Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [22]
“Momma, I don’t want to hear it, all right! I know what they say!”
“I just don’t want you getting mixed up with a girl like that. There’s no future for her but trouble. Believe me, I know! I know better than anybody. And the last thing you need is for people to associate you with her. They’ll look down on you, too.”
She wound the thread into a knot and then snapped it off. “You can let go now.”
In my bedroom, I slammed the door and fell face-first onto my mountain of pillows. They had been my grandmother’s, and they reeked of musk and age. I smashed my face into them so deeply I could hardly breathe.
My mother was clueless. Didn’t she see? She was only making Mandarin seem better.
Late that night I lay awake with a single white sheet pulled over my ear. It was warm out, and I had left my window open. The darkness chimed with the midnight music of crickets.
Several minutes had gone by before the low hum rumbled into my consciousness. Distant at first, the sound grew louder and louder as it approached, until it came around the corner and surged into a roar. Smashing one hand over my nose, I kicked off my sheet, darted across the room, and slammed the window shut right as the mosquito truck lumbered down our alley. I could see it through the chinks in my backyard fence as it hunched along, saturating the air with poison.
I remained at the window until the truck rounded the corner. The roar faded into a dull rumble. Now the crickets were silent.
I’d forgotten that spring brought mosquitoes, followed by the pesticide trucks to destroy them. Spring also brought the cottonwood snow that stuck to the bottoms of my shoes. It brought the agony of fire-ant bites, the crash-shatter of thunderstorms, and the dread of another sunburned summer. Three endless months with nothing for me to do except reread old books and accompany Momma and Taffeta on pageant trips.
Even more than summer, I dreaded that first yellow cottonwood leaf in August, which meant autumn, and the start of school. At least school filled my time.
Most of all, I dreaded Washokey’s winters. The chapped hands, the puddles in the hallways, the searing winds during our walk to school. The burny belch of radiators, making our classrooms reek like wet dog. And the two dreary weeks of holidays I spent cooped up with my mother. It took centuries for spring to arrive.
Spring—which I dreaded.
I dreaded every season. How tragically depressing. Like when I sat in class, staring at the clock, willing the second hand to move faster. Until I remembered I had no place to go. Not until college, at least.
As long as I lived in Washokey, would there be nothing for me to look forward to?
I stared out the window, both my hands gripping the sill. In our backyard, which we rarely used, I saw a plastic baby pool filled with stagnant brown rainwater. My rusty bicycle, half hidden by dry grass. A pair of Taffeta’s old red pageant shoes.
I sighed, then crossed the room and fell back onto my bed.
I found myself thinking about an incident in seventh grade. A bird had somehow flown into the busy cafeteria during lunchtime. He darted from one side of the room to the other, flying faster and faster, until at last he slammed into one of the enormous windows. Then he picked himself up, dove across the room, and slammed into the opposite window. Thunk. He did it again, and again. The cafeteria was filled with hoots and laughter while the bird wrecked himself against the deceptive square of sky. I’d wanted to shout at everyone, to shut them up. But even if they’d heard me, no one would have listened.
Right now I felt like that bird.
Mandarin’s words flared back to me all of a sudden, as if she were flitting back and forth across the dark room beside me, beseeching: We’re two of a kind. I can feel it.
But how did she know?
And then I remembered: she had read my essay.
Sure, I’d written it for the judges. But there were some truths, too. Things I didn’t quite