Like Mandarin Page 4

  But I knew all about her.

  That was what happened when you stuck around in the town where you’d grown up—even your daughters learned your stories.

  Like me, Momma had felt the pull of far-off places during her girlhood in Washokey. When her parents died in a highway accident, she saw a chance for escape. At eighteen, she left her grandmother’s house and moved in with her uncle on the other side of the state.

  I knew what had really happened during her three-month stay in Jackson. I knew all about the nights she’d spent in the brush beside the Snake River after her uncle had turned out to be some kind of pervert. The solace she’d found in crummy bars. And the nice police officer who’d rescued her at her lowest point and driven her home to Washokey. He’d gotten her pregnant with me on the way, although she didn’t know it until he was long gone.

  Momma had spent fifteen years of both our lives trying to compensate for her disgrace. It didn’t work, of course. Because small towns don’t forget.

  And neither do daughters.

  After Ms. Ingle handed back my history exam on Wednesday, she lingered by my desk. “Would you mind staying after class for a few minutes?” she said in a low voice. “I’ll write you a pass.”

  I nodded, watching as she continued up the aisle. Her brown dress drooped around her skinny frame like a burlap bag, and her nylons sagged in the knees. I knew she refused to buy Femme Fatale cosmetics from my mother, preferring the cheaper grocery store brands. She often kept me after class to discuss more challenging assignments, or simply to talk history. Sometimes she showed me historical postcards Mr. Mason had purchased online: pictures of women picnicking in stiff skirts, or frontiersmen crossing the bridge over the Bighorn River.

  In spite of her fondness for Washokey history, Ms. Ingle was an out-of-towner, assigned to our school due to a lack of able teachers. No matter how long she lived in Washokey, she’d always be someone different, someone we pretended to scoff at but really envied because she’d had a whole other life outside of Washokey. Just like Mandarin Ramey.

  Once the bell rang, I approached Ms. Ingle’s desk.

  “I thought I’d give you a couple days before I told you I’m sorry about the contest,” she said. “I suppose you can’t win them all.”

  Don’t tell Momma that. My hand located the small piece of nephrite jade in my pocket. Jade was Wyoming’s official mineral. The stone was the color of verdigris, like an ancient Greek coin gone turquoise with age.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking about you, Grace.”

  “Okay …,” I said.

  “I’ve always regretted that we haven’t been able to challenge you the way you deserve to be challenged. Though I stand by the notion that advancing you another year isn’t the best option.”

  I shook my head so hard my brain almost rattled.

  Sure, skipping me again would get me into college—and out of Washokey—faster. But I already felt light-years behind the rest of my classmates in all the real-life things that mattered. If they made me a senior next year … I shuddered. Already, the only sophomore who talked to me was Davey Miller, and he talked to everybody, whether they listened or not.

  Ms. Ingle knew how I felt. She’d pried it out of me the first week of school, after I’d overanalyzed a “What’s Your History?” essay and turned in a twelve-page manifesto. Our junior high teachers had spooked us into believing that high school would be tough.

  “You’ve excelled in your alternative course work,” she continued. “But I’ve noticed you haven’t signed up for a community service project yet.”

  Washokey students had to take part in ten hours of community service in both fall and spring. Momma wanted me to help backstage at Little Miss Washokey—an appalling idea, but I hadn’t come up with anything better.

  “Unless you were planning on assisting Mr. Mason again …”

  “I haven’t decided.” No way. Some of those ancient photos had sharp edges. I still had scars from the tintypes.

  “Of course, cataloging our history for future generations is priceless. But I’ve been thinking. How would you like a project whose results are a little more … immediate? And that takes advantage of your extensive brainpower?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess.”

  Ms. Ingle hesitated. When she spoke again, I could tell she was trying to sound nonchalant. “By any chance … do you happen to know Mandarin Ramey?”

  My thoughts blanked out for a second. Then they returned as a series of exclamation points instead of words.

  “Grace?”

  “Well, no, not like personally … But I know who she is, yeah.”

  “Mandarin’s predicament is the opposite of yours. We should have held her back years ago, but she swore she’d drop out if we did. We’ve lightened her load enough for her to scrape by. Yet anytime our help is obvious, she rebels. I’ve never met anyone so averse to a helping hand.”

  Ms. Ingle held out a glass candy dish filled with Reese’s Pieces. Taffeta called them Reesey Peeseys. I took a single orange candy to be polite. It stuck in my throat.

  “She needs help in all her classes,” Ms. Ingle continued. “But geometry and history the most—which happen to be your two best subjects. Mandarin also hasn’t chosen a community service project. She needs twenty hours to count for both semesters, since she didn’t complete a project last fall. I was hoping you could help her choose one. You don’t have to participate, but any sort of guidance—”

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  As soon as I uttered the words, a bizarre image flashed behind my eyes: Mandarin and me sitting side by side in the library, leaning over a massive reference book as thick as an ancient Bible. For some reason, we both wore glasses.

  I felt a tickle of laughter in my throat threatening to overflow. I coughed to keep it down. I didn’t want to look crazy. But the absurdity of the two of us, paired up—hysterical. Not just Mrs. Cleary hysterical, but straitjacket-bound, funny farm–inmate hysterical.

  We might as well frolic through a horse pasture, holding hands.

  “You look apprehensive,” Ms. Ingle said, misreading my face. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea.”

  “No,” I said. Or I thought I’d said it. It was as if I were outside myself, listening to me speak. “I can do it. But … I just want to get this straight. My service project is helping Mandarin find a service project?”

  “With some tutoring on the side.” Ms. Ingle smiled. “You’re a good person, Grace. I knew you had a strong sense of self. With the wrong person, Mandarin could be a …” She paused. “I just trust you won’t be influenced.”

  I felt the urge to laugh again, but this time at Ms. Ingle, for so thoroughly misreading not only my facial expression, but everything about me.

  “There’s just one problem,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Why would Mandarin want my help? I’m just a sophomore. The youngest sophomore in the school. It would be embarrassing for her. She’d never want to work with me—not in a billion years.”

  Ms. Ingle took a small handful of Reesey Peeseys and rattled them in her palm. “That’s not a problem at all,” she said. “Mandarin asked for you herself.”

  No matter what Ms. Ingle said, I never believed the whole preposterous mentorship enterprise would happen. Because that was the very definition of my rocks-and-books-and-badlands existence: in my life, nothing happened.

  So when Mandarin approached me on Thursday, I was completely unprepared.

  I was standing in the hallway between fifth and sixth periods, trying to buy a drink, but the fickle soda machine refused to take my dollar. Every time I crammed the bill into the slot, the machine spit it back out, like a wagging tongue. I began to feel frantic with thirst. In a few minutes I’d be late for English. To make matters worse, the machine sat at a nucleus of student traffic, and people kept jostling me, swishing their elbows against my overstuffed tote bag and knocking me sideways.

  At last,
I crumpled the bill into an unreasonable wad and tried to stuff it into the slot.

  “I’ll trade you,” a voice said.

  I whirled around, backing into the machine.

  Mandarin was posed before me in a lavender sweater, one hand balanced casually against her hip. With the other, she held out a fresh, unwrinkled dollar bill.

  “Go on,” she said.

  I plucked it from her fingers and gave her mine. “Thanks,” I mumbled. “I’m really thirsty.”

  “Sure seems like it.”

  The machine took Mandarin’s dollar on my first try. I pressed the button for a bottled water, and it banged down into the catch.

  “Just water?” Mandarin said. “There’s a fountain right around the corner, y’know. Spouting out an unlimited supply. For free.”

  “I know. It’s just … the tap water here’s kind of disgusting.”

  “Yeah, I guess it does taste dirty. Moldy, even. They probably pipe it straight outta the irrigation canal.”

  Mandarin watched as I unscrewed the bottle and sipped at the water self-consciously.

  “I thought you were thirsty.” She reached out. “May I?”

  I handed her the bottle. She tipped her head and drank, her throat rippling with each swallow, as if my water were ambrosia, nectar of the gods shipped down from Mount Olympus. A trickle escaped from the corner of her mouth and she caught it with her index finger. Then she handed the half-finished bottle back to me.

  “So there’s a reason I tracked you down,” she began.

  My heart began pounding like an Indian drum. I hoped she couldn’t hear it.

  “I ain’t doing too good in history,” Mandarin went on. “Actually I ain’t doing too good in any of my classes. Like math, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. I never got two- and three-sided shapes, not to mention five- and six-sided ones.”

  There’s no such thing as two-sided shapes.

  “And history. I’m flunking history. Plus, I haven’t even chosen a service project yet—and neither have you, I’ve heard.”

  Now my heart pounded like a whole symphony of Indian drums. An entire drum circle.

  “So I thought, maybe there’s a chance you could help me out.…”

  “But why?” I blurted.

  Mandarin studied me, her eyes narrowed slightly.

  “Well,” she said after a long pause, “you’re, like, Washokey’s resident genius, right?”

  “I do fine, I guess.”

  “You don’t have to be modest,” she said. “Not around me. Like I said, I’m flunking, and graduation’s getting close. And I sure as shit ain’t going to stick around, not even for an extra day. So, what do you say? Is there any chance at all you’re free to come to my place this afternoon?”

  I replied in involuntary gulps, like hiccups: “I can come. I can help.”

  “Perfect.” Her smile exposed a row of crooked bottom teeth. “Come around five-thirty, if possible. Wait—you need my address. You don’t know where I live.”

  I shook my head.

  “Here.” Mandarin withdrew a fat red marker from the seat of her jeans and took my arm, extending it in front of her. I held my breath as she tattooed her address onto my flesh in bold red letters: 34 Plains Street. She didn’t release my arm right away. I felt the cool touch of each of her fingertips separately, like bits of ice.

  “So five-thirty, yeah?”

  “Five-thirty,” I said.

  “Bring your textbooks. I always forget mine.”

  Finally, Mandarin dropped my arm. She waved, her hand fluttering like a hummingbird’s wing, and sauntered off down the hall.

  My eyes traveled back to my arm, tracing the cherry-colored letters, and stopped at the water bottle in my hand. I glanced around to make sure I was alone. Then I tipped my head back and tried to swig like Mandarin had. But when the final bell rang, I choked.

  In less than two hours, I was supposed to knock on Mandarin Ramey’s front door. So after dropping off Taffeta, I headed for the Tombs.

  The Tombs was a granite jumble that looked like a graveyard stirred and stacked by the wildwinds. It ran along the edge of the Bighorn River, about a quarter mile outside the city limits. All sorts of legends surrounded it—about Indian sacrifices, burials, lynchings—the sort of stories common in small western towns. Enough to keep people away. Out in the badlands, I came across beer cans in the strangest places, but I never found them at the Tombs.

  I had discovered the Tombs the past August, during one of my rock-hunting quests. I’d made the mistake of setting out at noon. Only half an hour in, I felt charbroiled. I sought shade among the piles of tomb-shaped rocks cooled by the river trees and meandering water.

  I found the Virgin Mary on my third visit.

  Each story described her differently: a head sculpted from stone, or a profile, or the whole holy likeness, holding baby Jesus. So-and-so’s cousin’s grandpa-in-law claimed she cried tears of holy water, or cured plantar warts, or sipped wine from a straw—all that mumbo jumbo typically attributed to magical Madonnas.

  They would have been disappointed by my find: way up high, where the geometry of stone formed a sort of cave, a woman painted in a black and greasy substance, like wet charcoal or tar.

  And she was extremely basic—not much more than an outline, though more complex than the cave paintings we’d seen on a field trip to the Medicine Lodge Archaeological Site. She wore a hood, or maybe a blanket, draped over her head. Because she was so obviously Native American, I knew she couldn’t be the Virgin Mary, unless she’d been painted after some Catholics had come and force-converted a local tribe.

  But she was definitely a mother.

  I liked to look at her. There was something comforting about her drowsy eyes, like those of a purring cat. Her almost smile. Her forearms, shaped like a cradle.

  Now, as I sat in the cave, embracing my knees, pondering the unbelievable reality—that I was going to Mandarin Ramey’s house in ninety minutes, seventy minutes, less than an hour—I could have sworn that the Virgin Mary gazed at me sympathetically.

  Of course, it would have been better if I could have found that comfort in Momma. But even the idea of that weirded me out. And she was preoccupied, anyway.

  I ran my finger along a cleft in the stone floor, trying to appease my anxiety.

  I’d imagined countless times the ways Mandarin and I might meet. During earthquakes. Tornadoes. Other natural disasters, like the storm that had created the Tombs. I imagined us holed up here together, sharing our innermost secrets while rain hissed into the river and thunder boomed outside. It was always a large-scale event that brought us together.

  Never anything as ordinary as a community service project.

  And I had never imagined—not in my most outlandish, plains fire–fueled, tornado-twirled fantasies—that Mandarin would come to me herself.

  All because she thought I was, like, Washokey’s resident genius?

  No girls ever went to Mandarin’s house. Not since Sophie Brawls—the only real friend Mandarin had ever had, or that anybody knew about.

  Sophie was one of the ranch kids bused in from the south, like Becky Pepper. She wore dresses all year long. Even in the winter, with clunky snow boots, gravy-colored tights, and a hooded parka. I only ever noticed Sophie in town because she had the largest eyes I’d ever seen. Like soap bubbles, set in a pearly round face with pink cheeks.

  When Sophie started running around with Mandarin, everybody noticed her. Their friendship was short and intense. Inseparable for two months and then came the fight. A real fight. Alexis swore she’d seen Sophie in the office afterward sobbing, with scratches like streaks of jelly on both sides of her neck.

  Someone in my grade called it a dyke fight. A few people laughed, but the label didn’t stick. This was Mandarin Ramey, after all.

  The fight was the reason Mandarin had spent the last three months of her sophomore year at the Wyoming Girls’ School. Sophie Brawls never came back. Since then, Mandarin had le
t no one into her life—well, other than her endless parade of men.

  I listened to the wind whistling between the boulders, reaching inside my hideaway like an invisible hand. When I lifted my face, I smelled lilac blossoms. It really was spring. As if life couldn’t get any more stressful, pageant season was beginning.

  Mandarin’s front door hurtled open before I had a chance to knock. I almost stumbled down the porch steps. Something about Mandarin made me back away each time we met, as if she were an explosion of heat or light. I felt like shielding my eyes.

  “Hey,” she said.

  She wore a white men’s undershirt over her low-slung jeans, and she’d tied her hair back with a scrap of thick yellow yarn. It made her look younger, her cheekbones more pronounced. We stood there for a second in uncomfortable silence. Maybe she was waiting for me to speak.

  Finally, she held open the door. “Well, come on in.”

  Her carpet was the sickly brown color of an old man’s den. A muted television made the dim room flicker and flash. In the intermittent light, I saw coffee-colored stains on the ceiling in menacing shapes and olive green furniture grinning at the seams. An oak dining table had been crammed into a corner, with one of the chairs overturned.

  Mandarin followed my gaze to the table. She went over and righted the chair without saying anything. Then she led me down the hall, flipping on every light switch we passed.

  She paused in front of her bedroom door, her hand on the knob.

  “Before we go in, I feel like I need to give some sort of disclaimer, or whatever. Like a surgeon general’s warning. What you’re about to see has got absolutely nothing to do with me. If that makes any sense.”

  “Okay …,” I said.

  I wondered if her walls were quilted with pages torn from celebrity tabloids, like in Alexis’s room, or childish relics, like mine.