Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [66]
“I’ve got to go,” she shouted. “Find me tomorrow! And happy birthday!”
She banged down the metal steps and leaped into the empty football field, rapturous, her arms outstretched as if she were about to take off. I remained where I sat, until the wind quieted and my stomach relaxed enough for me to stand.
As May came to a close, the final drumroll to the tri-county pageant began. Momma insisted I stay home every day after school to help prepare. Though all Taffeta’s dresses and accessories had long been completed, Momma couldn’t sit still. The afternoons were a frenzy of adjustment, reconsideration, taking apart, and putting back together. I spent my free time studying the photography books I’d checked out from the school library.
I saw Mandarin after school just once that week, when we met for milk shakes at the A&W so I could fix the mistakes on her math homework. I’d slipped out while Momma had been painting my sister’s face in makeup with names like Frisky Flamingo and What in Carnation. Mandarin had ways to keep herself busy, she assured me, though I sensed that my unavailability annoyed her.
At long last, I convinced her to consider helping the kindergartners as her community service project. She could serve ten hours in as little as two days. And after the way she’d talked to Taffeta, I knew she got along with kids. But getting her to approach the kindergarten teacher was another story. “That bitch’ll think I’m gonna corrupt ’em all,” she said.
Taffeta seemed overwhelmed by Momma’s pre-pageant storm. She was the eye of the hurricane, but in a way, she was overlooked. As soon as Momma stepped out the door to run an errand, she came after me for attention—bringing along a game of Candy Land, a page to color, an opera song she adored.
One time, she dragged the stereo to the kitchen and plunked it onto my lap.
“Listen! This is my favorite part.”
She turned up the volume. I listened for a second to the high-pitched garble of Italian. “Taffeta,” I said, “how is this your favorite part? You don’t even know what the words mean.”
“I do too,” she insisted.
“No you don’t—they’re in another language.”
“Yes I do, Grace.” She swiveled the volume knob. “Listen.”
Because graduation was drawing near, teachers ambushed seniors daily with pop quizzes to implicate the slackers. I still found it hard to believe that Mandarin planned to graduate, but that week, she ditched school only once: with me.
Although she claimed she never got in trouble for it, I suspected that the regulations of the ditching universe would be different for me. Like if I crossed the threshold of the school lawn and stepped onto the sidewalk, I’d be accosted by the whirl and whoop of an alarm, or a barricade of parents and teachers blocking my escape.
“Chill out,” Mandarin told me after geometry on Thursday, the last day of May. “We’ll be fine. Just don’t run until we’re outta sight.”
When the bell rang after lunch, we headed the wrong way down the hall from the cafeteria. We strolled through the double doors, over the lawn, and past the cottonwood trees, and if anybody saw us leave, they decided to forever hold their peace.
Mandarin had chosen the perfect setting for our photo shoot: an old horse pasture where the canal joined the Bighorn River. It ran up against a barn, more cottonwood trees, and a row of abandoned stables. The whole lot of it was owned by Gary Householder, a sleazy old guy Momma said used to hit on her when she was a teenager. He worked as a supervisor in the bentonite mines, so we felt certain he wouldn’t be home until late.
I’d been nervous about taking Mandarin’s pictures, but as it turned out, shooting came naturally to us both: her posing, me observing, with the camera lens like a two-way mirror between us, deflecting all discomfort.
Each snap embedded another part of her in my brain. The way her lips, when relaxed, never fully closed. The jut of her cheekbones when she pouted. The deep depression in the center of her clavicle. There was no denying Mandarin’s beauty, and yet so much of what was