Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [28]
“But we are.”
I continued to eat, pretending to be unaware of the lengthy silence that followed.
It was a big gamble, making a statement like that. In Washokey, lies were like secrets—they didn’t last, unless the town collectively overlooked them. Like Mandarin’s serving cocktails while being underage.
“Well,” Alexis said, “why aren’t you eating lunch with her?”
“Yeah, Grace,” Paige said tauntingly. “Why aren’t you?”
I hadn’t thought they’d call my bluff so soon. I tried to think of an excuse: Mandarin has a cold, so she told me to stay away. Or I’d rather sit with you guys! How lame.
“Thought so.” Alexis squeezed open a bag of chips with a pop.
I tried to scowl. “I don’t have to explain myself to you.”
“What does that even mean?” Paige said.
Then Samantha gasped. “There she is!”
My eyes followed the direction of her index finger. Mandarin had just emerged from the kitchen, carrying an orange and two bananas. There was something provocative about the way she held them, with her wrists bent back.
Alexis smirked at me. “Why don’t you go to her?”
“Fine,” I said. “I will.”
I tucked my half-eaten sandwich into my lunch bag and stood up, trying my best to look confident. But the knots in my stomach were back full strength: Palomar knots and Trilene knots and Triple Alpine Butterfly loops, like in the Eagle Scout guidebook I’d found at the junk shop. No one ever approached Mandarin. Not even the bolder kids.
And I was not, by anyone’s yardstick, one of the bolder kids.
Besides, if Mandarin had wanted to eat lunch together, she would have sought me out.
I took two steps, then hesitated.
“See? She’s not friends with her,” I heard Paige whisper.
“What did I tell you?” Alexis whispered back.
I pretended I didn’t hear them. One hand went to my pocket, my fingers folding around a tourmaline stone. I waited just long enough for Mandarin to disappear through the doors. Then I headed across the cafeteria.
As soon as I stepped into the hallway, I ran all the way to the girls’ bathroom.
I finished my sandwich inside the end stall. For the remaining twenty minutes of lunch, I stared at the scribble of red words, reading them over and over: School is horseshit. School is horseshit. Whether Mandarin had memorized it or written it there herself, I had no doubt she believed it. And right now I believed it too.
When I went downstairs at dinnertime, Momma was sitting with her chin in her hands at the kitchen table, which was covered with pageant paraphernalia instead of food. Taffeta sat in the corner with her legs splayed out, coloring her thumbnail with a purple crayon.
I hovered in the doorway, wondering whether Momma was adrift in pageant-related contemplation or she had come down with one of her gloomy moods.
The moods were rare, but memorable. I could always tell when they were coming on. She’d stand at the sink and stare out the window, or sit silently in the wingback chair in the family room, the only significant item she had left of her mother’s, for hours and hours. I never knew what triggered Momma’s melancholy. Thoughts of her parents? Nostalgia for the days before Jackson Hole? The lonesomeness of bringing up two daughters on her own? Not that she’d go for a Washokey man, even if she desired a husband.
“You can’t fall for someone when you know all their stories,” she often said.
Many times when she came out of her moods, she would start to ramble, recounting old stories that left both of us spooked. She spoke of human pelvises dug up in the empty hills. Children who had disappeared. The ghastly way that drifter had killed those hippies in the 1968 “massacre”—with an old lasso, Momma said. All sorts of afflictions and insanities she blamed on the yearly wildwinds, blowing the ozone out of the air and driving everybody mad.
Including her.
“Momma?” I asked warily. “Do you need help fixing dinner?”
It seemed to take a moment for her eyes to focus. “Dinner. I forgot about dinner.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I