Blue Running – Excerpt

ONE

I once had a mother who loved
me.

“She just didn’t love you enough,” Daw liked to say. He’d
sniff and smirk like a father does when he’s confronted with the mysterious
eyes of his fourteen-year-old daughter. Then he’d crush his beer can under his
boot. That was the start and the end of any conversation about my mother.

She didn’t love you enough. The crush of aluminum. The
smell of warm beer.

She left us before the Wall, so I fashioned a memory of her
from other things that were too delicate and expensive for me and Daw to have.
Her eyes were flecks of gold, her laugh wind chimes. Then, when I was in third
grade, I stumbled on an old photograph in Daw’s drawer and I didn’t have to
imagine anymore. Instead of finding a clean pair of socks, I’d dug up a pretty
blonde woman in a white robe. I suspected it was my mother right away. She was
laughing, and her bare knees peeked out from the robe as she leaned sideways. I
wondered if she was naked underneath. I wondered if Daw had taken the snapshot.
Had Daw ever been funny enough to make a woman laugh? I traced her cheek with
my finger. I’d never laughed that hard or looked that pretty. It seemed
impossible that I could be related to her. But on the back of the photo was my
mother’s name: Marla. I slid my finder over her smooth hair, then tucked the
photograph back into Daw’s dresser. Even at eight I knew she was Daw’s secret,
not mine.

I didn’t hate her for leaving us, but I did wish Marla had
hung around long enough to tell me how to be. I’d spent my entire life
in Blessing, but I never felt like a Blessing girl. My hair was never
long-long, never seemed to grow past my shoulders no matter how long I let it
grow. I didn’t have sleep-over friends, and I wasn’t good at skeet shooting or
cheerleading. I didn’t know how to laugh that way girls did, and make the boys
want to inch closer and rub their shoulders. I didn’t want boys to rub me
anywhere.

When we were younger, kids who were luck enough to have
birthday parties invited everyone in class. That was the only polite thing to
do. I’d been to some of these gatherings, seen the insides of a few houses.
Those smells in other houses – clean laundry, warm pecan pies, vanilla candles,
musky-sweet cat fur – were secrets I took home with me, all of them a comfort
that life could be better. Eventually though, we got old enough to throw
politeness to the wind and only invited our real friends to birthdays.

I was short and flat-chested and my dad was a drunk. I
hadn’t been invited to a party in three years.

Then, the year I turned fourteen, Maggie Wisdom moved to
Blessing. She wasn’t like the rest of us. Her clothes were too fancy and her
heels were too high. She talked too fast and she didn’t wear boots. I was the
only one who sat beside her on her first day of school and found out she was
from Austin, which explained practically everything. On the bus home, I found out
her daddy was rich. They were the ones who’d built the mansion at the top of
the hill.

I had her for the whole summer. For three months, people
stopped talking about Blue’s drunk daddy and Blue’s ugly clothes because they
were talking about Maggie, who’d somehow charmed the whole of Blessing with her
money and her camera-flash teeth and her talent for singing like an angel and
skeet shooting like the devil. For the first time, I was almost normal.

Then high school started, and the Pretty Ones patted a stool
at lunch and Maggie sat down at the far end of the cafeteria. She fit right in
with them. Maggie stopped sitting with me and things went back to the way they
used to be.

It was almost as if Maggie and I hadn’t ever gone on bike
rides that lasted all day, hadn’t freed the squirrel from the mouse trap,
hadn’t drawn tattoos on each other’s wrists with permanent marker. Almost as if
I’d imagined she was my best friend.

That September, during the first weeks of high school, I
found myself hopelessly lost in the wrong wing of the school, in real life and
in my nightmares. Everyone was so tall and the halls were so wide. Between
classes, I trailed behind strangers who laughed and teased and jostled each
other, all of us wading our way to the next class. Swept by a strange
desperation, I once laughed with a group of older girls in front of me like I
belonged to them, until one of them turned around and smirked, “Why are you
laughing, girl?” I shrugged and ducked away, my cheeks hot with shame.

In the cafeteria one day, I opened my lunch bag and stared
at the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Wrinkly apple. Broken cookies. I
missed Maggie’s lunches. Trading my broken cookies for her Babybel cheese
wheels because her mom didn’t buy sugar treats and my Daw didn’t buy fancy
cheese. I loved to pull that white tab across the red wax, which opened up like
a perfect little present each time. But Maggie was with the Pretty Ones now.