Real Bad Things(10)
Amid the disarray of the living room and noise of the boys, she paused. Her heart raced. The blood. She kept thinking about that night, that spot of blood on her shoes.
Rusty hoisted himself out of the recliner. “Guess I’m on supper duty again.”
“Guess you are,” Georgia Lee said, not meaning to sound as harsh as she did. She let the spring door to the deck slam and shut her family behind her.
She slumped into an Adirondack chair, one hand holding the wineglass, the other the bottle. Both shook like she was craving a fix. She set them down and placed her head between her knees.
Deep breaths.
Some days it felt like trouble hung around her like a coat she couldn’t cast off, weighing her down, no matter how good or kind or helpful she tried to be. It made her sweat. Restricted every forward motion so much that past deeds and present resentments swelled inside her.
Jane Mooney. She’d not thought of her in years. Now, the name afflicted her every twenty minutes like contractions.
Fuck. She mouthed that forbidden word, holding on to the belief her still developing preteen mind had produced that that was better than making the sounds, even though God knew her mind, her soul.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
When she lifted her head, stars spotted her vision. The moon was almost full, bright enough for some clear thinking, but all she could think was: What if I’d left school just five minutes later that one day? Her whole life would be different. She wouldn’t be sitting here worried about what her mind showed her on replay. Snatches of memory that didn’t amount to anything but trouble.
But she’d gone through the school doors at that specific time on that day, bent on enjoying her last year of high school. Those hot days before fall, she often ruminated on what might come next. Homecoming, prom, graduation, summer, yes. But after that, she wasn’t sure. Even with college on the list of Things to Do, the months ahead presented a blur of uncertainty. As she walked along the concrete sidewalk toward the parking lot, worry crackled through her veins. She should’ve known. She should’ve seen Jane Mooney and walked in the opposite direction.
Jane sat in the passenger seat of Angie’s car with the door open, a Dr Pepper bottle dangling from her hand. She looked up but didn’t move as Georgia Lee neared her own car and the narrow space that separated it from the one Jane sat in alone. Jane’s stare—no, assessment—made Georgia Lee nervous, especially when coupled with her silence. She dropped the car keys on the ground in her efforts to finesse the key into the lock. Finally, she asked Jane if she could move.
Jane swung her arm out Vanna White–style with a smile and nudged her legs to the side.
Despite the afternoon heat, the sensation of Jane’s closeness chilled her skin. Georgia Lee thanked her and opened her door after retrieving her keys from the ground.
Jane asked for her name and then propped her arm on the open window frame and slowly repeated it with a level of fascination that made Georgia Lee’s insides tingle. She wasn’t sure what to say. Georgia Lee had long known Jane’s best friend, Angie. When Angie was in first grade, her family had moved out of Fort Chaffee and up to Maud Proper after being sponsored by a local Christian missionary family, and later moved to Maud Bottoms. One day, Susannah’s boyfriend had called Angie an ugly word during lunch. The rest of their friends had laughed, but Georgia Lee had to force a lump of mashed potatoes down her throat. She hadn’t known food that mushy could go down that hard, leaving a raw trail in her throat.
Once Jane came along with all the other kids from Maud Bottoms, dropped into the middle of the school year after a tornado tore up their high school, Georgia Lee began to watch Angie and Jane so much she worried others might notice as well and call her a different kind of bad name. When she stared, her brain crowded with the words Stop looking stop looking stop looking, but she couldn’t look away from their ease with one another, how they laughed like they didn’t care what anyone else thought. Georgia Lee couldn’t remember ever feeling that way herself.
Jane had left Georgia Lee feeling sore all up in her body that day—sore from wanting something she shouldn’t want; sore from knowing it was wrong.
She rubbed her eyes and breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth. Three seconds in, six seconds out.
The last time Georgia Lee had seen Jane was on the five o’clock news, after she’d confessed to Warren’s murder. Twenty-five years ago now.
When reporters crowded around Jane after she exited the police car, her wrists in handcuffs, she had looked straight at the camera and said, “I killed Warren Ingram. Alone.”
Confusion. That’s what Georgia Lee remembered. The only thing she could really remember. It’d been so long ago. But wait: That was why her parents had locked her in her room. She remembered now, startled that she’d somehow forgotten.
Her parents had already expressed their “concern” with the friendship before Jane confessed to killing Warren. They certainly weren’t going to allow it after. But she didn’t expect they’d go that far.
Her body shook at the memory. Her father’s drill squealed into the wood of her doorframe four times. The freshly installed padlock knocked against the door when her mom unlocked it to bring her lunch or the homework that Christlyn or Susannah dropped off every Monday afternoon. Georgia Lee pressed against the door like some doomed fairy-tale princess, locked away to protect her from her own impulses. Fingernails scraping the wood till they were jagged, skin cracked. Not daring to complain lest her captors find some other creative torture to inflict on her. Christlyn’s and Susannah’s voices drifting upstairs, wishes for a quick recovery. Reminders from Georgia Lee’s mom that she could be out of school awhile. Words of thanks for their concern and help. Promises to tell Georgia Lee that they’d stopped by.