I cut my hair short and Mama smiled as if she'd finally gotten the girl she wanted. She brushed her hand across

my forehead as she whispered, "Your pixie looks cute." She must've thought I wanted to be Twiggy or something. But my hair did look fine once I slicked it back with some water. For the next couple of weeks I did boy things. I snuck into the bathroom and practiced shaving, lathering my face with Ivory soap, scraping the foam off with a yellow pencil. I stole a pair of James's underwear and practiced peeing like LU V I C K E RS

a boy, straddling the toilet seat and peeing toward the back. I dreamed about Rae, rescued her from those boys and was given kisses on my cheek. I told Maisey and James to call me Tommy. They looked at me like I was stupid and I knew I was but I couldn't help it.

That winter I asked for a Schwinn Stingray at the same

time James did, and come Christmas morning, I thought for sure I'd get one to make up for the Christmas when I got this lousy red cowgirl skirt with a dumb looking fringed blouse and a pair of white patent-leather cowgirl boots. I couldn't even bring myself to try that junk on.

The bike was parked next to the tree in the living room, red and shiny as a fire truck. But no, just as soon as I threw

my leg over the banana seat, leaned back against the sissy bar, and grabbed hold of the apehanger handlebars, here comes Mama with James, his dark brown hair all flattened out on one side of his head, sleep in his eyes. Mama piped

up and said, "No, Lily, that's James's. That's a boy's bike," she said, lowering her voice to a growl. "Your Barbie doll is over there."

"A Barbie doll?" I said, shocked. "I'm twelve years old. I don't want a stupid Barbie doll. I don't play with dolls; I've never played with dolls."

"I know that," Mama said. "It's not for you to play with. That's an original Fashion Queen Barbie. She'll be worth something one day," she said, "if you take good care of her. That Barbie's as good as money in the bank." She pushed me toward it, then turned and walked into the kitchen to help Daddy fix breakfast.

James smirked at me as he climbed onto the bike. "Stop stealing my underwear," he said. "Dork." He grabbed hold of 72

B R E A T H I N G U N D E R W A T ER

the handlebars, and I stood there in shock, couldn't believe this was happening again.

I had asked for that bike, and Mama had shoved me

toward an old Barbie doll that wore pearl earrings. It was like she was saying, You are going to be the Right Kind of Girl, and this is what the Right Kind of Girls want. It was bad enough just being a girl, much less having a mother who thought I'd want a stupid Barbie. Not even to play with, but to keep safe so she'd be worth something.

James hopped off the bike and sneered at me again.

"Don't even touch it," he said. "It's mine." I lunged at him and punched him square in the belly. His eyes went round and he doubled over. I slammed my fists so hard against his curved back that I hurt myself, but that didn't stop him. He reared up and flew at me, knocked me down into the pile of presents and wrapping paper strewn across the floor. I landed funny on a metal tackle box and felt blood trickling down my leg. I squirmed away from James, grabbed the Barbie doll by the legs, jumped up and whacked him as hard as I could across his nose. That surprised him.

He pounced on me again, then began punching my

chest with balled-up fists, tears running down his cheeks. His breath smelled like peppermint. "You're not a boy," he screamed as he pummeled me, "you're just a stupid fucking girl, a stupid fucking girl, a stupid fucking girl."

I spit in his face. "You're a stupid fucking sissy," I shouted.

Maisey tried to get between us, but James and I were going to kill each other. I was ready to murder him. Finally, Mama ran back into the room screaming at us to stop. Daddy stood in the doorway behind her, holding a frying pan. The smell of bacon filled the room.

73

LU V I C K E RS

"She hit me in the face with that Barbie doll," James cried, his fingers covering his nose.

Mama swung around, picked the Barbie up, grabbed me

by the arm and wailed away at the backs of my legs. "You have to ruin everything, don't you, Lily?" My legs stung, but I wasn't going to let Mama know it. I glared at her when she stopped. "You're not going to stop until you make me have a nervous breakdown, are you?" she said.

She threw the Barbie doll across the room. "Now both

of you, get up and get the hell out of this house before I kill you." She watched us while we got up and gathered our stuff together, then turned and pushed through the door. Daddy stood still, holding the frying pan. "Put that wrapping paper in the trash," he said, as if that had anything to do with our fight.

I hated James when he rolled his bike outside and sailed down the hill barefooted, still wearing his red flannel pajamas beneath his jacket. Even his pajamas made me mad; they were covered with spaceships, airplanes, cowboys, Indians.

I had to wear a stupid pink gown, and nobody could ride a bike down the street wearing a gown. I didn't feel better until later that morning when I slung Barbie on top of the house and watched her roll off the roof into the azaleas. When I reached into the bushes to grab her so I could throw her on the roof again, I spotted an old plastic washtub and realized I could sit in that and slide down the driveway. Our driveway was steep, so steep that the tail end of our Fairlane would drag against it if Daddy didn't pull in just right.

Sliding down the hill in the washtub was almost as good as riding a bicycle, but not quite. It was loud for one thing, sounded like somebody sanding a piece of wood. And I 74

B R E A T H I N G U N D E R W A T ER

could feel every crack in the concrete on my butt, which was still sore from landing on that tackle box during the fight.

I skinned my knuckles raw before I wore a hole in the tub. Then I was stuck. But after watching James ride his new bike around the house and down the hill for the three-hundredth time, I got another idea. I would coast down the hill on my

old blue tricycle.

That trike was like part of my body, and I knew just how to handle it. I hauled it out of the utility room and parked it on the carport, right at the crest of the hill. Maisey dropped her Barbies to watch me, to see what I was going to do. I was way too big to ride it, so I stood on the little metal step between the back wheels and leaned over to grasp the handlebars. I pushed the trike forward a little, braked it by dragging my foot, then did it again. Except for the fact that I couldn't sit

on it, it was perfect. I'd surf that baby down the hill. I took off. The next thing I knew, I was gone. I never had a chance to put my foot down. The wheels spun so fast it was like they weren't even there.

The peppery smell of crushed weeds rose around me as I

lay in the ditch at the bottom of the hill crumpled up under the blue tricycle, our fuzzy-headed neighbor, Mrs. Dozier, looking over her shoulder at me as she pinned her husband's boxer shorts on a clothesline. Her eyes were so close together she looked like a hamster.

Every now and then she glanced over her shoulder at me

as she clipped a shirt onto the clothesline. I lay in the ditch and watched her watching me. I thought of Rae lying in that field, her naked white legs, me watching the boy move his hand over her mouth. Me running home in a blur. I thought of other blurry things, of how the tricycle spokes disappeared 75

LU V I C K E RS

in a blur, how when you're going really fast in a car, all the bushes blur together, how my mother hated me, how when you're a girl who likes to do boy things, everything's a blur. I lay in the ditch whimpering for myself, a blur rolling down the hill.

Finally, Mama walked down the hill to get me. I heard

her voice before I saw her. "Mrs. Dozier, you didn't see Evel Knievel whiz by, did you?" Mrs. Dozier said something, but I couldn't make it out. I heard Mama's voice again, cheerful: "Oh, that's a lovely tablecloth; do you think the sun will bleach all those ugly stains out?" Mama didn't like Mrs. Dozier one little bit.

Then Mama stood at the edge of the ditch, looking

down at me. "Are you crazy?" she whispered as loud as she could. "What do you think you are? A damn stunt driver?

I oughta leave your ass here, let the ants eat you." But she bent over, gripped my hand, and dragged me out of the ditch, up over the weeds, and up the hill to the house, saying over and over again, "Oh, honey, if a car had been coming,

you would've been killed." And she said it so many timesifacarhadbeencoming, ifacarhadbeencoming—that it started sounding like a wish and I thought she was saying "if only a car had been coming, if only..." and I saw the car coming, as if she'd wished it into being. I saw it rolling right over me in slow motion, not a blur at all, and I knew that I'd almost been killed, that I would've been killed, if a car had been coming. If a car had been coming, I would've been killed. And Mama would've been happy. And it was all because I was a girl who wanted a banana-seat bicycle.

76 12

A few days later, I told Mama I was going to ride uptown to the Dimestore, but I was really going to ride out to mine and Rae's shack to see what it felt like. Mama was still mad at me for whacking James and pretending to be a boy, but I didn't care. Every time I looked at the purple bruise on James's nose, I felt giddy, wanted to hit him again. Let him have that stupid Stingray. Who needed a sissy bar anyway? Not me.

I rode Maisey's rickety bike through town, pedaled my boy-self past all the dusty shop windows, slowing so I could get a good look at my reflection in the glass. I didn't have

the delicate features of a girl. Not my nose, not my lips, not even my dark eyebrows. I would ve thought I was a boy if

I saw myself pedaling by. I thought back to a day at school when Amy Melzer, a tall blond fourteen-year-old, cornered me in the hall at school, looked at me with slitted eyes, and said, "You woulda made a good-looking boy." She smiled and I turned red. Later, I wished I'd said something back to her, like You wanna kiss or something?

I was a good-looking boy. Dark brown hair, olive skin. LU V I C K E RS

A mouth I could twist into a sneer like Elvis's. I spit on the sidewalk and pedaled on. I pulled up to the Dimestore and leaned my bike against the crumbling brick wall. The bell jangled when the door slapped shut behind me. It was dark inside. Old Mrs. Bevis sat behind the counter watching me. I said hi and pretended to look for a bag of Sugar Babies"I don't see the Sugar Babies; where are the Sugar Babies? Don't you have any Sugar Babies?"—while I stole a pack of gum with her looking straight at me. I could've robbed a bank right then.

I climbed onto my bike and headed out into the country, down the dirt road to Rae's. I knew she wouldn't be home. I'd heard that the Millers had gone up to Macon to visit

Rae's cousin. From the road the gray house looked hollow, empty as a shell. The grass that Rae had laid down in to let her pony walk over her had dried up and blown away. It was hard to believe that come spring, the yard would be full of dandelions.

Rae and I used to make wishes with the dandelions; we

blew the white puff of seeds hard until each one floated off in the wind. You weren't supposed to say your wish out loud, but we did. We wanted the same thing: to live together in California when we grew up and own a toy store.

I rode past her house on down the dirt road to our shack.

I couldn't bring myself to open the door, so I stood on the porch and looked in through the window. Nothing had changed. A dead spider on the dirty windowsill, a perfect lacy dragonfly wing, one of those dried-up lizards on the wood floor. Off in the corner I saw Rae's blue and gold horse ribbons, the Hav-A-Tampa cigar boxes that held my bug collection. Rae's tap shoes sat on top of the table.

78

B R E A T H I N G U N D E R W A T ER

I hopped down and backed away from the house as

if it were alive, as if it had swallowed Rae up. I felt myself getting angry at her again for letting those boys into our house, for taking their dollars, for walking away from me that time, for letting that boy do those things to her. But I knew she didn't let him, no matter what she said, and I knew I could've helped her. I could've helped her but I didn't. I didn't because I couldn't tell what was happening, because she walked across the field with them. She did. She walked across the field with them and I couldn't tell. I started to cry. I picked up a rock and, without thinking, threw it through the window, smashing the pane. The pop and clatter of broken glass soothed me, but it wasn't enough. I gathered more rocks and ran around the house, throwing them all, picturing Rae's face at each and every window. By the time I finished, the house was a wreck, the windowpanes nothing but jagged holes, and I realized I'd be in trouble if anyone saw me. I didn't care. Rae was as far gone as one of those dandelion seeds, and I didn't have a prayer of being friends with her again. I punched her out of my head like a window. Just like that. Good-bye.

79

13

Going buck to school after Christmas vacation was the worst time ever. All the kids wore brand-new clothes, and all

they wanted to talk about was who got what, and what was

I going to say? "Mama got me a collectible Barbie doll." Not that anybody was going to ask, but that didn't make going back any better. I wanted to see Rae. I knew she'd have a field day with all those kids bragging about the loot they got. She could probably come up with a good plan for Fashion Queen Barbie. Tie her to a couple of bottle rockets and shoot her into outer space. Something like that.

James rode his bike ahead of me and Maisey, and I concentrated on hating his guts until he was out of sight. When I got to school, a sick feeling came over me. I remembered Rae's last words to me: "You are one stupid girl, Lily...you don't know shit." I wanted the bell to ring so school would start and I could get it over with.

I didn't see Rae until after lunch. She was sitting on the

hill next to the lunchroom with Robbie and Leon, watching the rest of the kids whirl past the way we used to do. She was laughing at something, probably making fun of the LU V I C K E RS

girls' new pleated skirts, the boys' blue jeans. I didn't want her to see me. I wondered if she'd been to our shack, seen the broken windows. Wondered if she knew I'd thrown the rocks. I couldn't understand why she'd chosen those boys over me. I watched as Robbie and Leon rolled down the hill away from Rae, bumping into each other, bits of dried grass tossed into the air by their bodies. There wasn't a trace of what had happened that day at the park. They were boys rolling down a hill. She was a girl watching them.

Rae and I just stopped being friends. She never said

another word about the boys after that day in the lunchroom. She never let herself get near me again. It was as though we'd never met, as though we'd never gotten naked together and danced beneath the sky. I disappeared, became one of the rest of the kids, and she became one of them, girls who didn't follow the rules. She started hanging out with the rough kids, not just Robbie and Leon but Sharon Etheridge, a girl whose arms were covered with small pink craters from cigarette burns, and Mike Jones, a big fat stupid kid who once hyperventilated on a dare and fell backward on the iron radiator in homeroom, knocking himself out.