Liv could not get the water of her daily showers hot enough to cleanse her, and once in class, she so closely studied her fingernails for skinner flesh that she missed being called upon. She continued to move alongside Monica, Krista, and the gang in the halls, and sat with them at lunch, but interactions felt blurry and muffled, as if performed through a fiberglass pane. If only they spoke fewer words, like those three she couldn’t get out of her head, the three the skinner continued to croak every time she saw it: Car. Bow. Hole.
Her interactions with teachers followed the same model, and when Coach Carney called Liv into the crowded office she shared with other coaches, Liv expected role-model boilerplate: Is there something troubling you? There are counselors trained to help you. Liv declined the seat Carney offered and adopted a pose she’d be able to hold long enough to cycle through a short series of lies. Instead, Carney ambushed her.
“You’re off the team, Liv. I’m sorry.”
Runners were dutiful by nature, and Carney wasn’t practiced at tasks like this. She crept a hand over her mouth as if prepared to cry if Liv cried; the coach was a noted weeper, liable to shatter into sobs when a runner scored a personal best. Liv, though, felt no mirrored emotion. The fiberglass was still there, slotted between her and a world that seemed increasingly unintelligible. At least Carney’s pointed words cracked the pane. Liv narrowed her eyes and tried to peer through it.
“It’s just too many missed practices,” Carney said. “It’s not fair to the other girls.”
“The other girls.” Liv echoed it only to get her mouth moving, but once uttered, the words hung there like soot. “What did they say?”
“They didn’t have to say anything,” Carney said.
But that was an artful dodge. Girls had said something, and Liv believed she knew which girls. Monica, for sure. Or Darla, Laurie, and Amber if Monica convinced them to do the dirty work. That was it, then: Her legs were cut off from under her, severing the last link she had to her friends. How quickly it happened, Liv mused, thinking back to the first day of school, just a few weeks back, all those cheers and hugs. A different time, and she a different person. Liv examined herself for grief, and it was only the carefulness of this search that alerted her that her hands were balled into fists.
She looked down at them. They were the same fists that had twice assaulted the skinner; that’s what fists were for. Liv snapped her head up and looked for something to hit. Letter-jacket emblems, paper inboxes, a coatrack—nothing with the sort of bulk that would be satisfying.
So instead she kicked. Her foot punted the metal folding chair Carney had offered, and it flew backward, clanging shut against the floor. Carney leaped to her feet.
“Liv!”
“I don’t want to be on any team,” Liv snarled. “None of you understand anyway. No one understands anything.”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
But Liv was out of there, slamming the door to cut off whatever bullshit Carney, who was probably weeping already, hoped to shovel at her, and just so the crying coach would have something to stop her from giving chase, Liv ripped a bulletin board off the wall. It hit the floor with a giant whap while individual papers took flight, each promoting more bullshit. It was like Doug had said, all of it just running around in stupid circles.
Liv careened in the direction of the parking lot. Get out of here, get back to the shed, where actual events of consequence were going down. She fled downstairs and heard voices banging about the auditorium. Baldwin herself—all Liv needed right now. Actually, it was. It was exactly what she needed.
The auditorium was dark except for the middlemost seats, dusted pollen yellow by sun shaving through the lobby entrance. The stage itself was bright, as if carved from the dark by a knife, and hosted several kids moving like robots while reading from scripts. So here they were, the cast of Oliver! Liv figured that they, too, whispered about her every time they passed her in the hall.
Liv hurried along the front row, not seeing Baldwin until she sashayed in from the wing, her billowy skirt moving like a jellyfish, to take the girl by the elbow and restage her. Liv stopped, throttling the railing over the orchestra pit. It was Baldwin up there, but it could have easily been Carney, or Gamble, or anyone who’d done her wrong.
“I hope all of you are happy!” she cried.
They were illuminated; she was not. The actors squinted, trying to recognize her by shape and sound. Off to the left, or stage right, or whatever the hell thespians called it, stood an actor instantly recognizable by his exemplary posture. Bruno Mayorga—and it was the final indignity, this boy she’d come to like, even trust a little, incorporated into this sham of a show.
“You’re all shitting on my dad’s memory by doing this,” she raged.
Baldwin was the only one who looked to have identified Liv right off. She heaved a sigh big enough to be appreciated in the balcony.
“I offered to discuss this with you,” Baldwin said.
“Everyone thinks they know what happened to him!” Liv shouted. If only these assholes could lay their eyes on the skinner, Liv thought. If only Doug would agree to show the skinner to all these ignorant nonbelievers. “You have no idea, none of you. He was not crazy, not even a little. You just didn’t listen to him. No one did. And they shut down his play, which could have been really important to everyone, just so we could have this, this … shit?”
Her splintered voice scared her.
“This is not the time, Liv,” Baldwin snapped. “If you want to talk about it, we can talk about it. But tomorrow. Not now. You have to be an adult about this.”
“Why would I talk to you? You’re the one to blame for all this!”
“That’s right. I am. So I’d appreciate it if you spoke to me privately and left everyone else alone.”
Liv spread her arms to appeal to her fellow students.
“If any of you had any guts, you’d quit!”
“Oh lord,” Baldwin muttered. “Enough with the mutiny routine.”
“Well, don’t be surprised if your sets end up busted.”
“That would be destruction of school property.” Baldwin was starting to sound bored. “At least then we’d be done with you.”
“You’ll never be done with me.”
“Our own Phantom of the Opera, I’m honored. Now will you leave?”
Liv’s lips moved, but she was emptied of comebacks. Had Baldwin won this round? The idea infuriated her, even more so for Bruno standing witness, but her muscles were tightening as they did in the Armory, a dangerous feeling, so she headed for the red exit sign. She ducked down some stairs, shoved open a door, and was blinded by a blast of sunlight from which she didn’t recover until her hip collided with the station wagon. Then she was in the front seat, vision blurred with sweat, but the engine didn’t turn, and then she was outside the car again, kicking the door as hard as she’d kicked Carney’s chair, as hard as she’d wanted to kick Baldwin.
She stomped from the parking lot toward town. Summer had fought back, and it was gallingly hot, and she kept her eyes on the sidewalk until she sensed a car crawling beside her. Car: The word had a dark magic now, straining for bow, reaching for hole. She ducked and looked at the driver. It was Bruno. And for the first time since she’d met him, he didn’t greet her with a smile.
“What?” Liv demanded.
“What is with you?” he asked.
Liv ground her teeth and resumed walking. The car crept alongside her.
“That’s creepy, you know,” she said. “That’s stalking.”
“Get in. I’ll drive you.”
“Even creepier.”
“I’m the one who should be worried! You’re acting like you’re going to knife someone!”
“I am.” She stopped, and the car stopped, too, chuckling exhaust. She breathed it in on purpose, craving the toxic taste. It was too much and she coughed, leaning over with the force of it, and when she rose, wiping her mouth, she was weaker. Her muscles still ached from the skinner interrogation, and she was tired of pretending they didn’t.
“You don’t even know where I’m going,” she mumbled.
“To the knife grinder, obviously. Get in—you can tell me.”
He pushed open the passenger door. She gave him a lengthy warning glare, but he was the least threatening boy she’d ever met, and besides, what did it matter? She almost wished he did try something, so she could bite off his finger.
“The vet clinic. By the Best Western. My mom works there. She’ll drive me home.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He got the car moving again. The interior smelled like its own foreign land, as strangers’ cars always did, and though it rated only a notch below her own clunker, as well as Doug’s, it was, like Bruno, exceedingly clean. Not so much as a gum wrapper obscured an inch of the sun-roasted upholstery. Liv futzed irritably with the air-conditioning until she sensed Bruno beginning to enjoy her futile effort. She turned her face to the wind. Inside a car was, at least, out of the sun.
“Fuck,” she sighed.
“You’re a barrel of monkeys today.”
“I didn’t ask for this ride.”
“Will you take ten chill pills?”
Liv took a deep breath. She’d been so heated minutes ago she’d been lucky she hadn’t punched a fist through the station wagon window. Here Bruno was doing her a favor, and she was being a bitch about it.
“What’s a knife grinder, anyway?” she asked.
“It’s an old-fashioned job where you sharpen knives. There’s a song in Oliver! that mentions it.”
“So you got your wish. You’re in the play.”
“You really have it out for Baldwin, don’t you?”
“Aren’t you skipping out on practice?”
“It’s called rehearsal, Fleming. And no, they were done with my scenes.”
“Then why were you still there?”
“I don’t know. Just to hang out?”
“Seriously? You have nothing better to do?”
“What are you doing that’s so important?”
The car slunk into a shadow the exact shape of the Armory.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Bruno said, “but were you always so mean?”
“No.” There: honesty. It felt good. “I guess I made myself this way.”
“And are you happy?”
She gazed out of the window. Even their speed of travel couldn’t make Bloughton, a town that moved at a creep, go any faster. Bruno’s question was so simple, yet was one she’d never been asked. There had to be a way to be strong without being horrible. Be the tallest you can, Major Dawkins had urged, and maybe sitting inside this car, where no one could gauge her true height, was the best place to try.
“I don’t want to make things weird,” Bruno said. “I’ll just drive.”
“It’s not weird. It shouldn’t be.”
“I mean, I get why the play would make you sad. I just don’t get why it makes you mad. That’s not a productive emotion. If you were sad about it, then, you know, you could kind of work through it, and then it’d be over. You know how it is after you cry. You feel better.”
“So be a girl, you’re saying. Cry it out.”
“Man, you’re unbelievable.”
“Sorry. Sorry.”
She was. Every conversation she’d had with Bruno had been a revelation of disarming candor. Another conversation like it was suddenly all Liv wanted in the world.
“What’s Oliver! about?” she asked. “I mean, I saw my dad’s version, but it was a little confusing.”
“The story itself? It’s idiotic. I only like it for the songs. I’ve been reading the book to see if it’s any better.”
“The book? The Charles Dickens book?” She laughed, and the laugh, coming as it did so abruptly, made her smile. “That’s like grade grubbing in a class where you don’t even get grades.”
“It’s about this old guy Fagin, who lures all these orphans to his house to become his army of pickpockets. Now that’s creepy. Makes a guy like me picking you up on the road pretty harmless, huh?”
“And Oliver’s one of these kids.”
“Right. He gets caught pickpocketing, but it ends up helping him find his parents.”
“And who are you playing?”
“I’m the Artful Dodger. He’s like the old man’s assistant.”
“So you’re a tall, Mexican Artful Dodger. What would Dickens think?”
“Dickens calls Fagin ‘the Jew’ for like half the book. He would’ve lost his shit if he ever saw a Mexican Dodger.”
“Maybe I should audition. Be an understudy in case someone keels over. Really blow Baldwin’s mind.”
“I wouldn’t bother. It’s a crap play for girls. There’s not a single female main character except Nancy.”
“Who’s Nancy?”
“She’s a hooker in love with an abusive maniac.”
“What happens to her?”
“He murders her.”
“It’s so nice the school keeps supporting this inspirational drama.”
Bruno laughed. “Well, they always cast a girl as Oliver. Guys can’t hit those high notes.”
Liv’s stomach seesawed as Bruno turned into the vet clinic lot. She hadn’t realized they were already there. She’d been distracted, honestly amused, and only realized the extent of her smile when she felt it retract into the afternoon’s established scowl.
She didn’t move for a moment too long.
“What’s wrong?” Bruno asked.
“Nothing. Thanks for the ride.”
She bucked from the seat back, but there was a hand on her upper arm. Her instinct was to recoil, rip it away, and swing at it with Doug’s table-leg baton. Instead she looked at its owner. Bruno’s bright white teeth were hidden. The honest brown eyes, though, did not change.
“I just want you to know that everyone knows how you feel,” he said. “I mean, as much as we can. We’ve talked about it. Everyone’s sympathetic. If there’s anything we can do to make you feel better, just tell me. We’re not bad people. We’re theater geeks.”
Anger had so overwhelmed Liv lately that a trickle of gratefulness was enough to drown her. She gripped the door handle in hopes of keeping her head above it.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you guys. Everything is confusing right now.” Liv gestured at the clinic. “My mom’s got two jobs and can’t pay the bills, and I’m not helping at all. At all. I don’t know what I’m doing. You don’t understand.”
“Yes, I do. My mom’s got two jobs, too. Plus four kids, and my dad’s doing shit work in Mexico, and we move like every couple years, and what am I doing to help? I’m in a stupid musical.”
“Why do you move every couple years?”
“Why do you think? My parents worked for nine years at a factory in Monroeville squashing pumpkin into little cans for people to make their stupid Thanksgiving pumpkin pies until one day there was this sweep and my dad ends up in Mexico and mom ends up basically on the run through a series of shithole towns where it gets harder and harder to get hired because her résumé is full of jobs she quit without notice. So, yeah, I think I understand.”
The only pumpkin Liv had ever given thought to was the Floating Pumpkin. Bruno’s vehemence made her feel like the insensitive dunce she was, and she had to suppress the urge to tell him that she wasn’t just another privileged white girl, that she knew what it was like to remake yourself into a different person. However garish her hardships, Bruno Mayorga had her beat. And yet what he’d offered her was something she suspected he’d never told anyone. The final thing Liv wanted to say, but didn’t, after nodding and apologizing and getting out of the car, was that he shouldn’t worry—she, more than anyone, knew how to keep a secret.