The point my sisters ganged up on me to make in the hallway outside tutoring yesterday is the one it always is: it’s the least I can do.
It’s not that Mirabel inspires me in some sparkly-disabled-sister-inspirational-rainbow way. More like she shames me in a regular-sister-who’s-both-smarter-and-nicer-than-I-am way. It’s the least I can do, not the way Mrs. Radcliffe says when she makes us tutor: I am blessed so I should serve. More like: Mirabel can’t, but what’s my excuse? If Mirabel could, she would shout down the kids kicking River’s ass, demand protection for him from the school administration, use her body to shield his, use her fists to give as good as River got. I guess it makes sense Mirabel feels a kinship with anyone at the mercy of bullies, circumstance, their own physical limitations, and shit they inherited from their parents that isn’t their fault, but the only way she can help is to make me do it for her.
You know that saying “Easier said than done”? This is true even when you can’t talk.
Still, I was convinced. Am convinced. Can you be reluctantly hell-bent? I am that. What I can do and whether I should do it for River Templeton may be in question, but anything I can do for Mirabel, I do, if not always gladly then resolvedly.
So I submit that into evidence. Okay, yes, a part of me is thinking that if I help him, he’ll help me back, actually do what he said he would, spy harder on his father, get us proof we can use. But part of me—a bigger part—decides to help him because I love my sister. Petra would call this exculpating.
Our last class of the day is English, and River’s knee bounces through the whole of it. He sits one behind, one over from me, and I can feel him through the floor. When he catches me looking back at him, he smiles then winces. His bottom lip is split again.
The bell rings, and he’s up like Pavlov’s dogs, but I was prepared for that, so I meet him at the door and push him back into the classroom as everyone else files out.
“You don’t look so good,” I tell him.
He makes bodybuilder arms. “How about now?”
Flirting with me. Because he likes me or because he wants me to like him? Because he likes me or because he doesn’t want to talk about how he’s getting his ass kicked?
“Your arms look fine.” They do, actually. “It’s your face that concerns me.”
“Fine?” Mock offended. “Feel these.”
I do. Flirting back, I suppose, but what choice do I have really? And anyway, I don’t know what I’m feeling for—it’s the first biceps I’ve squeezed that I’m not related to—but I see his point. “Better than fine,” I admit. “Nice.”
“Nice? That’s even worse. We’re looking for mighty. Epic. Awe-inspiring.”
“They make your head look tiny in comparison,” I offer.
“That’s my only goal,” he says.
“I think you should expand it.”
“My head?”
“Your goal. I think you should shoot for tiny and intact.”
“I don’t want to get greedy.”
“Let me help you,” I say.
“Help me what?”
“Survive high school.”
“Depends how. Are you going to disguise me?”
“A disguise will never work.” It’s hard for me to say because I don’t do this very often, but whether he’s flirting or evading, I think he’s pretty good at it. “You’re too distinctive. What with all those big muscles.” Me too, I’m pretty good at it.
“True, true.” He pretends to stroke his pretend beard thoughtfully. “Will you fashion some kind of unbreachable transport for me to take back and forth to school? Like the popemobile?”
“Not unless you’re the pope.”
“Can you cast a protection spell?”
“I don’t know. Let me ask someone who does magic.” I can feel my cheeks are flushed. “Hey River, can you teach me a protection spell?”
His cheeks are flushed too, though whether we’re embarrassed or enjoying ourselves I couldn’t say. “I can teach you how to pull a really long scarf out of your armpit.”
“Pass.”
“Then I don’t think you can help me,” he says.
“I have to.”
“Why?” He’s suddenly serious. He moves a step closer to me—and he was pretty close already—looks hard into my eyes. “Why?” he says again, softer, and waits for me to say because I like him or at least because I care about him or at the very least because it’s the right thing to do. Instead I tell him the truth. Well, some of the truth. “I promised my sisters.”
He blinks. “Okay.” Takes a step back, but only one. “For your sisters, I agree to let you try to stop everyone from beating me up.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’re welcome.” He puts a hand on each of my shoulders like he’s going to pull me in and kiss me. He does not. “So what’s the plan, fairy queen?”
It’s a good question.
The only answer I can come up with is this: I can’t run circles around these guys, but I can talk circles around them.
I decide to start with the Kyles. Two birds and all that. At tutoring, I try begging them. “Just leave the kid alone.”
“No,” they say.
“Please,” I wheedle. “For me.”
“Still no.” Everything the Kyles say, they say together.
I try flattery.
“But you’re so much stronger than he is.”
“True,” they agree but can’t see why this isn’t an argument for beating him up rather than against.
I try an appeal to fairness.
“It’s two against one.”
“We take turns,” they assure me.
I try reason, but reason is not their strong suit.
“It wasn’t his fault. He’s our age.”
“He is?”
“Of course. He’s enrolled in high school.”
“Who cares if he’s our age?”
“Because what happened with Belsum happened before any of us were even alive.”
“That’s why you’re so vacuous,” Petra puts in from where she’s doing multiplication tables with Nellie in the corner. But the Kyles aren’t studying for the SATs so they don’t know what “vacuous” means, which, come to think of it, is probably for the best.
I summon patience. “If he wasn’t born yet, it can’t be his fault. And besides, how much control do you have over your parents’ actions?”
“Huh?” they say.
“If your dad does something stupid, is it your fault?”
“Yeah,” says one.
“Usually,” says the other one.
I resort to platitudes.
“Violence is never the answer.”
And it’s like a clearing, like a wind blows the storm clouds from their brains and suddenly you can see for miles.
“It is,” they say.
“His dad’s gonna give my dad a job, Mab,” Kyle M. says.
“Mine too,” says Kyle R.
My legs pretzel, and I fold right to the floor. They cross theirs nimbly and join me, crisscross-applesauce on the carpet like when we were in kindergarten. My brain is screaming: It’s starting. It’s started. And also, quieter, She won’t survive this.
“My dad said the whole place is a shit show,” says Kyle M., “but maybe it’ll be better this time.”
“My dad said the whole company’s corrupt, lying assholes,” says Kyle R., “but a job’s a job.”
“So we did what we had to,” they say together.
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe our dads can’t stand up, but we can.” Kyle R. looks so earnest it’s like he’s still a kindergartner. That was the year he started an adopt-a-slug program at recess with the slogan “Even the slimy deserve a family.”
“Maybe our dads can’t stand up,” Kyle M.—adoptive father to the vast majority of rehomed slugs—adds, “so we have to. You know? Their way didn’t work, so now it’s our job.”
I nod. I do know. But then I shake my head. “But River’s on our side. He’s helping us.”
They look skeptical. I know how they feel. “How?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m working on it. But I can’t get him to help us if you won’t leave him alone.”
“Are you sure he’s helping?”
I’m not. “I think he’s trying.”
“He might be lying to you, Mab.”
“Maybe,” I admit.
They consider the matter between them.
“Plus, Mirabel says,” I add. My ace in the hole.
Their faces light up. They emerge from their huddle, nodding.
“We’ll stop for the moment,” says Kyle M., “if you promise to let us know when it’s time to start up again.”
“And,” adds Kyle R., “if you promise to tell Mirabel we did what she said.”
On my way home, I stop by Pooh’s to bring her a loaf of zucchini bread my mother put into the oven when it was raining but didn’t remove until after it stopped, so Monday wouldn’t eat it. Pooh, of course, doesn’t care.
“Who pooped in your piña colada?” she says when she buzzes me in and sees my face. I follow her into the kitchen where she opens her fridge, inserts the zucchini bread, and swaps it for a heap of meats and sauces she starts piling on the counter.
“Tutoring sucked,” I tell her.
“Poor baby. You need animal flesh.” She puts a plate of galbi—her mother’s recipe—in front of me, then starts setting up a steamer for dumplings.
“I don’t think that’s the problem.”
“Then what?”
“The Kyles are beating River up because his dad gave their dads jobs.”
She nods. This makes sense to her, a strange kind of warped Bourne logic, whack-a-mole revenge. “And you want to save him.” She’s grinning at the bossam she’s wrapping in cabbage leaves. “That’s very sweet.”
“Not me. Mirabel.”
“Bullshit. You love him.”
“You wish.” Everyone could do with a little excitement around here. “I’m telling you it’s Mirabel. She pled his case. She begged me to help him.”
“Why?”
“She’s nicer than I am.”
“Well, that’s certainly true. Whereas you, you think you’ll let the kid keep getting the shit beat out of him?” She’s half teasing, half making a point, though I don’t know what point.
Until I say it out loud, I don’t even know it’s in my head. “He thinks we’re so fucked up.”
“I bet. Who cares what he thinks?”
I do. “He thinks we’re this tiny backwards, backwoods, backwater town, stupid and pathetic and hopeless. Crazy. South of crazy. Beggarly. Lugubrious.”
“You and Petra might have studied enough now.”
“He feels sorry for us.” I sound bitter as orange rind.
“Not sorry enough,” she says.
“It’s not his fault.” I keep saying that.
“Not yours either.”
“Sure, but no one’s blaming me.”
“You inherited his father’s father’s mess,” Pooh says, “and so did he. It should be his burden at least as much as yours, don’t you think? He needs to see what we are. He needs to know it in his bones. Maybe the Kyles’ll knock some sense into him.”
“The Kyles don’t have enough sense to knock between them,” I say, and she nods, and she’s quiet, and then she says, “But you know what else?”
“What?”
“He needs to see how we’re broken maybe. But you? You need the opposite. You need to see how we’re whole.”
“A hole?”
Pooh has been in Bourne as long as anyone. She needs a wheelchair just because she’s old. You forget, living here, that some of us falter before it’s time, but if we’re lucky and live long enough, we’ll all wind up there in the end. What’s different about Pooh is she’s so old that even though she’s been here forever, she hasn’t been here forever. There was a time before. Pooh has lived in two different countries and four different states. She’s visited family in Korea, California, and Hawaii. She went to college and drove cross-country once with her roommate. She knows about the world out there. She’s the only one I know who does. Except River.
“Bourne’s on the small end of town-sized and a bit too powder-keg-y at the moment for my taste, but there’s a lot that’s really nice about this town. We’re not especially wonderful maybe, but we’re not especially miserable either. How it is here is how it is everywhere.”
I raise an eyebrow at her. “It’s really not.”
“Yup, it is. It was just the same for him in Boston, I promise you.”
“What are you talking about, Pooh? Boston has museums, historic stuff, parks, baseball, millions of people, nontoxic bodies of water—”
I’m just getting started when she interrupts. “He was sick of all the kids he’d known since grade school, the ones he never liked but his parents made him hang out with, the ones who were there when he accidentally called the kindergarten teacher Mommy and remember when he got hit in the face with a volleyball in sixth grade and cried so hard they had to send him home. He wants a million things he doesn’t have. He wants everything. He thought there was no one new to meet and no one he wasn’t bored to death of and nothing to do on Saturday nights and nowhere left to go. He felt trapped there like he’d never get out. And then suddenly? He got to come here. He doesn’t think Bourne’s lame. He thinks it’s exciting.”
“No way.” I’m laughing now, shaking my head.
“Maybe not Bourne itself, but all the new people, new school, new possibilities.”
“They’re beating him up,” I remind her.
“Exciting!” She shrugs. “Roils the blood. Muddies the waters. I bet he loves it.”
“He doesn’t. He’s terrified.”
“Because you know what else it does?” It’s like she hasn’t even heard me. “It makes pretty girls feel protective of you. It makes pretty girls stand up for you in front of everyone.”
“You’re crazy, Pooh.”
“I’m not. I’m telling you. Here’s not so different from anywhere. You can’t see that now but you will. When you leave, you’ll see. And River Templeton? He’s not so different either. Teenage boys are teenage boys. I bet you anything he’s over the goddamn moon to be here.”
“How could that possibly, possibly be the case?”
“Easy,” Pooh says. “You’re here.”