The Stud Book (5 page)

“All good.” Georgie’s eyes were blue and watery. Her face seemed superimposed on her neck, the way her head bobbled. She was barefoot, in worn flannel pants and a sweater. A soft blue nightshirt poked out in a ruffle below the sweater’s edge.

The officer asked, “Mind if we come in?”

She let them in without resisting, without asking questions, as though out to prove her own innocence by a sheer willingness to comply. Did she know what this was about? She moved away from the door. The house was dark inside, the curtains closed. Dulcet, Nyla, and Bitchy Bitch followed on the heels of the cops.

Dulcet whispered, “Did you call them?”

Georgie shook her head, a swift, secret negation.

The officers walked from room to room, restless animals, and gave a cursory glance to the bedroom and bathroom. The two men were as tall as Dulcet and twice as wide. “You have one child?” the first officer asked. He held up a thick finger, a simple illustration: one.

“That’s right.” Georgie held Bella tightly to her chest. The baby was calm, sleeping.

Bitchy Bitch nosed a Diaper Genie near the front door.

The women clustered in the kitchen, leaned against the counters, and were mostly silent, as though they’d be arrested if they said the wrong thing; nobody knew what that wrong thing was. You have the right to remain silent.… That was the only right they could count on. They waited together the way they had years before when somebody had called the cops on their parties, or when they sat in cars, pulled over for speeding tickets. If you moved slowly, didn’t argue but went along with it, there was a good chance the cops would go away.

One of the officers said, “We got a call from a concerned party. Thought there might be trouble.” He ran his eyes over a chipped plate with a piece of toast on it, a half-full glass of orange juice, an open bottle of baby formula, and three white drips on the counter. A package of cloth diapers rested near the door.

Nyla slid the cake box onto the counter.

The second officer asked, “Are there any other children in the house?”

Georgie said, “No.” She said it loud and clear, as though testifying.

“Anybody else at all?” he asked. Georgie shook her head. She might’ve raised her right hand, if the baby hadn’t been in it, and sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth—
and nothing except exactly what you want to hear, officer!

The cop looked at Dulcet, then he looked at Nyla, studying each of them in turn.

“We just got here,” Nyla said.

They were big men with big shoes and heavy tools, trying to solve a problem they couldn’t see.

One looked at Dulcet’s shirt. “Womb-man, huh?” he said, and smiled.

She pulled her satin coat closed over her shirt.

After a moment, the second officer looked toward the first and said, “Okay?” That was their conference; they made a silent decision. The first put a card on the kitchen counter with his name and badge number on it. “Take care,” he said, satisfied.

Once the police were gone the small house felt a little bigger, the air a little lighter. The women could move. Nyla asked, “What was that all about?”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Georgie said. “God almighty.” She held the baby in one arm and reached the other down her flannel pants. Her hand came back up with a vial of prescription pills. She slapped the vial on the counter. Dulcet and Bitchy perked up their ears.

“A mistake.” She wrapped the baby blanket more tightly.

Nyla said, “Oh! She’s got a little bonkie-bonk on her sweet li’l noggin.” She leaned in to kiss the baby’s head.

Georgie pulled Bella possessively close and ran a finger over the red patch on her girl’s white forehead. “I hit her with the phone.”

Nyla blanched.

“It was an accident. It fell on her.” Georgie moved away, toward the bedroom. “You can have those pills. If the phone rings, don’t answer.”

Dulcet said, “But these drugs are yours. They’re legit—”

Nyla added, “Georgie, that’s enabling.”

Georgie, in the next room, called back, “It’s nurturing. Dulcet needs pain pills.” They knew one another well.

Nyla called after her, “Do you need anything, while we’re here?”

Georgie’s only answer was the rustle of a comforter and pillows tossed on the bed. Dulcet studied the label on the vial like a fine bottle of wine. She cracked the lid and took out a tablet.

“We love you!” Nyla shouted.

Dulcet swallowed her pill with a handful of water from the kitchen faucet. She pulled out her pipe and her stash, and ran the pipe through her damp fingers. “Not much of a welcome.”

In the back room, the TV spoke in a low murmur.

“New moms are a world of two. When you’re nursing, your body fills up with chemicals, relaxing hormones—”

“Relactating,” Dulcet offered.

“—that make you happy to lie around.”

“They have synthetic drugs for that now,” Dulcet said, and wiped a drip of water from her chin. She rested her baggie on the counter then packed the pipe. She said, “Who wants to stick around to be your own kid’s best cautionary tale? It’s a setup.” She let her lips find the narrow stem of her pipe and took a swift hit.

Nyla opened the cake box and touched a finger to what was left of the glazed fruit on top.

Dulcet’s exhale filled the kitchen with smoke. She tipped her head back to blow the smoke up. Her thin neck was marked with tendons. Her eyes softened.

Nyla hissed, “Sweetie, there’s a baby in the house!” She turned on the fan over the stove, opened a kitchen window, and flapped her arms to drive the smoke out.

Dulcet said, “Doing what I can for the planet, supporting hemp farms, right? Hemp fields pull carbon dioxide right out of the air.”

Obligingly, she blew into the fan’s updraft.

Nyla flapped both hands at the smoke as though trying to fly, to urge the toxic air out. She said, “Arena wasn’t a cuddly baby. She wouldn’t look at me. For a long time, I thought she was autistic.”

Through yellowed teeth, and as Nyla did her flapping dance, Dulcet said calmly, “Arena turned out perfectly fabulous.”

A
rena had slipped from her high school halls to sit on the edge of a turnaround pit on the side of the road across the street from school, just far enough away to escape the rules. She gave a gentle pat to the dead ferret wrapped around another girl’s neck. A yellow sign over their shoulders read
SLOW CHILDREN
. Someone had spray-painted an arrow pointing down from the sign to the spot where Arena sat, where smokers and stoners regularly perched along the decidedly uncomfortable corrugated aluminum railing meant to keep cars from sliding into the parking lot of the veterinarian next door.

She was a lanky colt in a tiny T-shirt that said
I ♥ POPCORN
and skorts, that skirt-short combination, short enough to fit the child she’d been five years earlier. Her dark hair hung like satin.

The girl in the ferret pelt, with a jumble of black dreads, watch-gear earrings, and lace-up boots, rested beside her with her eyes closed.

A guy sat cross-legged in the gravel, wearing the outfit of disenfranchised white boys since the breakout of the Clash thirty-some years earlier: a T-shirt, black jeans, and Converse. Arena knew the Clash from listening to her father’s records. She listened to vinyl
in her room most nights, imagining her father’s voice channeled through scratches and guitar riffs—the Melvins, the Clash, the Wipers. Romeo Void. Even the Slits and Wendy O. Williams channeled her dad, because otherwise? She could barely remember having a dad—only knew what it felt like to want him.

The girl in the ferret neckerchief opened her eyes to offer Arena a smoke. Her eyes were dark, and her smudged makeup was even darker. For Arena, looking directly into anyone’s eyes was like looking at aluminum reflecting the sun, or a swimming pool on a bright day.

She was bad at it.

She shook her head no at the cigarette. “Why start something I’d have to keep doing? It’s enough to brush my teeth and change clothes.” She kicked her vegan-friendly Toms red wrap boots into the gravel. Her mom had bought her those boots. Her mom, a yoga instructor now trying to get a store up and running, was always broke but up on the good causes, and with every pair of Toms sold a poor kid somewhere got new shoes, too.

Arena pretty much was that poor kid.

“Who changes clothes?” This girl, total steampunk, had worked hard to look like she’d been in the same black rags since, what, maybe 1889? “Social pressure to change clothes is just a way capitalism keeps us on the rat wheel.”

The Clash kid, in his own uniform, said, “Weren’t you, like, Goth last year?”

She said, “Visigoth. It was a specialization, but I’ve evolved.”

Arena said, “Smoking is the biggest corporate scam ever.”

“Not if you buy the Indian kind.” The girl scratched her head through her mass of hair. She had rings on every finger, spiders, cogs, and crystal.

The Clash guy said, “You sound depressed.”

Arena asked, “Because I don’t smoke?”

He ground the cherry of his cigarette out in the gravel. A button on his messenger bag read
ALPHA NERD
. He said, “Where’s your zest for livin’?”

The Visigoth-turned-steampunk waved her cigarette. “Your spirit of adventure!”

“American Spirits of adventure. Blue pack.” Alpha Nerd tapped his pack on the ground twice. “What’d you come out here for, then?”

“Reading break.”

“Right on.” When the girl nodded, her black dreads shifted in a thick mass. “They don’t let you do that in there?”

“Not enough.” Arena found a book in her pack,
Red Azalea
by Anchee Min. Inside, the school’s hot halls smelled like crushed ants and gym shoes. If she sat in the grass of the school lawn by herself, that’d be weird. But when she sat with the smokers it was, like, sociably antisocial.

She opened the book to a dog-eared page.
Red Azalea
was a memoir about life in Mao’s China, written by a girl assigned the role of a peasant. The author lived in barracks and slept in a room with eight other girls, each inside her own mosquito net.

Anchee Min wrote, “I spent the night of my eighteenth birthday under the mosquito net.… The air felt creamy. It was the ripeness of the body. It began to spoil. The body screamed inside trying to break the bondage.”

Arena knew that scream.

“My body was in hunger. I could not make it collaborate with me.… I tossed all night, loneliness wrapped me.… The mosquito net was a grave with a little spoiled air.”

In the school halls football players sent one another porn shots and videos of cheerleaders sucking them off, or whatever they could lift off the Internet and make look like it was their life. Lockers were decked out with raw beavers, boobs, and cocks, and slammed shut fast when a teacher walked by. Sex was everywhere—in mute shots of naked bodies, grunting videos, and jokes—but to read about sex without pictures was a totally new kind of thing.

She was maybe the very last virgin in the whole school.

Reading about sex was intimate. Reading about anything was like this really cool secret code from one brain to another, like ESP. Arena looked at the letters. How was it that letters turned into sounds? And sounds formed words and the words could mean absolutely anything and everything, even body fluids—and what exactly let her brain know how to decipher meaning from marks on a page?

Weird.

Writing was the most abstract art ever. She wrote in the back of her book, rough lines, making the letters as awkward and cryptic as possible. She wrote, “gOd.” Then she turned the page to Alpha Nerd. “What do you see?”

He said, “God?”

She nodded. There it was, the collective delusion. She’d made him see God in a few lines.

Alpha Nerd, Son-of-Joe-Strummer, who probably didn’t even know who Joe Strummer was, said, “Want a pick-me-up?”

She put a hand to her shirt, over the muscle that ran from her chest to her shoulder. A pink and white scar ripped through her skin there. She held her eyes open and steady. To let Alpha Nerd’s eyes meet hers was an exercise in connecting, like hands over her body. He said, “First one’s free.”

She said, “You’re that kid we learned about in seventh grade. In that peer pressure video?”

He grinned. “Everybody does it.” It was a line from the film.

She reached out a hand. He put a packet in it. She tried not to blink. His damp hand brushed her skin. She could smell the earth below where they sat, the dirt and dust. She could smell oil on the ground, as though a leaking car had idled there. She closed her fingers around the package. This was new terrain. She’d stepped into the video of their seventh-grade cautionary tale. The paper of the packet was solid, like a promise, crisp as the page of a magazine.