LARRY FASCO WAS entertaining Peachy Otts in the Ramouds’ rec room the next morning.
“It was at this bar in Havana, see,” he said. “Me and a few sidekicks and ol’ Ernie Hemingway. You know ol’ Ernie?”
“He bags groceries down at the Bumble Bee.”
“Pathetic! What do they teach in reform school these days?” he said. “Anyway, I says to him, I says, ‘Ernie, how can I become a great writer like yourself?’ I ask him this after I buy him a few beers. He liked Genny Cream.”
“Oh, really.”
“From the mouth of God, I’m telling you, every word is true,” Larry said, pointing at the ceiling. “So I lube him up with a few Gennies, ask my question, and you know what he does? Do you?”
“Hunh-uh.”
“He says, ‘Get lost, you lowly vermin.’”
“No way!” Peachy chuckled.
“He says, ‘Take a long walk off a short cliff, you lowly vermin, scum of the sea, armpit of the earth.’ That’s how he talked. That’s what he thought of me. That’s how writers show they like you.”
“Cool. Even if I don’t believe you.”
“Then me and my bud Jupe Ellis, we decided to go visit my ol’ bud Willy Shakespeare who was writing stuff and hanging around, trying to get my opinion. You know Willy the Spear-man?”
“Hunh-uh.”
“Lawrence Fasco, what are you doing in my basement?” Melvina said. She was standing in the doorway.
“Aha, here’s my buttercup,” Larry said. Peachy stared at him and said, “Melvina?”
“That’s right.” Larry stood and did a little shimmy in Melvie’s direction. “She’s the devil-woman and I’m a devil-worshiper, yee haw!”
“You better not say that,” Peachy said, chuckling. “She’ll get you, man. She does that—I’ve seen her in action.”
Melvina stood her ground before Larry’s shimmy and crossed her arms over her chest. She eyed Peachy then turned back to Larry. “And where, pray tell, is Mr. Ramoud, the supposed owner of this house?” she said.
Larry dropped his outspread arms and walked back to the card table where he’d been sitting. “Well, hell, he’s in the bathroom, as usual.”
Melvina snapped her fingers at Peachy, and Peachy jumped up and followed her out.
Jem was upstairs in the living room, the school application form fanned out before her. It depressed her, having to look at the layers of such applications again: test scores, essays, grade reports. They covered the table. Melvie had Peachy sit between herself and Jem. Melvie folded her hands and said, “Now, Peachy Otts. How would you like to go to college?”
“No way,” she said.
“Oh,” Jem said. “I don’t know about this.”
“Why should I?” Peachy said. “College is where the brains go, like Jem. That’s where all the suburbs kids go.”
“Right,” Melvie said. “That could be you, too.”
Peachy was shaking her head again. “No way, you guys. What? Look, I’m stupid and teachers hate me. Dolores is the brain, send her. Ma always said me and Glady had can openers for brains. All I ever learned in school was stuff like how to make fart noises on my arm. Perry Hardcaster showed me when I was flunking out of fifth.” She started to lift the crook of her arm halfway to her mouth, but Melvie lowered it with the tip of her finger. “I never made it out of high school, and I never want to!” Peachy said.
“Peachy, look,” Jem said, and picked up a page of the application. She pointed to a question that asked about Peachy’s educational objectives. “Just hypothetically. Could you think up something to say for a question like this?”
Peachy stared at a point somewhere between the page and Jem’s finger. Her eyes were motionless, and her face tightened. Finally she looked up at the two women and chanted, “Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow—”
“Peachy…” Melvina sighed.
Peachy grabbed the page, crumpled it up, and threw it down on the table. It bounced off onto the floor.
“Young lady!” Melvina went after the paper, but Jem was looking at Peachy. She turned to the first page of the application and pointed to the blank that read: Name, last, first, middle initial. “Can you read this?” she asked.
This time Peachy didn’t look at the page at all, but stared Jem in the face. She didn’t blink. Jem looked away. She thought about middle school, Peachy in sixth and Jem in eighth, on the bus where Peachy would stare off while she pricked herself with safety pins and let little points of blood come to the tops of her thighs. Staring and humming. She had a smell, at times almost unbearably sour, like dill pickles. Once Peachy told Jem she was pricking the letters of a girl’s name at school into her leg, so the blood would spell out Janet. Only when she was done she hadn’t spelled out the girl’s name at all. Instead, little x’s and o’s and snaking lines of blood twisted over the surface of the leg, a collection of hieroglyphics.
Jem heard Melvina murmuring: “That says name. Peachy, can you write your name?”
With great deliberation, Peachy put her fingers to the page and drew a line of crosses and spirals across the application.
“Peachy Otts,” she said, then grinned and stood, moving toward the back door. “You’re lucky,” she said. “I don’t write that for just anybody.” Then she ran out the door.
Melvina lifted her eyebrows at Jem. “Well.”
“It’s a start,” Jem said.
THAT EVENING, WHEN Jem and Melvina went outside, the trees were yellow in the lowering sun; the tall grass, bright splinters; the woods, deep and fragrant. The fields were littered with white and purple clover.
“Jemorah, I’ll explain the world to you someday,” Melvie said, opening the car door. “It’s all starting to come to me. The trick is you can’t rush it.”
Jem leaned against the house, inhaling deeply, seeing the spans of telephone wire threading pole to pole, past wildflowers and hills, moving back past half-burned silos and the wreckage of barns, the sky awash in evening colors.
“And you’re not getting away that easily, Ms. P. Otts,” Melvina said to the highway.