Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [78]
“For fuck’s sake, knock it off, you crazy bitch!”
“Then get the fuck out of here, you creep!” she screamed. “You fucking maniac. You know how old she is? Barely fourteen years old. You’re fucking sick!”
Fourteen?
Tyler took advantage of the pause in her attack to hop to his feet. “You’re insane! What the hell’s wrong with you? Why’d you tell me to bring her out here in the first place?”
Why’d you tell me …
It took a moment for me to understand. I looked up at Mandarin still crouched on the ledge. Her eyes caught mine, then darted away. Just like mine had earlier, in the parking lot of the Benton High auditorium, when she’d feigned leaving town for real and I’d been found out.
“Just … get the hell out of here,” she ordered Tyler, the fury draining from her voice. “Or I’ll tell everyone at school you’re a fucking rapist.”
With his arms still wrapped around his head, Tyler turned and lurched off toward his truck. He flung open the door and dived into the front seat. The tires scraped over the gravel as he backed into the road, then took off in the direction of the party.
Mandarin came over and stood a few feet from me. Her knee was freshly skinned, probably from climbing down the boulder. I stared at her knee instead of her face.
“Gracey …,” she began.
“Take me home,” I told her knee.
I sat in the passenger seat of Mandarin’s truck, leaning as far from her as possible. She was driving much more slowly than usual, but I didn’t comment. Washokey passed outside my window, the same stores, the same dreary, monotonous houses. When we passed Solomon’s, I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, I discovered that Mandarin had pulled to the side of the road. She’d left the truck running. I could tell she was waiting for me to speak.
Finally, she cleared her throat. “Gracey, he didn’t …”
“No,” I said.
“Thank God.” She sounded genuinely relieved. “Because I told him …”
She cleared her throat a second time. When she spoke again, her tone had changed. And she sounded—of all things—self-righteous.
“Y’know, Gracey, if you hadn’t—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I said, interrupting her. “I heard enough. All I needed to hear was that you planned this, Mandarin!”
She took a cigarette from the pack on the dash. Instead of lighting it, she picked at it with her thumbnail, shaving off tobacco flakes. “I didn’t plan for it to go that far,” she said quietly.
“A real friend wouldn’t have planned anything at all.”
“I would never let anything happen to you. You know that.”
“Just a second ago, you weren’t sure if anything had. What were you thinking—that handing me over to some Washokey creep would make me trust you? Why couldn’t you have just explained it all to me? I didn’t need to experience it myself. You should have told me. I would have listened!”
“You wouldn’t have.”
“I would!” I kicked the dashboard, like a little kid throwing a tantrum. Mandarin’s pack of cigarettes fell to the floor.
Mandarin sighed and steered back onto the road. We drove the last few blocks to my house in silence. When she pulled into the bottom of my driveway, she turned off the engine and looked at me.
“Gracey, listen.… You’ve got to let me explain.”
I opened the passenger door and started to climb out.
“I needed you to leave with me,” she continued anyway. “I still need you. But I always felt like there was something keeping you here, some reason you couldn’t let go. And so I knew I had to show you how Washokey really is. How the people here, the guys …” With one hand, she folded the cigarette over her index finger, tearing it in half.
“I knew you needed to see for yourself.”
I shook my head. Her explanations were empty. Meaningless. Nothing but mosquito noise. Because that night, I had learned the third truth about Mandarin Ramey.
Sleeping with men she hated wasn’t ironic. It wasn’t one of her carefree fuck-yous,