Ray rarely addressed her directly. A record ended, and the basement buzzed with silence.
“What does it do?” Gia asked. Ray’s eyebrow rose.
“Eu-phor-ia.” Leo exhaled a cloud of smoke, stretching the word into an exotic place with leis of tropical flowers around your neck at the airport. “And more energy than a million cups of coffee.”
He couldn’t even sit long enough as it was. The scrapes and bruises forming on his arms and hands were proof. She wanted to make a snide comment about the fence but couldn’t think of one fast enough.
“I’ll show you,” Ray teased, “so you’ll know when you’re at a party.”
The only parties Gia knew had streamers and stick ponies, not the parentless kind with pillows, black light bulbs that made clothes glow, spinning bottles, and holding hands like Lorraine told her about. She inched closer, because she would be in eighth grade soon. Things were changing. Lorraine paused on the steps, staring toward the upstairs door.
Ray crushed the rock with the bottom of a beer bottle into powder, like in the fingerprint kits her father used to bring home from the station. He’d let her dust everything until oily prints appeared like magic on doorknobs, handles, forgotten glasses of water.
“The good stuff comes like this. Powder is junk.”
Tommy and Leo leaned their elbows against their thighs. Was it working already, drawing everyone closer, or was it like the powders in her book that coated budding orange blossoms on trees or lay sprinkled in sidewalk cracks to stop weeds, only to cause sparrows to fall from trees? Or worse, like the invisible chemicals that got dogs or babies sick after they played on the floor or with their toys? But she wasn’t scared. She was curious. This was more interesting than watching her parents thumb through the TV Guide, arguing over what to watch while a bowl of popcorn steamed between them.
“Then you taste it.” Ray dipped his pinkie and rubbed it over his gums. “That’s good. My gums are numb. The numb-er the better,” he fake slurred, more animated now. He’d been waiting all day for this, and his excitement was contagious.
Leo reached forward, but Ray stopped him.
“Ladies first,” Ray said to Gia. “Just a taste.”
Gia let go of the banister, drifting toward Ray like a jellyfish in a current, avoiding Lorraine’s eye. Just a taste. Leo raised one surprised eyebrow. Doing something before Leo made her bolder. She dipped her pinkie, the powder illuminating a maze of lines, as her head did circles around itself: oranges growing slowly in a grove, sprinkled with snow in Florida, so far from here. It was not the same thing.
Ray mimed a little circle. Gia imitated him. A bitter taste spread through her mouth, worse than grapefruit, then went cold.
Her face puckered. The spell was broken. There was nowhere to spit, so she swigged from the beer bottle on the table, too disgusted to care that Ray’s girl-kissing lips had been on this bottle, but the taste lingered. She felt tricked, worse than the time they’d told her pickle juice was soda and wouldn’t let her have any because she wasn’t five yet, but she’d begged and they’d let her, then laughed into each other like hyenas. Why did she bother coming here? She stomped to the steps.
“Hey, hey, hey. Wait. I know. It’s gross. You’re right. Just let me show you the next part so you’ll know.” Ray tore off a chunk of a magazine cover and scooped the powder into a line on his fist, then sucked it up his nose until it was gone, flashing his hand at the end like a magician. Why would anyone do that after what she’d just tasted? But Leo’s fist was out, which wasn’t surprising, considering he was stupid enough to think Vietnam and Hells Angels were good ideas. Ray smiled at her. She’d passed some kind of test. OK, she imagined him saying. You can join the over-ten club now. Part of her still wanted to be let in.
Ray had wanted to be a doctor once. He’d cut an old white T-shirt in half, wear it over his clothes, listen to their heartbeats with two cups on a string, the echo of a beat traveling from cup to cup. “What seems to be the problem here?” he’d ask while their feet dangled from the makeshift exam table on the counter, covered in newspaper so it crinkled like the real kind, prescribing M&M’S in Dixie Cups or candy cigarettes to calm their nerves while Nurse Lorraine took notes on a legal pad. Leo’s illnesses were always the best—tucking the lower half of his arm into his shirt so only his elbow popped out. “It was here this morning.”
Uncle Frank had come home one night to this scene in the kitchen, stinking of stale beer. “Like any of you got the brains to be doctors,” he’d laughed. “You’ll be lucky selling encyclopedias.” They’d stopped playing doctor after that. Ray never talked about what he wanted to be now. Maybe it was this.
“Hey,” Ray called after them. “I’ll pick you up later. We’ll go for a ride.”
A ride meant cruising Cross Bay, windows down, hollering at people they knew. She’d much rather be in the boat, dropping the outboard into the water with a splash, gliding feather smooth on black water until the bay opened up, gray and choppy, salt on her lips. Disappearing into the marsh to watch planes take off, looking for mussels, wind tangling her hair. President Kennedy had promised a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and Gia hoped her parents would let her take the boat out alone before then. That would be better than any walk on the moon. That would be eu-phor-ia.
“Shouldn’t we leave room for real girls?” Tommy pleaded.
“What would they want with you?” Ray shot back.
Gia slammed the basement door. A Florida magnet fell off the refrigerator, broke in two neat pieces.
“Shit.” Gia stuffed them into her pocket to glue and put back later, but Aunt Ida was already in the doorway, ghost white in her floral housedress and cold cream, ice clinking in her gimlet. She’d hated Gia since the time Gia had plucked all the translucent seedpods off her money tree and skipped around in a flannel nightgown, handing out “money” to every open hand, while Aunt Ida had made a big show of stuffing the stark branches into the trash and hauling it out to the curb. Her mother would hear about this for sure.
“Wind took it.” Lorraine shrugged. Aunt Ida nodded even though the windows were closed, the whole house buttoned to shut out dirt, bugs, and problems that couldn’t be scrubbed with bleach.
In the living room, Uncle Frank yelled out for another beer. As Aunt Ida shuffled to the fridge, wrapping a towel around her hand to open the door without a smudge, Gia wondered why anyone would ever want to grow up and be a woman.
Chapter Three
A flea bit a dog and died from its blood; insects died from vapors off poisoned plants. Bees carried contaminated nectar to a hive and turned it into poisonous honey: spreading, spreading, spreading. The book didn’t always say where these things happened, but it was here. Gia was sure of it—in her sparrows and stray cats and the rabbit hutch or the canals that led to the bay and beyond to the ocean.
Outside of Ray’s basement, the white rock felt connected to these things too. The day the sparrows had fallen, other birds had cut across the sky, gripped tree branches with tiny claws, oblivious to the ones on the ground, and for a moment, Gia had felt as if she were on the ground with her arms tossed out to either side, her hair in the grass, blank eyes staring at a regular blue sky. Something was happening to her while the other birds tugged worms from the earth. It was so upsetting she’d grabbed at herself to make sure she was whole before riding away on her bike, but the feeling persisted.