She’d waltzed into fourth-hour Humanities midway through class, wearing red-framed sunglasses, a red puffy jacket over an orange baby-doll dress with zebra-striped leggings, and worn purple Chucks. Silver star-and moon-shaped studs lined her lobes, up into the cartilage, and she twisted them as if tuning the pegs of a guitar. Her long, curly hair was the honey brown of fresh motor oil. She was as tall as, or taller than, most boys, slim up top but broad at the hips, like a chemistry beaker.
The girl slid into the desk next to Angie. She smiled and said, “Hey,” as if they’d been friends forever. Surprised, Angie’s face heated up, and she smoothed down her bangs, where she had already sprouted a slim silver streak. Like her father, she went white by thirty-five, but at sixteen she had only that streak like a stick of spearmint gum. A clump of girls whom Angie thought of as the Ra-Ras turned and gawped, their eyes sparkling with glitter shadow and malevolent intent.
“She doesn’t talk,” one of the Ra-Ras said, indicating Angie.
The new girl didn’t answer. She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and cracked a piece of neon-green gum until the Ra-Ra turned around and slid down in her seat. Angie kept her eyes on her graffiti-carved desk but snuck a sideways peek at the girl. Despite the earrings and the gum, with her riotous hair, oval face, large brown eyes, and tiny mouth, she reminded Angie of a figure in a Renaissance painting, like the ones Ms. G had shown them. Sort of glowing but sad. For some reason, Angie thought of xylophones. Perhaps because of all the bright colors, or perhaps because of the sudden range of notes in her percussive heart.
After school, Angie worked in the bay at her father’s auto shop. With the garage door open, she could see the white steam of her breath, but she didn’t care. She layered up with a down coat, wool hat, and gloves with the fingertips cut off. Under the hood of a car she was no longer the quiet girl in the back row. Here, with the thrum of an idling engine, she was animated, singing low to the pop songs on the radio blaring from the shelf behind her. She was going to run her own shop someday, somewhere far from this place where kids spit in her hair or bumped her with brick-weight backpacks or elbowed her in the throat in auto shop, even though she knew more about cars than any of them. “Shitheads, all of ’em, mi’ja,” Papa said. “Don’t know nothing from nothing, verdad?”
She worked on the belts and filters on her ’69 Impala, checking the tension on each part as her father had taught her. Cuidado, he’d say, easy now. He’d been protective even before her mother ran off to California in search of a bigger life with a man who sold real estate. That according to her letter, anyway. Angie didn’t see her mother or her bigger life at all. It’d been her father and her alone so long she hardly remembered it any other way. At the shop, he let her work on her own. If he did help, he leaned next to her at an alert distance, gave her quick pats on the back. Pat, pat. Used to be she could sit on his lap and hug him close, breathing in his smell of orange pumice and sweat. Still, he was always around. Lately he had been making noise about how he wasn’t sure what he’d do without her there, and she didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything, as usual.
Papa came out of the office into the bay. He had circles under his eyes, and his shirtsleeves bagged around his skinny arms. He stumbled on an errant pipe wrench. Though no one saw but Angie, she had the urge to defend him, to announce how much he could carry, everything from tires to bedsprings to even her, like the time she had her wisdom teeth yanked and had to be hauled, drugged and dead-weight, from the dentist’s chair to the truck.
He held up an invoice. “Can you run over to Eddie’s for me? His guy’s out sick, and I need this belt.”
“Sure.” She set down her crescent wrench.
He handed her the invoice and gave her a quick pat on the shoulder.
Slow and careful, she backed the Impala out of the garage. Outside the bay, the day shone bright despite the cold, and the sun heated her face and hands through the windows. As she pulled away, Angie glanced in the side mirror. Papa stood in the bay, smiling and waving, his white hair tinged gold by the sun. Cuidado, she could hear him saying, and she resisted the sudden urge to gun it.
Eddie’s Auto Parts was on the south side of town, the newer side, off the intersection of the highway that led to Sedona, Flagstaff, and the Grand Canyon. The town had had a growth spurt, with cheap motels and gas stations and a few chain eateries cropping up like crab grass along with a SuperMart and the HealthCo and a new medical complex. Most of the town, though, still seemed the same: the college and the District, with historic brick stores and houses and tree-lined neighborhoods; her father’s shop on Main south of the District; the slag heap hunkered low and black behind the fairgrounds; one supermarket, one movie theater, one high school, one pecan orchard, one cement plant, one nice restaurant—Shane’s on the Bluff, with a nautical-Western theme—and one river, a lazy, curling thing that smelled of fish and moss, where the sycamores and cottonwoods grew dense, setting loose their fluffy white seeds in the spring and summer. All tucked tight against the rolling Black Hills range with its rough ridges, the Woodchute and Mingus Mountains, the town of Jerome nesting on its side.
On her way back from Eddie’s, caught up in the roar of the engine and the sun warming her through the windows, Angie decided to make a quick detour out to Arroyo Lake and took the dirt turnoff next to Sycamore Bridge. Few other kids went there—they all headed to the river or to Peck’s Lake outside town to fish and swim and slug cans of cheap beer and then drive home fast on graveled roads. She preferred Arroyo, which was smaller, right in town but secluded behind trees and shrubs.
Coming around a bend, she swerved to avoid a person walking on the side of the road. Her tires skidded on the gravel, fishtailing, and she yanked the wheel too hard. The back end swung until she turned into the spin and braked hard, screeching to a dusty halt. Her body unleashed a flood of adrenaline, and she sat panting at the wheel.
She jumped when someone knocked on the passenger-side window. With a dumb blink, she realized the person was the new girl. Angie leaned across the seat and rolled down the window.