“There’s some food missing,” Mrs. Bobbie announced. “From my top shelf.”
She didn’t elaborate or say what the food was, but I figured it was something good, cookies or candy or something. I’d seen inside the pantry—counted everything from stem to stern one morning before anybody was up. Mrs. Bobbie was on the ample side, and she probably didn’t like it when the kids got into her snacks.
“We don’t hide food here, Daphne,” Mrs. Bobbie went on, and I jerked in surprise. “There’s a gracious plenty to go around for growing girls. And anyhow, when you hide food in your room, it brings roaches, so you need to bring it back to me right away.”
I glanced around the table. The Super Tramps were all staring at me—Omega with her beautifully pursed fuchsia lips, Shellie with her languid eyes, and Tré behind her curtain of stringy hair. I could feel the weight of their attention, like stones crushing the breath out of me. Their eyes were aflame with some expression I didn’t recognize. It might’ve been admiration. Or bloodthirstiness.
I looked down at my plate. We’d all been given a scoop of macaroni and cheese with chopped-up hot dog mixed in it. The whole concoction was dusted with crushed potato chips. There were no vegetables or fruit accompanying the meal, only the one half a cup of Kool-Aid to drink. It wasn’t a shock that the food had been taken, but all the same, I hadn’t been the one to do it.
“Mrs. Bobbie has a special diet from her doctor, hon,” Mr. Al said. “She gets sick if she don’t take in enough calories.” His face was kind under the floppy blond wings of hair, but I had a hard time believing what he was saying. I’d never heard of a sickness like that.
“I didn’t take it,” I said.
Mrs. Bobbie made a sound like Of course you did. She’d been doing this long enough to know better, I guessed. She knew how foster kids were.
Chantal piped up. “I’ll check our room.”
“Now, hold on.” Mr. Al put out a hand, but Mrs. Bobbie shook her head at him. Chantal scooted back her chair, ran out of the room, and, in an astonishingly short amount of time, returned with three small boxes of yogurt-covered raisins. She laid them on the table in a neat row and I stared at them, openmouthed.
“She ripped a hole in the mattress and stuffed them up inside,” she announced, then turned to see my reaction.
My face heated and my eyes watered. I hadn’t done that. I didn’t know there was a hole in my mattress. Chantal would, though. She sure would. That bitch!
Mrs. Bobbie regarded me, her lips pursed. “Where’s the rest of it, Daphne? There was more.”
“No, there’s not. I don’t know. I didn’t take those raisins.” My voice shook.
But there was the evidence lined up beside my plate, three tiny red boxes. I looked at Mr. Al, hoping for some sort of help, but he glanced over at Chantal.
“Let’s eat up, girls,” he said and hunkered over his plate of hot-dog mac and cheese. He didn’t look at me again.
Later, after Mr. Al and Mrs. Bobbie had settled in front of the evening news and we were cleaning the kitchen, the Super Tramps crowded around me at the sink. They were so close, their scent enveloped me. It was sweet, some kind of cotton-candy perfume I didn’t recognize.
“What did you do with the rest of Mrs. Bobbie’s food?” Omega said. “If you tell us, we’ll share it with you.”
“I don’t know.” I stole a glance at Chantal, who was flicking crumbs off the table with a dishtowel, spraying them across the floor I’d just swept. “I didn’t take it.”
They stared at me blankly for a few more awful seconds, then ordered Chantal and me to finish the kitchen for them. Then they all trooped upstairs to their room.
“Homework, ladies!” I heard Mrs. Bobbie shout after them from the TV room, and a door slammed above us in response. Chantal went back to flicking crumbs from the table instead of coming to help me at the sink. I turned back to the suds without a word.
After lights out, I waited patiently for Chantal to finish kicking my bunk. When she finally quit and I heard her breathing deepen, I climbed down the ladder and tiptoed down the hall. I tapped on the Super Tramps’ door as loudly as I dared and immediately it swung open. Tré in a T-shirt, her hair in short braids, stood before me. A pink light glowed behind her. I could see the other two girls were awake too, propped on their elbows, heads close where they’d pushed their beds together. That cotton-candy smell enveloped me again. I really liked it.
“What?” Tré said. Her fingers were splayed out on the door, nails slick with wet black polish.
“I think I know where the food is,” I said.
Her eyes widened and she flashed a delighted smile down at me. I thought suddenly how pretty she looked with her hair pulled back. Her skin was porcelain, and her legs were long and toned. I wondered why her mom and dad had given her away. And why nobody had adopted her. Suddenly, Omega appeared in the doorway and, shoving Tré aside, propped her hip against the frame. She was wearing a T-shirt too, but she’d cut the sleeves and neck out of hers and it showed the ribs of her sternum. The rise of small breasts.
“Where?” was all she said.
I told her about the overturned canoe. After which, she clicked the door shut in my face.
In the morning, after our breakfast of cornflakes, there was a flurry of gathering backpacks and jackets and shoes. I didn’t have any of the above, so I walked out to where the white bus waited to take us to school. Someone plucked at my shirt. I turned. It was Omega.
“Hold out your hand.” I did, and she dropped into it two Chips Ahoy cookies. “Don’t fucking eat ’em where anyone can see. You have to be alone in the girls’ bathroom. Alone, locked in a stall. Okay?”
I nodded, curling my fingers around the crumbly cookies. My stomach growled as I imagined them melting in my mouth. The sharp, sweet tang of the chocolate chips in the crevices of my molars.
“You know where the clubhouse is, right?” Omega said.
I squinted up into the piercing morning sun, up at her gorgeous face. Her lashes were coated with mascara and lined with a thick black sweep. Her mouth glowed fuchsia. She looked like a girl that should be on TV.
“Chantal showed me,” I said.
She pursed her pillowy lips. “I should’ve known she’d sneak. I bet she lied and said that we let her come in, didn’t she?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to give the wrong answer and ruin my chances.
“Because we don’t let her in,” Omega said. “And we never will.”
I smiled.
Omega did too. “You wanna know why? She’s a disgusting piece of shit. She’s trash. Her parents killed each other, did you know that? Her mother shot her father in the face, and then shot herself in the face, right in front of Chantal.”
My throat went dry.
“You know what she did after that? She ordered pizza and watched a movie. I’m not even kidding.”
I waited. There was more, I could tell from the gleam in Omega’s eyes.
“Has she thrown up yet in your bedroom?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Well, she will. She has these fits and throws up everywhere. And we don’t want her getting sick in our clubhouse. Having one of her fits and upchucking all over the place like that demon-possessed girl in The Exorcist.”
I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about, but I nodded. Omega studied me with narrow eyes. I wondered how she got her eyeliner to wing perfectly like that on both sides.
“We got something better than cookies in the clubhouse, if you’re cool,” she said. She had a devilish tone in her voice. “After school, okay, little Daphne-Doodle-Do? You come to the clubhouse and hang out with us.” She reached out and tweaked my left nipple and the shock of it, the sting, actually made my eyes water. “Titty twister!” she shouted over her shoulder. I didn’t say anything. My newly budded breast burned.