Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [57]
Even as I said it, I didn’t believe it. I wasn’t sure what my expression looked like, but Momma must have assumed it was still directed at her. She dropped her gaze and began to rifle through her beach bag.
“It must have been a mistake,” she said. She pulled a crumpled dollar out of her bag. “How ’bout you run along and locate that Mexican who sells ice cream?”
I snatched the bill and stumbled away. Just outside the gate, the ice cream man stood behind a freezer cart with sponge paintings of triple cones on the side. Numbly, I picked out a mixed-berry Popsicle.
When I turned, I was face to face with Alexis & Co.
Alexis was flanked by Samantha and Paige. They all wore bikinis. Alexis’s breasts poured over a too-small top. She didn’t have to cross her arms to boost them. Paige’s lima bean tummy stuck out over her bathing suit bottoms. Samantha held a can of diet soda pop. All four of us recoiled, startled speechless.
Alexis was the first to recover. “Slut,” she hissed.
The three of them veered around me in a flood of giggles, leaving me like a drowned ground squirrel in their wake.
The edge of the desk bit into my shins. The light of the computer monitor burned my eyes in the dark room. But even though I’d memorized it by now, even though I’d known already and refused to believe, I couldn’t stop squinting at the map proving Riverton was in Fremont County.
Riverton, WY 82501.
Proving Mandarin’s mother was alive.
She worked at the Riverton flea market. She’d married somebody named Paisley. Or maybe she’d been a Paisley all along. She was sending Mandarin arrowheads. All the gruesome details of her suicide—the dishrags, the pills, the duct tape … Mandarin had made them up.
And she didn’t want me to know.
Finally, I switched off my computer and crawled into bed, pulling the sheet over my ear. I felt more baffled than anything. Because why lie? Why? I couldn’t begin to fathom Mandarin’s reasons. But I knew better than to ask. I wasn’t willing to risk another fight. Our friendship had barely survived the last.
Although, I couldn’t help wondering: if Mandarin had lied about something so momentous, what else might she lie to me about?
• ••
In the days that passed, I didn’t tell Mandarin what Alexis had called me. I didn’t know how to feel about it. It made me wonder whether everybody thought of me as Mandarin’s protégé—her fuckup-in-training; a project, like the community service she kept putting off along with any conversation about our so-called escape—or whether they believed I was actually like Mandarin.
I kept hoping some of her had rubbed off on me, literally. Maybe some cells from her fingertips when they grazed my arm, or from the neckline of the sweaters she let me borrow on windy evenings. Or after she borrowed my hairbrush, maybe her stray hairs interlaced with mine. I wanted to ask her to be my blood sister, like back in elementary school, and sense the exact moment when her blood began to flow into my veins.
I knew she’d think I was crazy if I asked. Though some days I almost convinced myself that it was happening on its own—Mandarin’s spirit draping over me, like fairy glamour.
But all too soon, I remembered that appearances were one thing. I might walk the walk, but when it came down to what I believed made Mandarin Mandarin, I hadn’t even begun to catch up.
Mercifully, she never called me out. We never talked about sex at all. It was as if Mandarin believed it irrelevant to our friendship.
And maybe it was. But as long as it was one of the factors that defined her, I knew I had to have it.
I just had no idea where to begin. When I thought back, I realized I’d never had much of a crush on anybody. Objectively, sometimes I saw what the other girls squealed about. Tag Leeland had nice arms, but his neck seemed too big, like a boa constrictor swallowing his head. I liked Mitchell Warren’s melty brown eyes, but his skin disgusted me—at sixteen, he had the sun-worn, freckled hide of a fifty-year-old rancher. Not to mention the way he