While she was in the bathroom getting her toothbrush, I tiptoed to her desk. The picture wasn’t of me, but a woman with hair so long it curled on the ground. Her eyes were colored in black, her arms wide open. I knew the drawing was finished because it had Becca’s signature in the bottom right corner, a big B and then a curlicue. It didn’t look like it, but it was supposed to be her name.
“Every artist has a signature. This is mine,” she’d said when I asked about it.
Why had she told me it wasn’t finished? Her footsteps clomped in the hallway. I put the drawing back fast and sat back on her bed. She gave me a funny look, lips all pushed out, when she came in but didn’t say a word.
My mom didn’t order pizza, but she made stuffed shells and garlic bread, which was almost as good. Dad and I play-fought over the last piece of bread, earning a “Please, Joe” from my mom. He won but tore it in two pieces for me and Becca.
“Thank you, Mr. Cole,” she said.
“Thank you, Dad,” I said, but I’d taken a bite of the bread, so I had to talk around it. My mom shot me a look, and I tried to look sorry, because I wasn’t showing my chewed-up food on purpose. When she wasn’t paying attention, my dad winked.
He started telling Mom about work, which was always boring, until he told her about an accident at a job site with a crane, not one he was driving. The guy busted his head open falling in a hole or something, so they had to pour new concrete, and now Dad was going to start working on that job, for a fancy new building near the old cemetery. Then Mom told him about her day at the dentist’s office where she worked part-time. Even more boring.
After, with a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips, we went to my room to listen to music. But I voted for Whitney Houston and Becca wanted Mariah Carey, so we ended up playing the radio, on our backs on the floor, feet resting against my mattress.
Becca rabbited her feet, then pointed her toes. “I wish I was allowed to hang posters. She says it would ruin the walls.”
“My mom gave me stuff that doesn’t mess them up. If you want, I can give you some, too. It doesn’t tear the paper either.”
“She’d still get mad.”
I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t the first time we’d talked about it, but I felt guilty. In addition to the picture Becca had drawn of Roxie, I had posters of Whitney and Madonna and Paula Abdul. But it wasn’t just the posters. My room was painted bright blue and I had polka-dot sheets. Becca’s was pale yellow, which she hated, and her comforter and sheets had ugly flowers. The only picture on her wall was a framed print of fruit in a basket. Once we stayed in a hotel in Ocean City with almost the exact picture. It was pretty awful. I didn’t understand why her mom was so weird about it all.
“Do you have a mirror?” she asked.
“Duh, right there.” I pointed to the wall over my dresser.
“No, a small one.”
It didn’t take me long to find one in the bathroom.
“You have to hold it like this”—she held the mirror at boob level and bent her head over, her hair spilling down in pale, shiny curtains—“and look down.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
I did, but my hair spilled forward, covering the mirror. She gathered it into a ponytail at the base of my neck and said, “Try it again.”
I was Silly Putty stretched the wrong way.
“That’s what you’ll look like when you get older,” Becca said.
“Gross, I’m all squishy. Here, you do it and pull your hair back so I can see.”
“I look even more like my mom,” Becca said, her words deflated balloons.
“I bet you don’t. Show me.”
“Fine,” she said, holding her hair back and tilting the mirror.
Her mom’s twin was staring up from the glass, but I said, “Your face is way better than hers.”
“Right. I wish I looked like my dad.”
I rubbed my palms on my thighs, not sure what to say. Becca’s mom said he’d left before Becca was born because he didn’t want to be a father. A pretty crappy thing to do. He never even called or anything.
She stuffed a chip in her mouth and spoke around the crunches. “Even though I hate him. I hate them both,” she said.
I didn’t think I could ever hate my parents, but I might be mad enough to if my dad had left and never knew me. If my mom didn’t even try to make him.
She turned and peered through her hair. “Hey, have you heard of …”
“What?”
“Never mind, I’ll wait until tomorrow when we’re all together. At the house.”
“Oh, come on. You can give me a hint.”
“Hmmm,” she said, tapping her chin. “One hint. She’s called the Red Lady.”
I hoped it wasn’t just a made-up story, or if it was, I hoped it was good, with a name like that. “What did she do? Kill her whole family? Her parents?”
“Nope, that’s all you get.”
“Not fair. I won’t tell them you told me.”
No matter how much I asked, she refused to say another word.
I crossed my arms and said, “It’s probably just something like the angel.”
“It’s not like the angel at all.”
A couple months ago she’d told me a story about how an angel tried to kidnap her when she was really little. Her mom had to fight the angel to save her, a real fight ending with the angel’s hair and wings torn off. It was made-up, like all of Becca’s stories, even though she said it really happened and she’d just remembered it.
“Hey, Becca? What if we can’t break in the house?”
“We’re not breaking in. Jeez. We’re just walking in like normal.”
“But what if you can’t get the key?”
“I’ll get it.”
“But what if you can’t?”
She sighed, dropping her head. “Let me braid your hair.”
“It was in a braid this morning. You took it out, remember?”
“That was earlier. Please?” She touched the half-heart. “Best friends forever?”
I groaned but gave her the brush from my dresser. Sitting in front of her with my legs crossed, I said, fingertips to my half of the whole, “Best friends forever.”
Humming “Vision of Love,” she started working out the tangles at the ends.
“I want hair like yours.”
“No you don’t. I want to cut it all off, but my mom says it’s too thick and I’ll end up with a giant mushroom on my head. Ouch.”
“Sorry.” She yanked a tangle of hair free from the brush and waved it in my direction. “Hello, I’m Mr. Octopus. Nice to meet you, yes indeed.”
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said with a giggle as she separated my hair into several sections, more than she’d need for a braid.
I reached for the mirror; she nudged it away with her knee. I tried to feel my hair, but she smacked my hand. “Nope, stop. I’ll let you see it when I’m done.”
“Don’t make me a porcupine,” I said.
She giggled again. “You’re not going to chicken out tomorrow night, are you?”