Come Clean. Terri Paddock
Читать онлайн книгу.
did it on purpose. She did it, Hilary.
She did it to spite me. She did it so that when our mom lost the steel in her lip, started feeling guilty later and called up to see how I was adjusting and asked, is my Justine OK, did you give my baby her glass of water? Then Hilary would be able to say with a straight face and clear conscience, ‘Of course we did, Mrs Ziegler.’ And Mom wouldn’t think to ask, ‘But did she drink the damn water, or did you, you evil woman, put it somewhere it was certain to get knocked over so she’d never get a drop of it?’ Mom wouldn’t think to ask that and she’d go to sleep tonight never realising how thirsty I am or how dry my lips are or how I’ve got nothing to wash down this taste of bile and vomit and betrayal.
There’s movement on the other side of the door. Rigid with fear, I listen to the chatter of the key ring on the other side, the scraping of metal on metal as the key’s teeth match up with the lock’s grooves, then the turning of the mechanisms deep inside and then the click-thud as the bolt snaps back. Should I hide? There’s nowhere. Should I pretend to be asleep? Wait behind the door to pounce? Throw the wicker wastepaper basket over her head? Even as I’m asking myself, I’m imagining Hilary twirling the massive ring of keys round her neck like a witch doctor spins a string of skulls, working his spell over each of his victims.
But when the door opens, there’s no Hilary. Instead there’s a girl. She flips on the lights too suddenly and almost blinds me, but I can see her through my squinted lids. I don’t know her. She’s dressed in a billowy red sweat suit and is several inches shorter than me and wider, almost round like a ball, with pale skin and straight red hair, greasy and slicked back into a ponytail twitching high and off-centre atop her head.
Mark and Leroy are back, lingering behind Pony Girl in the hall and they don’t enter all the way when she does. She sashays in swinging a Kmart plastic bag which she flings on to the sofa. ‘Your clothes,’ she says.
‘I’m fine in what I’m wearing, thanks.’
‘Not regulation.’ She tosses her hair and gestures towards the bag again.
I reach into it. There’s a green synthetic tunic littered with pink polka dots and a pair of brown corduroy pants. I hate cords at the best of times, the sound they make as you walk, the friction, the ribbons of material rubbing up against one another, leaving funny brush patterns and picking up lint from wherever you sit down. I hate them and these ones are two sizes too big, cheap and nasty to boot. Very cheap, judging by the price tags still attached to them as well as the tunic.
‘These aren’t my clothes,’ I tell Pony Girl.
‘Your parents brought them for you.’
Our parents?
I take a step towards her. ‘Did they come back? Are they still here?’
‘No, they left them here,’ she says, her breath stinking in my face. What’s that smell? ‘They left them when they left you.’
I rub the bridge of my nose. There’s a spot there where, if I close my eyes and press hard enough, it feels like I’m giving my brain a pinch. A little squeeze that rockets pain like prismed light into my thoughts. It hurts most when I use the knuckle of my forefinger, but it only hurts for a second and then sometimes it helps. It makes things clearer.
Like now, like how it’s clear to me now that our parents must have had this planned, who knew how far in advance. Maybe weeks, maybe hours. Time enough for Mom to go shopping at Kmart. Perhaps she went this morning while I was still asleep, dreaming of you and swimming – how long ago was that?
I can’t fathom it, nor can I fathom how my very own mother could shop for me at Kmart of all places. We never shop at Kmart. And how could she pick out quite such an atrocious outfit? I’ll look like a tree with the brown pants and the green top – a cherry tree, even, thanks to those hideous pink polka dots. What was she thinking?
But hang on a minute. Perhaps it isn’t all bad. There is only one change of clothes. You don’t give a person just one change of clothes if you expect them to be gone a long while. It is only an evaluation, isn’t it? After three days I’ll be able to go home again and everything will be peachy keen. Maybe I’ll only have to stay one day. One change of clothes, one day.
‘You can change into them after the strip-search,’ the redhead says.
‘The what?’
‘Strip-search. We’ve got to check you ain’t trying to sneak any contraband into the programme.’
‘You must be kidding.’
“Fraid not.’
‘I don’t have any contraband and I’m no way going to take my clothes off to prove it.’
‘Sorry, chickie,’ she says, not appearing the least bit apologetic. ‘Them’s the breaks.’
‘No way. Uh-uh.’
She reaches out and picks at the hem of your turtleneck. A loose thread dangles and she yanks at it until it breaks, causing the material to bunch up round the stitching at the edge. ‘I’m not gonna have to get Mark and Leroy there to restrain you, am I? You wouldn’t like it that way, I bet you wouldn’t.’
On cue, the two bruisers square their shoulders and bristle threateningly. Around the corners of Leroy’s mouth flickers a faint hint of a smile.
My own shoulders slump and I can feel my lower lip start to quiver. I blink and focus on a point on the wall. I can read the needlepoint now: ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ it tells me. ‘No,’ I say.
‘Good, it’s always so much easier with a little cooperation.’ From the back pocket of her sweat pants, Pony Girl unfurls a pair of rubber gloves. Not the surgical kind, skintight and unobtrusive. These are kitchen gloves. Thick and bright yellow, the kind you use when you pick up Brillo pads and scrape the grill after a barbecue or when you want to clean the oven.
Mom used to wear gloves like that, I recall, when we were little. She warned us not to listen to that flimflam about dishwashing liquids that were good for you – no matter what the commercials said, the grease, the suds, the serrated edges of steak knives and the tines of all those grimy forks, those things were bad bad bad for your skin. You had to wear gloves to protect your hands, to keep them young and unlined and so as not to break your nails, especially after you just paid five dollars for a manicure. Mom would kick up a fuss if she couldn’t find her kitchen gloves, which she couldn’t sometimes if we’d swiped them from their place, under the sink with the Drano and the vacuum bags. We liked to play dress-up with them. You’d pretend they were evening gloves, the elbow-length satiny kind like Audrey Hepburn would wear in those old films you liked to watch.
Mom had gloves like Hepburn’s, too, which she wore sometimes when she dolled up in long dresses with short sleeves and went out with Dad, buttoned up tight in one of those tuxedos with the ruffled shirts, for the annual dental association ball. But she kept the real evening gloves stowed in a shoe box at the top of her closet behind some crumbling family photo albums and we couldn’t reach them. So we made do with the kitchen gloves – not that she ever thanked us for the substitution.
Pony Girl pulls on her kitchen gloves, bringing me back to attention as she wrestles the cuffs right up to her elbows, the rubber cracking against her funny bone, just like you did when you were pretending to be Audrey Hepburn. No giggling now, though.
‘Get undressed,’ she demands.
I raise my eyes to Mark and Leroy. That hint of a smile is still break-dancing around Leroy’s mouth and it seems to have spread like a yawn to Mark as well. I’d like to rub those smarmy grins off their faces with an eraser the size of a double-decker bus. I’ve never undressed in front of a boy in my life. Except for you, of course, but that’s not the same. Not even Dad has seen me naked since I was maybe six.
Pony Girl follows my gaze and now she’s grinning too. ‘Feeling shy, are we?’ She crosses to the door and kicks it shut, the two fools jumping back just in time to avoid sore noses.