My Tiki Girl Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  DUTTON BOOKS

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  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa * Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R

  0RL, England

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the

  author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Jennifer McMahon

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

  means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and

  retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except

  by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a

  magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party

  websites or their content.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  eISBN : 978-1-101-04348-6

  [1. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 2. People with disabilities—Fiction.

  3. Emotional problems—Fiction. 4. High schools—Fiction. 5. Bands (Music)—Fiction.

  6. Jazz—Fiction. 7. Homosexuality—Fiction. 8. Family life—Connecticut—Fiction.

  9. Connecticut—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M225375My 2008 [Fic]—dc22 2007028276

  Published in the United States by Dutton Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  www.penguin.com/youngreaders

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For all the Dahlias

  and Maggies out there

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to my agent, Dan Lazar, and to my editors, Mark McVeigh and Maureen Sullivan.

  Above all, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the writers, artists, and activists whose strength, courage, and determination have made books like My Tiki Girl possible.

  1

  All the girls in tenth grade hate Dahlia Wainwright. They say she’s a witch and that if you touch her, you’re cursed. They say she’s so fugly the boys have to put a bag over her head to bone her. But as far as I can tell, Dahlia doesn’t waste her time with boys. And the truth is, the girls hate her because she’s prettier than any of them and it’s not that all dressed up with blue mascara kind of pretty like Sukie Schwartz or Heather Tomasi. It’s the kind where she could be covered in mud or stung from head to toe by bees and her beauty would still turn heads. The girls hate her because the boys all want her. The boys hate her because they can’t have her. So Dahlia hangs out alone between classes, sneaking out to the soccer field to rest her back against the goal and smoke. Today, during lunch period, she’s right where I knew she’d be: braced against the white goal frame, the net behind her like a spiderweb, while she watches to see who might wander in.

  I had walked into the cafeteria, and the first thing I saw was Sukie Schwartz holding court at a long, rectangular table. I heard the buzz of their talking, laughing, teasing, and it mixed together in this sickening way with the gray-meat smell of overdone hamburgers, perfume, sweat, new sneakers, and floor wax. I hurried to the nearest exit before Sukie could catch my eye, and now I’m hobbling my way out to the soccer field where a single girl stands smoking and reading.

  I say hobbling because I am a Frankenstein girl. The bones in my right leg are held together with screws and a metal rod. I walk with a stiff-legged limp. I used to use a cane, but don’t anymore. My father says I still should, that I haven’t healed completely from my last surgery, but he’s not the one who has to deal at school. I mean, the movie-monster limp is bad enough, right?

  Dahlia, I’ve learned from the gossip, just moved from Delaware. I’ve lived here in Sutterville, Connecticut, my whole life. It’s where I lost all my baby teeth. Where tiny hamster, gerbil, and bird skeletons lie in rotted-out cardboard coffins beneath the oak tree in our backyard. Also where, if some future archaeologist goes digging, they’ll find the remains of a plush toy: a gray terrier named Toto I buried after the accident.

  Sometimes it seems like my life is divided into two halves. I call them BTA (before the accident) and ATA (after the accident). I don’t say this out loud or anything, but it’s how I’ve got things arranged in the file cabinet inside my brain. It’s been less than two years since the accident, so the ATA file is pretty small.

  If I were giving you a tour of my Sutterville, I’d show you the Elff Soda factory where my dad is sales manager, the big blue Colonial house we live in, the town pool where I used to go to swim and flirt with boys with my ex-best friend Sukie Schwartz, the Paramount Theater where I had my first kiss with Albert Finch during some sci-fi movie, and the bench in front of Tip of the Cone where my mother and I would sit and eat our brownie sundaes with mint chocolate chip ice cream and extra nuts whenever we had something to celebrate.

  I’d also show you an intersection three blocks from the junior high, and it would look like any regular four-way stop to you, traffic moving north and south, east and west. But it’s not just any old intersection. It’s where my mother died.

  “Hey,” I say to Dahlia as I limp straight toward the net. She keeps reading and smoking her sweet-smelling, crackling cigarette all the way down to the filter before crushing it out under one of her worn combat boots.

  The truth is, in my old life, my best-friends-with-Sukie life, I would have thought a girl like Dahlia was a total freak and probably made fun of her behind her back, rolling my eyes at her clunky boots, Salvation Army wardrobe, and pinup girl lipstick, which is way too dark for her complexion. B
ut in my new, ATA life, things are different. I have no friends. Not real ones anyway. No one gets me. I spent all last year being the freakiest girl in our class and everyone walked around me carefully, holding their breath like I was made of smoke—one wrong puff and I would disintegrate.

  I want tenth grade to be different. I want someone to get me, not just pretend to out of pity, but to really get me. I’ve been watching Dahlia Wainwright for two weeks now—long enough to think that maybe she’s the one.

  Dahlia’s wearing a black beret and these red-and-white-striped tights with a pair of torn-up jeans over them. The jeans are more hole than fabric. She wears a hippie-dippie Indian print shirt with little bells on the strings used to tie the V-neck closed. Her pale face is made paler still by the blood-red lipstick she’d expertly applied in a neat bow. She’s reading Sylvia Plath. Clearly, this is a girl who out-freaks even me. One who isn’t going to be scared off by my sorry-ass limp and tragic dead mother story. Now, if I can just not blow this by saying the wrong thing. But Dahlia saves me.

  “Listen to this,” she says, without looking up from the page. She starts to read in a theatrical voice, clear and crisp. It’s a poem, but it’s like no poetry I’ve ever heard. It’s all about being broken, asking if you have a glass eye or a hook, stitches or scars. It’s mean, but sort of funny.

  Dahlia snaps the book closed, and looks at me.

  “ ‘The Applicant,’ ” she says, in a normal voice. “The opening stanzas. Freaking amazing, yes?”

  She reaches into her huge patchwork purse and pulls out a bag of candy.

  “Licorice allsorts?” she offers.

  It’s like she’s been waiting for a broken girl with a limp to come along to read those lines to. Like she’s been expecting me.

  Now, the truth is, I’ve always hated licorice, and the candy she holds out is black and white with pastel colors mixed in. I can’t imagine anything less appealing.

  “Sure,” I say, opening my hand, taking a few pieces gratefully, popping them into my mouth like, well, like candy.

  “Sylvia Plath is my second-favorite poet. She put her head in an oven, did you know that?”

  “No,” I mumble. My mouth is full of candy that is grossly sweet and bitter all at once.

  “My first favorite, is, of course, the Poet God Himself: Jim Morrison.”

  I nod like I’ve heard of him.

  “Hey, I’m starting this band. A beatnik, rock, jazz fusion kind of thing. You play any instruments?”

  I shake my head. “Just the clarinet. I was in marching band in junior high.” I roll my eyes like, Can you believe it?

  “Perfect!” she squeals.

  “But I’m not really that good. I haven’t played in forever.” I am officially in panic mode now. My throat feels tight, and when I speak, the words come out high and breathy, like a dog’s squeak toy.

  “You’ll be great. I can tell,” she says, then gives me this smile that makes me almost believe her.

  “So what happened to your leg?” she asks, and I have to admire her for having the guts to actually ask the question that every other stranger who sees my limp-walk is wondering. The other tenth graders all know the story; half of them sent cards and flowers saying Get Well Soon back in eighth grade when I was stuck in the hospital forever. Now they can’t even look me in the eye. It’s like they’re scared of me. Like tragedy is catching.

  I think about lying to Dahlia, saying I was shot from a cannon or kidnapped by aliens and experimented on.

  “Car accident,” I say, unable to lie in the end.

  “Let me see,” she says.

  I’m wearing this totally embarrassing pink skirt my father got me that screams of my old life, my pre-Frankenstein girl life, and I lift it up, pull down my kneesock, and show her the long, ragged scar that runs from my knee to my ankle.

  “Jumping catfish!” she says, then reaches out to touch it.

  I don’t even think of stopping her.

  2

  Dahlia’s mom, Leah, has been to the loony bin, and it’s there, she tells us, that she was given her first doll. She holds the doll in her hands, fingers stained with nicotine from smoking unfiltered cigarettes all the way down, and tells the story for what must be about the millionth time, but we never get tired of hearing it. She makes it sound like it’s not her who’s telling the story, but Birdwoman. The doll is a woman in a calico dress with the head of a bird. I don’t know my birds real well, but this one doesn’t look like a songbird or bird of prey. It looks like a crow or a raven maybe, its head all glossy black feathers, its eyes two tiny glass beads. When Birdwoman speaks, Leah’s voice is a cackle, and I inch nearer to Dahlia. Our bodies are pressed close now, side to side like Siamese twins, and Dahlia’s brother, Jonah, is lying stretched out like a snake on the back of the couch behind us. His breath is faint, so faint that I think he’s holding it, waiting for the story to be over so he can exhale, finally relax.

  “I am Birdwoman,” Leah croaks. “I once was human, but a human life is no place for a bird’s spirit, so I released myself of earthly burdens.” Leah closes her eyes when she speaks, holds the Birdwoman doll so that it’s facing us, the beaded eyes staring, glossy in the light, two tiny crystal balls.

  Leah got Birdwoman in the loony bin, a gift from her friend Pam, who had a tattoo of an ankh between her thumb and pointer finger. The ankh, Leah explains, stands for everlasting life. Leah’s painted the symbol on the front of the doll’s dress with gold fabric paint. Dahlia and I draw it on our hands in permanent marker, our own little tattoos. The kids at school say, What’s that supposed to be? You two in a cult or something? Dahlia laughs and says, Yeah, we are. The cult of Birdwoman. Caw! We’re total freaks to them anyway. The tattoos are just further proof.

  The ankh looks like a cross with a loop on top. The loop reminds me of the hole in a sewing needle, like the ankh is supposed to be used for mending. Not for mending the holes of dresses, but holes in your spirit, which is, according to Leah, what Pam suffered from until she threw herself off the top of the hundred-foot tower in Lake Crest Park.

  “She spent the night there,” Leah explains, “then jumped as the sun was rising.”

  It seems to me that this is backwards somehow. Like if you were really going to off yourself, you’d do it with the setting sun in front of you, but I’m no expert. I’ve never known anyone who killed themselves before. Only famous people like rock stars and Marilyn Monroe. Pam feels more real to me than these people. When I look at the doll she left behind, it’s like I knew her too; like I would know just how to describe her to a stranger. I’d begin and end with the ankh. Everlasting life, I’d say, proving my point by explaining how her spirit slipped so easily from human to doll, the way a hermit crab finds a new shell. It’s that easy. This is the first lesson we learn from Leah, from Birdwoman: the dolls are vessels, waiting.

  “No,” Leah corrects, still making Birdwoman do the talking, “Pam didn’t jump, she flew. You don’t know you’ve got wings till you have to use them. You just have to trust they’re there. Believe in the power of flight. Do you believe, birdlings?”

  We nod our heads. We’re all real quiet when Leah tells her stories. It’s like being in church. And it’s not just Jonah who is holding his breath—all three of us are, because we’re never sure of the ending.

  Jonah believes, like we all do in a way, that Leah can make things happen when she pulls out her dolls. Like she can use them to predict the future, or maybe even control it. Leah says that on the morning Pam threw herself from the tower, Birdwoman jumped too, falling off Leah’s dressing table for no apparent reason. It was then that the power of the dolls was revealed to her, and she’s been collecting them ever since.

  Leah has a doll for each person in her life, and dolls for people she hasn’t met yet too. Like my doll, for instance. She picked it up at a flea market last year and put it on her dresser with the others, not knowing who it would come to be. The doll sat there, waiting, a rag-doll clown with a
porcelain face full of hairline cracks, two blue tears painted on its white cheeks. She says that in that way, she invited me into their lives, and when I first came home from school with Dahlia three weeks ago, Leah knew the flea market clown was me. A few days after knowing me, she named it—named us both, really. I am LaSamba, the worrier, the sad clown.

  Dahlia’s breath is sweet, like the clove cigarettes she smokes: Djarums from Indonesia that crackle and pop as they burn. Her fingers are long, the nails perfect, unlike my own—fingernails chewed to the quick, cuticles swollen and bloody. Dahlia says she used to bite her nails too, but cured herself of it by taking up smoking. Her body is all smooth curves and freckles. Her eyes are grayish blue, the kind of eyes that change shade with her mood or depending on what color shirt she wears. Her dirty-blond hair is straight and thick—she wears it back in a ponytail or tucked behind her ears under the beret. I like the feel of her beside me when we sit like this on the couch listening to Leah talk the doll talk. Dahlia’s got on the Catholic school uniform she found at the thrift store: a pleated navy blue skirt with a crested blazer that says St. Christopher’s. She wears this with her combat boots, a Doors T-shirt, and a pink plastic rosary around her neck.

  Maybe later we’ll put on our grass skirts and hula dance, compose a new song for our band, or listen to Jim Morrison (I know who he is now, I know all about The Doors).

  Birdwoman didn’t have much to say tonight, which could be a good omen, but may be a bad one too. We’ll just have to wait and see. Now Leah is up, spinning in circles around the room, Birdwoman in her outstretched hand flying up by the ceiling. It’s Jonah who’s off the couch first, running behind his mother, flapping his arms like wings, his blue and gold magician’s robe trailing behind him like the tail of some tropical bird. Dahlia and I join the dance, and soon we’re all there, running in circles around the living room floor, flapping our wings, caw-caw-cawing, and I’m getting dizzy, staggering around like a drunk. I’m spinning with Dahlia, Leah, and Jonah, Birdwoman soaring above. I’ve forgotten all about my limp, the dull pain that radiates from my knee to my ankle. I’m thinking this is it, we’re flying and we may never come back down.