“Your problem is,” she said, which was always a shitty way to begin a sentence, “that you don’t know what bored is.”
“Wrong. I am often exquisitely bored.”
“Unholy matrimonies are boring,” said my aunt. “Plagues of salt? Boring. The realization that none of us can run – that we’re all here to be used and abused by forces we can’t even fight – that’s so boring, kid!” She’d used sharp cheddar in the mac ’n’ cheese and it was my favorite, but I didn’t want to do anything other than push it around the plate. “If you get your license you can drive out to Denny’s.”
“I am not interested,” I said, “in fucking Denny’s.”
“I wanted you to make some friends and be a teenager and not to get in over your head,” she said, and speared some macaroni savagely. “And I want you to do the dishes, so I figure I’ll get one out of four. Don’t go sneaking out tonight, you’ll break the rosemary ward.”
I pushed away my half-eaten food, and kept myself very tight and quiet as I scraped pans and stacked the dishwasher.
“And take some Band-Aids up to your room,” said Mar.
“Why?”
“You’re going to split your knee. You don’t outrun fate, champ.”
Standing in the doorway, I tried to think up a stinging riposte. I said, “Wait and see,” and took each step upstairs as cautiously as I could. I felt a spiteful sense of triumph when I made it to the top without incident. Once I was in my room and yanking off my hoodie I tripped and split my knee open on the dresser drawer. I then lay in bed alternately bleeding and seething for hours. I did not touch the Band-Aids, which in any case were decorated with SpongeBob’s image.
Outside, the mountains had forgotten summer. The stars gave a curious, chill light. I knew I shouldn’t have been looking too closely, but despite the shudder in my fingertips and the pain in my knee I did anyway; the tops of the trees made grotesque shapes. I tried to read the stars, but the position of Mars gave the same message each time: doom, and approach, and altar.
One star trembled in the sky and fell. I felt horrified. I felt ecstatic. I eased open my squeaking window and squeezed out onto the windowsill, shimmying down the drainpipe. I spat to ameliorate the breaking of the rosemary ward, flipped Mar the bird, and went to find the bride.
The town was subdued by the night. Puddles of soapy water from the laundromat were filled with sprats. The star had fallen over by the eastern suburbs, and I pulled my hoodie up as I passed the hard glare of the gas station. It was as though even the houses were withering, dying of fright like prey. I bought a Coke from the dollar machine.
I sipped my Coke and let my feet wander up street and down street, along alley and through park. There was no fear. A Blake knows better. I took to the woods behind people’s houses, meandering until I found speared on one of the young birches a dead shark.
It was huge and hideous with a malformed head, pinned with its belly facing whitely upwards and its maw hanging open. The tree groaned beneath its weight. It was dotted all over with an array of fins and didn’t look like any shark I’d ever seen at an aquarium. It was bracketed by a sagging inflatable pool and an abandoned Tonka truck in someone’s backyard. The security lights came on and haloed the shark in all its dead majesty: oozing mouth, long slimy body, bony snout.
One of the windows rattled up from the house. “Hey!” someone called. “It’s you.”
It was the girl with shiny hair, the one who’d danced like an excited puppy in the rain of salt. She was still wearing a surfeit of glittery eye shadow. I gestured to the shark. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “It’s been there all afternoon. Gross, right?”
“Doesn’t this strike you as suspicious?” I said. “Are you not even slightly weirded out?”
“Have you ever seen Punk’d?” She did not give me time to reply. “I got told it could be Punk’d, and then I couldn’t find Punk’d on television so I had to watch it on the YouTubes. I like Punk’d. People are so funny when they get punk’d. Did you know you dropped your cereal? I have it right here, but I ate some.”
“I wasn’t aware of a finder’s tax on breakfast cereal,” I said.
The girl laughed, the way some people did when they had no idea of the joke. “I’ve seen you over at Jamison Pond,” she said, which surprised me. “By yourself. What’s your name?”
“Why name myself for free?”
She laughed again, but this time more appreciatively and less like a studio audience. “What if I gave you my name first?”
“You’d be stupid.”
The girl leaned out the window, hair shimmering over her One Direction T-shirt. The sky cast weird shadows on her house and the shark smelled fetid in the background. “People call me Rainbow. Rainbow Kipley.”
Dear God, I thought. “On purpose?”
“C’mon, we had a deal for your name –”
“We never made a deal,” I said, but relented. “People call me Hester. Hester Blake.”
“Hester,” she said, rolling it around in her mouth like candy. Then she repeated, “Hester,” and laughed raucously. I must have looked pissed-off, because she laughed again and said, “Sorry! It’s just a really dumb name,” which I found rich coming from someone designated Rainbow.
I felt I’d got what I came for. She must have sensed that the conversation had reached a premature end because she announced, “We should hang out.”
“In your backyard? Next to a dead shark? At midnight?”
“There are jellyfish in my bathtub,” said Rainbow, which both surprised me and didn’t, and also struck me as a unique tactic. But then she added, quite normally, “You’re interested in this. Nobody else is. They’re pissing themselves, and I’m not – and here you are – so...”
Limned by the security lamp, Rainbow disappeared and reappeared before waving an open packet of Cruncheroos. “You could have your cereal back.”
Huh. I had never been asked to hang out before. Certainly not by girls who looked as though they used leave-in conditioner. I had been using Johnson & Johnson’s No More Tears since childhood as it kept its promises. I was distrustful; I had never been popular. At school my greatest leap had been from weirdo to perceived goth. Girls abhorred oddity, but quantifiable gothness they could accept. Some had even warmly talked to me of Nightwish albums. I dyed my hair black to complete the effect and was nevermore bullied.
I feared no contempt of Rainbow Kipley’s. I feared wasting my time. But the lure was too great. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said, “to see if the shark’s gone. You can keep the cereal as collateral.”
“Cool,” she said, like she understood collateral, and smiled with very white teeth. “Cool, cool.”
Driver’s licenses and kissing boys could wait indefinitely, for preference. My heart sang all the way home, for you see: I’d discovered the bride.
THE NEXT DAY I found myself back at Rainbow’s shabby suburban house. We both took the time to admire her abandoned shark by the light of day, and I compared it to pictures on my iPhone and confirmed it as Mitsukurina owstoni: goblin shark. I noted dead grass in a broad brown ring around the tree, the star-spoked webs left empty by their spiders, each a proclamation the monster dwells. Somehow we ended up going to the park and Rainbow jiggled her jelly bracelets the whole way.