Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [6]
She seemed to be waiting for me to speak, but my lips wouldn’t work.
Mandarin Ramey had never stood so close to me. She had never spoken to me before. In fact, Mandarin rarely spoke to anybody at school. She preferred the men she served at her father’s bar over boys her own age, and after her attempt at friendship with a girl named Sophie Brawls went sour a couple years back, she avoided girls altogether. It was amazing how much we all knew about Mandarin. How much, and how little.
“I won fifty dollars,” I said at last.
Mandarin smirked. “Yeah, but it’ll be a stupid savings bond, the kind you can’t touch till you’re of age. And you’re how old, fourteen?”
“Almost fifteen.”
She studied me, her expression blank. Without moving her torso, she dropped one hand to her hip and slipped a cigarette from her back pocket. Every move she made, from the cock of her head to the cross of her ankles, was graceful, yet calculated, as if she were posing for an unseen camera. She poked the cigarette between her lips and lit it, sucking in so hard her cheeks collapsed inward.
Then she offered it to me. “Want a drag?”
Even the idea—sharing a cigarette with Mandarin Ramey, putting my mouth where hers had been—made my face flush. I shook my head and turned to the door.
“Ain’t you gonna wash your hands?”
I stared at her in horror. She smiled at me. A haze of smoke lingered around her head like a halo.
Which would be more embarrassing—escaping now with unwashed hands, or lingering to wash them? With every split second of internal debate, I died a little more. Finally I hurried to the sink beside hers, jabbed on the faucet, and scrubbed my hands as quickly as I could.
“I was just giving you trouble, y’know.” She yanked a trail of brown paper towels from the dispenser and stuck them in front of my face. “I don’t bite. Really.”
I dried my hands without meeting her eyes.
“Aw, get your ass back to class. Me, I aim to finish this cigarette. I’ll see you in math, all right?” She gave me a playful shove, herding me out.
As the bathroom door creaked shut behind me, I staggered down the empty hall of lockers and around the corner. There I backed into the wall, crackling a poster for the Future Farmers of America. My tote bag slid off my shoulder onto the ground. I could still feel the imprint of her hand on my shoulder, still smell the faintest trace of smoke on my clothes. Mandarin Ramey had spoken to me.
And not only that …
Mandarin Ramey knew my name.
I gazed out the window across the hall. Great sheets of earth swept into mesas furry with sage, then tumbled brokenly into valleys. The only color in the landscape was an early patch of Indian paintbrushes with blooms like ruby shards. As I watched, several red-winged blackbirds startled and took flight.
Depending on whom you asked, Washokey, Wyoming, had two or four claims to fame.
First, Washokey had the biggest jackalope statue in the western half of Wyoming. It sat in front of the grocery store on Main Street. Jackalopes were Wyoming’s official mythological creature: jackrabbits with pronghorn antlers, the essence of Wyoming sense of humor. Nobody actually believed they existed, with the exception of armchair tourists on Wyoming message boards.
Second, and more notoriously, Washokey was the site of Wyoming’s 1968 hippie massacre. It wasn’t really a massacre. Only three people were killed, including the killer. But the headlines put Washokey on the map.
Washokey’s other two claims to fame were subject to question.
The town had made headlines again the year I was born, when someone spied the likeness of the Virgin Mary in a cluster of boulders by the Bighorn River. But that was also the year of the great storm, when the wildwinds bellowed through town fiercer than ever, and the river brimmed over its banks and jumbled up all the boulders like a kid spoiling a marbles game. In all the years after, nobody could figure out which rocky cluster was the special one. Except for one person. And I wasn’t telling.