When My Heart Was Wicked Page 5

  “It’s a Taino symbol for sun,” the girl is saying. “I wanted it bigger, but my arms are too small.”

  “It’s cute,” says one of her friends, and the tattoo girl squinches up her face and looks at her disdainfully.

  “It’s not cute, it’s tribal. Ancient people would say this tattoo puts me closer to the gods.”

  “Oh no, avert your eyes, gods,” says a boy with dark curly hair and eyes that remind me of a cat. They are a strange greenish-yellow — more green than yellow, but still there is something feline-esque about them. “Olive’s coming closer and she isn’t wearing underwear.”

  “Shut up!” The girl with the tattoo, Olive, punches him in the arm, but I can tell she’s a little flattered that he’s thinking about her underwear or lack thereof. I wonder if they’re dating or if they’re just that kind of friends. I think of Zach and feel a pang. Sometimes it really did feel like we were on our way to becoming more than friends. Now I’ll never get to find out.

  The classroom begins to fill up, even though the bell hasn’t rung yet. Olive looks at me, and the others follow her gaze, but she looks away and they do too. She continues to show her tattoo to anyone who will look, and everyone wants to look, even though, as far as I can tell, it’s just a black circle with a simple face inside. I hover at the back of the classroom. Hopefully, when the teacher comes (Mrs. Kesey, according to my schedule), she will see me and find a place for me to sit.

  The bell rings and more students shuffle in followed by a white pregnant woman with red blotchy skin and stringy blond hair. She looks like the kind of teacher who would go home crying after the first day, yet the way she walks, the way she sits on her desk at the front of the room, exudes a quiet confidence.

  “Okay, everyone,” she says. Her eyes find me at the back of the room and she smiles. “All kinds of news today. Olive got a new tattoo.” Olive waves like a princess, her wrist straight but her hand rotating side to side. “Very nice. And we have a new student. Hi there,” she says to me, and she smiles widely. “You must be Lacy.” I nod. “Welcome. Lacy comes to us from Chico, just about … ninety miles north?” I nod again.

  “Chico State’s a party school,” someone says in a fake grown-up man voice from the front of the room.

  “Chico State’s awesome.” The boy with the curly hair fixes his cat eyes on me. “Pioneer Days, right? Party.” He throws a half-assed fist bump in my direction, and I blink at him. I have no idea what he’s talking about. Olive looks at me with what appears to be disdain, although I can’t imagine why. I haven’t said a word yet.

  “Pioneer Days were shut down in the eighties, Mr. MacLachan, due to excessive partying,” the teacher says.

  “Excessive partying,” the boy repeats admiringly, and he and his friends snicker. The teacher carries on as though she doesn’t hear him.

  “Okay, Lacy, so you can sit” — she looks behind herself at something on her desk — “right there next to Mr. Davis. Mr. Davis, raise your hand.” A boy in a football jersey raises his hand and his eyebrows, smiling politely or condescendingly, I can’t tell which. I walk forward and take the seat.

  A chubby boy with glasses who sits in the front row waves at me. He has orange socks around his hands, cut like fingerless gloves. Olive continues to look at me coolly. I stare back at her. Then I wave at the kid in front. He grins broadly. Maybe he’s special ed or something.

  After class, Olive and her crew walk out of the room together like an amorphous mass. But first the boy with the yellow eyes glances at me, and he nods, closing his eyes and smiling slightly.

  The chubby boy from the front of the room comes over. “Lacy, oh my gosh, how are you?”

  “Do I know you?”

  “Lacy Fin, right? I’m Martin Molinero. We used to be neighbors.”

  “Oh my God!” I look at Martin, trying to see in him the little boy I used to know. Martin and I lived in the same apartment complex when we were nine. But he was skinny then, a little scrap of a boy who was terrified of his father. One time, after Martin forgot to bring his raincoat to school, his dad made him stand in his underwear in the rain until the sun went down. He had to stand in the apartment complex parking lot where we could all see him. That day he wouldn’t talk to me, or even look at me. It was my loneliest day. Other days, we spent hours together, trading bottle caps or listening to the big kids who called each other the N-word at the park near where we lived.

  “Wow, Lacy. You look exactly like your mom. I used to have such a big crush on her.”

  “You did?” My hand goes self-consciously to my hair.

  “Don’t worry,” Martin says quickly. “I’m not so much into girls anymore, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh,” I say, and, as if from another part of my brain, an ugly word forms. A horrible word that sounds like hate and makes me cringe even though I didn’t say it out loud.

  Where did that come from? I bite my tongue hard so that I can taste blood, and my eyes well with tears. It’s happening.

  I used to be mean. I was one of those girls. The kind who loved to deliver bad news. I was the girl who would flirt with your boyfriend, and if you were my best friend, even better. I would steal from other kids’ desks, and I would lie about it to their faces. I was an angry old witch in a thirteen-year-old’s body. But I’ve changed. I’m not like that anymore. I am a good friend. I am a good person.

  At lunch, I meet Martin in the cafeteria, over by the line for Taco Queen. Olive and her friends are standing nearby too, the girls sipping from Diet Cokes and the boys singing an off-tune rendition of the Beatles’ “Rocky Raccoon.”

  “How’s your first day so far?” Martin asks me.

  “It’s okay.” I tilt my head, thinking about what more I can say. “I miss my friends.” And this school smells funny, like fish. My old school smelled fine. And my locker has pink and green gum stuck to the back wall. And I’m having mean thoughts again, and I don’t know how long it will be before I start acting like a total bitch and hating everything and cutting myself and being completely out of control.

  “That sucks. I’m sure it was hard to leave your friends,” Martin says, sighing in sympathy, and I struggle to get ahold of myself. “Well, are you buying food? We can go sit outside. I’m on a white foods diet. Milk and vanilla yogurt, I guess.” He looks at the cartons skeptically before reaching for them.

  “A white foods diet? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “I made it up. Last week it was Christmas foods. I like to mix it up.”

  I smile. We move into the line and I start reading the menu overhead.

  “You could get a queso blanco quesadilla,” I suggest.

  “Nice,” Martin says, putting back the cup of yogurt. “I might have starved.”

  “Oh, look,” someone says, and I feel Martin tense beside me. It’s Olive. “Martin has a little friend. Hey, new girl. You might want to rethink your social standing. Reputations are made very quickly around here.”

  “Then I’ll make sure if I get a tattoo, it won’t look like it was done by a first grader,” I say, my voice like venom. I don’t know when it happened, but the shell has cracked. The bad me is being reborn.

  “Let me see your schedule,” Martin says. We are eating our lunches out in “the plaza,” which is really just a strip of grass with some trees. I pull the wrinkled schedule from my notebook and hand it to him.

  “Oh, look, seventh-period chem with Mrs. Burke. I’m in that class!” He claps his hands together. “You can be my lab partner!”

  “I can? You don’t already have one?”

  “Nope.” Come to think of it, it does not appear that Martin has any friends at all. I don’t know how it’s possible to be into the spring of junior year and not have a single friend, but this seems to be the case with Martin.

  Which doesn’t make any sense. He’s funny and smart. He’s comfortable to be around. You would think a guy like that would know lots of people.

  “It’s because of Olive,” Ma
rtin says, evidently reading my thoughts. “She’s the reason no one will talk to me.”

  “How come?”

  “She hates me because I beat her in the sixth-grade spelling bee. She warned me beforehand that if I didn’t let her win, she’d make my life miserable. I didn’t believe her. But don’t worry; I’m not miserable. The people at this school are mindless zombies. Only stupid people would put Olive and her friends on a pedestal.”

  “Agreed,” I say, watching the zombies circle around their queen, while Olive holds court with an apple in her hand. The boy with the yellow eyes catches my eye. He winks at me before I have a chance to look away.

  After lunch is gym glass. Why on earth would anyone schedule PE after lunch? Gym is humiliating enough without upchucking your chimichanga all over the floor.

  Before class, I am given a uniform to wear: shorts and a T-shirt with a bubble in which I am supposed to write my name with permanent ink. The uniform is too big for me, but all they had left were larges. I roll the waist of the shorts over itself so they won’t fall off while I’m doing whatever it is they do in gym class in Sacramento.

  What they do, as it turns out, is volleyball. Great. I am terrible at every sport that involves a ball, but volleyball is probably my least favorite. The way those balls fly straight at your head. The way every girl on your team groans when you miss. And I always miss.

  On the bright side, I am new here. No one knows that I suck at sports. And I have reinvented myself before. Maybe today will be the day I master volleyball.

  Just as Mrs. Anderson has us line up so we can pick teams, Olive comes sailing into the gymnasium. The girls in line seem to perk up. The arms of her T-shirt are rolled up, presumably so we can all admire her new tattoo.

  “Miss Santiago,” says the teacher. “You’re late.”

  “Sorry,” Olive says like she isn’t sorry at all.

  “Okay, we’re about to pick teams.” Mrs. Anderson assigns captains, and, surprise of surprises, I am picked last.

  A girl on my team serves the ball. It flies over the net, and the other team assumes it will be out-of-bounds, but it lands just inside the line. Our team cheers. Our server serves again. This time they’re ready for it. Pass, set, hit, it crosses the net and comes, of course, straight to me. I cover my face with my hands. The ball hits my hands, and my team is yelling at me. I am mortified, but I try to shake it off.

  Now the other team serves. It goes to one of Olive’s friends, who passes it to Olive. But instead of setting it, Olive hits, hard, aiming for my head. And makes perfect contact.

  It is official. I am the newest loser at school.

  Last period of the day is chemistry, my always and forever favorite class. I love chem, I love botany, I love everything science. I loved biology. I intend to love physics. I love the language of science, chock-full of terrific-sounding words like Bunsen burner and electron and harmonic motion. The fact that matter and light can be both wave and particle. If I’m ever in a band, I’m going to call it Wave Particle Duality.

  By the time I get to class, Martin is already sitting at his desk, and I smile and take the seat beside him.

  “Hey, lab buddy,” he says. The class files in, and I get the best news of the day: Olive isn’t in it, and neither are any of her friends.

  The teacher, Mrs. Burke, closes the door behind her. The rest of the hour is a lovely blur of metals and alloys, molecular theory and periodic law and chemical bonding.

  After school, Cheyenne is not waiting for me by the bus stop, and it occurs to me that we never discussed how I’d get home. The bike, she’d told me, was for getting to and from school, but since she drove me this morning, I am bikeless. Also, there is the small fact that I don’t know how to get back to River Park.

  You would think I could just walk in the direction of the river, which might seem like a simple thing in most cities, but is not a viable option in Sacramento. For one thing, there are two rivers that run through town, and the streets wind and curve so that you’re always changing direction.

  I start walking until I see a sign that says CSUS. This is Sac State, and I know we don’t live too far from there. I walk until I find the campus, and then I sit beneath the ginkgo trees. I think of Chico, of the mermaid’s eye I found with Anna, of the goat boy on the river. Of the magic that was there, until my dad died.

  Here, there is no magic. Only another girl lost in a strange part of a new town. A girl who used to be bad. That old story.

  Our last name is Fin, like the fin on a fish, like a mermaid, scales and salt. The name belongs to all of us, Cheyenne, my dad, and me. Anna took it when she married him, so we are all of us Fins. The fins are what keep a fish stable, what keep it from rolling out of control. And yet, we Fins, we are always rolling, like kids down a hill, faster and faster as we fly toward the bottom.

  I don’t remember a time without Anna, although there was one. She didn’t meet my dad until I was four, but I don’t have much memory of that time. From the time I was two and my parents divorced, I bounced back and forth between my mom’s house and my dad’s. It wasn’t until I started kindergarten that Cheyenne asked the court for, and received, full custody.

  I remember my dad and Anna’s wedding. They were married in the spring the year I was seven. The wildflowers were blooming and the creek was high. The teepee we sometimes stayed in was covered in fairy lights, and Tibetan prayer flags hung from the trees. Anna made me my dress and a crown of poppies and lupine. Our friends the Treehuggers were playing their music, and apple blossoms fell from above.

  Before the wedding, my mom had told me she was scared Anna was trying to replace her. She made me swear that I would never call her Mom. As though I ever would. As though Anna would ever have wanted me to. Cheyenne was afraid they would try to take me away. “Your dad thinks I’m unfit,” she would tell me. I would sit beside her and pat her hair. She was afraid I would forget her. I swore I would never ever forget her, not if terrorists tortured me with bamboo under my fingernails. Not if stars ripped across the black sky and crashed onto the earth in a fiery explosion of gas.

  I am about to give up, just cut my losses and become a homeless wanderer through the streets of Sacramento, when I see a tire shop that looks familiar. When I see the crimson of the red picket fence, I duck my head and whisper yes in relief. My backpack is getting heavy and I’m starved.

  I sludge through the gate, past the weird fountains, and up to the door to Myrna’s shop. Myrna is behind the counter. When she sees me, she grins.

  “Lacy,” she says. “I had a feeling I’d see you again soon. I made cookies and I can put on some tea. What kind do you like? Are you hungry?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Whatever kind of tea you have.” She smiles again and hurries me through the beaded curtain and into a little kitchen area in the back. “This used to be a house,” she tells me. “Can’t you imagine living here? It’s so cozy.”

  I try to imagine how the kitchen would look without the black walls and spiderweb curtains, marble floors and glittering skulls. I suppose, if slicked with some yellow paint, it could be considered cozy. I sit at the table — a sheet of glass perched on a weird metal monster — and Myrna pours me a cup of tea.

  “I like your table,” I say.

  “Isn’t it awesome? It’s an alien table. My husband got it for me for my birthday.”

  “You have … different tastes.”

  “I’m drawn to the macabre. The funny thing is, our house doesn’t look anything like this. I’d be afraid to sleep around all these monsters and ghouls.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. I think it’s that fear that made me want a shop like this.” She brings a plate of cookies to the table and sits down. “You know, we always want to dance face-to-face with our demons, but maybe not late at night. What brings you today?”

  “I was lost,” I admit.

  “I can give you a ride home. If you don’t feel like walking.”

  “That’s okay. You h
ave your store to watch.”

  “Hmm. Yeah, well. You might have noticed I don’t get a lot of clientele.”

  “Why not? Your stuff’s amazing.” I finger the rose necklace that falls at my heart. “Even if people weren’t here to shop, you’d think they’d come to look around.”

  “It used to be like that. Maybe they can sense that my heart’s not really in it anymore.” Myrna laughs to herself, a bitter secret laugh that I know not to question. She folds her arms around herself and crosses her legs. She’s wearing one of her fabulous black sweaters, black jeans, and boots, but she looks cold, and sad. I sip at my tea, which is hot and surprisingly normal: peppermint. I expected roadkill oolong or something.

  “My stepmother, Anna, would like it here. Not that she’s into the macabre; she’s not. But she loves things that are handmade.”

  “Oh?” I should probably stop talking. I know Myrna and my mom are friends, and I don’t want Myrna telling her I came to her shop and told her all about Anna. But I also want Myrna to know. I feel like she should know where my loyalties are.

  “She sells her stuff too, but not in a shop like this. She sells online, and then a bunch of shops around the country sell her stuff. She makes paper crafts, mostly. But she also knits, and she sews, but not by hand like you. She uses a sewing machine.”

  “Do you miss her?” Myrna asks, and I feel that the question is genuine. But I know you can’t trust anyone. I know this is my cue to go.

  “Nah,” I say. “I have my mom now. She’s great too. I have to get going. Can you tell me how to get home?” Myrna walks me back through the shop and points me in the right direction.

  “If you hit the river,” she says, “you’ve gone too far.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “And thanks for the tea.” Myrna looks so sad. I almost want to go back and give her a hug. But instead, I hurry through the red picket fence and backtrack around the corner toward the river.