From the first day of the previous summer vacation, her backyard became a beach. She lay on her “Earth Angel” towel and basted herself with Coppertone and soaked up the rays. But the tan wasn’t coming fast enough to suit her. So she stopped the Coppertone—and got burned. Blisters! Pain! No sun for a week! Torture! Whiter than ever from slathers of Noxzema, she smelled like a cough drop.
It wasn’t until August that the last signs of white and pink and red were gone. By the time we entered sixth grade, she was brown as a caramel apple. By January she was snow white again.
And here she was the following June: pink.
She pulled a top from the rack, draped it over herself. “What do you think?”
It was a slit-sleeve jersey with wide horizontal black-and-white stripes.
“You look like an escaped prisoner,” I said.
She held it out, studied it, nodded. “You’re right. I’ll take it.”
She gave it to me and went to the next rack. Then she snatched it back. “Hey, you—go,” she commanded. She waved at the aisles. “Shop.”
I could have told her that the allure of Charming was lost on me. I was perfectly happy with my T-shirt and dungarees. And—hey—my dungarees were rolled up to pedal-pusher length. Who said I wasn’t fashionable?
But I gave her my other reason: “I need my money for Eloda’s present. Her birthday’s tomorrow.”
She shoved her shirt back to me. “Okay. But I’m warning you. Your days in the kiddie section of Chatlin’s are over. Don’t ever let me catch you shopping anywhere but here.”
I saluted. “Yes, ma’am.”
She bought two more tops and an ankle chain and we went cruising down Main Street. Pretty soon I became aware that Reggie wasn’t simply walking beside me. Something else was going on.
My first clue was the car horns.
Voices came with the beeps. Some I could make out:
“Va-voom!”
“Hee-yah!”
It was coming from summer-free high school boys cruising Main: car windows open, convertible tops down.
My attention turned on a whistle. A crew-cut boy was standing shotgun in a baby-blue convertible, directing his shrill, two-fingered blast at…us? Then it hit me. All these noises I’d been hearing were aimed at the thirteen-looks-seventeen girl at my side.
For the first time, I noticed the other sidewalkers: boys, men, even females. Almost no one passed us without casting an eye her way, from quick glances to bold stares. It seemed everyone on Main Street, even the traffic lights, was looking at Reggie Weinstein.
And she knew it.
One peek at her face was all I needed. She seemed to be looking straight ahead, to be merely strolling. But that was the giveaway. Normally she’d be stopping and gawking into every storefront we passed. Normally she’d be chattering away at me. But she was silent, her Passion Pink lips appearing to pout and faintly smile at the same time. Heck, Reggie Weinstein wasn’t walking down Main Street. She was walking down the runway. I could almost hear Bert Parks crooning: “There she is…Miss America…”
Good grief, I thought, she’s pink. What’s gonna happen when she’s tan?
And then she was reaching into her little silver mesh purse and pulling out a pair of cat-eye sunglasses. The frames were white. And then she put them on.
And then I heard a sharp squeal of car brakes.
“That’s it,” I said out loud. I grabbed her and yanked her into the nearest store.
12
The store was Woolworth’s, which was where she wanted to be anyway.
She headed straight for Records, where she bought Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee.”
We spun each other on chrome-trimmed stools at the soda fountain. We both had Cokes: Reggie, cherry; me, lemon. As the soda jerk took our empty glasses, Reggie cut loose a ferocious belch that almost blew the jerk’s white cap off. He went boggle-eyed and cracked up. I pounded the counter. “That’s the Reggie I know and love!”
Reggie just sniffed and got up from her stool, like, That wasn’t me, and headed off to Cosmetics.
She stood before a display of chocolate-brown plastic jars in the shape of hockey pucks. The product was called Tan-er-Ree.
“I thought you use Coppertone,” I said.
“It’s not sun lotion,” she said. “I’ll never need that junk again.”
“So what is it?”
“It’s tanning butter. I read about it in Seventeen.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. “You put it on toast?”
She ignored my question. She pulled a jar from the display. She sounded like a salesman: “You put it on before you go to bed. When you wake up, you’re”—she threw out her arms—“tan!”
Her beautiful wide eyes invited me to join her in the wonderment of it all, but I could only reply with blunt sarcasm: “A miracle.”
She didn’t get it. She nodded with vigor. She turned to the jar. She kissed it. “A miracle.”
I was hoping she would just buy it so we could get out of there. Cosmetics departments made me nervous. But she kept fussing over everything she saw: eye stuff, lip stuff, skin stuff, feet stuff.
I tried to distract myself by thinking of Boo Boo let loose in Woolworth’s. I pictured her snatching whole rows of eyelash curlers and lotions and creams.
Suddenly there was a bullet of lipstick in front of my face and Reggie was saying, “I’m buying this for you.”
It was Passion Pink. The tip of it touched my upper lip. I flinched back. The pink bullet came after me. I slapped it away. I yelled: “Stop it!” I ran from the store. Outside in the bright sun, my eyes hit the sign across the street, and I knew what I was going to get Eloda for her birthday.
13
She stared at it mutely so long I finally said, “It’s a diary.”
She kept staring. “I see that.”
The cover was red. The letters saying MY DIARY were gold.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
She cleared her throat. “Thank you.”
We were sitting at the dining room table.
When I had seen Verlane’s Stationery the day before, the idea had hit me. It had seemed brilliant then. Now I wasn’t so sure.
“You’re supposed to write in it every day,” I explained. “But you don’t have to. Maybe every other day. That’d be okay, I bet.”
Her finger traced the gold letters. She opened it, moved a few pages. One hand still clutched a dustrag. “Or whenever I feel like it.”
I yipped, “Yes! Absolutely. Whenever you feel like it.” I touched the tiny golden key. “And see—it locks. It’s private. You can write anything. What you did that day. Your thoughts. Your feelings. Anything.” A submerged thought bobbed to the surface like a cork on water: Me, for instance.
She seemed entranced. She kept staring at the diary, as if waiting for it to speak or dance. I kept staring at her, waiting for a sign.
As with Boo Boo, the most striking aspect of Eloda’s appearance was her hair. It was short and wiry. But the color was the thing. On her reception sheet (I had sneaked a peek) it said Hair: red. But really it was more orange than red. And that’s how I thought of it: orange. Almost carroty.
At last she snapped out of her trance. “Well”—she pushed herself up from the table—“back to work.”
She fingered the wrapping paper and ribbon but didn’t seem to know what to do with them. “Gimme,” I said. She handed them to me and headed for the hutch, where I had interrupted her. In her wake she left a quick “Thank you.”
I crumpled the paper and ribbon till they were the size of a golf ball. She kept her back to me as she dusted the hutch. I squeezed the paper and ribbon and willed her to turn around and look at me—at me—for she had been looking only at the gift the whole time. Look at me, Eloda, I silently implored. Say my name. Say, Thank you, Cammie….Thank you, Cammie….
But she only said, not even turning, “Aren’t you going out?”
14
I
had four favorite things to do when I was mad: ride my bike, eat junk, spit in the spittoon in the back of the prison lobby, known as Reception, and punch the imported lunch meat in the Salami Room. On this day I did the first three.
I slammed out of the apartment and down the stairs to Reception. I hawked up a lunger and fired it into the spittoon. I grabbed my bike (which I kept parked just inside the door) and stormed outside and down the concrete steps and onto the sidewalk. I rode down Airy Street to city hall at the corner, turned left and rode down Hector to the end of the block.
The tail end of the city hall building—like the prison, a full block long—was a merchants’ bazaar. There was a fish guy, a vegetable guy, a picture-frame guy. I went to the candy guy. I still had money after the unappreciated birthday gift, so I got a handful of Milky Ways, five candy cigarettes and a Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy.
Then I headed for the North End, where the rich people lived. Houses in the North End stood alone and often had yards in front as well as back, not to mention driveways and even garages. More to the point, the North End was bicycle-friendly. Little commerce—only the occasional corner grocery. Little traffic. No hills.
I tore around the streets, my baseball glove swinging on the handlebars. I gritted into the wind: Who needs her…Who needs her…I pictured her beside flashy, loud, interesting Boo Boo. Eloda was so plain and dull. Except, of course, for the orange hair, which clearly belonged on a more flamboyant person. On Boo Boo orange hair would have been perfect.
I ignored stop signs. I raced up and down driveways, even across a few front yards, daring somebody to call the cops, somebody to yell, “Hey!” Nobody did. I pulled up, took a candy cigarette from my stuffed pocket and pretended to strike a match. I cupped my hands and pretended to light the cigarette, tilted my head back and pretended to inhale deeply and blow out the smoke as I listened for a grown-up voice to call, “Hey!” There was only silence. Not surprising, as there were no people in sight. The rich kids were off at summer camp. The rich fathers were at work making more money. The rich mothers were locked behind their curtains and venetian blinds, sipping tea. The North End was a ghost town. And then, suddenly, my heart froze. I caught the sound of rattling bottles—a milk truck was going by.
This had been happening for a couple of years. I felt an electrified jolt whenever I heard the rattle of a milk truck. I crushed the cigarette in my teeth and rode on.
The East End was a better match for my roiling emotions: traffic jams, disorder, noise, people. I had to ride more slowly through the East End traffic and hills, but that made it easier to stuff myself with Milky Ways.
Who needs her…
I rode down Main Street. I rode through red lights. I cut in front of a Schuylkill Valley bus. I tossed candy wrappers over my shoulder. I stopped on the Airy Street bridge and spit on cars passing below. I dared somebody to yell. Stop me. Arrest me.
Nobody did.
I saw a little kid screaming at his mother: “I don’t want to! I don’t want to!” He was clinging to her leg as she dragged him along the sidewalk. Then he started kicking. I veered to the curb. “Yo!” I yelled. “Knock it off! That’s your mother!” The kid and the mother both froze, gaping at me as I rode off.
I pedaled to the far west end of town, Forrest Avenue. Past the brickyard and the pigeon farm. Right turn and the long coast past the cornfields and the crumbling tunnels of the State Hospital and on to the park.
They were there, at the Little League field. The baseball guys. On this day there were four. Two white: Romig and Ears DelFina. And two black: Mug Williams and Benny House. Benny House was there only because he was Mug’s cousin. He was eight and threw like a girl.
I didn’t. I had been playing catch and chasing fly balls with my dad for years. Every April since I was nine I had showed up at Little League tryouts, only to be told, “No girls.” But they couldn’t stop me from playing sandlot. They couldn’t stop me from dreaming of becoming the first female major leaguer.
We got up a game. Batter. Pitcher. Infielder. Outfielder. And Benny House, exiled to the wastelands of right field. I was about to feed the first pitch to Romig when someone called, “Hey!” and came sliding up to the backstop on a green-and-cream Roadmaster. It was the kid from outside the prison wall. “Too late to get in?” he said.
Romig and I looked at each other. What kind of kid was this? Didn’t he know you don’t ask questions? You don’t ask permission. You just do it.
I should have said, Yeah, too late. But I remembered how he had recovered the badminton racket and bird for me. So I flipped my head toward the outfield. You might have thought I’d just given him free movie tickets. He beamed and piped, “Thanks!” He pulled his glove from the handlebars and let his bike fall like it was trash and lit out for center. Everything this kid did was annoying me.
But he could play. Each time he came to the plate, he ripped a line drive. He was the only player on the field as good as me.
“How do we know who’s winning?” Mister Question said at one point.
“It’s too complicated,” I told him. Which was true. We had our own system that could never be explained to an outsider. We kept track by scratching lines in the dirt in the first-base coach’s box.
Everything was going along hunky-dory, but Mister Question couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Hey,” he said, “when does Benny get to bat?”
Dead silence from me, Romig and Mug Williams. The whole plan had been to park the eight-year-old in right field (which nobody hit to) and let the dummy think he was in the game. We prayed the kid hadn’t heard. But he did. “I wanna bat!” he cried out.
“Wait your turn,” Mug told him. “We’ll tell ya.”
Each time somebody picked up a bat, the whine came from right field: “I wanna bat!”
Finally he slams his mitt to the ground and says, “I quit!” Which was great, except then he adds: “I’m goin’ home.” And starts walking off.
Mug looked stricken. “Oh no. I gotta stick with him. My mother said. If he goes, I gotta go.”
So Mug runs after his cousin and drags him back. He tells the kid okay, he can bat, but first he has to be catcher. Usually the wire-mesh backstop did the catching.
So I step up to the plate with Benny the catcher pounding his mitt behind me and yelling, “Okay, Mug, zip it in here!” and Mug lobs it in and I belt a screamer to left center. I’m rounding second, and when I see Romig is having trouble digging the ball out of the picket fence, I know I’m heading home. My cap flies off, I’m rounding third full-speed, and when I look up, who’s standing on home plate but the runt, yelling, “Peg it here!”
I don’t see the ball. All I see is somebody blocking home plate. I cannonball him. Kid goes one way, glove another, ball another. The kid is screaming. Something is bleeding. Mug is on me. “Whaddaya doin’? Ya tryin’ to kill ’im?” Spit flecks hit me in the face.
“The catcher was blocking the plate,” I say calmly. “It’s my job to score.” I spit in the dust. “It’s called baseball.” I go for my glove. I climb on my bike.
Mug follows me. “He’s a little kid!”
“He’s a catcher,” I say, and pedal off.
Mug fires: “And get a girl’s bike!” As if that’s going to hurt me. I laugh. My bike is a Columbia Jet Rider. And yes, it’s a boy bike, with the bar from front to seat.
As I pass the right-field fence, I don’t look back. But I know the Roadmaster kid is standing at shortstop, watching.
15
I couldn’t care less that they were ticked off at me. I was used to it.
Because I was the Little Girl Whose Mother Was Hit by a Milk Truck, adults in Two Mills were mostly nice to me. But it didn’t make me nice. I once overheard a woman on a sidewalk whisper, “She’s such a little curmudgeon.” I looked it up. It meant grouch. So that’s who I was. Cool.
I was especially not-nice to other kids, who cut me no slack for having a dead mother.
I headed for Ned’s on the park boul
evard above the baseball fields. Ned’s was the home of the foot-long hot dog. Perfect. I used up the last of my money on two foot-longs and a black-and-white ice cream soda. With every bite, I threw a punch at the world.
I was halfway through the second foot-long when Ned’s doorbell tinkled and an old man stuck his head in and called: “They got him!”
“You’re kidding,” Ned called back. He was washing glasses. “When?”
“This morning,” the old man called. “Just heard it.”
“Where?”
“Bridgeport.”
“You’re kidding.”
There was no reply. The screen door slapped shut. The old man was gone.
Ned looked at me. “Hear that?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He plunged a sponge into a glass. An ugly sneer curled his lip. “Good…good…that son of a—” He cut himself off in mid-curse, the way grown-ups did when a kid was around.
I knew what they were talking about. Everybody did. A week before, a boy fishing at the river had made a gruesome discovery. The body of a girl was floating in the shallows—beside a dead sunny, the newspaper said. She had been visible from the P&W trestle over the river, if any trolley-rider had bothered to look down.
Her name was Annamarie Pinto. She was sixteen. She stood five foot one inch and had long black hair and she listened to “Lavender Blue Dilly Dilly” every day because her favorite color was lavender. She was going to be a high school senior next year. She planned to attend Peirce Business School to become a secretary. Her mother was a checkout lady at Fiore’s Market on East Main Street. I knew her from stopping in to get sodas and Tastykakes.
Annamarie Pinto had been strangled. But that accounted for only half the town’s uproar. The other half was about this: the killer had used Annamarie’s own lipstick to draw something on her stomach. It was a star surrounded by a circle. For the first day or two, most people were baffled. Did the star mean something? Or did the killer just like stars?