He squinted at me, running a hand over his dark beard. “You got any special skills or anything?”
“No.” I tilted my head. “Well, maybe. Is surviving a special skill?”
“I guess?” Bubba said it skeptically, probably thinking of my four deaths he’d just witnessed. But Bubba didn’t know. Not really.
“Yeah, I’ve got that, then. Not dying. That’s what I’m good at.”
2
I had to take two buses to get home. The second one was crowded, and I pressed my body into a corner, face-to-face with a poster of Beyoncé selling makeup.
My phone dinged repeatedly in my pocket, but I didn’t pull it out. My news alerts hadn’t stopped since last night. The same headline was everywhere—on the phones around me, rolling across the small television screen mounted to the wall of the bus behind the driver. GRAYSON ST. JOHN ANNOUNCES INTERNATIONAL FIGHT SQUAD.
Grayson St. John would have beaten that fake scrab five out of five times. The people trying out for his fight squads probably could have done a level one course with their eyes closed.
The bus screeched to a stop. I squeezed around a guy staring at his phone and stepped off.
Sweat rolled down my back as I trudged down the sidewalk. It was May, in Dallas, which meant it had already been summer for a month.
Fridays were always lively in my neighborhood, even with the heat. The Brown boys whizzed by on their bikes, a taco truck at the end of the block had several customers, and Mrs. Gonzalez sat on her porch, wearing her leather shoulder holster over her loose blue dress. Her gun sat against her hip, clearly visible to anyone who walked by. She’d moved here from New York City several years ago, after the scrab attack in Midtown Manhattan, and she spent all day, every day, on her porch with her gun. Some of the neighbors reminded her that she’d moved here because there had never been a scrab attack in Dallas. She’d showed them the scar on her leg—twenty-four stitches—where a scrab had swiped its claws across her flesh. We all left her alone.
A few girls I went to school with were gathered around a car in the street, one of them on the ground, pulling a flat tire off the wheel. The girl sipping a large fountain drink, Adriana, caught me watching them and smiled, lifting her hand in a wave.
“Hey, Clara!” Her nails were so bright pink that I could see the color from across the street. Adriana’s hair and makeup were always perfect—she’d been the one to teach me how to put on eyeliner.
I waved back and walked a little faster.
All the eleventh-grade girls in my neighborhood were friends, except for me. I’d hung out with them until middle school, when it had become clear that they were the smart girls, the girls who would get scholarships and spend years voluntarily going to school after the required portion. It would be a miracle if I even finished high school. I just made them uncomfortable, so I came up with excuses not to hang out with them until they stopped asking.
I turned the corner and headed for the first house on the left. It was small, one-story, white, with bars on the windows that were ostensibly for our protection. The path to the front door was covered in weeds. The lawn always went to hell when Dad was gone.
Inside, the television was on, the local news playing to our empty faded blue couch. Paintings hung at strange spots on the walls, like someone had slapped them wherever or had a very odd design sense. In reality, they covered bad patch jobs or holes that had never been fixed. The most recent addition was a brightly colored painting of Texas that hung crooked at my eye level.
I found Mom in the kitchen, frantically stirring something in a bowl, flour dusting her black T-shirt. Mom did everything frantically, like someone was chasing her while she was mixing. I didn’t know if it was an acquired behavior or if she’d always been that way. I’d have put money on the former.
She noticed me standing at the entrance to the kitchen. A crease appeared between her eyebrows. I was a constant source of worry, or disappointment, or concern. Never quite figured out which.
“What are you making?” I asked.
“Your school called,” she replied.
My phone dinged in my pocket. In the other pocket was a summer school schedule confirming what we all already knew—I was an idiot. I swallowed as I pulled the paper out.
“Two classes, mija?” Mom said, stirring so hard batter splattered across her shirt. “You failed two classes?”
“I could never figure out what the physics teacher was talking about. It never made any sense to me. Even after lots of studying,” I added, which was a total lie. I never studied. How did you study something that made absolutely no sense? Was I supposed to stare at the book and hope it all miraculously clicked one day?
“And English?” Mom asked. “How do you fail English? You like to read.”
Not the kinds of books they made us read in class. I shrugged.
She stopped stirring and let out a sigh so heavy the neighbors probably heard it. “You were supposed to get a job this summer.”
“I know.”
“You were supposed to help me.” She gestured with both arms to nothing in particular. I was supposed to get a job to help her pay the bills so she wouldn’t break down and call Dad again. It was our deal.
“Maybe I should just get a GED,” I said.
“No. Absolutely not.”
“I’m not going to college anyway. What does it matter?”
“You are not dropping out of high school.”
“Then I’ll get a job on nights and weekends. You worked in high school.”
She gave me a look that clearly said, You’re not me. I wasn’t her. I’d never wanted to be, in most ways.
The front door opened, and my older brother stepped inside. Laurence had an expression that clearly said he wished he’d stayed gone longer. It was his usual expression.
“I’m flunking out of high school,” I said.
“Oh.” There was no surprise in his tone.
“You are not flunking out. You’re going to summer school,” Mom said.
Was physics suddenly going to make sense in summer school? I was going to fail, again, and we’d have further confirmation of my stupidity. It had been well established since first grade, when the teacher sent a note home to my parents saying I was unfocused and kept hitting the other kids when I got frustrated. I was nothing if not consistent.
But no one ever asked why I was unfocused, or why I had so many absences, or why hitting the other kids seemed like a good idea. So I fell further behind, and I never found a way to catch up. My teachers got used to disappointment. We all did.
“Just don’t call Dad,” I said. “We can figure this out.” I looked at Laurence, hoping for help, for a sudden reveal that he’d found a new job after getting fired from the last one.
Laurence seemed uncomfortable, like he always did when anyone expected something of him. He was happiest slipping through life invisible, which should have been difficult, at six feet tall with the build of a former football player. But he managed it most of the time. He could move like a ballerina on a spy mission whenever he detected a potentially awkward situation.
“My buddy has a line on a job,” he finally said. I didn’t try to hide my surprise. Laurence so rarely came through with the good news I hoped for.