“Hey!” he heard Norton Threemonger yell.
Rob didn’t look up. He concentrated on the weeds.
“Hey, disease boy!” Norton shouted. “We know what you got. It’s called leprosy.”
“Yeah!” Billy shouted. “Leprosy. All of your body parts are going to fall off.”
“They’re going to
“Yeah!” Billy screamed. “That’s what I meant.
Rob stared at the sidewalk and imagined the tiger eating Norton and Billy Threemonger and then spitting out their bones.
“Hey!” Norton shouted. “Here comes your girlfriend, disease boy.”
The bus coughed and sputtered and finally roared away. Rob looked up. Sistine was walking toward him. She was wearing a lime green dress. As she got closer, he could see that it was torn and dirty.
“I brought your homework,” she said. She held out a red notebook stuffed full of papers. The knuckles on her hand were bleeding.
“Thank you,” said Rob. He took the notebook. He was determined to say nothing else to her. He was determined to keep his words inside himself, where they belonged.
Sistine stared past him at the motel. It was an ugly two-story building, squat and small, composed entirely of cement block. The doors of each room were painted a different color, pink or blue or green, and there was a chair, painted in a matching color, sitting in front of each door.
“Why is this place called the Kentucky Star?” Sistine asked.
“Because,” said Rob. It was the shortest answer he could think of.
“Because why?” she asked.
Rob sighed. “Because Beauchamp, the man who owns it, he had a horse once, called Kentucky Star.”
“Well,” said Sistine, “it’s a stupid name for a hotel in Florida.”
Rob shrugged.
It started to rain; Sistine stood in front of him and continued to stare. She looked at the motel and then over at the blinking Kentucky Star sign, and then she looked back at him, as if it was all a math equation she was trying to make come out right in her head.
The rain made her hair stick to her scalp. It made her dress droopy. Rob looked at her small pinched face and her bleeding knuckles and dark eyes, and he felt something inside of him open up. It was the same way he felt when he picked up a piece of wood and started working on it, not knowing what it would be and then watching it turn into something he recognized.
He took a breath. He opened his mouth and let the words fall out. “I know where there’s a tiger.”
Sistine stood in the drizzly rain and stared at him, her eyes black and fierce.
She didn’t say “A real one?”
She didn’t say “Are you crazy?”
She didn’t say “You’re a big old liar.”
She said one word:
And Rob knew then that he had picked the right person to tell.
Chapter 12
“We got to walk through the woods,” Rob said. He looked doubtfully at Sistine’s bright dress and shiny black shoes.
“You can give me some of your clothes to wear,” she told him. “I hate this dress, anyway.”
And so he took her to the motel room, and there, Sistine stood and stared at the unmade beds and the tattered recliner. Her eyes moved over his father’s gun case and then went to the macaroni pan from the night before, still sitting on the hot plate. She looked at it all the same way she had looked at the Kentucky Star sign and the motel and him, like she was trying to add it up in her head.
Then she saw his carvings, the little wooden village of odd things that he had made. He had them all on a TV dinner tray beside his bed.
“Oh,” she said — her voice sounded different, lighter — “where did you get those?”
She went and bent over the tray and studied the carvings, the blue jay and the pine tree and the Kentucky Star sign and the one that he was particularly proud of, his father’s right foot, life-size and accurate right down to the little toe. She picked them up one by one and then placed them back down carefully.
“Where did you get them?” she asked again.
“I made ’em,” said Rob.
She did not doubt him, as some people would. Instead, she said, “Michelangelo — the man who painted the Sistine ceiling — he sculpted, too. You’re a sculptor,” she said. “You’re an artist.”
“Naw,” said Rob. He shook his head. He felt a hot wave of embarrassment and joy roll over him. It lit his rash on fire. He bent and rubbed his hands down his legs, trying to calm them. When he straightened back up, he saw that Sistine had picked up the carving of her. He had left it lying on his bed, intending to work on it again in the evening.
He held his breath as she stared at the piece of wood. It looked so much like her, with her skinny legs and small eyes and defiant stance, that he was certain she would be angry. But once again she surprised him.
“Oh,” she said, her voice full of wonder, “it’s perfect. It’s like looking in a little wooden mirror.” She stared at it a minute more and then carefully laid it back on his bed.
“Give me some clothes,” she said, “and we’ll go see the tiger.”
He gave her a pair of pants and a T-shirt, and left the room and went outside to wait for her.
It was still raining, but not hard. He looked at the falling Kentucky Star. He thought for a minute about one of the not-wishes he had buried deepest: a friend. He stared at the star and felt the hope and need and fear course through him in a hot neon arc. He shook his head.
“Naw,” he said to the Kentucky Star. “Naw.”
And then he sighed and stuck his legs out into the rain, hoping to cool them off, hoping to get some small amount of relief.
Chapter 13
They walked together through the scrub. The rain had stopped, but the whole world was wet. The pines and the palmettos and the sad clusters of dead orange trees all dripped water.
“This is where my mother grew up,” Sistine said, swinging her arms wide as she walked. “Right here in Lister. And she said that she always told herself that if she ever made it out of here, she wasn’t going to come back. But now she’s back because my father had an affair with his secretary, whose name is Bridgette and who can’t type, which is a really bad thing for a secretary not to be able to do. And my mother left him when she found out. He’s coming down here to get me. Soon. Next week, probably. I’m going to live with him. I’m not staying here, that’s for sure.”
Rob felt a familiar loneliness rise up and drape its arm over his shoulder. She wasn’t staying. There was no point in wishing; the suitcase needed to stay closed. He stared at Sistine’s shiny shoes and willed his sadness to go away.
“Ain’t you worried about messing up your shoes?” he asked her.
“No,” she said, “I hate these shoes. I hate every piece of clothing that my mother makes me wear. Does your mother live with you?”
Rob shook his head. “Naw,” he said.
“Where is she?”
Rob shrugged his shoulders.
“My mother’s going to open up a store downtown. It’s going to be an art store. She’s going to bring some
