Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [51]
Don’t worry, I thought as I stared at the nearest one, a deer head. We’re going to free you.
Just as I turned to Mandarin to utter something profound—I hadn’t quite determined what—she whacked my shoulder.
“Tag! You’re it,” she shouted, and darted off into the canned-goods aisle like a kitten doped on catnip.
I had to keep calling her back as she skipped through the store, dancing, hiding, bursting out from behind displays of soda pop boxes. She devoured an apple and stuck the core among the lettuces. She drew angry faces on the eggs with her eyeliner.
“Who does this look like?” She held up a cantaloupe.
She’d drawn a face with a long droopy mustache. Mr. Beck, of course. “Ha,” I said. “Great. Can we hurry?”
We lugged a stepladder from trophy to trophy. As Mandarin tossed me each animal head, she shouted, “Heads up!” Hilarious. I insisted on whispering in reply, as if my voice might tone down hers. This might have been my idea and all, but I was terrified of getting caught.
We stacked all the trophies in a shopping cart, bobcats and pronghorns and foxes together, an animal kingdom united in death. So morbid. But I still giggled at the absurdity of it. A cart full of heads. Roadkill for dinner!
In the parking lot, Mandarin hopped onto the back of the cart. “Push me.”
I gave her a shove. Too late, I imagined the cart hitting a crack, and the trophies tumbling out all over the pavement. I hurried after her.
We loaded the trophies into the truck and tied a blue tarp over them so no one on the road would know what they were. “One sec,” Mandarin said.
I watched her wheel the cart to the entrance and leave it neatly behind the others.
On her way back, she got out her eyeliner and drew a mustache on the cement jackalope in front of the store. Then she drew eyelashes.
“I didn’t want to sexually discriminate,” she explained, slamming the door of the truck. “So how you feeling? Tired?”
I felt more wide-awake than I ever had. As if Mandarin’s energy from the grocery store aisles had invaded my body. My instincts had been right. This night would define our friendship, cement it, render it unbreakable.
“Not tired at all,” I replied.
“Good!” Mandarin said. “Then we can go get the others.”
“What others?”
“The other trophies.”
“What do you mean?” I squinted at her. “The ones in people’s houses? In their barns? We can’t, like, purge the town entirely.”
“I know that,” Mandarin said. “But it ain’t worth it unless I get one in particular—that old wise one, from the Buffalo Grill. That elk.”
“You want to break into the Buffalo Grill?”
“Why, you got a thing for the Dents?”
I thought about it. The thing was, the Buffalo Grill seemed more like someone’s home. Like the hospital, it occupied an old house. People ate in former bedrooms or living rooms, with all the walls knocked down between. And while I didn’t have a thing for Samantha Dent or her family, I didn’t have anything against them. When Alexis and Paige weren’t around, Samantha was actually kind of nice.
Then again, I knew Agatha and Dustin Wright, the owners of the grocery store. They weren’t bad either. But that hadn’t stopped me from pillaging their taxidermy.
“Let’s go,” I said.
As Mandarin drove, I kept catching whiffs of musk and old dead fur. I didn’t see how that was possible, since the animals were way in the back. Then I sniffed my hands. Yep, it was us.
“If Remy was an elk with its body chopped off, this is who he’d be,” Mandarin whispered.
We gazed up at the massive head. I supposed it resembled Remy Ramey, if I squinted. It had the same tawny beard, the same glazed eyes. Probably even the same fleas. As long as you ignored the dusty antlers, like alien hands.
Mandarin pried the nails partway out of the wall with the back of a hammer. I dragged a chair out from the table below the head. “I’ll hand it to you,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous! You can’t handle it. I’m bigger than you.”
“But I’m stronger.”
Mandarin raised her eyebrows. “Says who?”
I didn’t know why I’d said it—only that her limbs looked so frail. It had been years since