“Whoa. Damn… I’m sorry.”
“It is what it is, you know?” Bucket tried to lighten the mood. “Besides, this name is easier for me. Now I only have to spell out ‘Marwani’ when I’m on the phone. But everybody gets ‘Bucket’ right off the bat.”
And with that, Lucy had learned more about Bucket than she’d been able to discover in two years of friendship. She figured the FBI should hire dancers to run their interrogations.
But Toni wasn’t working at The Exchange today, and Lucy noticed Bucket’s disappointment after he scanned the store. Diabetic cat? Check. Rows of dusty old albums? Check. The woman Bucket hoped he’d one day marry? Negative. Judah was working, and he was nice, and always smelled like beer and cigarettes, and it was fun to ask him about the band patches all over his jean jacket, but still… no Toni/Antoinette/Amity.
Plus, Lucy’s corner-store pretzel tasted like it had been on the rotating rack since the days of the pyramids, so it was a rough outing so far.
At least I’m away from the perpetually concerned faces. At least I’m not answering all those carefully phrased questions meant to help me along the path to healing.
One thing about raising yourself as the child of two raging alcoholics was that you developed an allergy to being nurtured. Lucy liked that about herself, but it really fucked with the Hendersons’ parental instincts.
Lucy ditched her shitty pretzel in the store trash, keeping one small piece, which she offered to the store cat. The cat opened an eye, batted the pretzel chunk with his paw, gave the offering one lick, and then fell back into its diabetic stupor.
C’est la vie.
Album zone-out time—flipping through row after row of vinyl, breathing calmly through her nose, giggling at the occasional album cover, maybe even holding up the worst ones for Bucket to dig. Bucket was fine hanging out—she caught him checking the front door for Toni’s arrival, though she never came.
Lucy wondered who Toni was with at that moment. And what did her name mean to them?
She looked at Bucket again. He saw her looking, and pretended to browse through a stand full of sleazy old comic books. But it wasn’t long before his eyes drifted to the door again.
People are lonely, you know?
After an hour, Lucy finally felt her shoulders drop for the first time in too long. She let her fingers drift across some slip mats mounted to the wall and felt them pull against her, and she felt a rare moment of longing for the forests near where she was born, for the rough bark on the trees and the way it abraded her skin and made her hands feel open and alive. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the smell of that place, the way it had felt like home before the authorities came to take her away and place her in the orphanage and put her name and picture in the adoption database.
It was no use. That place—the good in it—felt lost to her. This was her world now—sharp, brittle, sticky juniper trees and frigid desert nights where the air felt as empty and mean as the faces of the white boys who laughed at her and lusted after her at the same time. A place full of kids with no money and kids with all the money, and every once in a while, a kid with a goddamn bloody textbook raised above his head talking about signals in his brain.
Her shoulders were back up to her ears.
Goddamnit!
Time to go anyway. Bucket had work at Culbertson’s the next morning. The Hendersons wanted Lucy to have a session with some grief counselor, even though she told them she was fine.
“I trust you, Lucy, but I’m having a hard time believing you’re fine.”
On top of having to deal with that overbearing grief bullshit, there was a rumor that the district was going to push for three more days of attendance, despite the tragedies at each school. Supposedly some of the more influential parents in the community demanded that the district still hold a graduation ceremony. If that was true, it meant that Lucy and Bucket actually had some homework to complete.
She tried to imagine sitting at the kitchen table and working on her differentials.
“This is the answer. You gave us the answer.”
Then that crunching sound as Mr. Chambers’s face collapsed.
Fuck the grades, she thought. They can give me a pass.
Bucket was up at the front counter, joking with Judah about buying a sticker for his car that read “Pipe Layers Union.” He said, “I like it because it’s subtle.”
“Really? That strikes you as subtle?”
“Sure. I mean, if I got an honest bumper sticker, it would just say, ‘10-Inch Pussy Wrecker.’ But this sticker lets the ladies know I can take care of business without being so direct.”
Judah laughed. “You must be packing some serious heat.”
“Well, I’m not going to talk too much about it. It’s not really your business. But I can say that my girlfriend in California—”
“Oh, shit. Here we go,” Lucy said.
“Pay her no mind. I was saying, I had a gorgeous girlfriend in California, before my parents moved us to this shitbrick city. No offense.”
Judah held up his hands, palms out. “Hey, I’m not the mayor. And this town blows.”
“So this girl, she was a model, so beautiful, but so skinny, you know what I’m saying?”
Judah nodded.
“And since I have what I have, it was tough for her. I’m going to be a gentleman about it, but I can tell you that I had to stick four fingers in her to loosen her up before she could take the D.”
Judah laughed and shook his head. Lucy wondered why boys instantly lost fifty IQ points the moment they started talking about sex.
“So, anyway,” Bucket said, “I better buy this sticker.”
“You got it, buddy. On the house.” Judah pulled the sticker from under the glass and passed it to Bucket. “I’ll charge it to my employee account.”
“Thanks, dude.”
“No problem, kid. I could listen to you run bullshit all day.”
Bucket beamed.
“Besides,” Judah continued, “you two seem like good kids. Especially compared to what I put up with from some of those little Brower Butte bastards. Shoplifting shit, even though they have the money. Fucking with the cat. Little creeps. And you wouldn’t believe the stuff they say to Toni.”
Lucy instantly recalled the litany of names and gestures she and Bucket regularly endured—how easily those boys said things like “goat fucker” and “jumping bean”—and her eyes dropped to the floor. She looked over at Bucket and saw he was clenching his jaw.
Judah must have been watching them closely. “Yeah… you guys know, right? That shit never changes. Even when I was a kid. Different guys, same attitude. I lived over past Westerhaus, if that gives you some idea of how I was growing up, and I’d look at those kids and imagine having what they had, all those opportunities, no serious worries, and I was so jealous. And later, when I was selling a little weed, those guys wanted me around, so I’d hang with them. Their cars were cool, I guess. Sometimes I got laid rolling with them. But I was always nervous. Just something about them that felt… off.”
“Like you’re waiting for them to be mean?” asked Lucy. The few times she’d tried to be social with the Brower Butte kids, she’d felt like either an accessory—“My Ethnic Friend”—or a curiosity to be studied like a bug under the magnifying glass until they got bored and decided to start pulling off wings.