The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [10]
Mickey sat up. “Would you get circus peanuts sometimes?”
“Peanuts?”
“Circus peanuts. The big fluffy ones. Kind of like Peeps, only not so sticky.”
“Sure.”
The next Friday, on her mother’s weekly shopping trip, Gwen put a bag of the orange peanuts into the cart. “Really?” her mother asked. “You hate marshmallow.” Gwen nodded. The next day, she took the treats to Mickey. Over the course of the summer, she brought Mickey Smarties, candy buttons, Pixy Stixs. Necco Wafers. Now and Laters. Gwen’s mother figured it out within a week or so, but she didn’t care. In fact, she complimented Gwen on her selflessness. But it didn’t feel selfless to Gwen, more like a necessary tribute. Mickey was valuable. Mickey knew things. You couldn’t have access to all she knew without making some sort of contribution.
Mickey had been roaming the wooded hills around Dickeyville since the age of eight, when she persuaded her mother to let her walk home from the public elementary school on the other side of the hill. She acted as if she owned every inch of it, and we didn’t contradict her. We never got lost when we let Mickey lead the way, while the rest of us could get turned around quite easily.
Yet Mickey was the only one of us who didn’t live in Dickeyville. Her family lived above it, in the town houses called Purnell Village, on the other side of Forest Park Avenue. Most children would not have been allowed to cross that street, much less walk to school alone, but Mickey had permission. Or said she did. Mickey was not always the most reliable person when it came to herself. Her stepfather, for example, was not her stepfather and did not own the gas station. He managed it. He did, however, look a little like Tom Selleck.
Caught in a lie or a contradiction by the rest of us, Mickey would shrug, as if the misstatements that flowed from her were incidental, a slip of the tongue, like mixing up facts you knew perfectly well. And because Mickey was beautiful, despite her wild bush of hair and grubby clothes, we came to believe that was one of the perks of beauty, the freedom to lie and not be called on it. Who wanted to fight with someone as pretty as Mickey? She was prettier still for not being able to do much about her appearance. She wore jeans and T-shirts, often the same ones two days running, and her hair was never quite brushed. Sometimes, Gwen’s mother would say, “Let’s play beauty parlor,” and Gwen understood it was an excuse to pull a brush through Mickey’s matted hair, which would shine and gleam under her mother’s care. Later, when we became a group, a unit, the boys wished they could have Mrs. Robison pull a brush through their hair, short as it was. Not that they ever said anything. Well, maybe Go-Go did. Go-Go never understood that there were things he shouldn’t want, desires he shouldn’t express. He would watch Tally Robison work on Mickey’s hair, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth as it often did, as if he thought something tasty might fall from the sky at any moment and he didn’t want to miss it. Sometimes Go-Go would try to climb Tally Robison, would literally start to shimmy up her body, trying to force her to unfold those thin arms and hold him.
But that was yet to come. That first summer, 1976, there was only Gwen and Mickey, Mickey and Gwen, best friends along with everything that being best friends entailed, all the wonder and closeness, all the pain and resentment. We didn’t have the term BFFs back then, and even if we had, it wouldn’t have been accurate. Mickey and Gwen fell well short of forever. But that summer, it felt like forever.
Tally Robison died in Gwen’s senior