“Bye Margo. Come see me again, you hear?” he calls after me.
When I get home an hour later, it’s already dark. I can hear voices from my mother’s room. I wonder if I have enough time to use the bathroom before he comes out. Whoever he is. I have to be back at the Rag first thing tomorrow, and I need a bath. I wish we had a shower like normal people, but the eating house was built before people washed themselves standing up. I grab a towel from my room and fill the bath. I’m halfway through washing myself when there’s pounding on the door.
“Margo,” my mother’s sharp voice calls out. “What are you doing in there?”
I know better than to answer her. What she wants is for me to vacate the bathroom. I do a quick rinse and jump out, being careful not to get water on the floor. She hates that. The next twenty seconds is me frantically pulling on my clothes. It’s not fast enough. I know that. I was stupid to think I had enough time, and now there will be consequences.
When I open the door she’s standing there in her red, silk robe with a cigarette dangling between her fingers. It makes a trail of smoke toward the gray ceiling. She glares at me, making silent promises for later. There’s a man standing behind her, looking as pleased as a newly fed baby. He leers at me as I squeeze past my mother and run barefoot to my bedroom. I didn’t even get to wash my hair. You can’t be ugly in this life and have dirty hair. For some reason I think of Judah Grant—the opposite of ugly, and the reason I wanted to wash my hair.
Judah Grant isn’t sitting in his yard when I walk to the bus stop the next morning. Delaney is digging around in her garden with a big straw hat on her head. She looks like one of those women you see on the cover of a gardening magazine. She waves at me when I walk by. Sometimes she gives me money and tells me to bring her things from the Rag. “I need a new pair of shorts,” she’ll say. “Size two.” Delaney’s whole entire body is the size of my thigh. I get things for her in the teen section of the Rag. “Hey Margo,” she calls. I stop. “Judah needs some shirts. Fancy ones. Something a man should wear to work.”
The liar! I’m tempted to ask where he works, but she’s busy pulling money from her bra, and I’m distracted.
She hands me a ten and a twenty. They’re both damp. I hold them between my thumb and my forefinger.
“What size is he?” I ask dumbly. I wonder why Delaney can’t go to the Rag herself and choose his shirts. I wonder why Judah is such an effing liar.
“Get him a couple nice ones with collars,” she says. I want to ask her where he’s working, but we’ve never talked other than me taking her clothes orders.
“All right,” I say. “Something nice.”
I’m going to get him some really ugly shit just for lying to me. Besides, a person who looks like him doesn’t need to be well-dressed, working legs or not. You have to leave some room in the world for the rest of us.
I buy Judah four shirts: pink paisley, purple with tiny white hearts, and a white shirt with red stripes so he can look like a candy cane. Christmas is all about lies anyway. The fourth shirt is nicer because I found a little mercy in my heart. It’s just plain blue. Delaney acts like I’m America’s Next Top Model when I hand them to her.
“They’re perfect,” she says. “You should work in fashion.”
I can’t wait to see him in the candy cane shirt, but I doubt he’ll even wear it. Tough luck for him, the Rag has a very strict NO RETURNS policy. But, he can donate it back if he likes. I’ll make sure Delaney re-buys it for his birthday.
When I get home, my mother’s door is closed. She’s left a note taped to my door, though. Pick up my medicine Sure. Why not? I’m my mother’s unpaid errand girl. I crumple up the note and throw it at her door. It’s unfortunate that she chooses that very moment to exit her room. The note hits her left breast and bounces to the floor. She watches it fall to her feet, and then brings her eyes back up to my face. My mother doesn’t have to say anything to punish me. She’s not verbally abusive. She turns back around and shuts her door. The message is clear. I disgust her. She wouldn’t even keep me around, except she won’t leave the house anymore, and I get shit for her. I head back outside and walk to the crack house for Wendy’s medicine. At least she didn’t send me to the bad people house.
“Yo, Margo!”
“Yo,” I say.
Judah is wheeling himself back and forth on the driveway. He’s wearing a thin white t-shirt and all of his muscles are popping out.
“Ew, gross. You have muscles.”
“Yeah, I’m a stud,” he says.
“Why are you doing that?” I ask. He’s wheeling himself left, then right, around and around, as fast as he can go.
“Workin’ out.”
“Cool, I don’t do that.” Like it’s not evident in the fat pockets around your knees, I think.
I keep walking, but he follows me out onto the sidewalk. I can hear his wheels squeaking behind me. I grin.
“You don’t smoke or work out. What do you do?”
I don’t know what I do; I’m kind of a loser.
“I talk to you once … now you think we’re friends?”
“You’re kind of mean looking,” he says. “I was scared of you. Once you got things rolling…”
He’s full of shit. He can’t even say it and keep a straight face.
I fall back into step, and he has no problem keeping up with me.
“I read,” I say. I look at him out of the corner of my eye to see if he’s judging me.
“I do too,” he says. I remember the book he was holding, the day I walked up his pathway. “Mostly biographies.”
“Ew,” I say. And then, “I get enough of real life in the Bone. I want to go somewhere good when I read, not into someone else’s crappy life.”
“Good lives aren’t worth reading about,” he argues. “I read about the struggle. Other people’s growing pains.”
“I like happy endings,” I say. “Real life never has a happy ending.”