Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [44]
“You know what that one looks like?” Paige’s hand darted in front of me to snatch a white stone. “A rock.”
“Hilarious,” Davey muttered.
“No, a rock. Not like a rock rock.” Paige smirked. “Like a crack rock. You know, like crystal meth.”
We stared at her like she was on crack.
“No way.” Davey blink-blinked at the charts. “It’s probably rock salt, or gypsum, or—”
“It’s got to be gypsum,” I said. “Scratch it with your thumbnail. If any comes away, it’s gypsum.” I reached out to take the stone from Paige, but she held it from me.
“I’ll bet you want it,” she said. “If it’s really what I think it is. Some of the guys my brothers know, they’re real meth-heads, the crazy sort. The kinda guys Mandarin Ramey runs around with. The kinda guys—” She snickered. “Well, y’all know what I’m talking about. Especially you, Grace.”
I felt my face heat up. “Paige, don’t be dumb.”
Truth was, I’d never even considered whether Mandarin did drugs. That wasn’t part of the rumors. I wondered frantically whether there might be a whole separate stratum of rumors passed around by the older kids, the kids who spent their nights partying instead of in their bedrooms, rereading paperbacks.
I glanced at Davey, but he was busying himself with his notebook, copying the parameters for gypsum off the charts. Unlike every other human being in the Washokey Badlands Basin, Davey didn’t like gossip.
I reached across him to grab one of the charts and my loose hair swept over his arm. He yanked it away and blushed.
“You know, Grace,” Paige continued, “everyone saw you acting all wild in the cotton that morning.”
Will you go with me? Mandarin’s voice, shouting in the wind. I hid my wince by pretending to examine a chart.
“Staggering all over the place,” Paige continued. She leaned across the table and thumped the white rock on my chart. “Like you were on drugs.”
I glared at her. “Give me a break, Paige.”
She held up her hands, the picture of innocence. “Don’t be pissed off at me. It’s only what everybody’s saying.”
“Well, everybody’s full of shit.”
“You’re even starting to talk like her! Next you’ll be wanting to look like her too. And after that, well …” She tried to wink suggestively, but her other eye closed too. “Who knows what you’ll do next?”
“Let’s just get to work,” I said through gritted teeth.
“You look like you’re doing just fine on your own,” Paige said. “You and the school faggot.”
Davey’s cheeks turned magenta.
I squeezed the rock so hard my knucklebones showed through my skin. How good it would feel to fling it right into Paige’s self-satisfied face. But then I’d get kicked out of class.
Instead, I did something I hadn’t done for ages: I raised my hand.
“Mrs. Mack?” I said, loud enough for the entire class to hear. “Paige won’t do any work. She’s just sitting here, distracting us.”
I knew my good grades would endorse my integrity. And at that moment, Paige was sitting with her feet up on another chair. Hurriedly, she dropped them to the floor.
Mrs. Mack glared at her. “Why don’t you come up to my desk, Miss Shelmerdine,” she said, “and do the experiment with me?”
Paige, speechless for once, trudged to the front of the room and sat.
I glanced at Davey again. He kept blinking and blinking, filling the boxes on the identification chart with his tiny penmanship, avoiding my gaze. As if he didn’t know what to make of this new Grace Carpenter. Well, neither did I.
As soon as Mandarin shut us inside her bedroom, I sensed something was wrong. The way she didn’t quite look me in the eye. The way she fell backward onto her bed, as if she’d succumbed to a spell of overpowering fatigue. The possible layers in her opening lines: “Let’s get this project over with,” she said. “So we don’t have it between us.”
Feeling uncertain, I sat cross-legged on her ugly old-man carpet instead of joining her on the bed. I cleared my throat.
“Well, we did this experiment on the hardness of rocks in science today,” I began. “I was thinking you could