Dark Water - Laura McNeal [52]
“This is America,” I said. “Right? In America, we’re the same. Equal.”
He didn’t answer me.
I considered the other reasons a boy might break away from kissing me, such as my weird eyeballs and lack of Greenie-size boobs. “What is it?” I asked him in a miserable voice, one that made me feel and sound like a kid who’s about to cry.
He stood like one of those Olympic gymnasts before a vault. He shook his head without letting me see his eyes.
I waited. I didn’t say, “Why not?” because I didn’t want to hear that the reason was not being attracted to me.
He turned then and walked back along the path the way he had come, and I had no choice but to go my own way home.
Thirty-two
This is what happened when I took the money to my aunt Agnès. I waited until Robby wasn’t home, of course. I found her standing at the kitchen island opening the mail while Robby’s dog, Snowy, nibbled dry food out of his red dish. Snowy sniffed at my shoes, then went back to nibbling.
“Amiel wanted me to give you this,” I said, and I set the stack of bills on the granite beside a glossy French magazine. The money looked frazzled and worn, as if it was too shabby to belong to her.
“What?” she asked. She wore a white ribbed sweater with short sleeves and a long necklace of pink stones that clicked when she moved. She was still studying a bill that she’d sliced open with a dashing silver letter opener. Every surface in the room—the granite, her oval fingernails, her short dark hair, the glasses in the cupboard—gleamed.
“Amiel wants to pay you back,” I said. “For the doctor.”
She wrinkled her perfect forehead and her sculpted mouth. “Pourquoi?” she asked. “He is our responsibility.”
“I guess he didn’t like being dependent,” I said, knowing also that he’d hurt himself juggling, which wasn’t her responsibility at all.
She adjusted the handle of her porcelain teacup, out of which steam curled gracefully. My aunt was a fan of fruit teas without sugar, and I thought I could smell sour pomegranate peel.
“Why did he give it to you?” she asked, her focus now changing in the way I’d feared it would.
I blushed, and she took a sip of her sour tea. “Do you want?” she asked, indicating the tea. I shook my head, and her look changed to sober consideration of me. “Where do you see him?” she asked.
“I don’t see him. Except for this. I ran into him, and he made me promise to give it to you.”
“Ah,” my aunt said. “I am not believing you.”
Snowy scrabbled in his dish.
“It’s true, though,” I said. “There is absolutely nothing between us.” I said it with enough misery in my face, I suppose, that she believed me. “I have to go,” I said.
“Come back later,” she said sympathetically, holding her thin teacup aloft but not taking a sip. “You and your mother should come for dinner now that you won’t have so much school. Come tonight.”
“Thank you,” I said, “but my mom already started something. It was in the Crock-Pot when I left.”
This wasn’t true, but it worked. When I left, the worn money was on the counter and my aunt was telling me that I was a very beautiful girl and I should let her take me shopping when school let out.
Thirty-three
I took exams and signed yearbooks and cleaned out my locker without another call from my father, my mother began working at the bookstore, and a single moth emerged from the nest of cocoons on my mother’s desk. The moth was white and ladylike and so still she might have been a pair of flower petals on a thick, furry stem. Although we checked every morning and every afternoon, anxiously expecting her mate, the other cocoons stayed whole and motionless. If you held one of them to the light, you could see a dark shape inside. The lady moth in her white dress waited a whole week, and then, as if she’d reached some final hour, she began to lay sterile eggs all over the nearest cocoons, embossing them with yellow unfertilized seeds. Then, imperceptibly,