Good Graces

soon because I’m going to be too busy protecting my sister every minute of every day. I don’t want him to get upset because he sometimes gets a nosebleed if he does, so I say to him the same thing I always do after one of our visits, “Thanks for the phosphate. It’s the best I ever had.”

When Troo doesn’t pay Henry a compliment the way she should, I nudge her.

“Thanks for the soda, Onree,” she says. “It wasn’t that bad.” She’s got a chocolate mustache, but I don’t lick my finger and dab it off the way a good sister should. I have had just about all I can take from Troo O’Malley this morning. (Sorry, Daddy. I know you’re watching, but enough is enough.)

Mr. Fitzpatrick calls again from the back of the store, “Son?”

Before Henry disappears all the way down aisle two to see what his dad wants, he stops and blows me a kiss.

“Awww, isn’t that sweet,” my sister says, drippy. “Ya done?” She grabs the soda glass out of my hand and before I can stop her she guzzles down what I got left.

“Troo!” I get her by the shoulders and stare deep into her eyes because you can really tell a lot about a person when you do that. The windows to her soul are twinkling, but not in the way regular people’s do when they’re feeling good about something. Hers have a steely glint. She doesn’t care that Molinari is seven years older or weighs a hundred pounds more. She’s already thinking about the best way to go about capturing him, I know she is. Greasy Al might want revenge, but so does she, and she won’t back down. She doesn’t know how. “You’re comin’ up with one of your plans, aren’t you,” I say.

“Whatta ya mean?” she says, like she just flew down from heaven, real angelic like that.

“You know what I mean, Trooper,” I say, slipping off my stool with this certain kind of feeling I’ve got all the time lately. I can’t stop thinking there’s something bad waiting for me around the corner with wide-open arms and no matter how many details I pay attention to, no matter how prepared I am, I can’t stop it from grabbing me or even worse, Troo.

My sister doesn’t snap her dime down on the marble counter the way I just did. She picks up her Golden Tomahawk bag and strolls past me out the drugstore door with a cherry-on-the-top grin. In the back pocket of her shorts, I can see the outline of a pack of L &Ms.

Chapter Five

Just like the park, where the O’Malley sisters are this morning is another important place to be in the neighborhood-Vliet Street School playground. The school is three stories high and made out of brick with a flat roof and a lotta doors, but none of us cares about that. It’s the blacktop we’re interested in. The heat comes off it in waves. And it’s not only the way it looks that reminds me of a bottomless sea. It’s the kids. Even if the last thing on your mind is playing a game of Statue Maker or Captain May I you can get lured over here by their happy sounds the same way those sailors did by those singing sirens the nuns taught us about when they covered the importance of resisting temptation. (Those sailors ended up dead, which is a word to the wise.)

The playground is about a block wide, so there is plenty of room to get together all kinds of games. Boys take off their shirts at the basketball court, which I have nothing to do with. Troo does. She likes any games that you play with balls. There are yellow-painted hopscotches and four-squares and flat green wooden benches that you can sit on if you want to play checkers or best of all, braid lanyards underneath the one shade tree, which I warned everybody is going to die soon if they don’t stop carving their initials into it. The playground’s also got four swings, a shiny slide that can blister the back of your legs in the afternoon if you forget to pull your shorts down far enough, a sandbox and two different kinds of monkey bars. The flat ladder ones that you can swing across jungle-style (Mary Lane’s favorite) and the other kind that are twisted metal pretzels that I don’t really get what you’re supposed to do with.

Just like I adored being at the lagoon, I used to adore being here. Nowadays I leave the house feeling brave, but by the time I get over here my tummy is letting me know it woulda rather stayed right where it was. It’s the counselors’ shed that Bobby grabbed me out of that’s causing all the problems. That shed is like Hound of the Baskervilles quicksand to me now. Smooth on the surface, but if you aren’t paying attention to the details, if you make one false step, it will suck you under and it only makes it worse if you struggle, so what are you supposed to do?

Thank Jesus, Mary and Joseph that the playground counselors this summer are both girls who aren’t murderers and molesters. Barb Kircher is back for more. I’m glad. Barb makes me feel a little less dumb. Like me, she didn’t notice last year that Bobby was a bad egg. I think she had a crush on him for a while the same way I did. She is also an expert lanyard maker and I just love those things. The silky colors and the slippery feel of them gliding through my fingers. I’ve made over fifty of them. I give them to people on their birthdays or any time I think they could use a little pick-me-up.

The other counselor, the new one who is taking Bobby’s place, is a girl named Debbie Weatherly, who is a friend of Barb’s from their college cheerleading team. Debbie must be the captain because she keeps telling us how she is so, so, so happy to be here! She reminds Mary Lane of that guy on The Mickey Mouse Club and I would have to agree with her. Mousketeer Roy, that was his name. (He got me so jumpy that I had to stop watching on Wednesdays, which was Anything Can Happen Day.) The new counselor lurks around in the background the same way he did. She isn’t going bald, though. Debbie’s got a sleek brunette do that she keeps out of her eyes with a colored headband that she changes every day, so she is very fashionable, but just like Roy, she is on the chunky side and has somewhat of a slack jaw.

The whole Vliet Street gang is here. Troo and me, Willie O’Hara, Mary Lane, Artie Latour and his sister, Wendy Latour, who is the only one of us who is not waiting in line to play tetherball. Wendy is swinging, which is her most favorite thing to do besides wandering off and turning up in the most unexpected places. Once she got found over at the zoo feeding the elephants peanuts way too close for comfort. She showed up in our own bathroom eating a stick of butter when Mother was in the tub. Another time, they found Wendy all the way downtown. This morning, she’s swinging, practically naked from the waist up, which she always tries to do because I don’t think clothes feel good on her skin. She does have on her training bra. She needs it now because her bosoms are growing up even if she isn’t. She is the strongest kid. When we play Red Rover, she can break through our closed-up arms like we’re a paper chain and she’s a pair of scissors right outta the box. She’s also a great hugger and a lot smarter than people give her credit for. She likes me better than she likes Troo and I am just nuts for her, too.

I call over to her, “Hi, Wendy.”

She yells back the same way she always does in her voice that sounds a lot like Froggy the Gremlin on the Andy’s Gang television show, “Thally O’Malley, hi… hi… hi!”

Wendy isn’t a regular kid, she is something called a Mongoloid. With her shiny black hair that is ruler straight, she looks like one of the waitresses over at the Peking Palace where you can get good chop suey on special occasions. Mother told Troo and me that the Chinese are an inscrutable people, which means they’re hard to understand, which fits Wendy Latour to a T.

“That’s good swingin’, Wendy, but maybe you should slow down a little.” I point to her head. “Your tiara’s slippin’.”

It’s actually my tiara. Troo calls me a chump, but I don’t regret what I did for one second. I knew I was gonna win. The counselors wanted to give me a prize for not getting murdered and molested last summer, but when Barb Kircher was about to announce me as Queen of the Playground at the biggest party we have in the neighborhood at the end of the summer, I looked down at Wendy in a pink party dress, smiling up from the crowd with shiny lips and her Cracker Jack ring on her wedding finger, and I grabbed the microphone and announced, “The Queen this year is… Wendy Latour!” The reason I did that is because someday I will grow up and get married to a pale pharmacist, but Wendy… one of the worst things about Mongoloids is that they don’t live very long, which I try never to think about.

“Hey,” I tell Artie Latour, who is her brother and one of the other twelve Latour kids, “Wendy’s goin’ too high and she’s got her blouse off again.”

He looks over fast, but he’s in the middle of a tetherball game with Willie O’Hara so he doesn’t want to stop and take his sister home to their mother so that she can get dressed.

Artie asks outta the side of his mouth, “Could ya do it for me, Sally?”