Shine - Lauren Myracle [18]
“She knows good eating, that’s all,” my daddy said. He rumpled her hair. “Ain’t that right, Miss Gwennie?”
It should have been my hair he was playing with, not hers.
I used my pious voice to say, “Well, I’m just glad you’re feeling better, Gwennie.”
“Huh?” she said.
“About that frog you killed. That poor itty-bitty frog.”
Christian kicked me.
Aunt Tildy said, “What’s that?”
“Nothing,” Christian said.
But Gwennie, she drew her eyebrows together and said, “What frog?” and I have forever after been amazed at how Gwennie erased that dead frog right out of her mind.
Except, did she really? Maybe she was just very, very good at burying things that were ugly. Not that I’d know a thing about that lifestyle approach.
I downed the last of my fluorescent yellow lemonade and studied my once-upon-a-time-friend, who was lonely and fat and had a crush on a boy impossibly out of reach. And yet, he’d defended her at the Come ‘n’ Go, when those college boys called her a fag hag.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she said.
I didn’t know I was. I cleared my expression and moved my hand to hers. It was as if I was watching a movie, only I was the one on the screen. I wondered how long it had been since she’d been touched, not counting being smacked around by her daddy.
“Being backhanded, that’s the worst,” she once told me. She confided in me a lot back when we were kids. I suspected she’d confide in me again, if she had anything to confide.
“You have pretty hands,” I said. She did, too. Pale and soft and pretty, nothing bad about them at all. “I wish I had pretty hands.”
“You do,” she said. “You need a manicure, is all. You want me to give you one right now? Hold on.”
She got to her feet, left the kitchen, and returned with a plastic purse filled with polishes and lotions and those thingies you put between your toes to keep them separated.
“Give me your hand,” she commanded.
I gave her my hand. She got to work, and it was just one girl painting another girl’s nails. Except it was more than that, too.
I told her about running into Tommy at church. I mentioned how he was out with Patrick on the night Patrick got beat up, along with Beef and my brother and some others. I asked if she knew that already, and she said yeah. I asked how late they stayed out. She said she didn’t know about the others, but that Beef stayed out real late.
“Like, when did he get in?” I said. It felt nice, the way she was rubbing circles into my skin. The lotion smelled like coconut.
“Dunno. I was asleep. But Beef’s always out late.”
“I wish he hadn’t dropped out of school,” I said.
“You and me both,” Gwennie said.
Beef didn’t like school, but he studied enough to get by. He was this close to a high school diploma, with a wrestling scholarship to Appalachian State waiting in the wings, when he blew out his knee in a meet and threw it all away.
“I just wish . . . gosh, so many things,” Gwennie said. “I wish he hadn’t dropped out school. I wish his knee didn’t get hurt. I wish he’d let me go out with him and the others last week.”
The misery in her eyes told me what she was thinking. Like me, she wondered if she could have stopped the bad stuff from happening if she’d been there.
“But Beef wouldn’t let me,” Gwennie said. “He never lets me hang out with him and his friends anymore.”
“Christian doesn’t like me hanging around, either,” I offered.
“But you like being alone. I don’t.”
I opened my mouth, then shut it, unsure where the truth lay. I didn’t like being alone. Being alone was slightly better than having to deal with people, that’s all. Or so I’d convinced myself.
“Beef hates it here,” Gwennie said. “Hates everything. He used to be fun, but now he’s like . . .” She lifted her shoulders. “He’s not the same as he used to be.”
Gwennie stopped rubbing my hand, though she didn’t let it go. “Patrick tried to help him. Tried to remind him of the bright side of things, you know?”
“That’s Patrick,” I agreed.
Her features softened, and I realized she had it bad for Patrick. She pined for him—an old-fashioned word, but the right one. It