Real Bad Things(7)
They’d recall her name soon enough.
With each clack of her suitcase wheels on the pavement, panic shot through her. Beat at her temples. Told her to run. She should’ve taken the flight to Dallas. She should’ve run when she could.
Run. That’s all she had to do. But then what? Coming home had always been the prediction, if not the plan. Her head didn’t even know how to change course. Her return—and Warren’s—felt fated.
Once she reached Diane’s trailer, she paused. Jane had lived here for almost two years. The longest of any place up to that point. The trailer still sat in darkness against the neighboring trailers. The grass was still overgrown and patchy. No trees or flower beds or wind chimes like some of the others. Of all the places for Diane to call her forever home after a life spent hauling them here and there and everywhere, an inexplicably itinerant existence within the confines of Maud, skimming the bottom. They’d inhabited apartments, houses, trailers. More than one night, when they’d been between places and Diane had been between jobs, they’d slept in the car.
It’s an adventure, Jane recalled Diane saying when she was near to crying, Jason already going at full throttle. And then: You’ll never remember this night.
She did remember. At least Diane had sheltered Jane and Jason a bit, offered something to keep their fears at bay. It had been an adventure. Potted meat cracked right from the can. Saltines and orange soda. Diane even let them eat some of her bridge mix while Jane read old issues of People magazine to Jason in the back seat with a flashlight before they both dozed off.
In Boston, people used to ask Jane if she was an army brat. No, she would say, we just moved a lot. She’d never even thought to question why they moved so much until people cocked their heads in confusion. She’d always assumed people just moved every year. She and Jason had drifted in and out of the three elementary school options Maud Bottoms offered. There was only one high school in the Bottoms, until its roof got ripped away by a tornado. But here Diane stayed. Probably because the trailer was paid in full and she only had to scrounge up rent for the lot.
On the porch, she ran her hands along the top of the door and along windowsills, under chipped ceramic flowerpots with dead plants, and in between cracked lawn chairs, looking for a spare key but finding none. She should’ve known to head to Cloverleaf Liquors to find Diane.
She sat down at the railing like she and Angie had done most days and nights, bored and hoping for something exciting to happen—until it did. She picked through a package of nuts she’d swiped from the airplane snack cart that morning. Mindless eating. She wasn’t even hungry. Her stomach cramped, but it gave her something to focus on other than her current situation. She shoved the empty package in the pocket of her jeans. Exhausted but wide awake, she waited.
If she’d watched her mouth, as Diane had always warned her to, Jane wouldn’t have had to leave Boston on a flight that morning. She might not have left Maud in the first place.
Low thoughts and hovering anxiety swarmed. On one otherwise ordinary Sunday, Jane and Angie had sat here on this same porch in their usual spots, legs dangling off the side and chins lodged on the rails. Their feet swung high above the overgrown grass below them. Jason sat next to Jane, singing softly to himself as he stripped the bark off a stick. His hands always had to be moving, doing. Tapping or clenching. He was sweet and sensitive, unlike other fourteen-year-old boys she’d known, all ratcheted up tight from hormones, itching to fight or fuck or both.
Light from the TV flickered through the white lace living room curtains behind them. The windows of the neighboring mobile home were covered with faded pages ripped from the Maud Register. Angie claimed a hoarder lived there, but Jane couldn’t confirm. The central AC unit underneath the kitchen window a ways down clicked on and off periodically, disguising the sounds of summer bugs and yonder dogs tied up in yards and Diane yelling at “all them ignorant folks” on America’s Funniest Home Videos, which she was blasting in the living room.
Angie swung her legs and chewed her gum. With her bored frown, bright-pink skirt, black leggings, off-the-shoulder black shirt, and bangle bracelets, she would have fit perfectly in a John Hughes movie. Angie, so different from other girls Jane had known. She was kind and generous and smelled good. Things Jane had never been accused of. Once they moved to a new place, Jane couldn’t help but cling to the first person who said something nice to her. That person usually turned out to be the weird kid in school, weirder than Jane, the New Kid. Angie wasn’t considered weird. She was considered something else entirely. Outsider. Other things.
Jane wormed a hand into Angie’s pocket and extricated a piece of Juicy Fruit, only to be punched in the arm and scolded to ask next time. Jane laughed and popped half the piece into her mouth. She gave the other half to Jason before resting her chin back on the rail. He ran his fingers over the smooth surface of the now naked tree branch he’d stripped, as if whittling with his fingertips. She ran her hand along his hair as she’d done when he was little, his head all warm and slightly damp. He swatted her away. She grabbed his hand in midair.
“What’s the magic word?” she asked, holding on. He tried to wriggle his way out but couldn’t. “Say it.”
“Fopp u copp kopp yopp o u.” Oppish. The secret language they used around Warren.
She squeezed his hand harder until he laughed and surrendered. “Okay, okay,” he said. “You are the smartest and strongest person I know.”