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School on Monday buzzed with talk of the body. Whispers filled the halls and corners of the yard at recess. Even the teachers were gossiping between classes. The four of us were attacked with questions soon as we stepped through the doors. What’s a body like? Did you touch it? Does it smell bad? Who was she? How’d she die? And on and on. The worst though, was the one they murmured behind our backs, the one that changed the way they looked at us; did they kill her?
Through the day, the rumours swarmed, gained life and solidity, they grew into full-blown accusations and theories that, somehow, Jenny and me had killed the girl, dumped her body and then gone back to admire our handiwork before the cops found her. At the final bell, the doors to school flung wide and we poured out onto the front lawn where parents would be waiting. Some kids ran but slowed down to pass me and Jenny. They stared. I stared back.
‘Freaks,’ someone shouted and everyone laughed. A collective roar of giggling and jeers. Freaks, losers, weirdos.
‘Johnny, let’s go,’ she said, grabbed my arm.
Then I saw little Timmy Greer, runt of the class, try to make his name. He picked up a rock, wound back his skinny arm and hurled it at Jenny. I grabbed her, turned her away, and the rock struck my back. I cried out. The little shit had power. But the pain disappeared when I saw, across the lawn, away from the doors, Rudy and Gloria staring at us. They’d left by the side door, right where Gloria’s locker was.
Another rock hit the back of my leg and with it a chilling cry, ‘Killer!’
That stung the worst, the first time it’d been said out loud, given breath and life. Then Jenny screamed as a rock caught her shoulder. They all joined in. Laughing and shouting.
‘Freak!’
‘Perv!’
‘Murderer!’
Tears burned my eyes. They threw stone after stone and Rudy and Gloria didn’t move, like they didn’t believe what was happening. Neither did I.
Jenny dropped to the floor and me on top of her, covering her, protecting her best I could. It was hail. It was storm. Crack after crack. Sticky feel of blood in a dozen places. My head, my hands, my legs. Make it stop. Make it stop. Every time Jenny yelped, heat rose in me. Rage. Anger. The rocks kept coming, handfuls of gravel from the path, every strike cut my breath short.
Then mercy. The voice.
‘Stop it! Hey! Cut it out!’ Rudy. Charging in. A god in middle school. ‘Leave them alone!’
The laughing kept going but the rocks stopped. Caught doing something wrong, the pack scattered, a few parting shots but nothing hit hard. Just another school day done. An act of violence giggled through, it’s okay to throw stones when the targets are freaks and weirdos. Ain’t that right, Mom and Dad?
Make me a bird, I thought, that I may drag them all sky high and let go. Who would be laughing then?
Rudy helped me up. Gloria helped Jenny. My face stung in a hundred places. Jenny had cuts about her arms and legs but, mercifully, her face remained untouched.
‘They’re saying all sorts about you both, the bastards,’ Rudy said. He tried to sound older, like a pa telling off his boy, but the worry on his face at the blood on mine gave him away.
‘I heard,’ I said, my ears ringing with killer, murderer, my eyes boiling with tears. ‘They don’t know shit.’
Gloria picked out a piece of grit from Jenny’s arm with one hand and held her hand with the other.
‘Mandy will clean you both up,’ she said.
On the walk to Gloria’s house, a mansion by Larson standards, she asked the question I’d been dreading.
‘Why did you go back to the body?’
I stared at her, stunned, and then my eyes darted to Rudy. His were lowered. He knew I’d think he told her and he hadn’t. Unless he had and they didn’t believe me.
Jenny, limping from a deep gash in her knee, answered.
‘Because it was a hundred times better than being in that house.’
The harshness in her tone shocked me and our friends. I don’t think either Rudy or Gloria knew how bad it was for Jenny until then. In truth, neither did I. Sharp, drunken words were one thing but since when was a cold dead body better than a warm bed? Better company than a real live mother? I swallowed down grit and tried to understand it but I couldn’t.
Gloria put her arm around Jenny, Rudy didn’t say anything, he didn’t have to. He’d spent nights in the Fort on his own when his dad got heated. Better a dirt floor than Bung-Eye’s backhand or belt.
Rudy put his arm around my neck, a friendly headlock. Gloria and Jenny walked in front, entwined, their heads resting together.
They never asked about that night again. Plenty of people did, over and over, rumours sprouted like weeds after the first rain, but between us four, there was nothing more to be said.
We waited in Gloria’s kitchen. One single room bigger than my whole house. Gleaming white and red tiles, like a picnic blanket draped on the walls. Mandy tutted and shook her head at our injuries. Rudy leant against the cabinet holding but not drinking his glass of lemonade. Ice clinked. Condensation beaded and ran. Gloria fretted in the corner, pacing, talking about mess, impatient to tell us her big idea, only to be hushed over and over by Mandy. Jenny sat with Mandy at the table, getting cleaned up while the woman muttered about who did it and why and if Jenny were her daughter, oh you wouldn’t be sniffling over nicks like this if you were my girl, she said. I waited my turn, standing awkwardly in the middle of the tiled floor, like a statue put in the wrong place.
Mandy had all but raised Gloria and the pair had a tense, parent–child relationship the like Gloria never had with her real mother. Mandy was the one telling her to pick up her shoes, clean her teeth, eat her cabbage. Real Mother dressed Gloria in bows and made her twirl. I doubt Gloria’s mother knew a thing about her daughter other than what colour dress best matched her eyes. Mandy didn’t care about any of that. She was ruddy-faced, skin scorched and bloomed from years over a steamer iron, her thin blonde curls made lank from the heat. Her body was a pillow lined with steel. Tree-limb arms, stump legs and hips spread wide from six babies of her own.
Jenny hissed, cried out.
Mandy dropped a chunk of stone onto the table. Red, ferrous streak in the granite. My sister’s blood. My blood.
‘Hush your whining, whey girl, just a scratch,’ Mandy said. Thick, Ozark accent. Straight down from the mountains Mandy came, like an avalanche.
Jenny sat at the kitchen table, leg on the big woman’s lap, while Mandy dabbed and cleaned the cut on Jenny’s knee. Deep. About an inch long. Every time Mandy took a cotton wad to it, took off all that red so the edges of the cut were clear, Jenny’s blood would well up again, spill down her leg, drip onto the floor.
‘You ain’t got no sticky in you,’ Mandy said, talking more to the blood than my sister. ‘Idiot body of yours, needs the sticky to gum all this up and stop the running. Here,’ she handed Jenny a folded-up kitchen towel, ‘hold this against that hole long as you can while I tend your shoulder.’
The mound of cotton wool, clean and white on one side of the table, shrank and transformed into gore. Wool stained red and wet, slapped every time Mandy threw a used piece on the wood. Despite her grumblings, she was gentle. Carefully sluicing away the grit, responding to Jenny’s wincing and yelps. Every time I heard Jenny’s pain it was an electric shock through me, a tiny charge that made me want to leap forward.
‘Lemme see that hole,’ Mandy said, placed her hand over Jenny’s and pried the ruined cloth away from her knee. The old woman smiled. ‘Ah, there it is, the sticky done gummed it up. No more running away with you.’
Jenny smiled along with Mandy’s words,