Chapter eighteen

Over the next few weeks, I slipped into a routine at my grandparents’ house. Get up, sneak to the shower, get dressed, wash the morning dishes, eat. Go outside, fold my bedding, play cards, think about Mom and Marin, and lie as low as possible until night fell, hoping nobody would bother me once I was asleep.

Ignore my half sisters.

Ignore my father and stepmother.

Ignore the grunts and orders of my grandparents.

Ignore, ignore, ignore.

I wrote a bunch of new foils.

Marin’s hair bounces when she runs.

I call Marin “Tippy” because she walks on her tiptoes.

Marin knows everything there is to know about dolphins.

Marin’s eyes sparkle when she dances.

Marin is a princess in orange-and-black velvet.

Marin sings in the bath.

Marin likes red Popsicles the best.

Marin can roller-skate.

Marin’s eyelashes are so long.

For every foil, there was a memory, so sweet and so clear I thought my heart might break in two. Not saying good-bye to them messed with me, made me mentally curl in on myself, made me pull away. I stopped checking my phone for texts. I stopped calling Dani. I stopped caring what happened to Ronnie or to anyone who wasn’t me. In my mind, even Ronnie wasn’t grieving as hard as I was, because he at least got to go to the funerals and I hadn’t even gotten that much.

Instead, I owned my grief. Turned it into something physical and ugly and carried it around in my gut.

“Hey, ” I heard one morning while I sat on my couch, staring at the world sullenly through the wet ends of my hair. I picked at the dry skin on my heels, softened by the shower, and zoned out, the tiny squares of the porch screen getting bigger and bigger under my gaze. Aunt Terry stepped out onto the porch, sat in the lawn chair Clay had pulled out that first night and nobody had bothered to put back. “I haven’t talked to you in days. You okay? ”

I tore my gaze away from the yard and blinked, her face shaded in purple where the light had been in my eyes a few moments before. “Not really, ” I said.

“You seen your dad lately? ”

I shook my head. I’d been avoiding him, and especially Tonette, ever since she’d screamed at me for “taking the last burger” the one night I tried to eat dinner with the family.

“You didn’t even think other people might want to eat, did you? ” she’d yelled.

Why would I? I wanted to respond. Who is thinking about me? Who is making sure I get anything?

“Has he checked on you at all? ” Terry asked, referring to Clay.

“No, but I kind of like it that way, ” I said. “When he’s checking on me, he’s yelling at me. Tonette, too.”

I half expected Terry to argue about it, to tell me that yelling was Tonette’s way or that Clay was the kind of guy who didn’t show his feelings, or maybe worst of all, to say the same thing Dani’s mom had said, that this would take time. But she didn’t say any of those things. Because she knew I was right.

“You need a mama, ” she finally said, very quietly.

I shrugged, numb, and pulled a hunk of dead skin off my heel, letting it drop to the peeling wood floor. Yes, I did need a mama. But my mama was gone. And nobody else could stand in. The end. “Whatever, ” I said. “Doesn’t matter.”

“I can’t be your mama, you understand. I can’t even take care of my own kids most of the time, ” Terry added.

“I know.”

“And Billie ain’t a good mama, take my word for that.”

I didn’t need to take her word for it. I’d already seen what kind of mom Billie was. “I know.”

“And Tonette spoils those girls. She don’t even know what they’re really like, she’s so blind.”

I shrugged again. It didn’t matter what Tonette saw or didn’t see in those girls. It only mattered what she saw and didn’t see in me.

“Listen, I don’t got a ton of money, but how about we go into town and get haircuts or something? ” Terry asked.

“Haircuts? ”

She shrugged, a sheepish smile crossing her face. “I got boys. Haircuts is the best I can do with a girl.”

It occurred to me that nobody was going to say one way or another whether I needed or didn’t need a haircut. Or a visit to the dentist. Or to study or to learn to drive or to eat regularly or do any of the things I was used to being reminded to do. It was all up to me now, a thought that was both empowering and frightening as hell.

“Okay, ” I said, my hands searching the back of my hair involuntarily. “I could use a haircut.”

Terry left the boys with Grandmother Billie and we scooted into the car Grandfather Harold had picked me up from the motel in. It was the first time I’d left the house since I’d arrived there. I sat in the front seat, holding Marin’s purse in my lap, more out of habit than because I needed it for anything, and marveled at how close the main strip of town was. Out on my porch, I’d felt so very far away from the rest of the world. Five or ten minutes on foot would have had me at the first gas station, another five would have gotten me to the teeny movie theater. Another five would have gotten me to pretty much anywhere else I wanted to be. How odd to feel so isolated when civilization was literally all around you.

Terry pulled up to a strip mall and swung into a parking space outside a shop called Karrie’s Kut ’N Kolor.

Inside, I was immediately swept away by the smell. Taken to so many different places in my past that I almost felt pulled apart. Times I’d been with Mom, nervously waiting for a color to set or for a new cut to be revealed. Times we’d taken Marin so she could get her tiny nails painted. Times I’d gone with Dani and her mom for pedicures or waited for Jane to get highlights done.

The last time I’d been in a beauty salon had been the weekend before the tornado, getting my hair fixed for prom.

Dani and Jane and I had decided to go as each other’s dates, even though Dani had been asked by three different guys and Jane had sort of started seeing a boy she’d met at an orchestra competition in April, and I probably could have talked Kolby into going with me.

But we’d made the decision that senior prom was for dates and romantic dinners and swanky nights out; junior prom was for fun. This was our “fun” year.

We’d gone all out. Big, floor-length poufy formals filled with tulle that ate us up when we sat down. Expensive mani-pedis and updos, sparkly shoes that we kicked off the second we hit the dance floor and ignored for the rest of the night, dinner at Froggy’s, where we played video games while we waited for our food.

It had been so much fun.

And I had completely forgotten about it until I smelled the astringent odors of permanents and hair dyes and nail polish and remover and glue. My old life was that far away. Gone. As if the tornado’s damage would never be complete. It had destroyed my present, laid waste to my future, and was now busy eating up my history, too, as I forgot what life was like before.

“May I help you? ” a pink-haired woman said, peering up at us over a massive marble countertop.

“We’d like to get our hair done, ” Terry said. “Whoever’s available is fine.”

The woman ran her sparkly black-tipped fingernail down a schedule book, then called over her shoulder, “Jonas? You got time for two walk-ins? ”

“Yep, ” a voice called, and she motioned for Terry to head back to wherever the voice had come from.

“Come on, ” Terry said, grabbing the sleeve of my shirt between her two fingers. “You can help me decide what to do. I haven’t had my hair done in a shop in prolly ten years. Always just have Billie cut it.”

We made our way back to the salon chair, where a man wearing all black and practically dripping in pomade assessed us over a pair of round-rimmed spectacles.

“Ladies, ” he said. “Who’s first? ”

I pointed at Terry, and she sat down in the chair, bashfully taking in her image in the mirror. Her hair was long and limp, hanging halfway down her back in split-ended clumps. Jonas ran his fingers through it appraisingly.

“What are we doing? ” he asked, and Terry looked over at me, questioningly, almost panicky.

I shrugged. “What do you want? Short? ”

She giggled. “I don’t know. I never did this before.” She turned back to the mirror and studied her reflection, twisting her head to one side, then the other. “Yeah. Okay. Short will work.” She glanced at me again. “Something fun, right? A change. A new me.” She reached over and squeezed my hand, the feeling so foreign I almost yanked it away, but caught myself. “We both need reinvention, don’t we? ”

I nodded. Why not? She was totally right. It hadn’t been my choice to reinvent myself. It had been thrust upon me and it sucked. But here I was in my crappy circumstances. This was my life now. Why not make a whole new Jersey? Start over. Who was going to notice, anyway? “Let’s get color, too, ” I said, squeezing back.

She bit her lip and then nodded. “Why not? Let’s splurge a little.”

Three hours later, we walked out of Karrie’s Kut ’N Kolor, our hair cut in sharp punk strips around our faces. Terry’s was dyed a solid hot pink. Mine was brilliant purple. We giggled as we got into the car.

“You like it? ” Terry asked, pulling down the visor so she could look in the mirror. She played with the ends of her hair.

“It’s definitely different, ” I said. “Mom would hate it.” I pressed my lips together. Up until this point, I’d only mentioned my mom when explaining to someone that she was gone, had kept her alive only inside myself. Did it make her more gone if I started talking about her in casual conversation? Did it make her more gone if I did things like dye my hair a color she would have hated?

All of a sudden I felt ashamed. Mom was barely gone. The dirt was probably still fresh on her grave. How dare I make a decision like this without her? How could I be so selfish? I had an urge to run back inside and have Jonas do it all back the way it was. Cut it blunt across the bottom, dye it brown.

“Your grandmother is definitely going to hate it, ” Terry said. “Which makes me like it all the more.” She grinned at me wickedly, then reached over and felt my hair with her fingers. “You look dark and mysterious, ” she said.

Just what I needed—to look as dark as I felt on the inside.

Terry was right—Grandmother Billie hated our color choices. She called us tramps and ranted and raved that next thing we’d be getting tattoos and having our faces pierced, and she asked Terry if she thought hanging around with me was going to make her young and beautiful, because it wasn’t.

The yelling created the kind of scene the family loved to flock to, and before I knew it, Lexi and Meg were standing in the living room doorway, taking it all in with matching smirks on their faces, staring at my hair as if it were so stupid and childish it made them want to laugh.

But the second Tonette came home from work, they started howling about how they wanted colored hair too.

“It’s not fair! ” Lexi cried, actually squeezing out a few dumb tears. “Terry never got us hairdos. Why should she get one? Just because she’s new.”

“You said she wouldn’t get any special treatment, ” Meg added. “This looks pretty special to me.”

On and on it went, and I could see Tonette’s body grow more and more rigid with anger as they begged. Could see her start to formulate in her head how out of line I was for coming into the house with colored hair.

I knew better than to stick around and wait to see what would happen. I scurried into the kitchen, grabbed a piece of cheese and a banana, and went outside, sneaking right through the porch and around the house with my food.

I kept walking when I reached the end of the driveway, heading back downtown without even realizing that was where I’d decided to go.

I peered in the windows of the shops as I walked from one strip mall to the next, barely recognizing the girl with the purple hair walking opposite me every time I caught my reflection. I fantasized about the things I saw displayed in the windows, remembering how I’d always complained to Mom about how poor we were.

“I have nothing compared to what Jane and Dani have, ” I used to tell her.

“Well, Jane’s and Dani’s dads are attorneys, ” Mom always answered. “But they look so miserable, don’t you think? ”

“No. They look happy. Because they have flat-screen TVs and video-game systems and nice jeans. I have crappy jeans. And Dani’s dad is an accountant, by the way.”

“Well, he’s got a lawyer air about him, ” she’d say, waving her hand dismissively. “Whatever he is, he makes more money than we do and that’s just part of life.”

“But I’m sick of always being the poor one.”

“You can get a job if you hate it so much, ” Mom had said. I’d turned sixteen last July. I was planning to get a job this summer. Hopefully at the community pool. But it, too, had been destroyed by the tornado. Whoosh. There went something else—my plans—cycloning into the summer sky.

I’d hated how Mom could never afford to spoil me the way my friends were spoiled by their parents. But we were nowhere near as poor as the people living in my grandparents’ house. And now I had nothing. Not even the jeans I used to think were so crappy. Funny how “crappy” turns into something better when you compare it to “nothing at all.”

I wandered into a bookstore—one of those cushy ones with the soft armchairs and ambient lighting. The kind of store where people come to kick back, eat a cinnamon roll, and read half a book before buying it. There was a little coffee shop inside the store, and my mouth watered at the smell of the strong coffee, the sound of the cappuccino machine whirring and grinding. People sat at the tables with their laptops open, nibbling on brownies and bagels and sipping out of paper cups while tapping away on their keyboards. This was the life that was familiar to me, and I wanted to cry, I was so happy to have found it.

Someone had left a newspaper at one of the tables and I sat down to read it. Not that I was all that interested in the Caster City news, but it felt good to do something normal and mundane again.

I read every word of every story in the paper. I looked at all the photos, read the captions underneath them. I read the classifieds. Then, not ready to give up the feeling, I rambled through the aisles and ran my fingers along the book spines. Touching the titles, remembering good books I’d read, picking up new ones I hadn’t heard of and studying their covers.

I sat back in an armchair and read through most of a book. I didn’t have the money to buy it, so I forced myself to stop reading, feeling a little like I was stealing, even though I knew I only meant to steal the moment of sanity. When I got up and placed the book back on the shelf, I noticed that the café had closed and it was dark outside. Someone had pulled a safety gate about a quarter of the way down in front of the doors, and a voice over the intercom was telling us the store was about to close.

Reluctantly, I left, making a promise to myself to come back and visit again soon. Maybe scrape together some money and buy the book I’d been reading. Something, anything to make me feel normal again.

I was walking along the sidewalk, taking in the neon lights of business signs and the stars above that, when my phone rang. It was Jane.

“Omigod, Janie! ” I squealed. “You’re okay! ”

“Yeah, I’m fine, ” she said. “I finally got a new cell phone yesterday. My old one got lost in the tornado. I’ve been dying to talk to everyone.”

“Dani said you’re in Kansas City? ”

“Yeah. Staying with my uncle. Our house got wiped out. Afterward, we were climbing around trying to find stuff, and this big bunch of bricks fell on me and broke my leg in three places. I’m on stupid crutches for the whole summer. Can you believe that? ”

At this point, I could believe almost anything. People think a tornado drops down on a cow pasture or a trailer park and everything is fine. They never think about things like infected cuts and broken legs and old ladies crushed by air conditioners in their bathtubs. They never think about orphans.

“Were you in the school when it happened? ”

She chuckled. “Yeah. We didn’t even know anything was going on. We were practicing and never heard the sirens. We didn’t figure it out until the power went off, and then we heard all kinds of horrible noise, crashing and banging, like everything was falling down around us. But everyone was fine. Nobody got hurt or anything. And, thank God, my parents had gone to my brother’s soccer game over in Milton, so nobody was home. Our house is completely gone.”

“Mine, too. I have, like, nothing left.”

“I have my violin, and that’s pretty much it, ” she said. “But the funny thing is, I don’t want to play it. At all. The only thing I’ve got left, and it’s still in my dad’s trunk.”

“It’ll come back.”

“I guess. Maybe. It just seems kind of pointless now, is all.”

So many things do, I wanted to say. “So are you going back to Elizabeth? ” I asked instead.

“Yeah. My dad’s been down there all week clearing off our lot. I guess right now everybody’s just trying to get the debris moved out of the way. There was a minivan on top of my bed.” She laughed, then sobered. “Oh, hey, I’m really sorry about your mom and sister.”

“Thanks. It’s been pretty hard.”

“Yeah.” She took a breath. “Dani told me you’re staying with your dad in Caster City? I didn’t even know you had a dad. You never talked about one.”

“I didn’t have one. He’s just a jerk who shares my DNA. And he would argue that we don’t even share that much. I’m trying to get Dani to let me stay with her in Elizabeth. I can’t live here.”

“When everyone gets settled, you should come up to KC for a visit, ” Jane said, and at last my heart lightened. My friends were coming through. “My cousin Lindy is a trip. You’d like her. I’ll ask my aunt.”

“Yeah, ” I said. “I’ll call when I get out of here, and then I’ll come by.”

We talked for a few more minutes about things like where our friends had ended up, what would happen with graduation, given that we didn’t have a school and nobody really knew how many seniors were still in Elizabeth, and whether or not the movie theater was standing. It seemed like so long since I’d talked about anything other than the tornado, I hardly knew how to talk about other things. The conversation ended too quickly, as we both seemed to run out of things to say. When had that happened? When did I stop knowing how to talk to Jane?

I hung up the phone and continued walking but only got a few steps when a blast of a horn a few feet away made me jump.

“Where the hell you been? ” Clay yelled, hanging out the car window. “Get in the damn car.”

At first I stood rooted in my spot. I had that “stranger danger” feeling that we were always warned about when we were kids. Don’t ever get into a car with a stranger, we’d been told. Trust your instincts. If your instincts tell you the situation is bad, stay away from it. Never get in the car with a dangerous person; never let him take you to another location.

But nobody ever told you what to do if you got those gut feelings about the man who was supposedly your father.

“What you starin’ at? Get in the car, I said! ”

Swallowing nervously, I pulled open the passenger door and slid into the front seat, the ripped vinyl making dull tearing noises on the backs of Terry’s jeans.

He had the car in drive and was squealing away from the curb before I even got the door all the way closed.

“Been looking everywhere for you. My sister must have lost her damn mind, ” he muttered, looking more at my hair than at the road in front of him. His tires bumped a curb and he quickly corrected, then overcorrected, the car swerving into the other lane and back again. “Lettin’ you color your hair, paying for it with money she ain’t even got. The two of you look ridiculous. And now my girls are feelin’ left out and Tonette ain’t gonna have ’em goin’ around lookin’ like that, that’s for sure. You keep tellin’ me I’m your dad, but you don’t even ask before you go and color your hair somethin’ stupid.”

I gritted my teeth, willing my mouth not to open, willing my ears not to hear him.

“You just gonna sit there like a loaf a bread? ” he pressed.

But I continued to stare straight ahead, ramrod stiff on the torn passenger seat, watching him sway and swerve and knock into things like a pinball, clenching my teeth and my fists and my heart, feeling my resolve to stay silent crumble. If I didn’t speak up for me, who would?

“If you’re gonna leave the house, you need to tell someone you’re goin’, ” he ranted.

“Why? ” I said, turning on him.

He pulled up to a stop sign, glanced at me. “What do you mean why? ”

“I mean why do I need to tell someone? ”

He looked at me, incredulous. “So people don’t go worryin’, that’s why.”

I coughed out a laugh. “Who is worried? Tonette? Billie? Harold, who never even speaks to me? You? Give me a break. Nobody here cares about me.”

“That don’t give you the right to disobey the rules.”

I hadn’t wanted to get into it with my father, but I’d opened my mouth, and now there would be no shutting it again. “Lexi and Meg told me you didn’t want me here. Why did you agree to let Ronnie send me? ”

He turned hard into a parking lot and screeched into a space. For a second, I got scared that he was going to do something dangerous. “I ask myself that every day, ” he said, his nostrils flared. “Maybe ’cause Tonette’s right and I’m some sorta sap. Guess I figured after all these years of your mom keepin’ you from me, I deserved somethin’ outta you.”

We were staring at each other now, each of us with hate in our eyes. “What are you talking about? ” I said. “She never kept me from you. You walked out on us. You never came back.”

A slow grin spread across his face and he began nodding as if it all made sense to him now. “Is that what she told you? That I walked out? ” He tipped his head back against the seat and laughed, then turned to me again. “I got tossed out. Christine ‘wanted somethin’ better.’ ” He made air quotes with his fingers when he said the last three words, then jammed a stubby thumb at his chest. “I told her I could be somethin’ better, I’d get a job and stop drinkin’ and would take care of you. But she said she deserved more and I’d see you again over her dead body and that was that. And look. She’s dead and now here you are.”

“You lie, ” I said through my teeth, but a part of me could tell that he wasn’t lying. A part of me could see it in the slight tremor of his thumb, could see it etched into the lines around his eyes. “You never wanted anything to do with me.”

His eyes hardened and he paused, sizing me up, the muscles of his jaw working. “Damn shame that’s the story she gave you. ’Cause it ain’t the truth.”

“It’s not a story. It is the truth, ” I said, but my voice was wavering, getting softer.

He put the car into reverse and began backing out of the parking spot. “When I threatened to get the law involved, she started sayin’ you weren’t even mine.” He put the car into drive and glanced at me one more time. “I believed her at the time. She was some kinda messed up and I wouldn’t a put nothin’ past her at that point. But anyone with eyes can see we got the same DNA.” He pulled out onto the road and started heading toward the house again. “And then she was gone. Moved. Wasn’t the first time she’d disappeared on someone. I gave up. Met Tonette, started over. Forgot I even had a daughter named Jersey. Didn’t seem like there was anything else I could do.”

We drove along for a few minutes in silence, the town giving way to squat cookie-cutter homes. I wanted to get back to the house, to retreat to my couch and pull the blanket over my head, try to disappear from the lies, try to ignore the sinking suspicion that the liar was Mom, not Clay. Just thinking it made me feel like a traitor.

If what he said was true, the story of my life was a lie. I’d spent so many hours wondering about him, imagining him, wishing he’d come to my birthday party or to Christmas mornings or would stop by or call to see how I was doing. He never did, and I’d spent so much time hating him for abandoning me.

But according to him, he hadn’t. She’d kept him away.

She let me think it was about me. She let me pine for him. She told me he was a monster, worthless, dangerous. She made me afraid of him. She encouraged me to hate him. I refused to believe it. I couldn’t.

“So why, then? ” I croaked. “If what you say is true, if you tried so hard to stay connected with me, why don’t you want me here now? ”

“Because I don’t need no paternity test to tell me whether or not you belong to me. At this point, I already know you don’t. You were Christine’s from day one. You ain’t my kid. You’re a stranger. And you’re messin’ with my real family.”

“I never had a chance to be your real family, ” I said.

He shrugged. “That ain’t my fault.”

He pulled into the driveway roughly, and I leapt out. I swung the door shut and tromped around the back of the house while he laid on the horn. I heard the front door open and Tonette’s nasal voice squawking, “I’m coming! I’m coming! Jesus, keep your wad in your pants, Clayton! ”

I was so busy thinking about my mom as I flung open the door to my porch, I didn’t even notice Lexi and Meg until I was practically on top of them.