Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [84]
I kept it in my hand as I dialed Mandarin’s number.
I followed the back road west of town, the one used mainly by farmers driving sheep or riding horses. It was a dirt road, but years of animal droppings made it look paved in cakey hay asphalt, mashed by animal hooves and pickup truck tires. Every once in a while, I’d come across a new pile of crap. Some were huge.
By the time I reached the river, it was almost sunset. The wind picked up, but I couldn’t tell if it was a normal wind or otherwise. I put a hand over my mouth and breathed through my fingers, attempting to keep my head clear.
I had no idea which Mandarin I would encounter that night: happy, angry, somber, or hysterical. I needed to be ready for any of them.
When I arrived, she was standing at the base of the Tombs, dressed in her lavender sweater, with the ridge of her clavicle jutting out over the neckline. It was the first time I’d ever seen her without black eyeliner. She held the jackalope head against her thigh, her fingers wrapped around the antlers. “So this is your place, huh?”
“Someplace magic,” I replied.
She glanced at the spot where she’d besieged Tyler with stones. “I didn’t know,” she said. “I promise.”
I shrugged and turned away, leading her up the boulders to my cave in the Tombs.
Once inside, I sat with my legs crossed. Mandarin didn’t sit right away, though. She circled the space, stooped over, one hand flat on the stone walls. When she reached the cave painting, she paused and looked at it for a long time.
“It’s the Virgin Mary,” I said. “Supposedly. Remember the stories?”
“She isn’t, though.”
“Isn’t what?”
“Mary.”
She sat at last, with her back against the wall, the jackalope head in her lap. The smudgy black eyes of the painted woman peered over her shoulder.
“So why’d you want to meet?” she asked warily.
I cleared my throat. She was going to find out anyway, but I knew I should be the one to tell her. “I told Ms. Ingle you didn’t do a service project.”
Her reaction was right on target.
“But school’s not over till next week!” The jackalope tumbled from her lap. “Why’d you have to go and tell her that?”
“She asked.”
“Why didn’t you lie?” She rose to her knees, but I didn’t budge. “You had no right to do that, Grace. That was our fucking project.”
Any other time, I would have backed down. But not that night. If I’d stood up to Momma after fifteen years, I could handle Mandarin Ramey. “Wrong,” I said. “You couldn’t even choose a topic. My project was helping you out.”
“Well, you didn’t, Grace. You ruined everything!”
“You mean graduating? Are you honestly going to tell me you think you’ll pass every final next week? That’s not my fault. You ruined that for yourself, Mandarin.”
We glared at each other.
And after one, two, three beats, Mandarin dropped her eyes. She picked up the jackalope and set it in her lap facing up. “I know,” she said.
I thought I might feel happy about this tiny victory. I didn’t.
“I just … I don’t know what stops me. Everybody knows I’m screwed up on the outside—all the stuff I do, I mean. They don’t know how I’m screwed up on the inside. Only the people who get close.”
“You solve that easy enough,” I said. “You don’t get close to anybody.”
“Well, you. And I had friends in elementary school too, y’know. Sarah Cooper at the A&W wasn’t all bad. And there was this one girl …”
“Sophie Brawls.”
Mandarin raised her eyebrows. “I guess you heard about the fight. And what happened after. It got so blown out of proportion. Not the fight, I mean—that was huge. For us. But it was ours to settle. When Mr. Beck got involved, and then the cops … Sophie didn’t even try to stop it all from happening.
“And then there’s my mother.…”
She paused, as if to catch her breath.
“We used to make dolls out of cottonwood down. Her and me. We’d cut shapes from old shirts and sew them up. I once heard you can’t truly hate a person until you’ve cared about