a hundred daydreams about how Richie and her would end up together. Sometimes there was a fire or a car crash and he saved her. Sometimes she saved him. There were other versions in which they got to know each other in unexpected and dramatic ways. But sometimes she didn't bother with any of these, and let Richie put his hands all over her and peel her like an orange, and why couldn't it be easy like that?
Instead of all the stupid teasing and hooting and things you weren't supposed to do except everybody did.

Nana lived in an apartment above a used-furniture store. Everything about her neighborhood was weird and depressing: the bakery with the cardboard wedding cake in the window and the dusty bride and groom on top, the lawyer's office with his name spelled out in English and in Hebrew, the barbershop that was never open, probably because nobody around here had hair anymore. Nana wouldn't move, even though Janice's mother kept after her to. She was afraid of ending up in the nursing home. When people got old like Nana, Janice's mother said, they got very excited about the idea of dying in their own beds.

Janice rang Nana's doorbell, then let herself in with her key. “Hi Nana, I brought your dinner,” she called, in case Nana had forgotten she was coming over and thought somebody had broken in, or maybe was having an embarrassing bathroom episode. “Yoo-hoo, Nana?”

Nana was in her usual chair where she could see the television and look out the window, depending on which way she turned. She was as fat as Janice's mother, but shorter, like a car or something heavy had landed on her head and squashed her down. She wore one of her dresses that didn't quite button up over her shelf of bosom, so you saw the big white cotton bra underneath. It didn't really matter what Nana looked like since she never went anywhere. The television was on loud, some kind of talk show. “Hi Nana, are you hungry? Mom made you chicken and noodles.”

Nana shifted around in her chair to see Janice better. “Put on some clothes.”

She'd forgotten. “All right, Nana, it's just really hot outside.
It's hot in here too, is your air conditioner working?” Janice untied the shirt from around her waist and put her arms through the sleeves. Why couldn't anybody ever give her a break? “How are you today?”

“I have bad blood, maybe cancer.”

“Well I bet you'll feel better once you have your dinner. Do you want to eat there? Or sit at the table?”

Nana pushed her way up from her chair and stumped over to the kitchen table. Janice was quick to turn the television down. She helped Nana get herself settled. Nana wore an old-fashioned hairnet, the kind you could use to catch fish, and her white scalp showed through her hair. Nana wasn't even all that old, seventy-two or -three, but she might as well have been a hundred. It was the same with Janice's mother, who was only forty, but she'd decided to give up on her looks and be somebody who never shaved her legs.

Janice dumped the chicken and noodles and some tap water into a pot on the stove. It was a solid, stuck-together mess and she prodded at it with a wooden spoon. Nana said, “Tell your mother, I need soap. Pink soap.”

“All right.”

“And rubber bands. It was on the television, about that girl.”

“What girl?” Janice said, though she pretty much knew already.

“The one who run off and they couldn't find. They found her. All cut up.”

“I don't want to hear about it, Nana.”

“All cut up and thrown out like the trash. You know what they do to her first?”

“No, and don't tell me. That's—” There was a word for her grandmother always telling her the worst, most horrible stories,
about girls getting raped and murdered and ending up in landfills or somebody's freezer, a really good word, but she couldn't think of it. “—sick.”

“She was a bad girl.”

“How do you know that, Nana? Whoever hurt her, he's the bad one.”

“She run off.”

“Well maybe she had a good reason for it.”

“No good reason. That thing between your legs? You can't see it but anybody else in the world can if they want to. Remember.”

“That's sick,” Janice said again. Sick was the clump of gluey food in the saucepan. It was the hot apartment and the shivery burning that rose up in her. Nana reached out and touched the back of Janice's bare leg with her fat soft finger, and Janice let out a little shriek. “Don't touch me!”