Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [47]
I thought I’d feel relieved. But once Ms. Ingle said it, I realized what it meant. If she didn’t fight it—and I knew she might—Mandarin would be paired with somebody new.
Somebody older. More experienced.
Somebody unafraid to seize shimmery, windstruck, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities laid out before them.
Somebody who wasn’t me.
“It’s all right,” I heard myself say. “I was just thinking out loud. I’ll still work with her. No problem.” Although I had no idea how, since Mandarin and I weren’t speaking.
Then, as if I weren’t upset enough, Ms. Ingle leaned in close and whispered, “I think your pants are a little too big. Would you like to borrow a belt?”
I’d eaten lunch in my bathroom stall all week.
Now I sat in the kitchen with Momma, hot-gluing tiny fabric flowers to a wooden hoop. I was making a mess of it—losing flowers, dropping flowers, gluing flowers to myself. Momma’s anxiety didn’t help matters. Every year, she seemed to enjoy pageant prep less and less, until the whole enterprise was more a colossal chore than an event she and Taffeta had enrolled in by choice. It was hard to believe her claims that she’d missed pageants terribly in the gap between my last and Taffeta’s first.
I’d never have thought Momma would notice my distress, especially in the midst of her own. Until she placed her hand over mine.
“Grace, dear,” she said, “is anything the matter? You’re not in any … trouble with that Ramey girl, are you?”
“Momma, no!”
“I just meant, are you having a tiff, is all.”
Only Momma would use a word like tiff. I balled up my fist underneath her hand. “Everything’s fine,” I lied.
“Okay,” she said hesitantly. She glanced at the mess I was making of the wooden hoop. “Still … maybe you should take a break. Why don’t you head to the store and pick up a gallon of milk?”
I was afraid of running into Mandarin on the street—it would be just my luck—but I couldn’t tell Momma that. She handed me a five-dollar bill. I ripped a flower off my thumb and headed for the door.
I pulled the hood of my sweater over my head and yanked on the strings, leaving myself a little circle to peer through. Then I gathered my tote bag in front of my chest like a padded shield. With my head down, I passed the back door to the grocery store and went around to the front. The ghosts of old-timey letters still decorated the gray brick building: Drugs, Soda Fountain, Washokey Merchant.
As I stepped inside, out came Becky Pepper, third-place winner in the All-American Essay Contest. I wondered whether she’d take my place at the leadership conference if I backed out.
I made my way to the dairy section and grabbed a gallon of milk. On my way back, I kept my eyes on the plank floor. If I glanced up, I’d see the trophies. Coyote heads preserved in full snarl, beady-eyed pronghorns, hawks with open beaks. The animals had decorated the grocery store my entire life. But now they made me think of Mandarin.
I’d almost reached the registers when I heard a high-pitched voice: “If it ain’t Grace Carpenter!”
I tried not to cringe.
Polly Bunker had the shiny-pink skin of a pig, though the wiry, pale curls sticking to her skull reminded me of a shorn sheep. Her grin was that of a shark. She wore a frumpy floral dress with a black slip peeking from under the hem.
“Mrs. Bunker,” I said. “You startled me.”
“I startled you!” She inspected me with a frown. “Then you must be skittish, girl, ’cause I never startled anybody in my whole entire life.”
I found that hard to believe. Back when Alexis and I had been friends, Polly Bunker was always materializing in the basement rec room with platters of Jell-O Jigglers and stainless steel bowls of Cheetos. She also used to come to our house unannounced, her chipmunk cheeks practically bursting with gossip.
She hadn’t come over in quite a while, though. I suspected