The Girl with the Mermaid Hair by Delia Ephron

Author:Delia Ephron
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

Bobo

SEÑOR sat up. His nose twitched, not rapid little sniffs to soak up the savories, but more investigative.

There was someone on the stairs.

Her dad. It had to be. Her mom had taken half a Vicodin and gone to bed ages ago. Quickly Sukie reached for her bedside lamp and shut it off.

A sudden rattling shudder. The hall table banged the wall, Sukie guessed. Her dad had stumbled into it, either because he’d had too much to drink or he hadn’t bothered to turn on the hall light. He won’t come in, he’d never come in, don’t let him come in. Relieved, she heard her parents’ door—the knob turning and then the click as it was pulled shut.

Señor flopped down and resumed gnawing.

Easing open the drawer in her side table, Sukie located one of her favorite objects—a pen with a built-in flashlight. She did the things she needed to combat the jumps—plumped a pillow, sat up straighter, balanced her journal on her knees, and, most important, continued to write, hoping that if she did, the jumble of thoughts and confusion and agitation would leave her head. The obsessive replay of events might stop. If she dumped her pain into her journal, perhaps when she shut the book, she’d find at least a temporary respite, enough calm for sleep.

She returned to the defining moment. Go home, my gut ordered, she wrote in her journal. I knew I should, but I didn’t.

Sukie trailed along behind Bobo and his girl posse to the parking lot and Kiefer’s car. Kiefer, who had been with Bobo on the day she’d first met him, nodded at Sukie, but that’s all. He drove. Bobo sat in front, and Sukie was crushed in back with Meg, the single-earring girl, whose name was Swan—well, it probably wasn’t, but she told Sukie to call her that—and two other cheerleaders, Mandy and Jinx. The whole way to the house of someone named Lionel, Swan reached around the headrest, one hand on each side, and massaged Bobo’s shoulders.

The car rolled right over the curb onto Lionel’s front lawn.

Sukie, struggling to keep up because her heels kept sinking into wet grass, followed the group past a pretty peach clapboard two-story house where, judging from the drawn shades, no one was home, to the two-car garage in back.

They entered through a side door.

Sukie nearly gagged. The place smelled of car oil and nachos, although there were no cars. The garage had been converted into a place to hang.

“That’s so disrespectful.” Jinx pointed to a couple making out on the floor, which was covered in dirty industrial carpeting. “It’s like God is dead and they don’t know it.”

Sukie stepped around the writhing couple and into the crush of gloomy brooding kids drinking beer. Although the mood was funereal and no one talked much, losing hadn’t affected anyone’s appetite. No sooner did one of the pep-squad girls squeeze swirls of cheese onto corn chips and nuke them than kids scooped the sticky mess up with their hands and licked them clean.

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