“I p-prefer to keep it between us.” She stammered, feeling an unraveling.
“I know you do. Let me see your hands.” Francesca let him take them. “May I?” He peeled off one bandage, then the other, to reveal pink marks. “You asked what I think?”
She nodded.
“I think last Thursday night I saw an overwrought girl faced with enormous pressures over the last few weeks. I think what I saw was those pressures coming to a head. I think—correction, I hope—that this strange, fluky, magical chapter in your life is coming to a close. And soon, you’ll be able to get back to living life like a normal teenage girl. With much to look forward to.”
Francesca turned to the side as if he’d smacked her across the jaw. “What do I need to do to prove to you I’m special?” she whispered.
Connie peeked around the half-open door. “We’re getting super backed up. Are you coming soon? Oh, hey, cuz! What are you two talking about?”
Mr. Falso cupped Francesca on the shoulder. It was the same move she’d seen him do to a hundred guys. “We’re chatting about developments in her life. Good developments.” He dipped past Connie and disappeared through the door.
Connie shrugged and gave a dopey grin. “Hope I wasn’t interrupting anything.”
At that moment, Francesca hated Connie. More than her father when, as a child, she’d heard him call her schizophrenic when it was proven by a Biblical scholar that she spoke languages used during the time of Christ: Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. She hated Connie more than the neighborhood leeches, who treated her like an alien creature to ogle and wonder at. More than her mother, who left her too young and clueless as to how to deal with her gifts. Pain wormed through her chest, looking for a way out, but it was trapped there, nesting.
Francesca blasted from the utility closet and headed for the front door. A line of hungry people waited to get inside. Their stark differences made no sense to her: the mumbling man wrapped in a filthy blanket; the tidy family of four who could have lived in Francesca’s neighborhood; the skinny girl in the bleached jean jacket licking her teeth. She felt their confusion that she was dressed to serve, yet leaving. Their eyes wandered all over her, not in a dirty way, but to wonder what could be so bad that she would leave a warm, dry place with food. She spun in circles, untying her apron and dashing it to the ground.
“You want to be fed?” she screamed. “He can feed you. I’m done!”
Francesca felt a papery hand on her arm and froze. She looked down at Donata. She had never seen the woman leave the tiny alcove where she folded napkins. It scared Francesca to see Donata mobile. And that she had come for her.
Donata’s mouth moved, a web of spittle wavering. Francesca stooped to hear. The woman opened and closed her hand in front of Francesca’s face.
“You fix,” Donata said, a gleam in her frosted eyes.
PART 5
Lips
OCTOBER 2016
The day after the climb with Mr. Falso, Ben found Kyle at the quarry, sitting on the lip of the ledge, smiling dully. Every so often, a gust moved the wings of his hair, or he shifted, vertebral nubs snaking up and down his back.
Taking over the Cillos’ ledge was a symbolic move. It came from a primeval place, something laced into the boys’ DNA that made staking out the altar seem a noble thing. The stories had filtered beyond Bismuth, and kids from other towns started coming to the quarry even though it was off-season now, to check out the spot where the girls had jumped. When a pack of boys, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, came out of the clearing laughing, Piggy stood wordless and slapped his palm with the baseball bat he’d packed for the occasion. The encroachers looked at one another and moved away, to a lower, lamer ledge that barely fit them, and sulked.
Louis whispered to Ben. “Did Kulik get stoned while we weren’t looking?”
Ben sat cross-legged on his towel. He had the jitters, a nervousness that had started the moment they chained their bikes behind Johnny’s Foodmaster and begun the mostly silent hike. Besides Eddie, Ben hadn’t seen any of them since the day he knocked Piggy unconscious. Their fight had become mythic: Piggy didn’t remember, and no one was about to remind him that Ben Lattanzi, with his rack-of-bones chest and bulbous Adam’s apple, had taken him down. The quarry did mind-erasing stuff like that, so you were never sure if something had actually happened or it was just one more quarry story.
But that wasn’t the reason for his nerves. Ben had to make his case, and the guys weren’t making it easy. Piggy, hungover and rank with beer, kept trying to nap, and now Louis was climbing down two ledges to talk to some younger girls he knew, only one of whom was a shade over plain.
Worst of all, Eddie had joined them at the last minute.
Piggy pointed his chin toward Eddie at the tip of the ledge getting ready to leap for the nth time. “And that one. That one’s like a robot, jumping and climbing, jumping and climbing. He’s making me tired just watching him.”
Eddie leaped over and over. He had fixed a plastic bag over his hand with rubber bands and duct tape at the wrist, the bag blooming with condensation. Ben understood why Eddie punished his body: it was no different from Ben revisiting the places he had touched Mira. Their answers would be found in pain, and they welcomed it.
Piggy yawned. “This is boring. There’s nothing to look at.”
From the ledge below, the girls giggled at Louis.
“Anything worth looking at is dead,” Piggy added.
Ben hooked his thumb toward where Eddie would momentarily rise. “You might tone it down a little.”
“It’s true. My eyes are actually bored. That’s what Kyle’s thinking. Right, Kyle?” Piggy said.
Kyle stared out over the water. The warm fall was finally turning, and so no one else dove but Eddie. The water was smoked glass. Rumors about hordes of gawkers hadn’t proved exactly true: there were about half of the usual number of kids from whom to protect the altar rock from desecration, but that was a lot, given the season. Even they were subdued, their dull murmur broken by the periodic plunge of a sad boy.
“So, Benny, you got us here. Talk,” Piggy said.
Louis reappeared from below wearing a guilty grin. Ben wouldn’t have minded if Louis hadn’t come, but there he was, along with Eddie, whom Ben would have to work around. Louis flashed a look toward Kyle before joining the rest. “Somebody decide to smoke and not share?”
“He’s been spacey like that the whole time,” Piggy explained, not bothering to hush on account of Kyle’s bad ear. “Swear to God, between him and Michael Phelps over there, and then this one calling emergency meetings? I think the whole town’s gone freaking nuts.”