Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [9]
Mandarin plucked a cigarette from the pocket of the man’s denim shirt and lit it. She sat on the top step, absently blowing smoke through pouted lips.
“What you should do is come with me,” he said.
She took another drag.
“Can’t you just picture it? We could get a little place by the mines, a double-wide if I get the raise they promised. I’d come home to you every night, and you’d always be there, taking care a me.”
“You’re not serious.”
I heard a hazardous tone in Mandarin’s voice, as if her consonants had edges. The man didn’t seem to notice.
“Course I am,” he said. “Don’t it sound like heaven?”
She waved her hand holding the cigarette, brushing him away. “I’d rather be a lot lizard at a highway truck stop than any man’s babysitter.”
The man hesitated, as if searching for deeper meaning in her words. Then he yanked the cigarette out of her hand and tossed it onto the dry lawn. She jumped to her feet.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“You’re a slut and a bitch, you know that?”
I gasped into my braid as Mandarin leaped up and struck the man’s chest, twice, three times. He caught her arms and pinned them behind her back. She struggled, but he was stronger. He pulled her against his chest and kissed her mouth.
Mandarin used to get into fights all the time, with girls, boys, anyone she thought deserved it. In the years after administration had sent her to the Wyoming Girls’ School, she seemed so resigned in comparison, all that fire put away somewhere. I imagined it a sort of turmoil she kept inside, like a scarlet crayon scribble.
I wanted her to keep fighting. But instead, she let the man pick her up and carry her back inside the house.
I waited for the fallen cigarette to dim and die, wishing I’d had the courage to run across the street and save her. Then I turned and sprinted down the block, feeling like a child, my braid slapping against the hood of my parka.
Washokey’s women did not love Mandarin, especially her teachers. Outwardly, they mourned her wasted mind. “Miss Ramey,” we heard them tell her, “your looks. Your adventuresome character. Such a sin to waste them, when you could be so much.”
But in secret, they gossiped like the rest of us. I was sure of it. They expected Mandarin to fail, every last one of them. And because they expected it, they wanted her to. They didn’t want to be proved wrong. Not by Mandarin Ramey.
I could see it in their faces—like now, as Mandarin finished the last calculations of a math problem gone horribly wrong. “Nice try,” Mrs. Cleary said, the irony sopping from her voice as she wiped the problem off the board with one brutal stroke of an eraser.
“Anybody else?”
Nobody offered. So she zeroed in on the one person who couldn’t refuse.
“Grace? What about you?”
I pressed my math book to my chest and hurried toward the front of the classroom. On my way, I happened to catch Mandarin’s eye.
She winked.
Blushing uncontrollably, I began to resketch Mandarin’s math problem. Behind me, I heard the other students scraping their chairs over the floor, exchanging notes and whispers.
All about her. Never about me.
Sure, maybe most of the attention Mandarin got was negative. But it wasn’t the kind of disdainful brainfreak attention I got, when I got any at all. Hers was lustful. And jealous. Because even as they condemned her, every single girl wanted to be her.
But nobody more than me.
I want to be beautiful like you, I thought, as if Mandarin were listening.
I want apricot skin and Pocahontas hair and eyes the color of tea. I want to be confident and detached and effortlessly sensual, and if promiscuity is part of the package, I will gladly follow your lead. All I know is I’m so tired of being inside my body.
I would give anything to be like Mandarin.
I stood in front of my full-length mirror and brushed my damp hair over my shoulders until it hung straight. I wedged my hands into the pockets of my jeans and hiked them down until the angles of my hips stuck out over the waistband. Then, without taking my eyes off the mirror, I began to saunter.
By now, I