Throw Like A Girl Read online

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Iris. It was an old joke with her and the Hopper. They were practically Abbott and Costello by now.

  “Why a guillotine?”

  Iris thought about this. “For the blood, I guess.”

  “I’m trying to help you here, Iris. But you have to let me help you.”

  “Sure.”

  “We have to take any threat to our students’ safety very seriously. Were there other people involved? Do you belong to some kind of group?”

  “You mean, like, a band?”

  “Do you know what I pray every night, Iris? Dear Lord, please don’t let me get shot by some little punk who’s mad about his algebra grade.”

  Iris considered the possibility that the Hopper had finally lost it. Hopper’s eyes behind her old-lady glasses had a cracked, marveling look, as if Iris were a dangerous zoo animal.

  “This is very serious business, Iris. We may have to call your parents or even the police. You might end up in a juvenile facility.”

  “Yeah?” Iris wondered if they got to wear jail uniforms and sleep in cells.

  “So if I were you, missy, I’d start talking.”

  “I’ll talk so much it’ll make your hair curl,” said Iris.

  Nobody had arrested them by the end of the day. They guessed they were still in trouble but they didn’t know how much, because they had all said different things and gotten the story confused. Barry Hamsohn’s mother came and picked him up. Iris decided to walk home with Rico. He lived pretty close to school and she didn’t feel like going to her house yet, in case the police were already there. She thought that her and Rico could run away someplace if they had to. They could be stowaways on a boat and sneak out at night to get food.

  “Fucking little pussies,” said Rico. “Hadda go tell their mommies.”

  Iris agreed, but she was still thinking about boats, and what the best kind would be, and how you found out where they were going. She looked around her at the sidewalks and houses and trundling cars. One advantage of walking with Rico was that you had plenty of time to take in the scenery. Maybe it would be easier to break into somebody’s house and hide out in the basement. She said, “What if we disguised ourselves? So when they came looking for us, they wouldn’t know it was us.”

  “Great idea. I’ll disguise myself as somebody not fat.”

  Nobody was home at Rico’s house so they fixed themselves cereal with chocolate milk and played Grand Theft Auto for a while. Iris got bored and said they should steal a real car so they could learn how to drive. She was tired of everything being pretend. She bet her whole stupid life would turn out that way, a bunch of pretend big ideas that never happened.

  Rico said he didn’t know of any cars anywhere to steal, but they could watch the guy next door cut down his tree, and Iris said OK. There was a saw going; they could hear the racket from inside.

  It was a bigass old tree all right, taller than the houses, and half of it had yawned right over onto the neighbor’s garage. A man in a blue jacket and a hat with earflaps was up on a ladder, running a power saw that took bites out of the branches. When they fell they made a noise and then an echo, BOOM and boom.

  “That’s Mr. Ortiz,” said Rico. “It’s his tree.”

  “How’s he going to get all the way up there?” The part of the tree that was still standing was really tall. The place where the rest of it had fallen over was like a giant splinter.

  “Climbing ropes,” said Rico. “See?”

  They watched as Mr. Ortiz tossed one end of a rope over a high branch and played it out until it reached the ground. Then he fastened it into a kind of sling and planted his feet on the tree’s trunk. He used the rope to walk his way up to the first high branch and swung his leg over it. When he saw Rico and Iris watching, he waved at them.

  “That is so cool,” said Iris. Cutting down a tree was a real thing. You could stand right there and watch it happen. It went from Tree to No Tree. “You think he’d let us help?”

  “Like I could get my fat ass up that high.”

  “We could carry the branches away or something,” suggested Iris, but Rico didn’t seem excited about that, so they just watched some more. Mr. Ortiz tied ropes around one of the big limbs, and when he cut it off, he hitched the rope up and seesawed the limb back and forth until he had it where he wanted it to land. Then he let it drop. He had already cut all the small branches from the part of the tree that had landed on the garage. It looked like a cactus, with its bare, chopped-off arms. It was cold outside and Rico wanted to go back in, but Iris said they should stay at least until the next big piece of tree came down. Rico said they could see just as good from inside, and the cold was bad for his asthma.

  “Dude, everything’s bad for your asthma. Except eating.”

  “Suck my dick, bitch.”

  “Suck my dick, bitch,” Iris said right back. It didn’t mean anything, it was just what kids said. But there was a little curdled thought in her head now because of stupid Kyle and his stupid ugly talk. Sometimes she got into a state of mind where she couldn’t look at people without imagining them naked. Once she’d seen Rico with his shirt off because he’d spilled hot soup on his stomach. It was kind of awful. Rico had boobs that hung down like something melted.

  Iris was about to tell Rico she was going home, if he was such a candyass that he couldn’t stand a little cold, when she saw somebody walking toward them from a couple blocks away.

  “Isn’t that Jovanovich and his brother?”

  “Oh shit,” Rico said. Jerry Jovanovich was one of the guys they sent the death threats to. His brother’s nickname was Goombah. Nobody knew his real name.

  “Maybe they’re just out walking,” Iris said, unconvinced.

  Rico said he wasn’t sticking around to find out. He ran up the front steps and inside, and Iris ran too. They locked the door and watched out the windows as Jovanovich and his brother came into view. The brothers stood on the sidewalk outside Rico’s house and yelled something, but Mr. Ortiz’s saw was running and when they opened their mouths only saw noise came out.

  “They know we’re in here,” said Rico. He was wheezing because of the cold and the running. His voice squeaked and jumped. “We could call the police.”

  “Oh sure. Like the police won’t arrest us first.” Iris lifted a corner of the curtain. Jovanovich picked up a stick and thrashed at the shrubbery with it. Goombah had his hands in his coat pockets and was chewing on something that he spit out. He was one of those guys who shaved his head. “When does your mom get home?”

  “Not till late.” Rico was still puffing and choking, so Iris ran and got his inhaler from his backpack. Rico jammed it into his mouth and slobbered a little, trying to get it going. Iris knew about asthma. It was when you couldn’t breathe because your airways closed up. It would have made a good plague back in Kansas.

  “Dude, you want me to call nine-one-one?” She didn’t like the goldfish way that Rico’s eyes were bulging. But Rico put the inhaler down, hacked a little more, and shook his head.

  “Sometimes it takes—,” he began, but right then the house shook, BOOM BOOM BOOM, like a tree crashing right on top of them. It was Jovanovich and Goombah, trying to break down the front door, and Rico and Iris both screamed in high voices like little girls which even in the middle of being scared embarrassed them.

  “Those guys are crazy!” Iris yelled. She ran to the front hallway. The door was the kind with wavy glass panels on each side. Jerry Jovanovich’s face was flattened against the glass. His lips were turned inside out like some weird pink corsage.

  “Get outta here!” she shouted. She couldn’t see Goombah. “Back door! Go lock the back door!” She listened to Rico groan and hoist himself up and lumber off toward the kitchen. “Today, man!” She crept up to the door and put her fingers against the glass. Something hard, a rock or a stick, hit the door and she jumped back and shrieked.

  “We’re gonna call the cops!”

  “Go ahead. See ho
w fast they don’t get here.” Jovanovich’s voice sounded close but hollow, like he was underground. “What are you two pervs doing in there anyway, playing with each other?”

  “Fuck off, Jovanobitch.” Iris listened for Rico in the kitchen. If Goombah broke down the back door, he’d kill Rico. All he’d have to do was punch him and he’d stop breathing. She’d have to run in there, find a knife or something. She wondered how hard you’d have to stab somebody to get a knife all the way through their clothes.

  Rico trotted in from the kitchen. His legs rubbed together when he tried to move fast, and he was still wheezing. “I put the—huh—chain and the deadbolt on.”

  Iris felt like she’d swallowed electricity. Her heart was spazzing out. When she tried to look at things they jumped around. Mr. Ortiz’s saw started up again, a high, whining racket. “What if we call the cops and pretend we’re somebody else?”

  “They can tell who you are from your phone.”

  “Shit.” She’d forgotten about that.

  “Come on out, skank face! Bring your lardass boyfriend with you. We got something for you.”

  “Bite me.”

  There was the sound of something heavy being dragged across the porch. Dark shapes passed back and forth in the wavy glass. They were doing something with Rico’s mother’s flower planters. Rico’s mouth hung open a little, like a drawer that wouldn’t shut.

  “Maybe one of your neighbors will call somebody,” Iris said. Though she already knew that Rico’s neighbors weren’t the kind who got excited about kids acting rowdy. It was one more thing that Iris’s mother didn’t like about Rico. Iris thought about calling her mother or even Kyle and telling them she needed a ride home, having the car scare Jovanovich away. But she wasn’t ready for this to be over yet. What if nothing like it ever happened to her again?

  She said, “We could go upstairs and drop stuff on them from the window.”

  “We could shoot them,” Rico said.

  “Oh yeah, right.”

  “If you had a gun, would you shoot them?”

  “Sure,” Iris said. She thought about Billy the Kid. “I’d probably have to practice some first.”

  “My mom has a gun.”

  “She so much does not.”

  “Does too. It was my grandfather’s.”

  “Then it’s old and it’s no good.”

  “It still has bullets, OK?”

  The front door shook and rattled in its frame. Iris and Rico jumped. Rico put his mouth to the crack. “Hey Jovanobitch. You wear rubbers for hats.”

  “Come outside and say that, you fat shit.”

  “Uh-uh. You come in here.”

  The door shook again, and then one of them was at the back door kicking, and Iris and Rico ran up the stairs. Iris ran. Rico was behind her somewhere. Once Rico told Iris that sometimes he slept on the living room couch so he wouldn’t have to climb the stairs.

  Iris reached the top. She didn’t hear any more kicking noise, so she guessed the lock held. She’d only been up here a couple of times. There was striped wallpaper with something wet soaking through part of it. Light came down from a high window at one end, white and smeared. The upstairs had a smell like boiled vegetables. “Hurry up,” Iris hissed. She could hear Rico stumping along and blowing like a horse. “Hurry,” she said again, uselessly.

  When Rico finally reached the top stair he said, “Whew.” They went into his mother’s room. It was smaller than Rico’s and almost all the space was taken up by the bed. It had a pink bedspread and some fancy pillows with fringe. There was a closet with a chest of drawers inside it. Rico pushed the clothes on hangers to one side and then the other.

  Iris went to the window. She could see the street in front of the house, and some of the yard, but not Jovanovich or Goombah. She guessed they were on the porch. Mr. Ortiz was still up in his tree. He looked a lot closer from here, almost like you could have a conversation with him. He was sitting on a big limb, riding it like it was a horse, and pulling his ropes up from the ground. It looked lonesome up there with nothing but the sky and the bare branches.

  Rico was scraping around in the closet. “She must of moved it. The gun.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Iris. She watched Mr. Ortiz take his gloves off and blow on his fingers. It was probably real cold up there. She wished she was him. She wished she was a hundred miles up in the sky, away from everybody else in the world, and that all along she had been somebody else.

  Iris opened the window. It was stuck shut, and she had to bang on the frame and push on it one side at a time. She unhooked the screen, knelt on the bed and stuck her head out. She could hear Jovanovich and Goombah walking around on the porch. She looked for something to throw to get their attention, but all she saw was pillows.

  “Hey.” Rico was on the bed, trying to squeeze in at the window. “Quit hogging.”

  “There’s nothing to see.”

  “Well let me see it.”

  Iris let him take a turn. With his knees up on the windowsill, he looked like something the window couldn’t swallow. He backed out again, carefully, and unrolled his shirt to show her something he had tucked away in his stomach folds. “What’d I tell you?”

  The gun didn’t look real to her because after all it was just Rico holding it. But once she held its dense, heavy weight, heavy like it was made out of some metal that came from deep inside the earth’s core, once she rubbed her finger along its oiled, dull shine, it was the realest thing in the world.

  “Is it loaded?”

  “Course it is.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Give it back here.”

  She didn’t want to let it go. Her hand liked the feel of it. But she allowed Rico to show her how to pull apart the barrel and see where the bullets were, nine of them, each one in its little slot, like seeds. “It’s a revolver,” Rico said. “A twenty-two. You could play Russian roulette with it because you can spin the bullets around.”

  Iris said she wanted it back. She stuck her head out the window and looked around for something to shoot. “How are you supposed to aim it?”

  “Just squint along that little bump thing at the end.”

  Iris pointed the gun at a car parked across the street, and then at an ugly fancy lamp in somebody’s picture window. She swung it toward Mr. Ortiz but she decided she liked him and wasn’t even going to pretend to shoot him. She backed away from the window. “So have you shot stuff before?”

  “Sure,” Rico said. “Lots of times.”

  “Liar. You lie like a rug.”

  “You don’t know shit,” Rico said, but Iris knew she was right. Rico never did anything he said he did. It wasn’t exactly lying. It was only things he wished he could do.

  Jovanovich and Goombah started making their racket again, banging things around on the porch. Iris leaned out the window. “Hey!” She wanted to get them out where she could see them. “Hey donkey dicks!”

  The racket stopped. They were probably surprised to hear her from upstairs. Jovanovich’s head popped up at the edge of the porch. Iris couldn’t see the rest of him. It was like his head really was on a stick.

  “Guess what I got,” Iris said.

  “A face like a bucket of worms.”

  “Ha. Ha. Ha.” Iris brought the gun up to the windowsill but kept it close in so Jovanovich couldn’t see it.

  Rico was making his asthma sounds again. “I left my inhaler downstairs.”

  “We can go back down in a little.”

  “I seriously need it, dude.”

  Rico wheezed and choked some more. Maybe he really couldn’t breathe, or maybe he was just scared of what she was going to do with the gun. Jovanovich was still grinning up at her. He had a pushed-in, piggy kind of face. He would never be anything other than ugly. If she shot him, nobody would ever have to look at him again. That would definitely be something real. Or she could take the gun home and shoot her mother or Kyle.

  Rico was making snoring sounds. Something squeeze
d inside of her. She bet she had her dumb period again. Rico’s hands were paddling, one on each side of his face. His eyes had that goldfish look. “Oh all right,” Iris sighed.

  She spun the barrel of the gun Russian roulette-style. She shook the bullets out into her hand and showed them to Rico. “See? It’s no big deal.” She threw one bullet down at Jovanovich and it hit the gutter and bounced off. “Bang!” she said. At least the bullets were real. “Bang!”

  In the corner of her eye she saw Mr. Ortiz struggle briefly to keep his balance, then topple over and fall with his arms outstretched and the ropes curling and snapping around him like banners.

  The

  Five

  Senses

  Having exiled herself forever from her old life, she looked into this new one and found nothing to recognize.

  Here was the ocean. It wasn’t what she expected. Instead of the frill of blue you saw on postcards, it was this enormous swollen rolling mass, gray, like some shaggy wild animal. Jessie—that was her name—had not realized that the ocean was always trying to climb out of itself, out of its space, a brimming cup. And it was huge. She remembered, from school or somewhere, that most of the earth was covered in ocean. Yes, and it wanted the rest of it too.

  It was cold, she hadn’t imagined Florida being cold, that was another thing. She’d left her winter coat back in the room, thinking she didn’t need it, so she walked along with her fingers curled up in the sleeves of her sweatshirt. The sky had no depth or shape to it. Cloud or fog, she couldn’t tell which, or maybe its gray was just the color of cold. Nobody else was out walking as far as she could see. It was just a strip of less desirable, gravelly beach across the highway from the motel. In one direction, far off, were fishing piers and restaurants and the fancy hotels that had their own beaches. At the other end, a scrubby tangle of trees blocked your way. Jessie felt stupid out there alone. She wished she had a dog or something. With a dog you could at least throw sticks.

  She looked for seashells, but the only shells she found were flattened, ordinary, and when she picked up one that was two halves still joined together, she could see something dead inside. Something dim, webbed, and sticky. “Oh God,” she said aloud. “R.B.?”