Like Mandarin Page 11

  And just like that, I realized what I had forgotten. But how? How could I have?

  Because to me, it was never real.

  I couldn’t let Mandarin know about the conference. Not yet. I knew she hated liars, but I had no other choice. “Stuff for the service project,” I said. “Just some ideas.”

  “Boooring,” she drawled.

  “Yeah. It is.” I started to ramble. “But it could be fun, if we do it together. We don’t have to whitewash walls or anything, like Tom Sawyer. I mean, really, the possibilities are endless. What about—”

  Mandarin threw a grape at my forehead.

  “I guess you’re right, though.” She bit another grape in half. “As much as I hate to admit it. I’d like to get the hell out of here respectably and all, so we should get that damn thing over with. How ’bout you come over after dinner?”

  “Sure.” I adjusted the pamphlets so they fell inside my bag, and followed Mandarin out to our usual place at the lilac planter, that morning’s excitement already settling into something more like nausea.

  To make matters worse, Mrs. Mack had lab groups planned—and she’d stuck Davey and me with Paige Shelmerdine.

  Mrs. Mack was a gnomish woman who hadn’t even majored in science. She pulled all our experiments from an old textbook that varied wildly in its levels of difficulty, but she could never distinguish the basic from the impossible. One week we might be mixing two simple chemicals and recording the shifting colors. The next week’s experiment might require masses, microscopes, Avogadro’s number, and calculations so nuanced even I had trouble figuring them out. Frequently, foul odors were involved.

  I expected that day’s lab to resemble the past week’s Identification of an Unknown Substance. (The substance turned out to be grape Kool-Aid.) So when Mrs. Mack said, “Today we’ll test properties of different rocks,” it seemed like God was trying to cheer me up.

  Or to compensate for Paige Shelmerdine.

  Paige wasn’t even supposed to be in our class, but her thrice-weekly remedial-reading appointments were scheduled for the same time as freshman science. Administration thought bumping her forward was preferable to holding her back. They didn’t consider how she’d hold back the rest of us.

  “There’s so many,” Paige complained as Davey spread our identification charts on the lab table. She had a stuffed nose, and she kept turning her head to the side and wiping it on the shoulder of her blouse.

  Davey and I tried to ignore her. “ ‘Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic,’ ” he read out loud. “ ‘Split into hardness, composition, color, and grain size.’ ”

  I pried open the yellow pencil box of rock samples. Most I could name right away. The local ones were all there: agate, quartzite, granite. Some, like obsidian and pumice, were obvious. Others could have been a couple of different things.

  “You know what that one looks like?” Paige’s hand darted in front of me to snatch a white stone. “A rock.”

  “Hilarious,” Davey muttered.

  “No, a rock. Not like a rock rock.” Paige smirked. “Like a crack rock. You know, like crystal meth.”

  We stared at her like she was on crack.

  “No way.” Davey blink-blinked at the charts. “It’s probably rock salt, or gypsum, or—”

  “It’s got to be gypsum,” I said. “Scratch it with your thumbnail. If any comes away, it’s gypsum.” I reached out to take the stone from Paige, but she held it from me.

  “I’ll bet you want it,” she said. “If it’s really what I think it is. Some of the guys my brothers know, they’re real meth-heads, the crazy sort. The kinda guys Mandarin Ramey runs around with. The kinda guys—” She snickered. “Well, y’all know what I’m talking about. Especially you, Grace.”

  I felt my face heat up. “Paige, don’t be dumb.”

  Truth was, I’d never even considered whether Mandarin did drugs. That wasn’t part of the rumors. I wondered frantically whether there might be a whole separate stratum of rumors passed around by the older kids, the kids who spent their nights partying instead of in their bedrooms, rereading paperbacks.

  I glanced at Davey, but he was busying himself with his notebook, copying the parameters for gypsum off the charts. Unlike every other human being in the Washokey Badlands Basin, Davey didn’t like gossip.

  I reached across him to grab one of the charts and my loose hair swept over his arm. He yanked it away and blushed.

  “You know, Grace,” Paige continued, “everyone saw you acting all wild in the cotton that morning.”

  Will you go with me? Mandarin’s voice, shouting in the wind. I hid my wince by pretending to examine a chart.

  “Staggering all over the place,” Paige continued. She leaned across the table and thumped the white rock on my chart. “Like you were on drugs.”

  I glared at her. “Give me a break, Paige.”

  She held up her hands, the picture of innocence. “Don’t be pissed off at me. It’s only what everybody’s saying.”

  “Well, everybody’s full of shit.”

  “You’re even starting to talk like her! Next you’ll be wanting to look like her too. And after that, well …” She tried to wink suggestively, but her other eye closed too. “Who knows what you’ll do next?”

  “Let’s just get to work,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “You look like you’re doing just fine on your own,” Paige said. “You and the school faggot.”

  Davey’s cheeks turned magenta.

  I squeezed the rock so hard my knucklebones showed through my skin. How good it would feel to fling it right into Paige’s self-satisfied face. But then I’d get kicked out of class.

  Instead, I did something I hadn’t done for ages: I raised my hand.

  “Mrs. Mack?” I said, loud enough for the entire class to hear. “Paige won’t do any work. She’s just sitting here, distracting us.”

  I knew my good grades would endorse my integrity. And at that moment, Paige was sitting with her feet up on another chair. Hurriedly, she dropped them to the floor.

  Mrs. Mack glared at her. “Why don’t you come up to my desk, Miss Shelmerdine,” she said, “and do the experiment with me?”

  Paige, speechless for once, trudged to the front of the room and sat.

  I glanced at Davey again. He kept blinking and blinking, filling the boxes on the identification chart with his tiny penmanship, avoiding my gaze. As if he didn’t know what to make of this new Grace Carpenter. Well, neither did I.

  As soon as Mandarin shut us inside her bedroom, I sensed something was wrong. The way she didn’t quite look me in the eye. The way she fell backward onto her bed, as if she’d succumbed to a spell of overpowering fatigue. The possible layers in her opening lines: “Let’s get this project over with,” she said. “So we don’t have it between us.”

  Feeling uncertain, I sat cross-legged on her ugly old-man carpet instead of joining her on the bed. I cleared my throat.

  “Well, we did this experiment on the hardness of rocks in science today,” I began. “I was thinking you could tie them into your service project somehow. Maybe we could contact some geologists, or something, and put together some sort of a display—”

  “Rocks depress me.”

  I tried not to feel insulted. “We could find someone who studies paleontology. Or archaeology.”

  “Ology ology ology.” Mandarin yawned and stretched, like a cat in a puddle of sun. “It’s all about dead things. What’s with you and the nonliving? What about the people?”

  “I thought you hated people.”

  “Bullshit. I love people. What do you think I am, a sociopath? I’d never have said that.”

  I cleared my throat, deciding not to contradict her. I hadn’t really liked the idea of using rocks, anyway—I wasn’t about to show anybody my collection. That was my secret. “We could, like, paint something. Something that belongs to an old person. A fence.”

  “Like Tom Sawyer?” she mocked.

  “We coul
d clean out somebody’s barn.…”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Well, what service project did you do other years?”

  “Nothing. Got my dad to sign the paper that said I did it. He’ll sign anything, if he’s drunk enough.”

  “Why didn’t you do that this year?”

  Mandarin shrugged. “They’re on to me.”

  I was beginning to get the feeling she was playing with me, batting me around like a mouse between her paws. I tapped my pencil against my knee and let a bit of my frustration slip out. “Well, do you have any ideas?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Whatever’s easy.”

  “I thought you wanted to get this over with. You’ve got to help me think of something, just a little.”

  “I don’t got to do anything.”

  “But you said you wanted to graduate.…”

  Mandarin rolled onto her side, propping up her head with one arm. All of a sudden, her voice went arctic. “Know what, Grace? You’re fortunate I’m helping you with this project anyways, after what you did.”

  “What I did?”

  In reply, Mandarin whipped something from underneath her pillow and flung it at me. Dark and glossy, it sliced through the air and landed on the floor by my foot. “Want to explain what that was doing in your bag, Grace? Because it sure ain’t ‘stuff for the service project.’ ”

  One of my pamphlets for the All-American Leadership Conference.

  She must have stolen it when I wasn’t paying attention. The winds picked up outside the window, and the air inside Mandarin’s room seemed to shift. Ozone, or lack of it. For just a second, my mind seemed to vibrate. I couldn’t pull my eyes from hers. “The conference is just for three weeks,” I said in a small voice. “We can go after—”

  “Three weeks,” Mandarin repeated. “Only three weeks! Anything could happen in three weeks. In three weeks I could be dead.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “We all could be dead in three weeks.” I started to babble. “A meteor could fall down and smash us all to pieces. Like the dinosaurs. That’s what happened to them. A stone from space thundered down and changed the weather, and whoosh! Wiped them all out.”

  Mandarin was still staring at me, but her expression had changed to one of contempt.

  “I swear I was going to tell you, but I only just found out today! Turns out, Peter Shaw cheated.…”

  “I just thought the same things were important to the both of us,” she said. “Hell, I should’ve known better, right? I mean, nobody thinks like me. Nobody else in the world. And you? You were just pretending.”

  “I wasn’t pretending, I only forgot—”

  “You’re right,” she said loudly, cutting me off. “You should forget about it. We both should.”

  I rose to my knees. “Mandarin, come on. I don’t even care about the conference. ‘Leadership in the Political Sector’? That doesn’t interest me. I couldn’t care less about the political sector—”

  Mandarin slammed her fist into the wall.

  I heard the bang, saw the smear of blood where she’d gashed her knuckles. I stumbled away on my weakened knees. It was so sudden, so violent. I thought of the stories about Mandarin’s fights. Sophie Brawls, and the scratches on her neck. I knew Mandarin scared people, but until then I’d never felt frightened.

  And yet, I felt even more frightened I’d ruined everything between us.

  “Mandarin …”

  “Just go,” she said quietly, cradling her injured hand. “And close the door behind you.”

  So that was it, then. It was over.

  I grabbed my tote bag and left without another word, shutting Mandarin’s bedroom door as gently as I could. On my way out of her house, I cupped both my hands over my nose and mouth, as if less oxygen would reduce my chances of bursting into tears.

  Then I saw the envelope.

  Just part of it, sticking out of the mailbox. I would have overlooked it if I hadn’t noticed the first few letters of Mandarin’s name. Handwritten, in neat blue ink.

  Although I was terrified Mandarin might come roaring out behind me, I pulled out the envelope. It felt lopsided, heavier than a letter should. I traced the outline of the triangular object inside, pinched it between my fingertips.

  An arrowhead.

  I remembered the jar of perfect arrowheads she’d pulled from under her bed. Blue-white chalcedony. Tiger skin obsidian.

  Somebody was sending Mandarin arrowheads.

  I looked at the return address. The strange name—Kimanah Paisley—meant nothing to me. Neither did the address: Riverton, WY 82501. Riverton was a few hours south. Home to the Wind River Reservation. More badlands.

  And to whomever was sending Mandarin arrowheads.

  My throat ached. What were a few weeks of friendship compared to what she’d apparently had with this mystery girl? Mandarin and I had spent barely any time together outside of school. She shot down every personal question I asked. Though I supposed she had good reason to—I’d betrayed her trust, all for three weeks at a stupid conference that was sounding worse by the minute. “Leadership: the Musical”? Really?

  I considered taking the envelope. Mandarin had stolen my pamphlet, after all. But instead, I jammed it back in the mailbox and headed for the Tombs.

  By Thursday, Momma’s pageant fever was worse than ever, though the tri-county pageant wasn’t until early June. She hadn’t even bothered to get dressed. She bustled around in a baggy satin muumuu covered in a pandemonium of butterflies and flowers against a royal blue background. Her bosom jiggled underneath like smuggled water balloons. It was almost hypnotizing.

  Each day, after school, she relegated hordes of menial tasks to me, like gluing rhinestones to Taffeta’s flip-flops for the swimwear competition. I never protested, which Momma found extremely unusual. She must have thought I’d come down with wildwind psychosis, though she never asked what was wrong.

  I still hadn’t mentioned my contest win, the papers at the bottom of my tote bag. I couldn’t even think of the conference without my throat burning and my lungs going haywire.

  On Tuesday, I’d approached Ms. Ingle after homeroom to tell her I’d have to find another service project. “I’m really sorry,” I said, still feeling guilty about what I’d called her behind her back. “It’s just not going to work out.”

  “Has something happened between you and Mandarin?”

  I fumbled in my pocket for a stone and found it empty. “Well …”

  “Grace, has she done something to you?”

  “Done something?”

  “You can tell me anything, you know. If Mandarin’s been pressuring you to take part in activities you know you shouldn’t—”

  “No!” I almost shouted. “Nothing like that. It’s just that I don’t feel like I’m the best person to tutor Mandarin. I’m just so young, you know? Maybe she’d be better off working with an upperclassman, or at least a real sophomore. Someone like …” I thought quickly. “Like Davey Miller.”

  “Davey?” Ms. Ingle said incredulously.

  “Okay, maybe not Davey.”

  “Grace, of course you’re a real sophomore. You’re at the top of the class.” She tapped her chin with two fingers. “I think I know what the real problem is. I’m sensing a case of low self-esteem. Is that correct?”

  “I don’t think …” I paused. If I denied it, I’d sound big-headed. But I didn’t want to agree, either.

  “If so, it’s entirely misplaced. In fact, you have more potential for success than any student I’ve ever taught. There’s plenty you can teach Mandarin. And she wants you to. Remember, she asked for you.”

  I didn’t reply, but a sniffle escaped.

  “Though if it’s absolutely necessary, I can help you think up a different service project,” Ms. Ingle continued. “Mr. Mason received a new shipment of historic bridge photographs he needs help filing. And I can speak to Mandarin about finding another t
utor.”

  I thought I’d feel relieved. But once Ms. Ingle said it, I realized what it meant. If she didn’t fight it—and I knew she might—Mandarin would be paired with somebody new.

  Somebody older. More experienced.

  Somebody unafraid to seize shimmery, windstruck, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities laid out before them.

  Somebody who wasn’t me.

  “It’s all right,” I heard myself say. “I was just thinking out loud. I’ll still work with her. No problem.” Although I had no idea how, since Mandarin and I weren’t speaking.

  Then, as if I weren’t upset enough, Ms. Ingle leaned in close and whispered, “I think your pants are a little too big. Would you like to borrow a belt?”

  I’d eaten lunch in my bathroom stall all week.

  Now I sat in the kitchen with Momma, hot-gluing tiny fabric flowers to a wooden hoop. I was making a mess of it—losing flowers, dropping flowers, gluing flowers to myself. Momma’s anxiety didn’t help matters. Every year, she seemed to enjoy pageant prep less and less, until the whole enterprise was more a colossal chore than an event she and Taffeta had enrolled in by choice. It was hard to believe her claims that she’d missed pageants terribly in the gap between my last and Taffeta’s first.

  I’d never have thought Momma would notice my distress, especially in the midst of her own. Until she placed her hand over mine.

  “Grace, dear,” she said, “is anything the matter? You’re not in any … trouble with that Ramey girl, are you?”

  “Momma, no!”

  “I just meant, are you having a tiff, is all.”

  Only Momma would use a word like tiff. I balled up my fist underneath her hand. “Everything’s fine,” I lied.

  “Okay,” she said hesitantly. She glanced at the mess I was making of the wooden hoop. “Still … maybe you should take a break. Why don’t you head to the store and pick up a gallon of milk?”

  I was afraid of running into Mandarin on the street—it would be just my luck—but I couldn’t tell Momma that. She handed me a five-dollar bill. I ripped a flower off my thumb and headed for the door.

  I pulled the hood of my sweater over my head and yanked on the strings, leaving myself a little circle to peer through. Then I gathered my tote bag in front of my chest like a padded shield. With my head down, I passed the back door to the grocery store and went around to the front. The ghosts of old-timey letters still decorated the gray brick building: Drugs, Soda Fountain, Washokey Merchant.