The Girl with the Mermaid Hair Read online

  “Meg, you have to buy a size smaller.”

  “No, two sizes smaller,” said another. “I bought a six and normally I wear an eight. God, this is tragic.” Her eyes fixed on an empty spot in the distance, and darkened as if she were absorbing the horror of the Hawks loss all over again. Her friends gazed with her into the bleak.

  “They’re sold out at Gilroy’s,” said Meg after a moment.

  “They still have some at coolboots.com,” said Sukie.

  Meg cruised Sukie from her bedhead down to her grass-and mud-stained heels, then flicked up to Sukie’s face again.

  Sukie tucked a hand under her hair and flipped the ends up.

  Meg slipped off her velvet scrunchee. Her straight chestnut hair dropped to her shoulders. She pulled it up, smoothed the sides, and refastened it.

  By way of a reply Sukie threaded her fingers languorously through her waves, lifted them into a curly nest, twisted them together, and then, in a maneuver requiring excellent coordination, simultaneously tossed her head and opened her hands. Her hair tumbled loose and cascaded.

  Meg blew upward at her bangs.

  Bang blowing, that’s what she tries to top me with, Sukie thought with disgust. No one can beat me in a hair-off. She pushed her thick, tangled, golden locks from one side of her head to the other and then, while they all watched gaga (at least that was her impression), she pushed it back. “Is this where the team…?” said Sukie. “I’m meeting Bobo.”

  A girl stopped picking at her pom-pom to crush a cigarette under her heel and pass the word to other kids who were standing there. “She’s meeting Bobo.”

  “You’re in the right place,” said one of the cheerleaders. A single sequined heart-shaped earring dangled as low as her chin.

  “Thank you,” said Sukie.

  The girl with the single earring pulled her sweater away from her chest, stretching out the neck, looked in as if to see if her breasts were still there, then patted her sweater down again. “We’re all meeting Bobo.” She giggled.

  Sukie thought this was really competitive of her and couldn’t think of a thing to say back, so she simply pushed her hair again. That will shut her up, she thought.

  “Hawks,” someone shouted.

  The gymnasium door had opened and the team poured out in a steady stream while everyone chanted, “Hawks, Hawks, Hawks.” Even though they were all saying the same word, it sounded ragged, unsynchronized, and without punch. “Where’s Bobo?” she heard Meg ask.

  “Blow-drying,” a guy answered.

  Blow-drying was not how Sukie imagined Bobo.

  She might spend an hour upside down, her arm killing her from the weight of the dryer to achieve a look of unkempt nonchalance, but she liked to think that Bobo shook his wet hair and let it be. The way he had in the mirror. He’d strolled out, his hair still wet from the shower, and shaken his head like the cutest dog before he’d spied Sukie backlit by a blazing sunset.

  Where was her scorching sky this evening? Where were the flames of crimson, purple, and rose that set her off to perfection? I don’t look good in gray, thought Sukie, noting that the rain was threatening to resume and the dull slate clouds above would do little to enhance her complexion.

  She had to accept that the sun was shut out of the story. Tonight there would be no sunset. Not even a mysterious compelling twilight. She had to live with the gray, but not with a blow-dried Bobo. She dismissed the notion out of hand. The guy who’d said it must have been joking. Or jealous.

  By the time Bobo finally turned up, the chanting had petered out. He hesitated in the doorway, the image of misery framed. His luscious mouth turned down, his eyes barely open, his posture more slump than slouch. Slowly he raised his hand, knotted it into a fist, and thumped his cheek repeatedly.

  I barely recognized him, Sukie confessed later in her journal. Defeat was transforming. Also the hat.

  She’d seen this kind of hat before, in a movie probably, but didn’t know what it was called. It was tweed, with a narrow brim and a sharp crease at the top. He wore it tipped back so that his whole face showed and his thick, black, possibly blow-dried hair flowed in a neat wave across his forehead. The sight of him produced a smattering of applause and a few feeble “Go Hawks.” The greeting drove Sukie nuts. It reeked of pity. He deserved better than that. She also felt a weakening in the pit of her stomach. Even miserable, he was magnetic.

  Robert “Bobo” Deeb thrust his hands into his pockets and shuffled out. Before he had a chance to buzz the fans and pluck her from them, the four cheerleaders she’d talked to swooped in and surrounded him.

  “Bobo,” Sukie ventured timidly. When she got no answer, she summoned more courage. “Robert,” she called. “Bobo?”

  Meg said, “Someone wants you,” and the group unfolded enough to allow him a glimmer of a view. He wiggled his shoulder and screwed up his face.

  “What’s wrong?” the girl with the single earring jumped to ask.

  “I itch.” His face, turned toward Sukie, showed not a spark of recognition. With his lids so low, Sukie guessed that she might appear blurry.

  “Sukie,” said Sukie, helping him out.

  The girl with the single earring scratched his back.

  “Down, over,” he said.

  “You texted me,” said Sukie. “We met at the mall.”

  The cheerleaders reclaimed ownership, reassembling around him, shutting off any possible response, and moved him along like bodyguards. Sukie called, “I’m sorry about the game. It was the ref’s fault.”

  Bobo stopped.

  He side-armed Meg and one of the other girls, moving them over so he had a wide, clear view of Sukie. She charged on. “Kigelburg’s foot was in bounds when he caught your pass. The linebacker knocked him out after. That ref is blind. I bet someone paid him, because you would have had a first down there and probably a touchdown, and you wouldn’t have even needed that stupid field goal at the end.”

  Bobo nodded and said the following words as if fighting off a great fatigue. “You got that right.”

  The crowd erupted. The ref. The ref screwed them. Players, fans, the pep squad, parents dumped every insult, every four-letter word they could think of on him.

  I did that, she wrote later. I put it all in perspective, and it was a really scary thing to do. I mean it was that lousy ref’s fault, but I don’t know how I had the nerve to come out and say it. I guess Bobo had been so emotionally and physically battered that I didn’t think of myself. It was one of those moments when a woman goes for it or not. I went for it and I am very proud.

  “Are you coming?” Bobo asked her.

  Go home, thought Sukie, and she did the opposite.

  “I ignored my gut,” she told Señor, pausing from recording events to consider the moment when she could have done one thing and instead did the awful other, and all that it led to. “Oh, Señor.” She buried her head in his fur. Normally he didn’t allow much contact, a scratch on the back or two, an ear rub. If someone tried anything more intimate, he would get up, move over just far enough to be out of reach, and resettle. But tonight he simply continued to chew his rawhide. Sukie loved Señor’s gnawing, the single-mindedness of it, how he didn’t stop until the tough hide was a juicy pulp.

  She wrapped her arms around him. Except for freeing his head to chew more comfortably, he allowed the hugging too. This was a turning point for him.

  They say that dogs know what’s coming. All natural disasters, earthquakes, tornadoes, storms—they feel the earth’s tremble, sense electricity in the air before tragedy strikes. Señor had those sensors about the Jamieson family. He knew what was coming before anyone, even before those who would cause it.

  Bobo

  SEÑOR sat up. His nose twitched, not rapid little sniffs to soak up the savories, but more investigative.

  There was someone on the stairs.

  Her dad. It had to be. Her mom had taken half a Vicodin and gone to bed ages ago. Quickly Sukie reached for her bedside lamp and
shut it off.

  A sudden rattling shudder. The hall table banged the wall, Sukie guessed. Her dad had stumbled into it, either because he’d had too much to drink or he hadn’t bothered to turn on the hall light. He won’t come in, he’d never come in, don’t let him come in. Relieved, she heard her parents’ door—the knob turning and then the click as it was pulled shut.

  Señor flopped down and resumed gnawing.

  Easing open the drawer in her side table, Sukie located one of her favorite objects—a pen with a built-in flashlight. She did the things she needed to combat the jumps—plumped a pillow, sat up straighter, balanced her journal on her knees, and, most important, continued to write, hoping that if she did, the jumble of thoughts and confusion and agitation would leave her head. The obsessive replay of events might stop. If she dumped her pain into her journal, perhaps when she shut the book, she’d find at least a temporary respite, enough calm for sleep.

  She returned to the defining moment. Go home, my gut ordered, she wrote in her journal. I knew I should, but I didn’t.

  Sukie trailed along behind Bobo and his girl posse to the parking lot and Kiefer’s car. Kiefer, who had been with Bobo on the day she’d first met him, nodded at Sukie, but that’s all. He drove. Bobo sat in front, and Sukie was crushed in back with Meg, the single-earring girl, whose name was Swan—well, it probably wasn’t, but she told Sukie to call her that—and two other cheerleaders, Mandy and Jinx. The whole way to the house of someone named Lionel, Swan reached around the headrest, one hand on each side, and massaged Bobo’s shoulders.

  The car rolled right over the curb onto Lionel’s front lawn.

  Sukie, struggling to keep up because her heels kept sinking into wet grass, followed the group past a pretty peach clapboard two-story house where, judging from the drawn shades, no one was home, to the two-car garage in back.

  They entered through a side door.

  Sukie nearly gagged. The place smelled of car oil and nachos, although there were no cars. The garage had been converted into a place to hang.

  “That’s so disrespectful.” Jinx pointed to a couple making out on the floor, which was covered in dirty industrial carpeting. “It’s like God is dead and they don’t know it.”

  Sukie stepped around the writhing couple and into the crush of gloomy brooding kids drinking beer. Although the mood was funereal and no one talked much, losing hadn’t affected anyone’s appetite. No sooner did one of the pep-squad girls squeeze swirls of cheese onto corn chips and nuke them than kids scooped the sticky mess up with their hands and licked them clean.

  Bobo sank onto one of the two lumpy couches, listed sideways, and curled up into a fetal position. He pulled down his hat to cover his face.

  A boy breaking up a six-pack offered a can to Sukie. She popped the top, spraying her shirt with beer.

  “Aw, you’re all wet,” he said. She tried to laugh but coughed instead.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Nothing,” said Sukie.

  Nothing. My name is nothing?

  The boy studied her a minute, took a gulp of beer, and said, “Let me know if you get drunk.”

  She shook her head yes, then no.

  He moved on.

  She couldn’t figure out how to stand. She tried the way her mother had taught her, with one foot in front of the other. She pretended she was at ease, forcing curious looks onto her face as if the room were filled with things she appreciated. How darling are those red lightbulbs stuck in every socket? Don’t they impart a lovely radioactive glow to one’s complexion? I love it that I’m standing alone, it doesn’t bother me, actually I prefer it, actually I don’t give a shit. I am a superior being in an alien world. No, in a world of red-faced aliens. That thought tickled her, but only for a minute. Mainly she longed to feel that she wasn’t invisible.

  She spent some time pulling strands of her hair in front of her face and examining them. Every so often she yanked one out and stuck it in her pocket.

  She forced herself to drink the beer too. Brew, I’m really into brew.

  Brew is a word I have never used in my life, she wrote in her journal, but throwing it around in my head was a great aid in helping me drink in a natural way something that tastes foul.

  Bobo was still curled up on the couch.

  Meg tapped his hat and he batted her hand away.

  Swan pressed a cold beer against his arm. He rolled onto his back, his hat slipped off, and he propped himself up enough to take the beer and chug it. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, accepted a bag of chips that Swan now offered, and shaking the bag, tossed a bunch into his mouth. He chased them down with more beer. He eats like an animal, thought Sukie with a shiver of thrill. For a second she imagined him crashing through a jungle, twisting off huge tree branches and chomping them. The vision of his mouth full of broken twigs and lush green leaves made her smile, and then unexpectedly her knees weakened. She had to put a hand against the wall to keep from swooning. He’s not an animal, he’s a wild man. Wild. Wild.

  Swan was dusting bits of chips off his shirt when Bobo caught Sukie’s eye. He wiggled his finger, beckoning her.

  “Me?” Sukie pointed to herself, and Bobo, in that way he had of making his needs known by the slimmest of means, raised an eyebrow in reply.

  Sukie approached slowly. He patted the couch, which was covered in a hairy stained fabric of an especially putrid yellow. She sat gingerly on the edge, and he shifted. She felt the curve of his body against her back.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said.

  “Me too.” Sukie twisted around to look at him.

  His hand lay heavily on his brow as if he were battling a wretched headache.

  “Don’t you think it smells weird here?” said Sukie.

  Bobo took a minute to consider that while Sukie cringed, and berated herself for saying something so lame. He twirled his index finger. She couldn’t decipher the meaning.

  “Turn back around,” he said.

  Sukie straightened so that she was no longer looking at him, and while she was wondering why he would ask that, she felt his cool hand snake under her jacket and shirt and press against her bare back.

  Her body quivered, and incongruously she found herself faced with a plate of cupcakes offered with a curtsy and a giggle by a member of the pep squad. “No, thank you,” said Sukie. His hand snaked higher.

  “Your skin. Not too dry, not too oily. Good glands,” said Bobo.

  “Glands,” Sukie repeated weakly, as his hand did what she was wishing it would. It slipped up to her bra and began fiddling with the catch.

  Sukie had made out before, at summer camp with a couple of different guys, less because she liked them than because she was curious. Until Bobo she had never been near any guy who made her insides melt.

  “Move over.” Jinx bounced down next to her and banged her butt against Sukie’s, knocking Sukie to the floor. “Oops, sorry,” she said.

  Stunned by her sudden ejection, Sukie waited for Bobo to execute one of his minimalist moves, a head tilt or a snap of a thumb, telling Jinx to skedaddle, but instead he rolled over, burying his face in the couch back.

  “Hey, Bo,” said Jinx. “Aw, Bo.” She kneaded his neck.

  The rug was wet with beer and littered with chips and cigarette ashes. Sukie looked at her hands. She’d used them to break her fall; now they were covered with disgusting bits of grit. She unfolded her legs, which had somehow gotten twisted under her, wiped her hands on her jeans, and got up. “I need a beer,” she said to no one in particular and, spotting a stack, strode over, seized one, popped the top, and took a swig so big she choked.

  “Are you okay?” asked Meg.

  Sukie nodded.

  “Should I pat your back?” Meg smiled. She had a gap between her teeth. Sukie admired it. How daring to have a space between your front teeth and smile widely. Something about the alcohol going to Sukie’s head made her realize that, if she were Meg, she would have perfected a toothless s
mile. She might even have tried to figure out how to talk without having her teeth show. Although that would have been harder.

  “There’s beer fuzz on your nose,” said Swan.

  Sukie wiped her hand across her face in that rough way Bobo had. Swan moved her single earring over to poke her tongue through the hole in the center of the heart.

  “It was a mass text,” said Meg.

  “What?” said Sukie.

  “The text you got. We all got it.”

  Sukie played with the beer can, drawing her finger in a circle around the top.

  “‘Meet me after the game,’” said Meg. “‘Danger caution.’”

  Feeling that she might throw up, Sukie walked unsteadily to the door and out into the rainy night.

  Sukie

  IT was a mean rain.

  It soaked and stung her all at once.

  Sukie plodded slowly, fearful, in a night so dark she couldn’t see her own hands.

  The garage had no windows to cast a friendly outdoor glow, and in the Hudson Glen residential areas, there were no streetlights. On clear nights skies were spectacular; shooting stars as frequent as Sunday. Her dad even took buyers to view real estate at night. “In this town the moon is a closer,” he’d told Sukie. “If I sense hesitation, I let the moon and the stars make my case.”

  Sukie fished frantically in her purse for her phone. No moon, Daddy. No stars. Dad, I have to call Dad.

  “‘Oh, Mr. Moon, moon, great big silvery moon, won’t you please shine down on me,’” Sukie sang in a tiny, tinny voice.

  She’d learned the song from her dad. When he sang it, “shine” didn’t mean only “shine,” it meant, “Make the deal go through.” Sometimes he added that in a deep growl, “Make the deal go through,” and they all laughed.

  “It’s bad luck to exploit the moon,” her mom had said.

  “Phooey,” her dad said. “Phooey.”

  Phooey. Phooey. Phooey. Phooey.

  Dad, there’s no moon. Dad!

  She couldn’t find her phone. Her hand slapped about. Nothing crammed into that big wet purse felt remotely like it.