“And,” adds Kyle R., “if you promise to tell Mirabel we did what she said.”
* * *
On my way home, I stop by Pooh’s to bring her a loaf of zucchini bread my mother put into the oven when it was raining but didn’t remove until after it stopped, so Monday wouldn’t eat it. Pooh, of course, doesn’t care.
“Who pooped in your piña colada?” she says when she buzzes me in and sees my face. I follow her into the kitchen where she opens her fridge, inserts the zucchini bread, and swaps it for a heap of meats and sauces she starts piling on the counter.
“Tutoring sucked,” I tell her.
“Poor baby. You need animal flesh.” She puts a plate of galbi—her mother’s recipe—in front of me, then starts setting up a steamer for dumplings.
“I don’t think that’s the problem.”
“Then what?”
“The Kyles are beating River up because his dad gave their dads jobs.”
She nods. This makes sense to her, a strange kind of warped Bourne logic, whack-a-mole revenge. “And you want to save him.” She’s grinning at the bossam she’s wrapping in cabbage leaves. “That’s very sweet.”
“Not me. Mirabel.”
“Bullshit. You love him.”
“You wish.” Everyone could do with a little excitement around here. “I’m telling you it’s Mirabel. She pled his case. She begged me to help him.”
“Why?”
“She’s nicer than I am.”
“Well, that’s certainly true. Whereas you, you think you’ll let the kid keep getting the shit beat out of him?” She’s half teasing, half making a point, though I don’t know what point.
Until I say it out loud, I don’t even know it’s in my head. “He thinks we’re so fucked up.”
“I bet. Who cares what he thinks?”
I do. “He thinks we’re this tiny backwards, backwoods, backwater town, stupid and pathetic and hopeless. Crazy. South of crazy. Beggarly. Lugubrious.”
“You and Petra might have studied enough now.”
“He feels sorry for us.” I sound bitter as orange rind.
“Not sorry enough,” she says.
“It’s not his fault.” I keep saying that.
“Not yours either.”
“Sure, but no one’s blaming me.”
“You inherited his father’s father’s mess,” Pooh says, “and so did he. It should be his burden at least as much as yours, don’t you think? He needs to see what we are. He needs to know it in his bones. Maybe the Kyles’ll knock some sense into him.”
“The Kyles don’t have enough sense to knock between them,” I say, and she nods, and she’s quiet, and then she says, “But you know what else?”
“What?”
“He needs to see how we’re broken maybe. But you? You need the opposite. You need to see how we’re whole.”
“A hole?”
Pooh has been in Bourne as long as anyone. She needs a wheelchair just because she’s old. You forget, living here, that some of us falter before it’s time, but if we’re lucky and live long enough, we’ll all wind up there in the end. What’s different about Pooh is she’s so old that even though she’s been here forever, she hasn’t been here forever. There was a time before. Pooh has lived in two different countries and four different states. She’s visited family in Korea, California, and Hawaii. She went to college and drove cross-country once with her roommate. She knows about the world out there. She’s the only one I know who does. Except River.
“Bourne’s on the small end of town-sized and a bit too powder-keg-y at the moment for my taste, but there’s a lot that’s really nice about this town. We’re not especially wonderful maybe, but we’re not especially miserable either. How it is here is how it is everywhere.”
I raise an eyebrow at her. “It’s really not.”
“Yup, it is. It was just the same for him in Boston, I promise you.”
“What are you talking about, Pooh? Boston has museums, historic stuff, parks, baseball, millions of people, nontoxic bodies of water—”
I’m just getting started when she interrupts. “He was sick of all the kids he’d known since grade school, the ones he never liked but his parents made him hang out with, the ones who were there when he accidentally called the kindergarten teacher Mommy and remember when he got hit in the face with a volleyball in sixth grade and cried so hard they had to send him home. He wants a million things he doesn’t have. He wants everything. He thought there was no one new to meet and no one he wasn’t bored to death of and nothing to do on Saturday nights and nowhere left to go. He felt trapped there like he’d never get out. And then suddenly? He got to come here. He doesn’t think Bourne’s lame. He thinks it’s exciting.”
“No way.” I’m laughing now, shaking my head.
“Maybe not Bourne itself, but all the new people, new school, new possibilities.”
“They’re beating him up,” I remind her.
“Exciting!” She shrugs. “Roils the blood. Muddies the waters. I bet he loves it.”
“He doesn’t. He’s terrified.”
“Because you know what else it does?” It’s like she hasn’t even heard me. “It makes pretty girls feel protective of you. It makes pretty girls stand up for you in front of everyone.”
“You’re crazy, Pooh.”
“I’m not. I’m telling you. Here’s not so different from anywhere. You can’t see that now but you will. When you leave, you’ll see. And River Templeton? He’s not so different either. Teenage boys are teenage boys. I bet you anything he’s over the goddamn moon to be here.”
“How could that possibly, possibly be the case?”
“Easy,” Pooh says. “You’re here.”
Two
Mab kicks over a stack of checkout cards, and I know she did not mean to, but she should be more careful because the checkout cards go everywhere, and that is a whole afternoon of work wasted. If you think it is ridiculous that I am using cards and pencils to track library books in this day and age, you are correct. If you think I am too stupid to know how to use a computer instead, you are incorrect. When Mrs. Watson gave me the books, she did not give me the scanner you use to catalog, lend, and track the books. I asked, but she said it got sold. Leave it to humanity to think the book scanner is more valuable than the books.
Mab says she is sorry about my cards, but she does not look sorry about my cards.
“Come downstairs,” she says.
“What is downstairs?”
“Mirabel.”
“Mirabel is always downstairs.”
“Exactly. We need to talk. All of us.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Three heads are better than one.”
“Like Cerberus?” There are two books about Greek mythology inside the microwave.
“Yes,” Mab says. “Exactly like Cerberus.” But she is being sarcastic enough that even I can tell.