Girl, Hero by Carrie Jones
“9:42.”
“And how about the clock in the living room? Can you see that one?”
“Yes, why?”
“What time does that one say?” I ask her. Grammy looks over at me, away from her poetry book.
“9:38,” my mother says, sighing.
“That’s the problem,” I say.
There’s silence on the other end for a little bit, but I can tell that she’s there because I hear her breathing. She breathes heavy because she smokes too much.
“You hate me, don’t you?” she asks, begging.
I don’t answer. Meanness is all bottled up inside of me, I guess, and I can’t answer. I think of her that time on the boat with my step-uncle. I think of her noises with Mike O’Donnell. Then I say, “I want him gone. He scares me.”
Now she’s silent. I wonder if she’ll listen. She didn’t listen about my step-uncle. On the other end of the phone, she starts to cry.
“I get lonely, Lily,” she says. “I’m human, you know. I’m just human.”
“He is not a good man. He. Is. Not. Good,” I say. I take a big breath. I fire my gun and it feels like I’m shooting my own self in the gut, making a big black hole. “It’s him or me.”
She says, “That’s not fair, Lily. That’s not fair. You’ll be leaving for college soon and where will I be? All alone without … ”
But I don’t hear anymore because Grammy wrenches the phone out of my hand as I howl. I howl so loud that even my mother should be able to hear it with a phone or without one. It’s a long howl, like that of a cat who has been alone on the fence too many nights, a cat who can’t find its way home and it’s raining, raining hard.
The tension in my father’s house is too much, with my sister hiding and my father trying to make everything jokey like it’s a happy, sitcom-family reunion and my Grammy wringing her hands, so I beg Sasha to let me sleep over and she lets me.
“What a great idea!” she says. “We can go over our lines.”
In the afternoon, I go to Sasha’s house and as usual she has some really good ideas about what to do.
First, we go over our lines by repeating the lines of the person before us. Then they repeat our lines before saying theirs. This is supposed to help us with the intentions of our character and the objectives of the other character.
Sasha’s mother listens to us and applauds once in a while. She’s a big-hugging woman, whatever that means. She’s the type of mother who understands that alone time is a good thing when you’re a freshman in high school. So after a while she tells us to buzz off and go hang out in Sasha’s room.
“Come here,” Sasha whispers when we’re in her bedroom alone. There are all kinds of cool lava lights everywhere, and beads dangle around her bed. On the walls are pictures of John Lennon. She loves John Lennon. That song about imagining there’s no people is her favorite. She says it’s better than the national anthem.
I think it’s funny how we both like dead Johns, but how our Johns are so different. It’s hard imagining you singing Let it Be. Or maybe it’s the other Beatle who sings that. Paul?
I go to where she’s sitting on the floor by her bed. “What?”
“Let’s make prank calls.”
I stare at her. “Why?”
“Hone our acting skills.”
“Isn’t that kind of mean?”
She shrugs. “We’ll do nice ones.”
I don’t want to, but say I will.
“You do the first one,” she says, holding out the phone.
“Me?”
“You need to loosen up.”
“I’m loose,” I say.
Sasha just laughs and dials a number. I take the phone. A nice old-lady voice answers.
“Hello,” I say. “Is your refrigerator running?”
Sasha rolls her eyes.
The old lady says, “What dear?”
“Is your refrigerator running?”
“Why, yes it is … ” she says.
“Oh, um, that’s good,” I say. “I must have the wrong number.”
I slam the phone down and Sasha laughs so hard she rolls on the floor like a dog.
“What?” I say.
She starts snarfing out her juice. It spills on her shirt, which makes me laugh too. We grab each other’s shoulders, but it takes us a long time to calm down.
“Why did you laugh so hard?” I ask her. “I screwed it all up.”
“Your problem, Lily,” she says all serious, looking into my eyes, “is that you’re too afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” I say. “I’m not afraid at all.”
I tell her I have a plan. And then I tell her the rest of it. I tell her about my mother’s man and what he says he is, and what I think he’s done.
Sasha and I decide that we’ll go on a double date with Paolo and Stuart Silsby tomorrow night, since it’s a long weekend and we don’t have school Monday. Sasha thinks Stuart’s a bit too pedestrian, but good to practice kissing on. “When I have enough practice, I’ll move on to Tyler,” she says.
We stand in front of her bathroom mirror, which stretches the entire length of the wall and has big lightbulbs all along the top like a mirror backstage in a theater.
Sasha’s mom is good at the makeup thing. She puts gold eye shadow on the inner part of my eyelids to make my eyes look wide. Sasha puts some gloss on my lips.
“Wet and kissable!” she says and I blush.
Then she rubs it in more and starts singing a song from the play, “Some Enchanted Evening.” I throw a cotton ball at her and she says in an over-big voice, “Oh, roses from my fans. Thank you dahlings.”
I brush my hair and stare at myself in her mirror. I look better than usual, but it doesn’t really feel like me.
“Do you think I look Irish?” I ask Sasha.
She puts her head next to mine. It’s longer and her eyes are big and brown. She has little freckles on her nose.
“Do you think I look Jewish?” she asks back.
“What does Jewish look like?”
She shrugs. “Who knows? What does Irish look like?”
“I think you’re beautiful,” I say. “Plus, you know all those Christmas carols. You’re the beautiful Jewess who croons Christmas carols, the shining star of Merrimack, Maine.”
This makes Sasha laugh. “So are you dahling, so are you.”
Then she puts on her serious Sasha face. “It doesn’t matter who your father is or isn’t. It matters who you are.”
I shrug.
“Paolo likes you a lot,” Sasha says. “Is he a good kisser?”
“Sasha!” Olivia sticks her head into the bathroom. “You’re so nosey.”
“Like you don’t want to know,” Sasha said.
“Inquiring minds want to know,” Olivia says, holding a lipstick dangerously close to my face. “Tell us or you get the famous lipstick torture.”
Her voice is like a vampire’s.
“Ves, tell vus,” Sasha vamps.
“No. No. I have sworn myself to secrecy,” I say. “I must not tell you what the infamous Paolo Mattias kisses like, what the fantabulous Paolo Mattias kisses like … it is a secret I shall take to my grave.”
They laugh and Olivia drops the lipstick back onto the counter. I sigh inside because how can you explain a kiss, how can you explain it without a million words and a poem and a painting?
A fist, that’s a lot easier to explain.
I have found some things that say Hannah Dustin felt guilty about what she did, about how she killed all those Indians, scalped them, so that she could escape slavery, go back to her family. It says she had nightmares. I hate that people fought and killed and died and had to live with what they did. I hate that people still do.
Zoom in on your face. You, Hannah Dustin. You live there and you long for home. You live there and you learn that you will go further north, be sold into slavery. The young man knows how to scalp, and that’s what you do, you scalp. Not just the men. You kill the women. You kill the children and you escape. You bring the scalps to prove what you did.
It makes my stomach sick. The colonists did so many, so many crappy things; they murdered, raped, kidnapped, stole land, spread disease, lied. People do this over and over. People do this now in our country, to other countries. People do it on a smaller scale to each other every single day.
But what you have to think about is that on the individual level, the smallest level, this is a mom. This is a mom who will do anything to get back to her home. Anything.
And you have to wonder what it is that you’d do, don’t you, Mr. Wayne? You have to wonder if you could go to such great lengths, break commandments, break lives, just to get home.
On Sunday Paolo comes over. He kisses Grammy’s cheek and her face just starts glowing. She grabs onto his hand and doesn’t let go.
“So, you’re our little Lily’s beau?” she murmurs.
I gasp. She shoots me a look, all mischief-eyed.
Paolo just smiles. “Yep.”
“You treat her well, young man.”
“Gram!” I cross my arms over my chest.
“I will,” Paolo says and she lets his hand go. He stands up and we take off outside. My dad’s backyard is lush with big Scottish pine trees he planted himself, and a rock wall and a garden. We hold hands and just stroll around until we get closer to the woods and the garden. This is a good place because spying eyes can’t see us. Clouds pass over the sun and it gets a little darker. The wind moves through the trees, making the branches whisper against each other.
“You know my gram’s watching,” I say and sit on my dad’s tractor. It’s huge. I have to climb up it to get in the seat.
“She’s cute.”
“She’s embarrassing.”
“Grandmothers are supposed to be embarrassing.” He starts scrutinizing the tractor. “I think I could vault this.”
“Vault it?” I make a fake sports-announcer voice. “Paolo, Mr. Parkour Man, begins his preparations.”
“It’ll be easy, like in gymnastics.”
I shake my head. “This is way bigger than a gymnastics vault.”
“I know.” He backs up, surveying. Then he comes back to me. Some chickadees trill in the woods. He reaches his hands up. “Hop off?”
“Say please,” I tease.
“Please.”
I hop down and he catches me. My nose smashes into his sweatshirt and I laugh.
“Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m good.”
He squeezes my hand and lets go. “Okay. Watch.”
He backs up, runs at the tractor. His body launches into the air and goes almost horizontal, I think, right where the seat is. Then he tucks in and somersaults to a perfect landing on the other side.
I gasp. “You show-off.”
“It’s just about figuring out where you want to go and not letting anything get in your way,” he says, trotting back around.
I remember to breathe. The chickadee stops singing. “Do you think you can do that with life?”
“That’s the point, I think. You take the confidence parkour gives you and bring it into everything.”
I nod. A cloud that’s been blocking the sun moves out of the way. “That’s amazing. You’ll teach me, right?”
He smiles, comes closer, pulls me against him. The soft cotton of his sweatshirt kisses against me.
My arms move around him, wrapping just above his waist. His voices comes out sweet like new corn. “I’m glad you’re here with your dad now.”
“I am too.”
After the movie, we go up Cadillac Mountain on Mount Desert Island and look for UFOs. I think that all the things everyone sees in the sky around here are military planes they’re testing out. In Cutler there’s a naval tracking station, and up in Millinocket there’s an air force base. I mean, it only makes sense. Still, it’s way more fun pretending.
We all get out of the car and huddle up on a granite boulder looking at the sky, waiting for aliens to come make our lives exciting, to whisk us away and make us heroes in our own adventure.
Paolo sits behind me and I lean back against his chest. The zipper pull on his sweatshirt digs into my back. I don’t mind.
“We’re going to go kiss each other until we can’t breathe,” Sasha says, standing up and taking Stuart’s hand.
Stuart jumps straight up into the air, taps his feet together and yells, “Yippee!”
Then they take off.
“Watch out for alien abductors,” Paolo yells after them. Then he waits an entire millisecond and puts his arms around me. It’s good to rest against him, all nestled up beneath a blanket. We sit there for a while and look at the stars. I don’t get scared or anything, because Paolo feels so solid, the way I imagine you would feel, Mr. Wayne.
Instead, I just nestle in and sigh and don’t think about anything but the stars. I kind of turn my head so I can look up at him, and Paolo leans his head down. His face gets so close. His lips, the lips that stretch above his jaw, the soft above the solid, they open a little bit. My eyes blink shut. Our lips push against each other, long and slow. My heart beats fast and swoony. My body turns more so my hands can reach into his hair, so it’s easier for my mouth to touch his. Soon, I’m kneeling in front of him and his arms around me push me closer and closer, like we’re going to meld together, and I think that maybe I should try to explain this to Olivia and Sasha somehow.
He tastes like cinnamon gum. I must taste like mint, because Sasha kept feeding me tic tacs in the movie theater.
When we stop he says, “You sound like you’re purring.”
I jump away, land on my butt. “Oh God.”
“No, it’s good.” He stands up. “It’s sweet.”
I hide my face in my hands. He touches the back of my head, feels the big lumps there and then he screws it all up and says, “You shouldn’t move back to your mom’s.”
I wait and stare at things, the blanket, the sky, pebbles. In acting, we would call this a poignant silence.
“You shouldn’t. Not unless that guy moves out. He could be dangerous.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, standing up too. My voice a flat dead thing in the night.
“And if he’s your dad … those clippings …”
“Wait. How do you know that?”
“Sasha.”
“Sasha,” I choke, like a half-laugh sort of thing. “I’ll have to kill her.”
“She’s trying to help.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We’re all trying to help you.”
“Right. Let’s help Lily. She’s our crusade.”
“It’s not like that.” Paolo grabs my hand. I try not to hold it, but I’m weak and I grab on tight just like when I was jumping up onto the bike rack at school. It steadies me.
Above us a plane roars, but there are none of the airplane lights on the wings and the shadow seems more rectangular somehow, not really plane-like. It blocks out the stars as it passes. The wind of it moves my hair against my face. Without thinking, I move closer.
“Did you see that? Did you see that?” Sasha comes running out of the woods. “It was right there. Did you see it? A real UFO!”
I try to nod, but I’m too busy crying, too busy
Stuart follows her, tripping and then righting himself. He jumps up and down, pounding his chest. “Take me! Come back and take me! Get me out of here! I hate Merrimack! I want to go to Planet Zigna, baby! Or you could drop me off in New York! Broadway, maybe?”
Sasha notices me. Her face turns sad. She hauls me up and says, “Okay. Enough. It’s time to be empowered. It’s time for the plan.”
The first house we go to is my sister’s. Brian’s truck waits there. The light is on in the living room and a football announcer’s voice sneaks into the lawn.
Tiptoeing, I peek in. He’s on the couch. The back of his head doesn’t move. The game fills the TV screen. Budweiser bottles line up on the end table.
“Who’s winning?” Paolo whispers.
“Patriots,” Stuart says.
“You can see that?” Paolo asks, squinting. “How can you see that?”
“He’ll hear you,” I tremble. “Shhhh.”
“We could take him.” Stuart’s breath comes out in little puffs. It’s cold tonight. “Just go in and take him down.”
“Violence is not the answer,” Sasha says all preachy. Both the boys groan.
“It isn’t!” she insists. “Give me the note.”
She takes the paper from my hand, runs up to the front door, opens the screen door and takes her gum out of her mouth. She smooshes it into the door and sticks the paper on it. Then she does something unbelievable. She pounds on the door.
“Run!” she yells.
Unable to make anything work, I stand there frozen. Brian clambers off of the couch. It’s like when you know the bad guy’s going to shoot, but you just can’t move because you’re worried you aren’t fast enough, worried about the ladies hunkered down and hiding in the saloon. What if a stray bullet hits them? But then, you’ve just got to do it, just got to take your gun out of your holster and fire, no holds barred.
“Run!” Sasha yells again. She’s already back at the car, opening the door.
Stuart yanks on my arm. I take off and pass him, leaping over a pothole in the driveway. I feel like I’m flying; I soar.