Torn Away (14 page)

I made a mental note to draw that on gum foil later. I didn’t want to forget the bubble song.

When I was done, I opened the fridge and took inventory. I had no idea what dinner had been, but whatever it was, there were no leftovers. Instead, I made myself a sandwich and cut up a few slices of cucumber. I didn’t know if the ingredients were spoken for, but I figured they couldn’t starve me. If nobody was going to take care of me, I would have to take care of myself and live with the consequences.

As I sat down with my food, I heard the sound of footsteps on the wooden basement stairs. Aunt Terry appeared at the top of the steps, holding the laundry basket I’d left behind earlier in the day. She extended her arms toward me.

“I brought your laundry up,” she said, setting the basket on the table next to me.

I swallowed. “Thank you.”

“I heard what happened this afternoon.” She pulled out a chair and sat down. “Clay’s all upset because he’s got to do a little work. It’ll be good for him.”

I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand and set the sandwich on my plate. “I just wanted out of the basement. I kind of freaked. It’s stupid, I know.”

Terry waved her hand. “It’s not stupid. I get it. Listen, don’t take what they say to heart.” She ran her fingernail along the side of the basket, tracing the squares. “Lexi and Meg. They’re just jealous of you.”

“Jealous? Of me?” What did I have that they could possibly be jealous of? They were prettier, they had a mom and
dad, and from what I could tell, they had everyone in the house—except for maybe Terry—eating out of the palms of their pretty little hands.

“Maybe I should’ve said they’re threatened by you. They think you’re gonna steal their daddy.”

I took a breath. “I feel like nobody wants me here.”

“They don’t,” she said. “But maybe they’ll come around. You never know. Weirder things have happened.”

But something told me that wasn’t going to happen. Even if Lexi and Meg found a way to completely ignore that I existed, they would never “come around.” Not really. If I was looking for friendship, I was in the wrong place.

“I should probably get myself to bed,” Terry said, pushing up from the table with a grunt. “Hey, did you ever find out about the funerals? Are they sometime soon?”

I shook my head. “I missed them.”

She froze, and I nearly melted under her sad gaze. “Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” And then, seemingly struggling with what else to say, she gave up and disappeared down the hall toward her bedroom.

I ate my sandwich in silence, hating how it seemed like everything in my life suddenly could be summed up by that one sentence: “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

After I finished eating, I washed my plate and changed into a pair of Terry’s pajamas, then went back outside, staying on the porch like the family dog. The air felt crisp and cool, summer night air, and I rolled all of my new clean clothes into tight rolls and slipped them, one by one, into the backpack, which I shoved into its spot behind the couch with Marin’s purse.

I curled up in my blanket and listened to the night sounds around me—crickets and frogs and cicadas and barking dogs—and tried not to think about this being my new reality, even while I knew it was.

Nobody was coming to rescue me. Nobody was going to keep me safe. It was all up to me now.

Over the next few weeks, I slipped into a routine at my grandparents’ house. Get up, sneak to the shower, get dressed, wash the morning dishes, eat. Go outside, fold my bedding, play cards, think about Mom and Marin, and lie as low as possible until night fell, hoping nobody would bother me once I was asleep.

Ignore my half sisters.

Ignore my father and stepmother.

Ignore the grunts and orders of my grandparents.

Ignore, ignore, ignore.

I wrote a bunch of new foils.

Marin’s hair bounces when she runs
.

I call Marin “Tippy” because she walks on her tiptoes
.

Marin knows everything there is to know about dolphins
.

Marin’s eyes sparkle when she dances
.

Marin is a princess in orange-and-black velvet
.

Marin sings in the bath
.

Marin likes red Popsicles the best
.

Marin can roller-skate
.

Marin’s eyelashes are so long
.

For every foil, there was a memory, so sweet and so clear I thought my heart might break in two. Not saying good-bye to them messed with me, made me mentally curl in on myself, made me pull away. I stopped checking my phone for texts. I stopped calling Dani. I stopped caring what happened to Ronnie or to anyone who wasn’t me. In my mind, even Ronnie wasn’t grieving as hard as I was, because he at least got to go to the funerals and I hadn’t even gotten that much.

Instead, I owned my grief. Turned it into something physical and ugly and carried it around in my gut.

“Hey,” I heard one morning while I sat on my couch, staring at the world sullenly through the wet ends of my hair. I picked at the dry skin on my heels, softened by the shower, and zoned out, the tiny squares of the porch screen getting bigger and bigger under my gaze. Aunt Terry stepped out onto the porch, sat in the lawn chair Clay had pulled out that first night and nobody had bothered to put back. “I haven’t talked to you in days. You okay?”

I tore my gaze away from the yard and blinked, her face shaded in purple where the light had been in my eyes a few moments before. “Not really,” I said.

“You seen your dad lately?”

I shook my head. I’d been avoiding him, and especially Tonette, ever since she’d screamed at me for “taking the last burger” the one night I tried to eat dinner with the family.

“You didn’t even think other people might want to eat, did you?” she’d yelled.

Why would I?
I wanted to respond.
Who is thinking about me? Who is making sure I get anything?

“Has he checked on you at all?” Terry asked, referring to Clay.

“No, but I kind of like it that way,” I said. “When he’s checking on me, he’s yelling at me. Tonette, too.”

I half expected Terry to argue about it, to tell me that yelling was Tonette’s way or that Clay was the kind of guy who didn’t show his feelings, or maybe worst of all, to say the same thing Dani’s mom had said, that this would take time. But she didn’t say any of those things. Because she knew I was right.

“You need a mama,” she finally said, very quietly.

I shrugged, numb, and pulled a hunk of dead skin off my heel, letting it drop to the peeling wood floor. Yes, I did need a mama. But my mama was gone. And nobody else could stand in. The end. “Whatever,” I said. “Doesn’t matter.”

“I can’t be your mama, you understand. I can’t even take care of my own kids most of the time,” Terry added.

“I know.”

“And Billie ain’t a good mama, take my word for that.”

I didn’t need to take her word for it. I’d already seen what kind of mom Billie was. “I know.”

“And Tonette spoils those girls. She don’t even know what they’re really like, she’s so blind.”

I shrugged again. It didn’t matter what Tonette saw or didn’t see in those girls. It only mattered what she saw and didn’t see in me.

“Listen, I don’t got a ton of money, but how about we go into town and get haircuts or something?” Terry asked.

“Haircuts?”

She shrugged, a sheepish smile crossing her face. “I got boys. Haircuts is the best I can do with a girl.”

It occurred to me that nobody was going to say one way or another whether I needed or didn’t need a haircut. Or a visit to the dentist. Or to study or to learn to drive or to eat regularly or do any of the things I was used to being reminded to do. It was all up to me now, a thought that was both empowering and frightening as hell.

“Okay,” I said, my hands searching the back of my hair involuntarily. “I could use a haircut.”

Terry left the boys with Grandmother Billie and we scooted into the car Grandfather Harold had picked me up from the motel in. It was the first time I’d left the house since I’d arrived there. I sat in the front seat, holding Marin’s purse in my lap, more out of habit than because I needed it for anything, and marveled at how close the main strip of town was. Out on my porch, I’d felt so very far away from the rest of the world. Five or ten minutes on foot would have had me at the first gas station, another five would have gotten me to the teeny movie theater. Another five would have gotten me to pretty much anywhere else I wanted to be. How odd to feel so isolated when civilization was literally all around you.

Terry pulled up to a strip mall and swung into a parking space outside a shop called Karrie’s Kut ’N Kolor.

Inside, I was immediately swept away by the smell. Taken to so many different places in my past that I almost felt pulled
apart. Times I’d been with Mom, nervously waiting for a color to set or for a new cut to be revealed. Times we’d taken Marin so she could get her tiny nails painted. Times I’d gone with Dani and her mom for pedicures or waited for Jane to get highlights done.

The last time I’d been in a beauty salon had been the weekend before the tornado, getting my hair fixed for prom.

Dani and Jane and I had decided to go as each other’s dates, even though Dani had been asked by three different guys and Jane had sort of started seeing a boy she’d met at an orchestra competition in April, and I probably could have talked Kolby into going with me.

But we’d made the decision that senior prom was for dates and romantic dinners and swanky nights out; junior prom was for fun. This was our “fun” year.

We’d gone all out. Big, floor-length poufy formals filled with tulle that ate us up when we sat down. Expensive mani-pedis and updos, sparkly shoes that we kicked off the second we hit the dance floor and ignored for the rest of the night, dinner at Froggy’s, where we played video games while we waited for our food.

It had been so much fun.

And I had completely forgotten about it until I smelled the astringent odors of permanents and hair dyes and nail polish and remover and glue. My old life was that far away. Gone. As if the tornado’s damage would never be complete. It had destroyed my present, laid waste to my future, and was now busy eating up my history, too, as I forgot what life was like before.

“May I help you?” a pink-haired woman said, peering up at us over a massive marble countertop.

“We’d like to get our hair done,” Terry said. “Whoever’s available is fine.”

The woman ran her sparkly black-tipped fingernail down a schedule book, then called over her shoulder, “Jonas? You got time for two walk-ins?”

“Yep,” a voice called, and she motioned for Terry to head back to wherever the voice had come from.

“Come on,” Terry said, grabbing the sleeve of my shirt between her two fingers. “You can help me decide what to do. I haven’t had my hair done in a shop in prolly ten years. Always just have Billie cut it.”

We made our way back to the salon chair, where a man wearing all black and practically dripping in pomade assessed us over a pair of round-rimmed spectacles.

“Ladies,” he said. “Who’s first?”

I pointed at Terry, and she sat down in the chair, bashfully taking in her image in the mirror. Her hair was long and limp, hanging halfway down her back in split-ended clumps. Jonas ran his fingers through it appraisingly.

“What are we doing?” he asked, and Terry looked over at me, questioningly, almost panicky.

I shrugged. “What do you want? Short?”

She giggled. “I don’t know. I never did this before.” She turned back to the mirror and studied her reflection, twisting her head to one side, then the other. “Yeah. Okay. Short will work.” She glanced at me again. “Something fun, right? A
change. A new me.” She reached over and squeezed my hand, the feeling so foreign I almost yanked it away, but caught myself. “We both need reinvention, don’t we?”

I nodded. Why not? She was totally right. It hadn’t been my choice to reinvent myself. It had been thrust upon me and it sucked. But here I was in my crappy circumstances. This was my life now. Why not make a whole new Jersey? Start over. Who was going to notice, anyway? “Let’s get color, too,” I said, squeezing back.

She bit her lip and then nodded. “Why not? Let’s splurge a little.”

Three hours later, we walked out of Karrie’s Kut ’N Kolor, our hair cut in sharp punk strips around our faces. Terry’s was dyed a solid hot pink. Mine was brilliant purple. We giggled as we got into the car.

“You like it?” Terry asked, pulling down the visor so she could look in the mirror. She played with the ends of her hair.

“It’s definitely different,” I said. “Mom would hate it.” I pressed my lips together. Up until this point, I’d only mentioned my mom when explaining to someone that she was gone, had kept her alive only inside myself. Did it make her more gone if I started talking about her in casual conversation? Did it make her more gone if I did things like dye my hair a color she would have hated?

All of a sudden I felt ashamed. Mom was barely gone. The dirt was probably still fresh on her grave. How dare I make a decision like this without her? How could I be so selfish? I had an urge to run back inside and have Jonas do it all back the way it was. Cut it blunt across the bottom, dye it brown.

“Your grandmother is definitely going to hate it,” Terry said. “Which makes me like it all the more.” She grinned at me wickedly, then reached over and felt my hair with her fingers. “You look dark and mysterious,” she said.

Just what I needed—to look as dark as I felt on the inside.

Terry was right—Grandmother Billie hated our color choices. She called us tramps and ranted and raved that next thing we’d be getting tattoos and having our faces pierced, and she asked Terry if she thought hanging around with me was going to make her young and beautiful, because it wasn’t.

The yelling created the kind of scene the family loved to flock to, and before I knew it, Lexi and Meg were standing in the living room doorway, taking it all in with matching smirks on their faces, staring at my hair as if it were so stupid and childish it made them want to laugh.

But the second Tonette came home from work, they started howling about how they wanted colored hair too.

“It’s not fair!” Lexi cried, actually squeezing out a few dumb tears. “Terry never got
us
hairdos. Why should
she
get one? Just because she’s new.”

“You said she wouldn’t get any special treatment,” Meg added. “This looks pretty special to me.”

On and on it went, and I could see Tonette’s body grow more and more rigid with anger as they begged. Could see her start to formulate in her head how out of line I was for coming into the house with colored hair.

I knew better than to stick around and wait to see what would happen. I scurried into the kitchen, grabbed a piece of
cheese and a banana, and went outside, sneaking right through the porch and around the house with my food.

I kept walking when I reached the end of the driveway, heading back downtown without even realizing that was where I’d decided to go.

I peered in the windows of the shops as I walked from one strip mall to the next, barely recognizing the girl with the purple hair walking opposite me every time I caught my reflection. I fantasized about the things I saw displayed in the windows, remembering how I’d always complained to Mom about how poor we were.

“I have nothing compared to what Jane and Dani have,” I used to tell her.

“Well, Jane’s and Dani’s dads are attorneys,” Mom always answered. “But they look so miserable, don’t you think?”

“No. They look happy. Because they have flat-screen TVs and video-game systems and nice jeans. I have crappy jeans. And Dani’s dad is an accountant, by the way.”

“Well, he’s got a lawyer air about him,” she’d say, waving her hand dismissively. “Whatever he is, he makes more money than we do and that’s just part of life.”

“But I’m sick of always being the poor one.”

“You can get a job if you hate it so much,” Mom had said. I’d turned sixteen last July. I was planning to get a job this summer. Hopefully at the community pool. But it, too, had been destroyed by the tornado.
Whoosh.
There went something else—my plans—cycloning into the summer sky.

I’d hated how Mom could never afford to spoil me the way my friends were spoiled by their parents. But we were nowhere near as poor as the people living in my grandparents’ house. And now I had nothing. Not even the jeans I used to think were so crappy. Funny how “crappy” turns into something better when you compare it to “nothing at all.”

I wandered into a bookstore—one of those cushy ones with the soft armchairs and ambient lighting. The kind of store where people come to kick back, eat a cinnamon roll, and read half a book before buying it. There was a little coffee shop inside the store, and my mouth watered at the smell of the strong coffee, the sound of the cappuccino machine whirring and grinding. People sat at the tables with their laptops open, nibbling on brownies and bagels and sipping out of paper cups while tapping away on their keyboards. This was the life that was familiar to me, and I wanted to cry, I was so happy to have found it.