Like Mandarin Page 2

  “May I have your attention, please. May I have your attention, please.”

  Mr. Beck, the principal, requested our attention twice during morning announcements. He wanted to take full advantage of his daily five minutes of fame. Usually, I ignored him with the rest of the class, but that day I stared straight at the speaker, a black circle like a pupil with no eye around it.

  “Good morning, everyone, on this terrific Tuesday, April tenth, with the temperature in the low sixties. This is your principal, Mr. Beck.”

  “Beck’s stuck in the sixties,” a guy called from the back of the class.

  “Ha, yeah, I bet he’s taking a puff of the dooja right now,” called another.

  With perfect timing, Mr. Beck coughed. Everybody laughed except Ms. Ingle, who opened her mouth and then closed it.

  “First news of the day,” Mr. Beck continued. “I’m pleased to announce I have the winners of the All-American Essay Contest, kindly funded by the members of Washokey’s 4-H and Kiwanis organizations, right here on this paper in front of me. Hold on to your seats!”

  I curled my fingers around the bottom of my seat. My essay flashed before my eyes like a reel of microfilm, each paragraph flipping by with an imaginary tick. Certain sentences hopped out at me, the turns of phrase I’d wrangled like rodeo calves. I’d written exactly what I thought would win me the grand-prize trip.

  “Third place and twenty-five dollars goes to Becky Pepper, junior.”

  Becky Pepper was a 4-H kid, bused in from one of the farms or ranches that made up Washokey’s unincorporated south. I suspected she’d written about the history of beef breeding or dairy science, something the judges would love.

  “Second place and fifty dollars goes to—”

  Mr. Beck coughed again. I sat very still.

  “Grace Carpenter, sophomore. And one hundred dollars and admission to the three-week All-American Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C., goes to our very own junior-class president, Peter Shaw! Congratulations, Peter.”

  My heart plummeted to the soles of my feet as I watched the other kids mob Peter. They mussed up his hair, snatched at his glasses. When Ms. Ingle went over to congratulate him, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I snaked my arm through the strap of my tote bag. Unnoticed in the confusion, I rushed out of the classroom.

  I was going to end up just like Momma. It was my fate. Born in Washokey and stuck there forever, trying to make myself stand out among the same old people. No matter how hard I tried to steer my life in a different course, something would always knock me back.

  These were the thoughts that packed my brain like gridlocked traffic as I crouched in the end bathroom stall, with one arm draped over the back of the toilet. Although no one was there to see me, I tried my hardest not to cry.

  “Only cry when you’re happy,” Momma liked to say. “Only weep when you win.”

  But it was through eyes blurred by tears that I noticed the graffiti at the bottom edge of the stall door, scrawled in thick red marker:

  School is Horseshit.

  I mouthed the words over and over. Had Taffeta seen them here? She was an advanced reader for her age, like I’d been. But this bathroom was in the high school wing. The elementary school kids used another, unless it was a real emergency. And besides, a person could only read the phrase from ground level—sprawled out on the grimy tile floor, like me.

  How pathetic.

  I mashed the heels of my hands into my eyes. Admittedly, I had no desire to be a politician. Or a leader of any sort. But I longed for those three weeks outside of Washokey, longed to see a different part of the country, to sample parts of another life. Miles of green grass. The Smithsonian—especially the gem and mineral collection. People in business suits. Here I saw nothing but jeans.

  The essay contest was supposed to tide me over until my real, final escape to college. And if I tapped into that deep-down part of myself I didn’t like to face, I had to admit it—I also wanted to win for the sake of winning.

  And to think that Peter Shaw—four-eyed shotgun shooter, demolisher of innocent anthills, a football player, for crying out loud—had written a better essay than I had!

  Now I’d have to wait two more years to leave. An unfathomable length of time. Two more years of imprisonment in the sun-scorched badlands, surrounded by the same old scandals, the same dusty streets, the same products on the grocery store shelves. How could I possibly stand it? Without something to break up the monotony, I would fade into the hills like one of those solitary ghost-people, who spent their days listening to the wildwinds batter their corrugated shacks.

  When I was younger, I used to beg Momma to move away from Washokey. She always shook her head and said the same thing: “I tasted it. That city freedom. But then I came to my senses.”

  As if Jackson Hole could compare to New York, or San Francisco. We wouldn’t even have to leave Wyoming, I pleaded. We had passed many memorable places on our road trips between pageants. Why in the world were we stuck in the Washokey Badlands Basin?

  “In a world that’s so big and wide,” Momma would reply, “you can’t blame me if I prefer this knowable portion.”

  The more Momma told me she wanted to stay, the more I wanted to go. I used to suspect that the badlands were inhabited with malicious spirits who didn’t want us to leave. Although now I knew better, I still didn’t feel better. Because if it wasn’t spirits keeping me in Washokey, then it must be something much stronger. I wondered if Washokey life had infected me—if it had altered some secret part of my brain or reprogrammed the amino acids in my DNA so if I ever got out, I would never be truly happy.

  Like a conch shell singing for the ocean. Washokey would pull me back.

  Sniffling loudly, I must have missed the creak of the door opening. I didn’t know I had company until the faucet splashed on.

  I froze midsniffle.

  For a moment, I considered hiding out. But then I remembered how, back in fifth grade, Alexis & Co. used to wait outside a bathroom stall until the girl inside finished and then make fun of her for taking so long.

  I scrambled to my feet, flushing the toilet on the way up, and pushed open the door.

  Mandarin Ramey stood at the sink.

  I saw her in fragments, like close-up snapshots. Her kohl-smudged hazel eyes. Her angular cheekbones—everybody said her mother had been part Shoshone. Her black hair, streaked with damp ridges and valleys from the comb of her wet fingers. The uneven hem of her white sweater. Jeans worn low on her hips. As she arched forward to shut off the faucet, the dip of her spine engraved in the apricot-colored skin of her back.

  She wiped her hands on her jeans. Then she faced me.

  “Grace Carpenter,” she said.

  My name sounded foreign on her tongue. How could she possibly have known it?

  “So it was you bellyaching in that bathroom stall.”

  Mandarin Ramey knew I’d been crying. I felt like throwing up.

  “It doesn’t matter to me one way or another.” She leaned against the dented metal sink. “I was only saying. It’s no shame to cry—I heard the essay contest announcement on the loudspeaker. A rotten deal, if you ask me. Peter Shaw’s got prairie oysters for brains.”

  She seemed to be waiting for me to speak, but my lips wouldn’t work.

  Mandarin Ramey had never stood so close to me. She had never spoken to me before. In fact, Mandarin rarely spoke to anybody at school. She preferred the men she served at her father’s bar over boys her own age, and after her attempt at friendship with a girl named Sophie Brawls went sour a couple years back, she avoided girls altogether. It was amazing how much we all knew about Mandarin. How much, and how little.

  “I won fifty dollars,” I said at last.

  Mandarin smirked. “Yeah, but it’ll be a stupid savings bond, the kind you can’t touch till you’re of age. And you’re how old, fourteen?”

  “Almost fifteen.”

  She studied me, her expression blank. Without moving her tors
o, she dropped one hand to her hip and slipped a cigarette from her back pocket. Every move she made, from the cock of her head to the cross of her ankles, was graceful, yet calculated, as if she were posing for an unseen camera. She poked the cigarette between her lips and lit it, sucking in so hard her cheeks collapsed inward.

  Then she offered it to me. “Want a drag?”

  Even the idea—sharing a cigarette with Mandarin Ramey, putting my mouth where hers had been—made my face flush. I shook my head and turned to the door.

  “Ain’t you gonna wash your hands?”

  I stared at her in horror. She smiled at me. A haze of smoke lingered around her head like a halo.

  Which would be more embarrassing—escaping now with unwashed hands, or lingering to wash them? With every split second of internal debate, I died a little more. Finally I hurried to the sink beside hers, jabbed on the faucet, and scrubbed my hands as quickly as I could.

  “I was just giving you trouble, y’know.” She yanked a trail of brown paper towels from the dispenser and stuck them in front of my face. “I don’t bite. Really.”

  I dried my hands without meeting her eyes.

  “Aw, get your ass back to class. Me, I aim to finish this cigarette. I’ll see you in math, all right?” She gave me a playful shove, herding me out.

  As the bathroom door creaked shut behind me, I staggered down the empty hall of lockers and around the corner. There I backed into the wall, crackling a poster for the Future Farmers of America. My tote bag slid off my shoulder onto the ground. I could still feel the imprint of her hand on my shoulder, still smell the faintest trace of smoke on my clothes. Mandarin Ramey had spoken to me.

  And not only that …

  Mandarin Ramey knew my name.

  I gazed out the window across the hall. Great sheets of earth swept into mesas furry with sage, then tumbled brokenly into valleys. The only color in the landscape was an early patch of Indian paintbrushes with blooms like ruby shards. As I watched, several red-winged blackbirds startled and took flight.

  Depending on whom you asked, Washokey, Wyoming, had two or four claims to fame.

  First, Washokey had the biggest jackalope statue in the western half of Wyoming. It sat in front of the grocery store on Main Street. Jackalopes were Wyoming’s official mythological creature: jackrabbits with pronghorn antlers, the essence of Wyoming sense of humor. Nobody actually believed they existed, with the exception of armchair tourists on Wyoming message boards.

  Second, and more notoriously, Washokey was the site of Wyoming’s 1968 hippie massacre. It wasn’t really a massacre. Only three people were killed, including the killer. But the headlines put Washokey on the map.

  Washokey’s other two claims to fame were subject to question.

  The town had made headlines again the year I was born, when someone spied the likeness of the Virgin Mary in a cluster of boulders by the Bighorn River. But that was also the year of the great storm, when the wildwinds bellowed through town fiercer than ever, and the river brimmed over its banks and jumbled up all the boulders like a kid spoiling a marbles game. In all the years after, nobody could figure out which rocky cluster was the special one. Except for one person. And I wasn’t telling.

  Washokey’s final claim to fame was Mandarin Ramey.

  Mandarin appeared in the doorway of our geometry classroom. The noisy flux of students bottlenecked behind her. She paused a second, backlit, as if surveying her realm. Then she sauntered across the classroom and fell into her seat with a huffy exhale of breath, leaning back so the hem of her sweater lifted tantalizingly.

  I kept one hand around the stone in my jacket pocket as I opened my notebook to last night’s homework. Although math was one of my best subjects, I made an effort to remain unnoticed in a class of sophomores and dyslexic juniors.

  Mandarin was the only senior.

  “We’re going to start our chapter on polygons today,” Mrs. Cleary announced, “which I know you’ve all been waiting for!”

  Hunching over my desk, I began to draw a border of circles along the bottom of my paper and added freckles, stems, and leaves. Mrs. Cleary, a Washokey native, made math hysterical. Not like funny-hysterical, but hysteria-hysterical. She hopped around in too-tight pants with her granny panty lines showing and waved her arms like a cheerleader. She chirped on and on, transforming the most interesting stuff into nonsense.

  I should have enrolled in precalculus when they’d given me the chance.

  But I’d known that Mandarin was in this class.

  I knew what and when all her classes were. I’d memorized the paths she took through the halls.

  I knew where she lived (in the blue house on Plains Street), when and where she worked (Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at Solomon’s, her father’s bar), and which foods she preferred at lunchtime (fruit, and only fruit—the more unusual, the better).

  It wasn’t like I stalked her. I only observed, which was something else entirely. And everybody had some level of fascination with Mandarin Ramey.

  Although I was pretty sure nobody else kept a mental tally of all the men she slept with. I could never be too sure, of course, because I based most everything I knew on rumor. And there were always rumors about Mandarin, though not all of them involved her men.

  Like the one about her joyriding with a truck stop prostitute. And the one about her streaking through a baseball game during a breakout from the Wyoming Girls’ School, which she’d attended for three months during her sophomore year. And the one about her running a road-enraged bone-head off the highway in her father’s truck.

  Mandarin denied or defended nothing. Which meant, according to the other students, that the rumors had to be true. Especially since she’d moved to town at age nine and had missed taking part in those formative childhood years when we’d memorized one another.

  Mandarin’s scandals gained the most attention. But that wasn’t all I envied about her.

  Her elegance. Her disdain. The subtext in every little thing she did. With Mandarin, the tap-tap-tap of a ballpoint pen against her desk was a come-on, a raised hand, a fuck you. Even her name was seductive: Mandarin, like the syrupy canned oranges I ate with my fingers. Because her mother was a mystery and her dad sure wasn’t talking, nobody knew where she’d gotten it—whether it was Native American, maybe from the Mandan Indians we’d learned about during our Lewis and Clark unit, or whether it involved the Chinese language. Everybody agreed it was impossibly exotic, like her cheekbones, her long black hair, and her gravelly slow-tempo voice.

  “Mandarin!”

  My pencil lead snapped. I covered my drawings with both hands.

  “Come up here and do number three from the homework on the board,” Mrs. Cleary said. I noticed that her nails were painted pale yellow. It looked like she had some kind of disease.

  Mandarin hesitated, eyebrows raised. Then, at her own insolent pace, she got up and sauntered to the front of the classroom. She tugged once at her low-slung jeans before selecting a piece of chalk. Washokey High was so backward only half our classrooms had dry-erase boards.

  What is it like? I wondered as Mandarin began to sketch. To be the one the entire school talked about, lusted after? To serve as everybody’s favorite topic of conversation? To walk down the street and leave grown men gaping as you passed?

  Solomon’s sat at the other end of Main Street, as far from the high school as possible. It wasn’t the only bar in Washokey. In a town of just thirteen hundred people, there were four places for cowpokes to get shitfaced—not even counting Della Bader’s seasonal Farm Bar in the unincorporated south.

  But Solomon’s was one of the most popular. Mandarin served cocktails there until two in the morning on weekends, though she wouldn’t be eighteen until September.

  On Saturdays, sometimes I hid in the doorway of the Sundrop Quik Stop across the street and watched Mandarin arrive at work. She had to pass the Methodist church, where a cluster of sunburned men often gathered out front, waiting for th
e afternoon service to begin so they could enjoy their evening festivities. I liked to imagine their conversations:

  Would you look at that, the first man would say.

  If only she wasn’t just interested in them out-of-towners, the second would reply.

  Hell, I’d risk a jail sentence to have that girlie squallin’ in my bedsheets.

  Shee-yit, I’d risk it all.

  But if Mandarin heard whatever they said, she never reacted—even though she had an epic temper. Maybe she kept quiet because she knew she’d be slinging them beers that night.

  She never paused to read the card-stock signs taped to the bar’s foggy windows: Happy Hour, Doller off Domestics, and Karyoke Singin Thursday Nites! Stepping over the yellow chow dog that slept in the doorway, she disappeared through the swinging saloon doors into the murky, smoky gloom.

  So far, Mandarin had drawn a lopsided three-dimensional cylinder on the blackboard. She dragged the chalk beneath the shape with a deliberate screech, causing all the girls in the class to clap their hands to their ears.

  The boys didn’t even twitch. Like me, they were spellbound.

  They knew they had no chance, though. Mandarin’s men were usually five years, ten years older, and from other, larger places: Casper, Laramie, even Denver and Billings. Men with no reason to stick around, except for her.

  At least, that was what everybody said.

  Mandarin never broadcasted her flings the way other students did. She never parked at the A&W for floats and chicken fingers, or copped feels under blankets at autumn bonfires. All that was too time-consuming. Mandarin treated her men like the apples she bit the good parts from, then pitched; like the still-smoldering cigarettes she famously crushed beneath her bare feet.

  I wondered how many of them she thought about afterward, and which ones, and why.

  I’d actually seen Mandarin with a man just once. It was early the past October, the limbo between scorch and freeze. I remembered pressing my braid into my nose and mouth as I walked down Plains Street, as if the scent of my shampoo would ward off the wind, the tang of impending snow.