CHAPTER 37
Susan
“Susan! Open this
door or I’ll boot it off the hinges!”
Nothing. Susan’s new
digs were still weird, still isolated, and still had that view of
the big dumb willow tree under which she and Gautierre had had that
stupid picnic.
“Susan! I know you’re
in there! You’re always in there!” And
why, Jennifer wondered, am I knocking?
What’s she going to do, call a cop? What’s a little breaking and
entering to my reputation?
“The neighborhood,”
her friend observed, opening the door, “is really going to
hell.”
“Tell me.” Jennifer
pushed past her and walked into the boo-hoo-Gautierre’s-dead digs.
The scene was almost exactly as it was the last time.
Same stale smell.
Same stupid sleeping bag. Same battered backpack. No toilet-paper
rolls, but two Kleenex boxes.
“Gah, it smells like
a wolverine’s butt in here.”
“That’s nice,” Susan
replied. “Who’s dead now?”
Jennifer paused, and
Susan bit the inside of her cheek. Shit. Maybe
her mom. “Well. Um. Nobody you were close to,
anyway.”
Good. Not her mom. Susan let the resentment swell
back up.
“Listen,
I—”
“Need my
help.”
“Yeah. Because
I—”
“Don’t remember a
single thing about the last conversation we had in this
room.”
“That’s
not—”
“Going to change a
thing. Nothing has changed, Jenn. Except I’m in dire need of
highlights. But who cares? It’s not like there’s anyone to look
pretty for.” She paused. “Did I tell you I lost a tooth? Woke up
and found it in the sleeping bag, like I was seven again, and
hoping to get a buck from the Tooth Fairy. I’m getting scurvy.
Isn’t that hilarious?”
“Hilarious isn’t the
first word springing to mind.” Susan looked as bad as Jennifer had
ever seen her, except maybe the circles under her eyes were bigger
and darker. And scurvy? Losing teeth? Ye gods. For the first time,
she hoped her friend was just in a funk and not losing her
sanity.
How much more can she take? Jennifer wondered.
Who’s dead now . . . ? That was getting
to be the question of the day. Fight and get stomped, or just get
stomped, but sometimes it was hard, really very hard, and maybe
getting stomped wasn’t so bad.
At least, she could
understand why Susan would find that a less awful alternative, even
if she couldn’t let her friend give in to it, not for one more day
or one more hour. “Why didn’t you come see my mom, dumb-ass?
She—”
“Is overworked and
saving lives on about forty seconds of sleep a night.”
“Yes, but for
you—”
“She’d drop
everything, and another life would be endangered, and for what? To
tell me I need to eat grapefruit? I’m aware, Jenn.”
“Susan, I’m not going
to argue with you. I am in full agreement: everything sucks, all
the time. But we have to pull together on this.”
“As opposed to
everything we’ve done for months? In case you haven’t noticed,
Jenn, none of it worked. Nothing at all works. We. Are going. To
die. In here. And it would be really great if you would go away and
let me rot in peace. Go away, Jenn. And take your bad news with
you.”
“Susan. I so don’t
have time for this.”
“Run along, then.
You—hey. Hey!”
Her oldest friend,
her finest friend, her very best friend, had taken her by the
shoulders and lifted her until they were eye to eye and nose to
nose. “You are going to help me, Susan, if I have to yank out all
your other teeth to get you to do it. Pull your head out of your
ass, stop sniveling about a boy—”
“Hey!”
“—and look at the
goddamned moon! Skip is going to kill everybody, is that penetrating through that thick
self-involved selfish pissing and moaning sniveling poor me poor me
crybaby skull of yours?”
“Your shrill
penetrating voice is the only thing getting through my thick
skull.”
“I need you,
dumb-ass! Get your thumb out of your
rear and help
me.”
There was a long
silence as the two friends eyeballed each other.
“Your breath,” Susan
said at last, “is unbelievably bad.”
“Toothpaste is gone.
Mouthwash is reserved for certain medicinal purposes.”
Both girls almost
started to laugh, remembered they were furious at each other, and
deepened their frowns instead.
“This is about Skip,
then.”
Jennifer nodded.
“Dianna told my mom and me. It’s this completely horrible thing
called the Poison Moon.”
“Why is it always
something like the ‘poison moon’? Why not ever the
Kitten-and-Ball-o-Yarn Moon, or the
Cotton-Candy-Sprinkled-with-Marshmallow-Bits Murder
Plot?”
“Seriously.” Jennifer
explained what Dianna had told all of them.
“So come on. I need
you.”
“All right. Unclench
your hands from my fragile shoulders before you snap me in half
like a damn wishbone.”
Jennifer felt blood
rush to her face. The entire time she’d been running down Poison
Moon 101 for Susan, they’d been nose to nose as Jennifer clutched
her shoulders like they were anchors. “Uh. Sorry.”
“I’ll admit you have
a point—that green moon is a total bummer.” Susan rubbed her
shoulders. “But why do a broadcast on it? Surely, the world has
seen it. It’s, uh, the moon.”
“They don’t know why
it’s green. They don’t know that the cause is lurking out there . .
. where they can reach him. They don’t know what it all
means.”
“Huh. Okay.
That, I’ll tell the world about. Why
should I be the only one hideously depressed and waiting for
death’s sweet embrace.” She paused, her eyes narrowing. “Skip
deserves to have his ass kicked for choosing green. Also, I’ve
decided, someone should do something nice for you. Since. You
know.”
“Okay.”
“He told Gautierre to
look after me. Even before the night Big Blue went up. I guess your
dad saw something there, even before either of us
did.”
Jennifer told herself
she would not cry, she would not. But she blessed and loved Susan,
and would forever, if only because Susan, too, had loved the man
Jennifer loved best. “I, um, I forgot about your thing with
green.”
Susan had worn a
grass green jumper to school on the first day of fourth grade, had
earned the name Grass Ass, and had been unable to shake said
nickname for years. This resulted in a poisonous hatred of all
things green, even salad, or twenty-dollar bills. Or poison
moons.
“I’m glad you’re
talking like an actual person instead of a weird scurvy
robot.”
“Says the girl who
shook me like a damn maraca to get her way. And if you go
near my backpack again, I’ll tell your
mom about the time you ate all the raspberries off the neighbor’s
bushes and blamed my parakeets.”
“Don’t talk about
those parakeets. I loathed them. Do you know how many times they
pooped on me?”
“Not enough times, is
how many. And I’ll talk about them, Ms. Ancient Furnace. And you’ll
listen. That’s my price for broadcasting source information about
la luna verde.”
“And don’t be showing
off with Spanish all the time. I could have taken Spanish. I could
have! I just had this dumb Ancient Furnace thing to do
instead.”
“Buenos dias, los Estados Unidos! Me llamo Susan Elmsmith,
y me amiga Jennifer es un estupida puta . . .”