My Tiki Girl Page 2

  “What shall we do now, my little birdlings?” asks Leah.

  We’re all lying collapsed on the floor. The steel gray carpet is full of faint stains and cigarette burns. In the corner next to me is the mark left by an iron put down when it was still too hot. Leah is clutching Birdwoman, but she’s holding her face-down, which means the doll is done for now. Dahlia is on her back, breathing hard, and Jonah is nestled against her, his head on her arm, his robe covering both of them like a beach towel. Like maybe they’ve just come out of the water and have had too much sun.

  “A trip to Jupiter,” suggests Jonah.

  “The mall,” says Dahlia.

  Leah laughs. “Aren’t they one and the same?” she asks, and we all agree, so we’re off to the mall.

  “Keys, keys!” shouts Leah as she’s putting on her old navy peacoat. The coat has holes in all its pockets, so she can never keep anything in them. Dahlia and I scramble around, looking in all the usual places for the car keys: on the kitchen table, in the dove-shaped vase by the front door, in the holeless pockets of other coats.

  Jonah shuts his eyes, says a key-finding spell, his fingers moving like sea anemones.

  “Keys that are lost will now be found, by the power of Merlin, by the force of the River Nile, so mote it be!” Just as he’s opening his eyes, Dahlia shouts, “Found them!” and there they are, pulled from a boot in the closet. Jonah smiles.

  “Boy magician strikes again!” shouts Dahlia.

  “All hail the Great Zamboni!” calls Leah.

  “Zamboni, Wizard of the West Winds!” cries Dahlia.

  “Zamboni, bringer of rains that make floods, finder of lost keys!” I cheer.

  Jonah pulls his robe around him tighter and grabs his magic wand for our trip to the mall, because who knows what evil forces we might encounter on the way.

  The Wainwrights live on the third floor of the only apartment building in town. It’s a big brick building that used to be a dynamite factory. No kidding. Canal Street Explosives turned into the Canal Street Apartments, the factory boxed off into four floors of little homes, the ghosts of explosions and careless workmen missing fingers long gone. We’re the only noise now. We sound like thunder racing down the stairs, Birdwoman taking flight in the lead. We’re cawing and laughing, Jonah is chanting a safe-journey spell as we leap down the steps two at a time. The stairway smells like curry and men’s aftershave, no trace of gunpowder left. Just when I think the heavy air may suffocate me, we’re out the door, running down the sidewalk that leads to the back parking lot where Leah’s yellow VW bug named Gertrude waits. The magician rides shotgun because he’s the best navigator; Dahlia and I take the back, sitting close.

  “Share a clove?” she asks me, and I nod. Dahlia takes a cigarette from the pack in her coat pocket and lights it as we’re pulling out.

  “Mission Control, we have liftoff!” shouts Leah, who lights one of her own cigarettes, an unfiltered Camel.

  We know all the dark parking lots for siphoning gas. The best one is behind Our Lady of Redemption. They have AA meetings there three nights a week, and when there’s no meeting, there’s Bible study and choir practice. We call it Our Lady of Perpetual Motion because we always get lucky here.

  Dahlia taught me the principles of siphoning gas. She showed me the fine points of getting just enough suction, then pulling the tube down and into the gas can quickly. Leah keeps the four-foot section of cut garden hose on the floor in the backseat, along with the dented red metal gas can. If you suck too hard and don’t pull away in time, you taste fire. You spit and cough and think you’re gonna puke. Leah keeps a bottle of flat Coke in the car and we use it to rinse out our mouths if we taste gas. We swish the soda around like sweet mouthwash and spit and spit.

  Tonight’s an AA night, and we fill the can with gas from some poor old alkie’s Caddy. He’s got a FRIEND OF BILL’S bumper sticker on the back of his car and a plastic Virgin Mary on his dash. Leah picks this car because of Mary. The Holy Mother is a sign and we are lucky. No close calls. Dahlia gets the flow going, sucking expertly on the end of the hose, and I hold the gas can, waiting for her to drop the hose into it. You have to keep it low once it gets going. It’ll only flow down and if you lift it up, you’ve wrecked the whole thing and have to start over.

  When the can is full, we dump it into Gertrude’s tank and we’re off and running. It’s a twenty-minute drive to the mall, and Leah has the classic-rock station on. She says it’s the only music worth listening to, and she and Dahlia know all kinds of trivia about every singer, every band. Sometimes it seems like they both take rock ’n’ roll as seriously as they take the dolls. It feels like the two are connected somehow, like one wouldn’t matter so much without the other. Right now, we’re all singing along to “Me and Bobby McGee” as we drive out of the suburbs and past the airport, where the planes come in so low you think they’re gonna land right on the highway. Birdwoman is resting on the dashboard, but unlike the drunk guy’s Mary, she faces forward. Birdwoman likes to see where she’s headed.

  Leah tells us that Pam, who gave her Birdwoman, was a huge Janis Joplin fan.

  “It’s a sign, birdlings,” Leah tells us as the song comes to a close. “Pam’s watching over us tonight. She and Janis both. It’s going to be a big night!”

  Gertrude’s heater doesn’t work so well and it’s October, so we’re glad we have coats on. Dahlia has an old sheepskin coat. Mine is denim with a fake sheepskin lining, not nearly as warm as hers. There’s an army blanket in the backseat that we use to cover up with and we sit closer together, shivering a little, maybe from the cold, maybe from the excitement of what might happen next. If I had to tell the truth, I’d say it’s just being next to Dahlia that makes me tremble, makes my heart beat some crazy island mambo song inside my skinny chest.

  “Tiki, what’s the game tonight?” Leah asks Dahlia, using her special name, her doll name, and this is a signal that things have really begun—we’re not ourselves anymore—anything goes.

  It’s always up to Dahlia to make up the games we play at the mall. Sometimes she gives us entire scripts to memorize, and we practice in the car like we’re rehearsing for a play. Last week, she had us go from store to store, saying we were from a children’s home and asking for gift certificates to raffle off to make money for a camping trip. Sometimes she has us shoplift, but it’s more like a scavenger hunt, really: find something red and under five dollars in Fox’s department store, a wig from a mannequin in Fashionbuzz, a jockstrap from Valley Sports. Jonah is the best shoplifter—maybe because he’s a magician, maybe because of the robe. People are so amazed by the spectacle before them—the little boy in a hooded blue robe with gold stars—that they don’t notice what his hands are doing. That and he’s just fast. His fingers move swiftly and carefully and he’s got this killer, ten-year-old smile that makes people believe he isn’t capable of doing wrong.

  “Tonight’s game is this . . .” Dahlia begins, pausing for dramatic effect. “Shopping for the end of the world.” Here she pauses again, knowing we’re all hanging on her every word, gobbling them up.

  “The world, as we know it, will be destroyed by the end of the night. We will survive, but other than the clothes on our backs, we are only allowed to keep one thing with us, and it should be a thing that will help us in some way. Our mission is to each go off and find our one thing. We have an hour, then we meet by the skating rink and see what we’ve all chosen.”

  “Positively brilliant!” squeals Leah as she pulls into the parking lot of the Farmcrest Hills Mall. The parking area is a maze of lots labeled with color-coded letters so you’ll be able to find your car when you’re done inside. After circling a few minutes, we find a spot in lot D. Leah likes to be able to park close, so close that sometimes, when she can’t find a spot, she takes the handicapped place and puts a note on the dash saying she left her permit at home but is transporting her crippled daughter. She has me accentuate my limp when we get out of the car in case anyone’s
looking. I’m happy to do it. Proud that she’d call me her daughter, even if it’s just pretend. Sometimes she gets tickets anyway, which we tear into a hundred pieces and drop out the window on the highway on the way home. Making confetti, Leah calls it.

  Jonah is quiet as Gertrude rolls to a stop; he’s concentrating, his brow furrowed the way he gets when he’s thinking hard.

  “I think I’d want my wand to be my thing,” he says at last.

  “No can do,” says Dahlia matter-of-factly. “All our worldly possessions are destroyed except for the one thing we each take from the mall tonight. Find a new wand if that’s what you really want, kiddo.”

  “A magic talisman,” suggests Leah.

  “A flying carpet,” I say.

  Jonah scrunches up his face again as we lock Gertrude’s doors. Lot D is right next to the movie theater. There are steel doors down the gray cement wall, away from the yellow entrance, which lead directly out of the theater. Sometimes we stand by them, waiting for people to come out, then we sneak in, moving through the crowd like salmon swimming upstream. Once we’re inside, it’s easy to walk casually down the hall, mixing with the paid-ticket crowd, and sneak from theater to theater. One Saturday, we watched four movies in a row. But tonight there will be no movies. Tonight we’re on a serious mission. The end of the world is coming, and we want to be ready.

  3

  As I walk around the mall looking for my one thing, I’m thinking that there’s still a long list of things Dahlia doesn’t know about me. Like that I had the lead in the school play back in junior high: Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. I mean, it’s hard to believe looking at me now, but once, I was the kind of kid who didn’t just act in some play but was the honest-to-god star.

  And Dahlia has no idea that Sukie Schwartz, the most popular girl in the tenth grade, used to be my best friend. Dahlia knows nothing about how we got our ears pierced together at this very mall, drooled over magazines full of boy band pictures, and made friendship bracelets out of braided embroidery floss.

  I’m afraid that if I told Dahlia all of this, she wouldn’t get it. She’d think less of me and say there was no way a girl like that could ever be LaSamba. She hates the popular girls so much, and to know that I was one of them, even back then, might tarnish me in this totally unfixable way.

  Sukie was in The Wizard of Oz, too. She was Glinda, Good Witch of the North. She wore this beautiful silver gown and carried a wand my mother had made with a huge star on the end covered in silver glitter. She spent downtime during rehearsals waving it over me, saying, Poof! You’re in Oz. Poof! You’re going to get an A on your history test. Poof! We’re going to the movies Friday night.

  My mother did the sets for the play. She was an artist. She made her living designing greeting cards: Happy Birthday, Thinking of You, Get Well Soon. I have a stack of them in a cardboard box under my bed. She made sympathy cards, too. After she died, we got a card from my dad’s second cousin saying how sorry he was, we were in his thoughts and prayers and all that. He wrote it all down in a card my mom had designed, covered in watercolor lilies. He’d picked it out in the drugstore and had no idea. Life is full of these strange little coincidences. The thing is, some of them come at you like the right hook of a boxer, knocking you down for the count.

  Sometimes, when something exceptional happens, I pull out that box of cards and pick one that suits the occasion. I imagine my mom has sent it to me from all the way up in heaven. It’s dumb, I know. When school started, I got a Good Luck card. The day I met Dahlia and she asked me to be in her band, I got a card with a picture of a shooting star that said, An unmade wish will never come true.

  But just what was I wishing for?

  Did my mother up in heaven know something I didn’t?

  Jonah is the first one back to the ice rink and I find him there, waiting alone in his robe, watching the skaters. It’s a small ice rink in the middle of the mall. Families come to rent skates and soar around in circles, always going the same way, never changing direction, poor dumb birds. I used to skate here with Sukie. One time in eighth grade, just before the accident, we went on this double date—her and Troy and me and Albert. We held hands while we skated like couples do in movies. Sukie and I had matching purple laces on our white figure skates. The world was ours then and we didn’t even know it; we didn’t know how easy we had it down there on the stupid skating rink as we moved beside the boys with their sweaty hands and rough wool sweaters, the purple laces on our skates proudly proclaiming that we were best friends forever. What a crock.

  Jonah’s favorite part of watching the skaters is the machine that cleans the ice: the Zamboni, which is where he got his wizard name. He thinks it’s magic the way it makes the cut-up, scarred ice smooth as glass again, always has.

  I want to ask Jonah what he’s chosen to be his one thing, but we’ll have to wait for Leah and Dahlia. The mall smells like popcorn and plastic, leather and perfume. The noise around us is a steady hum of elevator music, shoppers’ chatter, skaters’ laughter.

  “If it was really the end of the world, I would have my wand,” says Jonah, never taking his eyes off the skaters. He’s left his wand in the car, so he can’t turn any of them to mice or toads. He can’t say a spell to make them fall or to turn the ice to quicksand. Jonah believes he has some powers without the wand, but he needs it to pull off the really big stuff. Sometimes I want to say to him, “You know you can’t really do that, right? You know it’s just a game?” But that’s clearly against the rules, and Dahlia, who loves her little brother more than anything, would never forgive me.

  Leah’s next. “Good hunting, birdlings?” she asks. Birdwoman is with her, sticking her head out of Leah’s pocketbook so she can see. Jonah and I nod.

  Dahlia’s last to meet us, the soles of her heavy boots stomping across the polished floor, the pink plastic rosary swinging crazily against her chest as she hurries toward us. I can see from her smile she’s had success. She has her best shoplifting bag tonight—it’s a huge shoulder bag in a patchwork pattern. Once, she fit a whole turkey dinner in it—bird, cranberries, and all. Dahlia’s the one who takes the biggest chances—she surprises us every time.

  “Well, what did everyone choose?” she asks. “Jonah first.”

  Jonah looks shy, hesitant, like he isn’t sure if he wants to share it.

  “A magic ring,” he says reluctantly, pulling a silver band with a garnet stone out from his pocket. “It’s a ring of invisibility.”

  It’s a cheap ring, the kind made for little girls and displayed by the cash register at gift shops and drugstores—easy to steal.

  “Put it on, put it on!” urges Dahlia.

  “No. Not now. It’s only for very special occasions. It won’t work unless you really need it to,” Jonah explains.

  “A ring of invisibility will come in handy at the end of the world,” says Leah, and we all agree.

  “Leah’s next,” says Dahlia, and we watch Leah pull two gray plastic walkie-talkies from her bag. Leah doesn’t usually shoplift; it’s too risky. See, she went to jail once (it was a total setup) and the cops look at that as having a record, which means she has to be really careful—if she went to jail again, Dahlia and Jonah could end up in foster care, or worse, with their Aunt Elsbeth in New York.

  Leah probably bought the walkie-talkies at the high-tech outlet with one of her credit cards. She has a ton. One gets rejected and she just pulls out another.

  “It’s so we can stay in touch and give each other important messages when the end of the world comes,” Leah explains as she takes the walkie-talkies from their box. She shows us how they even have a button that makes a beeping alarm, and there’s a guide to Morse code on the side.

  “Now you, Maggie,” Dahlia says, and I reach into my pocket and pull out the knife I swiped from the case at Valley Sports. It’s a hunting knife, with a locking blade folded into the curved wooden handle. It feels heavy, covers the length of my open hand. I pull open the silver blade careful
ly; this knife is razor sharp. It’s for gutting deer—slicing through skin, muscle, and tendon.

  I chose the knife because it was the most dangerous thing I could think of. It seems to fit my new life. My life where I do dangerous things like shoplifting and siphoning gas. BTA Maggie would never have carried a knife. ATA Maggie is an outlaw girl. The knife is a symbol that anything goes.

  “Jumping catfish!” says Dahlia, her eyes wide as she stares at the knife, reaches out to touch the polished brass end. “You could kill an army of bears with that thing! You’ll use it to build us a shelter; hunt and gather; defend us from the marauders. Such a practical tool for the end of the world. LaSamba, the practical clown.”

  I push down on the safety catch, close the knife, and slide it into my pocket. I’m blushing like some kind of idiot just because some crazy girl with pink plastic rosary beads called me a practical clown.

  Dahlia reaches into her bag and pulls out a Polaroid and several packs of film.

  “It will be important to document the end of the world,” she explains. She’s ripping open the packet of film, loading the cartridge into the camera. She points the camera at us. Jonah, Leah, and I are leaning against the wall of the skating rink. Shoppers are walking past us. Behind Dahlia are the escalators, carrying an endless stream of people up and down, up and down. It reminds me of watching ants in an ant farm.