Keeping the Moon(14)
Author: Sarah Dessen

I smiled. “I don’t think she ever did either.”

“She was always so sure of herself.” Mira turned around in her chair to look at me, the light of the TV on her face. “Even during those terrible years when you two were moving from place to place, she was never scared. And she’d never take a cent from our parents; just because she was too principled. She wanted to prove to everyone that she could do it. That was always very important to her.”

I thought back to the nights we’d slept in the car; to ketchup soup. To the times she’d thought I was sleeping and cried silently, her hands over her face. My mother was strong, to be sure. But nobody was perfect.

Onscreen, my mother was leading the crowd in a touch-step, touch-step, her arms waving over her head. She had a big, bright smile, her muscles flexing and unflexing with each lunge. “Let’s go!” she said to them, to us. “I know you can do it! I know you can!”

Mira was watching, leaning in close. “I just love this program. The weight stuff—” she paused, shaking her head. “That’s not important to me; we’ve always been different that way. But I just love to see what she can do. It’s infectious, you know? That’s why I always watch,” she said softly, there in the dark, the light from the TV flickering across both of us. “I always watch.”

“Me too,” I said, and I sat on the floor by her feet. I pulled my legs in against my chest and we watched together as my mother spread the gospel, one touch-step, touch-step at a time.

Chapter five

The Colby post office was a tiny little house, one room lined with mailboxes, staffed by an old man who always looked half asleep. After I worked lunches I’d leave from the back door of the restaurant, walk across an empty field, then past an auto shop and a drugstore to come out right by its front door.

There’s a kind of radar that you get, after years of being talked about and made fun of by other people. You can almost smell it when it’s about to happen, can recognize instantly the sound of a hushed voice, lowered just enough to make whatever is said okay. I had only been in Colby for a few weeks. But I had not forgotten.

I was in the post office picking through the mail one day—bills, a check from Mira’s card company, and a postcard from my mother featuring the Venus de Milo in workout wear—when I heard it.

“Well, you know what they say about her.” It was a woman’s voice, middle-aged and twangy. She was around the corner, behind the next row of mailboxes.

“I’ve been told some things,” a second woman said. You could tell she wanted her friend to go on. She just wasn’t ready to contribute yet.

This was also part of what I knew.

“It’s no secret,” said the first woman. I could hear her shuffling her mail. “I mean, everyone is aware of it.”

I stepped back and leaned against the mailboxes, touching my tongue to my piercing. My face was already hot, that uncontrollable red flush that climbed across my skin, rampant, that one dry spot in the back of my throat that no amount of swallowing helped. I might as well have been back at school, standing in the girls’ locker room listening to Caroline Dawes announce to her friends that I’d told Chase Mercer my mother would pay him to be my boyfriend.

And that was a good day. Now here, months later in a town where I hardly knew anyone, it was happening again.

“She’s been like this ever since she moved here,” the first woman said. “But it goes beyond just personality quirks, you know? With that bike, and the clothes she wears. Not to mention all the strays she takes in. It’s like she’s running some kind of weird commune down at the end of that road. It’s embarrassing for all of us.”

“You’d think,” her friend said, “that someone would have told her how ridiculous she looks by now.”

“Don’t you think I’ve tried?” the first woman said with a sigh. “But it’s no use. She’s crazy. It’s that simple.”

I took a deep breath. They weren’t talking about me; of course they weren’t. They were talking about Mira. I thought of her on her bike, pedaling furiously, and my face began to burn again.

“Big Norm Carswell’s just beside himself that his son is living beneath her house. God knows what goes on over there. I don’t even want to think about it.”

“Is he the football player? Or the basketball star who went to State on that scholarship?”

“Neither,” the first woman said. “He’s the youngest, Norm’s namesake. They never knew what to do with him; the boy didn’t play anything. He has long hair and I think he’s into drugs.”

“Oh, that one. He’s actually very nice. He came to my yard sale just last week and bought up all my old sunglasses. Said he collects them.”

“He has many problems,” said the first woman. “But then, so does Mira Sparks. I just know she’ll end up living out her days alone, getting crazier and crazier, and fatter and fatter—” and her friend snorted once, an oh-you’re-terrible laugh—“in that big old drafty house.”

“Oh, my,” her friend said, savoring this. “That’s so sad.”

“Well, it’s her choice.”

I already hated this woman, the way I had learned to hate anyone who talked trash behind someone’s back. I was used to the flat-out mean, straight-to-your-face insult, no messing around or mixing of messages. Somehow, there was more dignity in that.

I turned back to the mailboxes, still feeling sorry for Mira, and tucked our mail in my back pocket. Then I heard something behind me. When I turned around, I saw the Big-Headed Baby for the first time.

I recognized her instantly: there was no way not to. She was about two years old, wearing a frilly pink dress and white sandals. Her hair was blond and wispy, and there was a pink elastic ribbon with a bow stretched across her head, which just made it look bigger, if that was possible. She had true-blue eyes and looked up at me, open-mouthed, clutching her skirt in her hand.

Man, I thought. Mira had been right: it was quite a cranium, somewhat egg-shaped, the skin on her scalp pale and almost translucent. The rest of her body seemed toylike in comparison.

She stood there and stared at me, the way kids will when they haven’t learned it’s rude yet. Then she lifted one hand, touching a chubby finger to her lips in the exact place where my piercing was. She held it there, still watching intently, for a few seconds. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.