Kevin Moody walks by with his peach-fuzz moustache and his blond hair parted down the middle, a perfect flip on each side. His tight jeans are ripped at one knee and bunched at his puffy white sneakers.
Ohio tosses her braids and wishes they were blonde. She puckers up, as if readying for a kiss. She read all about how to get your lips noticed in Teen Beat Magazine. Kevin Moody stands in front of her, obviously noticing her lips.
He says, “Is that your sister?”
Ohio turns. Mary Louise has one finger up her nose.
“What is she, retarded?”
“Fart off,” says Mary Louise. She flicks a goober at him.
“You girls are the ugliest chicks in town, you know that?” Kevin shakes his head and keeps walking.
“After your mama,” shouts Mary Louise.
Ohio slugs Mary Louise on the arm, hard. “No one picks their nose in front of Kevin Moody.”
“Who cares,” says Mary Louise. “He’s a burnout.”
Saturday night, TV is broken. Melanie Wilson, also going into grade nine, is having a party, but Ohio isn’t invited. Lying on the linoleum, she fingers the Great Lakes on the most worn page of their atlas. Voices like tiny cracked bells whisper: join us. There’s an X pencilled north of Put-In-Bay, where her mother saw the beast. A zigzag line traces their journey along the chain of cormorant- and gull-infested islands—Rattlesnake, Sugar, the Sisters—where they stopped to rest. It took days. The crap motor conked out and her mom had to row. “This is how you got here,” she says, showing her biceps. And, “You’re lucky to grow up in Canada. We got health care.” Another X on Pelee Island, where a local took pity and drove them to the ferry dock. Ohio was just a newborn, but sometimes memories surge: the slosh of waves against a rusty bow, the thud and creak of oars in the outriggers, the smell of fish and gasoline, and the fearsome sound of her mother by turns swearing, weeping, beseeching the gods, all the way across the lake. “All for you,” her mother likes to say.
In the atlas, Ohio finger-trails a shoal of minnows against the current, leaves Lake Erie, enters Lake Ontario, floats down the adjoining canal. Watersogged, she beaches on the Manhattan shore. With her eyes closed, she can be anyone. A runaway in New York City. A waitress. A drug lord boss baby. Madonna sings Papa Don’t Preach on the kitchen radio and Ohio gets up to prance in the kitchen. She’s all slippery legs and dark eyes; an empty belly, hands open, begging.
At the back of the freezer, hidden behind the fish sticks, is a small bottle of vodka. Ohio takes a swig. It burns her throat. The heat fades to a warm glow. She gulps again. She puts on her mom’s make-up using the kitchen mirror: coral lips, sea-foam lids, tangled green lashes. Ohio’s thick hair is natty, coiled with life, like her mom’s used to be. She has her mother’s eyes—stony black, damning—but her skin is darker, more like the man’s.
Ohio undoes her buttoned shirt and ties it above her waist. She’s as flat as the Erie pier, but it looks good with tight shorts. Especially when she puts on her mom’s cork-heeled sandals. She peels the forbidden leather vest off the final hanger at the back of her mom’s closet. It smells like mildew and stale tobacco, like something wild and not quite dead in a ditch. Its weight is armor across her shoulders. It gapes under the arms, in the chest, where her mom’s notorious rack stretched it out, once upon a time, that summer she ran with the gang.
“You look like a hooker.”
“Thanks.”
Mary Louise turns down the music and sits on a stool at the kitchen counter. “You left the door open. I could hear the radio outside.”
“So?”
“So, you’re lucky it’s only me who came up.”
“Am I ever.”
Ohio pouts and blots her lips with toilet paper. Pieces of it cling to the lipstick. She swaggers to the freezer, pulls again from the bottle.
Mary Louise pushes her glasses up her nose. “Alcoholic,” she says, blinking.
“As if.”
“You’re gonna do this all night? Boring.”
Ohio says, “You’re right. Let’s go downtown.”
It takes longer walking in the shoes. As she goes uphill, Ohio’s feet slide backwards with each step. She tries to buy smokes at the convenience store. Mr. Cooper says, “Nice try, Ohio. Mom working tonight?”
Mary Louise steals Pop Rocks and they sit in the parking lot, letting the tiny pink crumbs explode in their mouths: stinging sugar pings. Bingo is rammed, cars everywhere, motorized wheelchairs parked in a crooked line down the block.
“Look.” Mary Louise points to the gas station. It’s Don filling his Harley. She waves wildly until he nods back.
“Come on,” she says, trotting over.
Ohio follows, nearly wiping out on the curb.
“Ladies,” he says, staring at Ohio.
Ohio cringes, tugs the vest. Should she button it or leave it loose to show her bellyskin? Her mom wore it over a studded bra the summer she was seventeen, waitressing the biker bar in Ohio. That and a pair of cut-offs showing the smiles of her ass. Says they queened her, over in America. Says she made great tips, mostly. Then she met the man.
Don’s eyes peel away the make-up, the shorts, the slutty shoes. They linger on the leather, on a silver pin above her right nipple—entwined adders, tongues flicking one another.
He says, “Where’d you get that?”
“Yard sale,” she lies.
“You’re flagging colours, Sweetheart.”
Don opens her vest, fiddles with the pin and removes the backing, pulls it free from the leather. He reattaches the backing and tucks the pin into the tiny vest pocket with a fat finger. “Gang stuff. Never wear what you don’t know,” he says.
“My dad has a motorcycle but it’s broke,” says Mary Louise. She points to Don’s large belt buckle. “R-ride to live—”
“Live to ride,” he finishes. “Know what that means?”
She shakes her head, no.
“Means there’s nothing better on this earth. Wanna?”
Don sets his helmet on Mary Louise’s head and carefully tightens the strap. Ohio is stabbed by a jealous fork, seeing the way Don tucks strands of flyaway hair into the helmet. He lifts and settles Mary Louise in front. Last time he gave her a ride, Don helped Ohio onto the wide leather seat, but today she scrambles up on her own. She wears the girlfriend helmet. The motorcycle leans to one side when Don kicks the stand away and the muffler burns Ohio above her ankle. She clenches her mom’s shoes at an angle so she won’t get burned again.
Don revs the engine. Mary Louise squeals. Ohio is pancaked on his back just like the biker girls. Don smells like gasoline, sweat, and cigarettes. He says something Ohio can’t hear, not with the helmet on, not with the hot motor running between her legs, vibrating everything.
They hit the street with a lurch. Wind rushes Ohio’s face. Aphids swarm her open mouth like tiny fish. They turn south at the stoplight and she’s sure she’ll fall, but she doesn’t. They cruise past the Coin-o-Matic, they’re coming up to the Legion, the only bar, where a bunch of kids are smoking out front. Don opens her up, gets the lead out, and they speed the rest of the way to the pier.
Take that, Ohio thinks, squeezing tightly.
At the lake, Don turns off the motor and kicks the stand. He lifts Mary Louise and sets her down, takes the helmet off her head. Her lunatic grin is contagious.
“Live to ride, ride to live,” she chants.
Don doesn’t offer to help Ohio, so she slides off the leather seat, puts her weight onto one wobbly shoe, and lifts her other leg over the back of the bike. She sets it, trembling, onto the ground. She removes the helmet and shakes her braids. Don and Ohio walk across the sand and sit on a large, flat rock. Mary Louise twirls around, sugar high, leaps to the water’s edge. She skips flat stones, throws driftwood spears at waves, draws in the sand with a stick.