Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [19]
“Oh,” she said dismissively. “Around.” She swept the arrowheads back into the jar. I hoped she’d offer me one, but she didn’t. She set the jar on the floor and then flopped onto her bed. “Have a seat,” she ordered.
“So, where do you want to start?” I asked, as if I hadn’t heard her. “The Pony Express?”
“Start at the beginning. I’ve forgotten everything. How about cave people? Start with them.” She smacked the bed beside her. “Sit!”
At last, like an obedient dog, I perched on the very edge of her bed. I thought I could feel the heat of her mattress through the fabric of my jeans. I shook my head and flipped open the history textbook in my lap.
“You know, I don’t think cave people are in here,” I said. “And we’ve got math to cover too. And I have to be home for dinner by seven. My mother takes it seriously.”
“What, dinner?”
“Well, yeah … She likes to cook.”
Mandarin sat up and peered at me, as if I were some strange specimen she’d collected in her arrowhead jar. “I bet you even sit around the table,” she said. “Wow. I ain’t had a family dinner like that—I don’t think ever, to tell you the truth. Then again, a well-meaning but drunk-ass dad and a shameful daughter ain’t much of a family. My mother killed herself before I moved to town.”
“She did?”
I recalled what I’d heard about Mandarin’s mother. Supposedly, they’d spent the first half of Mandarin’s life together, hopping from small town to small town in the southeastern corner of the state. Then, for reasons nobody knew, Mandarin moved in with her father in Washokey. About the mother herself, rumors were scarce.
I’d definitely never heard she was dead.
“Wanna know how she did it?” Mandarin asked.
“How she …”
“It was really gruesome—not for the faint of heart. You better sit down for this one.” She paused, as if I weren’t already sitting. “It happened in our old apartment. First, the cops found a noose made out of knotted-up dishrags, but my mother didn’t own enough to make a proper one. Then, in the hallway, they found a whole bunch of sleeping pills, but just over-the-counter ones, lying all over the ground. And then, in the bedroom, know what they found? My mom, dead on the ground, with duct tape wrapped around her mouth like ninety times. She’d suffocated herself.”
Suddenly, I found it hard to breathe. I wondered if Mandarin had been home when it happened. If she’d seen the body. “I—I’m so sorry.”
Mandarin shrugged. “I’m over it.”
I nodded. “Well, we don’t have much time,” I said. “Maybe we could come up with a list of community service ideas, and then we could—”
“Aw, screw community service.”
I shielded my chest with my textbook as Mandarin rolled off the bed, stomped across the room, and kicked the wall. So that’s where the scuff marks came from.
“But I thought you wanted—” I began.
“School is horseshit.”
I mouthed the words I’d seen on the door of the bathroom stall as Mandarin flounced over to her stereo and jammed it on to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette.” It was kind of embarrassing, like a movie sound track that didn’t fit.
“I love this song,” Mandarin said, pacing around the room. “Do you? Probably not. Everyone around here likes that hokey country shit. Anyway, I know what I said. And I meant it at the time. I always got good intentions. I just hate it, all of it. I’m not stupid, even though people think I am. It’s just—there’s got to be a better way, y’know?”
I tucked my feet under the bed so they wouldn’t get trampled, trying to make myself as small as possible. “A better way to do what?”
“To get out.”
“Out of where?”
“Of where?” Mandarin laughed contemptuously. “Of Washokey! Of this little cow-shit town in the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing here! We’re hundreds, thousands of miles away from anything worthwhile. The whole town’s falling apart, the people are rotting, but for some fucking reason it’s like nobody ever leaves!”
She stopped pacing.
“It’s suffocating. And it ain’t just suffocating me, but everybody.”
I thought of her mom and the duct tape.
“Everybody’s dying