A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson

Author:Joshilyn Jackson [Jackson, Joshilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-05-19T14:53:41+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Liza

LIZA WALKS. SHE lifts and clicks her walker forward, then her good foot, then a desperate mental shoving to make the bad foot go. Rockettes.

She knows the way. She’s been this route a thousand times in the swel ing, ebbing past that washes al around her, a past that is so much larger and realer than the now. This is the way to Melissa Richardson’s house.

That man, Lawrence, the one Big loves, he tried to tel Big. Big didn’t hear or understand.

This is Liza’s fault. Big couldn’t understand because she only has the cup. Noun. Subject. Big has the cup, and it is up to Liza to give Big the verb.

The verb is at Melissa’s house, and Liza knows the way. She must lead Big there.

The words are coming back, and she has tried to tel Big, but everything that must be said is a swirl in her mind that boils away to word pairs when she tries to say it out loud: This does that. Bunnies comes. Liza walks.

Big must come down this road, come with Liza, until Big knows the word that goes with “cup.” Bunnies comes. Liza walks. Big must learn what

“cup” does.

Liza lifts and clicks her walker forward, and the wind that blows her is a resistance, a current that sweeps her back even as she moves forward.

Her good, strong, young legs push against the pedals. She is Liza-then, biking to her best friend’s house, and Liza-now, creeping the same route in her walker, one foot after another. She travels, caught in the ebb and wash of memory.

Liza-then is faster. The bike soars through the six miles and fifteen years that separate her from Melissa’s house. She is nearing the end of her first trimester. Standing on the pedals to coast down the last hil , she can feel the slight shift the baby is making in her center of gravity. No one knows except Melissa, who has been perfect. Melissa has said and done every right and good thing a girl should say and do when her best friend is pregnant. Until today. This afternoon, at school, Melissa stopped speaking to her. In the hal way after fifth period, Liza was made of air and Melissa puffed right through her, unseeing, unhearing. Liza had stopped existing. She is going to see if Melissa wil speak to her now.

Liza-now stumps another three inches forward, less than a block from her own house. She knows that when Liza-then arrives, Melissa will speak.

This is the first of their three final meetings, each a monkey-paw wish of an encounter, with fal out that wil set the troubled courses of her life.

She pushes herself, trying to catch up, but Liza-then’s bike is already sailing up the wide white drive. Poured concrete, not gravel. The house is white, too, with columns and a wraparound porch, stuffed ful of al kinds of things that don’t belong to Liza: a canopy bed, cable TV, cashmere sweaters. Melissa has her own clunky computer, where they trol the message boards, the only girls online, it feels like sometimes.

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