IT’S JUST A JUMP TO THE LEFT

by libba bray

“How did she get ahead of us?” Agnes whispered to Leta.

“I can’t believe her. She came earlier than us on purpose,” Leta said.

Five people up in the line, Jennifer Pomhultz, in a rabbit-fur jacket and side ponytail, executed a perfect step-ball-change while her older sister and a handful of others applauded.

Leta sneered. “There’s the dance move. I knew she’d do it. Like we’re supposed to care that she got a callback for Six Flags.”

“I don’t care. Do you care?” Agnes asked.

“You can’t imagine how little I care.”

If there was anyone Leta and Agnes hated, it was Jennifer Pomhultz, and for very good reason. For six months, Leta and Agnes had a Friday night routine: At eight o’clock, Leta went to Agnes’s house. At nine, they started getting ready—plumping their lips with Bonne Bell Lipsmacker, experimenting with eyeliner, torturing their hair (Leta’s was shoulder length, stick-straight, and brown; Agnes’s, long and blond and wavy-thick) with curling irons and Aqua Net. By eleven-fifteen, their parents would drop them off at the Cineplex for the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Leta and Agnes would take their places in the long line that snaked from the box office around the side of the Cineplex and into the back alley. Waiting in line was as much a ritual as the movie itself, and the girls delighted in singing along to “The Time Warp” and comparing props—toast, bags of rice, newspapers—with the other moviegoers. Rocky Horror was their church, and they were devout. But Jennifer Pomhultz had only been coming for a few weeks—anyone could see she didn’t even know the lyrics to the songs—and already she was acting as if she’d been a Rocky devotee for years. She wore a stupid hairdo and too much blusher and a jacket made from bunnies. Maybe that’s what ninth graders did, but Leta and Agnes didn’t have to approve.

“Look at her! She’s trying to be Magenta. Last week, she was Janet.”

“You just don’t do that. You don’t switch characters,” Leta agreed. “God, she is such a fake.”

“The fakiest of the fake,” Agnes said, and she slipped her arm through Leta’s in solidarity.

Leta and Agnes had been best friends since third grade when they’d both been hall monitors and discovered a mutual love of horse models. But now, Leta and Agnes were fourteen and in the second half of eighth grade, and that demanded certain concessions. A deal was made, terms agreed upon and sealed with a vow said over the Ouija board: By summer, they would give up TeenBeat magazine and start reading Cosmopolitan, which they had only glimpsed in the drugstore. They would buy at least one pair of cool jeans from the mall. And before the school year was out, Leta and Agnes would each have their first kiss.

Leta hoped hers would be with Tom Van Dyke, who worked behind the concession stand. Tom was a high school junior and beautiful, with shaggy brown hair and heavy-lidded brown eyes, which reminded Leta of Tim Curry, who played Frank-N-Furter. Tom drove a red Camaro and played drums in marching band. Often, when she had been banished to the bench during gym class—Toni Benson deliberately hit her in dodgeball and Coach Perry did nothing about it—Leta consoled herself by imagining she was Tom’s girlfriend. In these fantasies, Leta cheered him on during halftime concerts as he marched across the field in measured beats, taking his place as part of a perfect formation—a sunburst, a castle, or the Crocker High School mustang, which was their mascot. Sometimes she closed her eyes and imagined Tom kissing her in the rain over at the Frankenstein Place, and she was as beautiful as Susan Sarandon, who played Janet.

“Is he here? I don’t see him,” Leta said as she and Agnes pushed past the pimply-faced door guardian who asked for tickets and checked IDs, turning away anyone who wasn’t seventeen. Leta and Agnes had been granted a pass from the theater manager who used to go to A.A. meetings with Agnes’s mom.

“He’s behind the counter, same as always. Get to it,” Agnes answered, and Leta felt her heartbeat quicken.

Tom’s hair shone in the glow of the popcorn machine. “Can I get you something?” he asked.

“Can I have a Sprite, please?” Leta felt she should say something more, to keep the conversation flowing like she’d read in a TeenBeat article, “Snag Your Crush!” “I really want a Coke but I have an ulcer? And my doctor said I can’t drink Coke anymore because it gives me a stomachache?”

Tom jiggled the cup under the stream of pale, foaming soda. “Bummer.”

“It’s the same with popcorn, bad for my ulcer,” Leta continued. “I had to have a barium swallow. They call it a ‘delicious strawberry milkshake’ but it’s like drinking strawberry-flavored chalk. I almost barfed it back up.”

“Hey, Tom, I can cover for you if you want time with your girlfriend,” the other guy at the counter snickered, and Leta’s face went lava-red.

“Shut up, Marco. That’ll be a dollar twenty-five,” Tom said.

Quickly, Leta dropped her change on the counter. Agnes pushed her toward Theater 2. “Smooth move, Ex-lax. At this rate, you’ll never get kissed. Come on. I don’t wanna get stuck in the back with the virgins.”

Leta and Agnes settled into their seats, third row center. When the lights dimmed and the familiar red lips and white teeth glowed on the screen, the audience erupted into cheers, and Leta felt that surge of excitement in her belly, the thrill of sitting in the dark with strangers sharing an experience that made them all seem like friends. She and Agnes sang along to every lyric. They threw toast and shouted comebacks. But once Columbia was on-screen, Leta was alert, her feet miming the steps below her seat, her hands making small motions on her lap. Only once did she look away, her eye drawn by a flash of gold on the front row. There sat Jennifer Pomhultz wearing her sister’s gold-sequined baton twirler’s outfit with fringe at the shoulders. So Jennifer hadn’t come as Magenta at all but as Columbia, and Leta felt a surge of panic mixed with hatred as Jennifer also imitated Columbia’s moves. Leta elbowed Agnes and pointed.

Agnes’s mouth hung open in disbelief. “That bitch!”

Someone on their row—a virgin—made the mistake of starting up the battery-powered carving knife way too early. Its electric growl disturbed the mood, and the audience pounced with a chorus of shushing.

After the movie, Leta and Agnes waited out front for Mr. Tatum to come pick them up. It was brisk in the parking lot—the flatlands of Texas could be surprisingly cold in winter. Leta crossed her arms to stay warm and brooded over Jennifer Pomhultz. “I can’t believe her. She can have anyone else, but Columbia’s mine.”

Agnes waved it away. “Don’t worry about it. By next week, she’ll be Riff Raff.”

But Leta did worry. That’s why she had an ulcer. Even now, her stomach burned with acid, and she wished she’d brought her Maalox along.

“Hey, aren’t you Diana’s sister, Agnes?” A guy with dark hair and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt walked up to them, tossing his cigarette in the parking lot on the way. Leta recognized him from her brother’s high school yearbook. His name was Roger, and he raced motocross. “I’m Roger. I’ve seen you around.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen you, too.” Agnes said it really cool, but she was smiling in a way Leta had never seen her smile before.

Mr. Tatum was late as usual, and for a half hour they stood around talking and trying to stay warm. Roger made fun of Agnes but it was really a compliment, and when Agnes fake-punched his arm, Leta could see she wasn’t insulted at all; she was thrilled. At last, Leta saw Mr. Tatum’s old white Buick edging into the lot from College Drive. Mrs. Tatum had taken their new car when she left to “find herself” on an ashram last year, leaving Agnes and her sister Diana in the lurch with a dad who was no more than a shadow in their house.

“Your dad’s here,” Leta warned, and Agnes moved away from Roger.

“So, you wanna go see a movie tomorrow or something?” Roger asked Agnes.

“Sure. Okay.”

Mr. Tatum drove up and honked the horn. He sat in the driver’s seat staring straight ahead. Agnes jotted her phone number on the back of an old napkin and offered it to Roger with a smile that gave Leta an uneasy feeling in her stomach, like the climb on a roller coaster when you’ve glimpsed the first steep drop but there’s nothing to do but hold on till the end.

Dammit, Janet

Two weeks later, on a Saturday, Leta spent the night at Agnes’s house. Aggie’s grandmother had suffered a fall, and her dad was in Kansas arguing with the siblings about what should be done. This left Agnes’s older sister, Diana, on duty, but she’d gone off with her friends. In exchange for the girls’ silence, she’d promised them one monumental favor, no questions asked, to be collected at a future date.

Leta and Agnes enjoyed having the house to themselves. They pretended they were stewardesses sharing an apartment in New York City, where they entertained rock stars and heads of state. Leta said her name was Astrid Van Der Waal, and she was also a Swedish princess. Agnes called herself Agatha Frank-N-Furter until Leta objected, so she changed it to just Agatha, like Cher, and said she was a spy. When they tired of that game, they cooked Tuna Helper in a small black pan, adding in canned corn because it was a vegetable. They scooped it all up with Doritos and washed it down with lemonade concocted from water and neon-pink powder in a jar. They’d lost count on the spoonfuls and the lemonade was puckery tart. It left a coating on Leta’s tongue that made everything taste slightly off.

“You know what you say to corn?” Leta said, giggling.

“No, what?”

“See you later!” Leta laughed so hard some of her Tuna Helper fell out of her mouth. When Agnes didn’t laugh, Leta explained, “See you later? Because corn comes out in your poop?”

Agnes rolled her eyes. “You probably shouldn’t say that around guys. They’ll think you’re gross.”

Leta felt confused. They always laughed at poop jokes. Always.

“Guess what?” Agnes said. “Roger invited me to a party.”

Leta took a bite of Tuna Helper. It still tasted like lemonade powder. “When is it?”

“Friday night.” Agnes did not look at Leta when she said this.

“But that’s Rocky Horror night.”

“Yeah, sorry. I’m not gonna be able to go this weekend.”

“But we always go to Rocky Horror on Fridays. And Jennifer’s still dressing as Columbia. I need you as my wingman. You have to come.”

Agnes glared. “Oh, Leta, grow up.”

They spent the rest of the night not speaking. As she lay in her sleeping bag, her mind going over and over the conversation like a rosary, Leta noticed that Agnes’s horse models weren’t on her shelves anymore. Instead there was a dried-out rose in a vase and a new poster of some motocross champ she’d never heard of. When Leta’s mom came for her on Sunday morning, Leta packed her stuff and ran out to the car without even saying good-bye.

THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES

“Who in here has heard of the band Steely Dan?”

Leta’s student teacher, Miss Shelton, looked out hopefully at the class. She had on her flared jeans, feather earrings, and kimono top. Her long blond hair hung down straight as a sheet of ice, and her magnificent boobs were pushed into a canyon of cleavage that had every boy in class sitting at attention.

Tracy Thomas raised her hand. “Will this be on the test, Miss Shelton?”

“No, Tracy,” she said with a wink.

Miss Shelton had tried to get everyone to call her Amy on the first day, but their teacher, Mrs. Johnston, had looked up from her Texas history essays wearing an expression like she’d just swallowed an egg. “I think Miss Shelton will be best,” she said with a smile. But today, Mrs. Johnston was out doing teacher in-service, and Miss Shelton was holding up an album cover that had a photo of a red-and-white ribbon streaking down the middle, like the remnant of a torn American flag.

“This is Aja, the new album from Steely Dan,” Miss Shelton said, as if speaking of gods. “I’m going to put this on, and we’re going to talk about what you feel when you hear the music.”

Miss Shelton dropped the needle on the record, and the record player’s ancient speakers crackled and popped. The song sounded slightly Chinese and floaty, and it reminded Leta of when she and her brother Stevie were kids bobbing down the river in giant inner tubes. She closed her eyes and saw Stevie in her mind as he was then, his head lolling back against the black rubber. He was singing some stupid novelty song about not liking spiders and snakes, giving it an exaggerated country twang, making her laugh. Sometimes, if she thought really hard, she could still see Stevie the way he was before the accident. But it never seemed to last long.

Miss Shelton passed between the rows of desks. “What does this music make you feel? Remember, there are no wrong answers. Anyone?”

“Horny,” Jack Jessup whispered, and the back of the class erupted in laughter.

“Besides horny,” Miss Shelton said, giving him a playful swat.

“It makes me think of flying through clouds.” It was Cawley Franklin. He and Leta had drama after school together.

“Good, Cawley! Anyone else?” Miss Shelton stopped at Leta’s desk. “Leta, how about you? What does this song make you feel?”

Leta’s mind was flooded with images. Roger driving Agnes around the neighborhood on his motorcycle. Stevie propped up on his navy bedspread in his room, watching afternoon TV, babbling words that made no sense, his useless left arm and hand curled against his side like a sea creature forced from its shell. Her dad packing his shoehorn and shaving cream into a small case that fit into a larger suitcase that fit into the trunk of the car that drove him to a job in another state.

“Nothing,” Leta said. “Sorry.”

Cawley Franklin caught up to Leta in the hall after class. He was tall and rangy, with the hunched, loping walk of someone who hadn’t completely moved into every part of his body yet. His long, blond hair hung like two curtains on either side of his freckled face. Cawley had transferred to Crocker Junior High last year, and now he lived with his grandmother out past the mobile home park near the Happy Trails Drive-In where you could watch old horror movies for a buck.

“Whad’ja think of AAAA-ja?” he sang, imitating Donald Fagen’s nasally tone.

“I don’t know. Kind of weird. I like Pink Floyd a lot better. What did you think?”

“Dunno. Mostly I couldn’t stop looking at Miss Shelton’s boobs.”

Leta rolled her eyes. “Nice. You going to the Popcorn tomorrow?”

“Indeed,” he said, twirling a fake mustache.

“You’re weird,” Leta said, but she was laughing.

OVER AT THE FRANKENSTEIN PLACE

After school, Leta let herself into the house. She could hear her mother talking on the phone, so she slipped down the hall to Stevie’s room and knocked. He wouldn’t answer, she knew that, so she pushed it open. Her brother sat on his bed watching the small black-and-white TV in the corner.

Leta took a spot on the floor beside the bed. She’d learned not to sit too close to Stevie. Sometimes he spazzed out, his arms making uncontrolled movements. Once he’d accidentally smacked Leta in the face, busting her lip. The seizures were the scariest, though. He’d had four since he’d come home from the hospital. Each one seemed to be worse than the last.

“Hey,” Leta said. “What’s happening on Lost in Space? Dr. Smith up to his old tricks?”

Stevie’s left hand twitched, and Leta automatically moved back. His hair had grown back straight and brown over the indent in his left temple where the bullet had gone in. On a clear, cold day in October, Stevie and his best friend Miguel had been down at the lake shooting at snapping turtles. They were just packing up to come home when the gun discharged by accident. In an instant, the bullet pierced Stevie’s temple and did its damage, taking a detour down into his lung where it lived still, a bud of metal that might bloom at any moment and kill him. Sometimes it felt like that bullet had traveled further, though. Like it had flown right through their family, splitting them into a before-and-after that couldn’t be put back together.

The TV hiccupped with static.

“Adjust,” Stevie rasped.

Sighing, Leta trudged to the gigantic Magnavox that was so old it still had rabbit ears. She moved the antennae back and forth, stealing glances at the snowy TV, trying to see if the picture had sharpened.

“Better?” Leta asked, her hands still on the antennae. Her brother’s hand twitched. “Stevie,” Leta said slowly and firmly. “Is the picture better now?” Sometimes she had to repeat things two or three times until Stevie understood them completely, and even then, he might answer with the wrong words, a sentence frustratingly out of order that you had to decipher like a secret code.

Leta gave up. “You need anything else?”

“Yes,” Stevie said, shaking his head no. “I’m the robot.”

“Great. You’re the robot. Just what we need in this family.”

“Robots in the house!” Stevie insisted.

Leta’s stomach flared with a familiar, burning pain, and she took a deep breath. “Okay, then. Don’t watch too much. It’s bad for your eyes.”

“You adjust, adjust,” she heard him say as she walked away.

In the kitchen, Leta’s mom was putting the finishing touches on a casserole. It seemed to Leta that her mom had gotten older just since Stevie’s accident. Like someone had let a little of the air out of her, and now her features didn’t have enough to puff them up anymore.

“I’m putting this in the freezer because it’s not for us,” her mother announced as if she were answering some urgent question on Leta’s part, which she wasn’t. “It’s for the progressive dinner at church on Friday night.”

“I’ll call the papers.”

Her mother turned, hands on her hips. “Was that necessary?”

Yes, it was, Leta wanted to say. She couldn’t say why it felt so very necessary to be angry with her mother all the time, but it did. She would walk into a room where her mother sat reading or grading papers and be consumed with a sudden need to wound that would be followed moments later by a terrible guilt and an equally ferocious longing to be forgiven and comforted.

Leta opened the fridge door and waited for something to announce itself. “Friday night is Rocky Horror night. It’s your turn to drive.”

“Well, I can’t take you. Get Agnes’s dad to do it. And close the refrigerator door!”

Leta closed it hard and her mother glared. “Mr. Tatum is going to some convention.”

“Ask her sister. Ask Diana.”

“They’re going to camp out for concert tickets.”

“Well, that’s just too bad,” her mother snapped.

“Mo-o-o-om!”

“Cry me a river, young lady. You’ll just have to skip it this week.”

Leta thought of Jennifer Pomhultz in her sequined baton twirler’s outfit dancing her Six Flags routine onstage, silhouetted by the eight-foot-tall reflection of Columbia as Tom Van Dyke stood clapping in the back, a look of love in his eyes.

“This is important to me! Why can’t you just understand me for once?”

Her mother slammed a bag of frozen peas onto the counter, turning it over and over to break apart the icy scar tissue connecting them inside. “Oh, yeah? Well, why is it always my job to do everything? When did I sign up to be mother of the world? That’s what I want to know.”

“I didn’t ask for a kidney,” Leta mumbled, fighting back tears. She reached into the fridge and quickly grabbed a Coke.

“I heard that. And you know you can’t have Coke with your ulcer. If you think I’m going to pay for another barium swallow, you’ve got another think coming, young lady.”

Leta slammed the Coke onto the refrigerator’s top shelf. Her mother whipped around, pointing the bag of peas at her. It sagged like one of those melting guns in a cartoon. “Break that refrigerator and just see what happens.”

Leta rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to break the stupid refrigerator.”

“You bet you won’t,” her mother said. “It’s five o’clock. Drink your Maalox.”

“Fine!” Leta took the Maalox bottle out of the cabinet above the sink. She swallowed down the white, chalky spoonful of medicine, trying not to gag. Three times a day, she had to drink the stuff, letting it coat her insides with a protective film.

In the back of the house, Stevie was shouting at the TV. Leta’s mom flinched. “Go see what he needs, please.”

“You do it. He’s not my kid,” Leta shouted, running for the front yard where she stood panting, trapped on all sides. Next door, their neighbor Mrs. Jaworski clipped at her roses with short, hard snips. Mrs. Jaworski was seventy-five and wore a flowered housedress and frosted orange lipstick outside the lines of her lips like a clown. She hated kids in general, teenagers specifically, and Leta in particular. As Leta tried to sneak back in without being noticed, she was caught by the tinny sound of Mrs. Jaworski’s voice. “You kids better stop throwing your Coke cans in my yard, young lady.”

“Sorry?” Leta answered.

“You’d better be sorry. I found three of them in my yard just this morning. Look!” With her snippers, she pointed to the grass where three crushed soda cans had been carefully laid out like the dead. She’d actually posed them. It was unreal.

“Those aren’t mine,” Leta said.

“I’ll tell your father!”

“My dad’s not here,” Leta answered back, but Mrs. Jaworski wasn’t listening.

Leta crept around the house to the back bedroom, which had been her father’s old study, and let herself in quietly through the window. She never came in here, really, and now, her mom’s decoupage supplies took up half of the room. Leta’s dad had moved to Hartford, Connecticut, four months ago when his company relocated, but they’d stayed behind because her parents said the housing market was in a slump. “No sense selling until we know for sure whether this job is going to be permanent,” her dad had explained as they sat at a table in Luby’s Cafeteria in the mall while her mother ignored her beef Stroganoff and kept a hand pressed to her mouth like a dam. When she finally spoke, she only said, “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, Leta,” but she looked at Leta’s dad when she said it, and the next week, he was living in Hartford, and Leta was helping her mom with Stevie.

At first, Leta had really missed her dad. But now sometimes she forgot he existed. When that happened, when she’d remember him as an afterthought while blow-drying her hair or finding a pair of his slippers in the laundry room, she’d be hit by a wave of guilt. She knew she should miss him more, but she didn’t, and now that he was gone, she began to realize that he’d never really been around much. Even her fuzziest memories were of her dad hunched over the newspaper at breakfast or sitting in his study at night “crunching numbers.” In these grainy memory slide shows, she saw him walking to his car in the mornings, coming home for dinner at night an hour after Leta, Stevie, and her mom had eaten. Later, on his way to the back of the house, he’d appear in her doorway like an apparition.

“How ya doin’, kiddo?”

Leta would look up from her magazine. “Good,” she’d say.

“Whatcha reading there?”

“TeenBeat.”

“I thought you liked those, whatchamacallit, those Nancy Drew books?”

“Yeah. In fourth grade.”

“Ah, gotcha. Well, turn on a light. Reading in the dark is bad for your eyes.”

And then he’d be gone again and Leta would be left with the impression that they’d never really had a conversation at all.

Back in her room, Leta dropped the needle on the Rocky Horror soundtrack. As Tim Curry sang, “Don’t Dream It, Be It,” Leta powdered her face to a chalky finish and drew wire-thin eyebrows above her own with a Maybelline pencil that used to be her mom’s. She sighed as she came to her hair. It was all wrong—lank and brown, not short and punkish-red like Columbia’s. On the other side of the wall, Stevie moaned and shouted random words—“Robot! Fire! Adjust! Car!”—while her mother cooed to him, but her voice still sounded angry underneath.

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Leta murmured to no one. Her mother called for her, and Leta blared the soundtrack, singing ferociously this time, twirling around her room till she felt dizzy and sick and the glittery surface of her ceiling seemed to move like an alien thing waiting to eat her.

TOUCH-A, TOUCH-A, TOUCH ME

The next afternoon, Agnes was waiting for Leta at her locker. They hadn’t spoken in a while, and Leta found she was elated to see her friend.

Agnes waved her over. “We need to talk. Can you ditch gym?”

“What if I get in trouble?”

“Go to the nurse. Say you got your period and your mom is coming to pick you up. Then meet me in the girls’ bathroom on the first floor. Here, wrap my sweater around your waist like you’re covering up a stain on your pants.”

It took some doing, but Leta managed to convince the school nurse—who really did not want to know too much information about Leta’s periods—to give her a pass. Then Leta met Agnes in the girls’ bathroom. Agnes stuck her head under every stall to make sure they were alone.

“What is it?” Leta asked.

“Promise not to tell anybody?”

“Promise.”

“Double promise,” Agnes insisted.

“Okay, I double promise!”

They sank to the floor with their heads under the sinks.

“I let Roger finger me,” Agnes said.

Leta’s stomach made a small flip, and her head felt light and dizzy and full of white noise, as if she’d finally taken that first plunge on the roller coaster ride. “You what?”

“I let him put his finger in my?—”

“I know what fingering is, Aggie. Jesus,” Leta interrupted. Her heart beat against her ribs. “Did it hurt?”

“Sort of. You get used to it pretty quick, though, and then it’s not so bad.”

“Not so bad, or good?”

Leta could practically feel Agnes’s shrug. The doors swung open. A small girl came in, glancing nervously from Agnes to Leta and back.

“Go ahead,” Agnes growled, and the girl raced into a stall. In a second, they could hear her peeing in fits and starts like she wasn’t sure she should be.

Agnes lowered her voice to an excited whisper. “He said he really, really likes me, that he could maybe fall in love with me.”

“Wow,” Leta said, matching the urgent quiet of Agnes’s tone. “Did y’all do anything else?” She wanted to know. She didn’t want to know.

“Not yet,” Agnes giggled, and Leta felt the words like two quick gunshots. “We have to get you a boyfriend, Leta.”

Leta zipped her hoodie up over her mouth. “I’m working on it,” she said, her voice sweatshirt-muffled.

The bathroom rumbled with flushing, and the girl came out of the stall with her head down. She rushed for the bathroom door, not even stopping to wash her hands.

“Gross,” Agnes said. “Seventh graders. What can you do?”

WILD AND UNTAMED THING

Wednesday afternoons Leta spent at the Popcorn Players Community Theater—“where the play’s the thing!” The theater was housed in the city civic center, a big drum of a building with an indoor walking track around the perimeter on the second floor. When Leta walked in, Cawley was perched on a ladder in the center, attaching papier-mâché flowers with a staple gun.

Seeing her, he bellowed, “Juliet! Forget thy father and refuse thy name!”

“Cawley!” Leta hissed, embarrassed. She dropped her jacket and purse on a folding chair. “What did I miss?”

Cawley hopped off the ladder and squinted up at the civic center’s walking track, where two older ladies race-walked in circles, their jewelry glinting under the harsh fluorescent lighting. “Well, those blue-hairs in the matching pink track suits have gone around about fifteen times now. I think they’re going for the gold. Oh, hey, look what I found in the props box.” He pulled out a gold lamé tuxedo jacket. “I know it’s not exact, but I thought you could use it for Rocky Horror. I mean, it’s sorta close to Columbia’s.”

Leta slipped it on. The jacket was a man’s and too big, but it could work. “This is great. Thanks.”

“Sure.” Cawley pulled a package of vanilla wafer cookies out of his backpack and offered one to Leta. “So, where’s Agnes today?”

“With Roger at some motocross thing.” The force of the words sent wet cookie fluff flying from her mouth to her cheek.

“She’s into motocross now?”

“No. She’s into Roger.” Leta thought of Agnes’s confession in the girls’ bathroom. It made her stomach hurt. “I need some milk.”

They took the stairs to the dark cool of the civic center’s basement where the wheezing vending machines lived. Leta pushed A7 and a plastic carton of milk ka-thunked its way into the tray below. She gulped it greedily, but her insides still burned.

“I shouldn’t tell you this,” Leta began. “Agnes let Roger finger her.”

Cawley’s eyes widened. “Whoa.”

Leta buried her face in her hands. “God, I shouldn’t have told you that—she’d kill me! Don’t say anything! Promise me!”

“I promise. Are they doing it?”

“No! Gah, Cawley. Don’t be gross.”

“Sorry.” Cawley tucked his hair behind his ear. “So…have you ever, you know?”

Leta felt the blush to her toes. She laughed too loud. “No! God, no. I mean, not…I mean, no.”

“I wasn’t trying to say that you did or anything or, you know, I was just—well, since you said that about Aggie…”

He let the words die and they each took another swig of their drinks. Leta stared hard at the sign on the wall that said MAINTENANCE. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

“What about you?” she heard herself ask. “Have you ever, you know, done that with anybody?”

“Huh-uh,” Cawley said, and his hair fell forward again, covering his face.

“Actually, I’ve never been kissed.” Leta didn’t know why she said it, but she couldn’t take it back now.

Cawley let his hand rest on top of hers. “I’d kiss you. If you want.”

Leta had imagined this moment. She’d imagined it with Tom. Tom breaking form in marching band to pull her to the field, where he would gaze into her eyes, kissing her passionately while the marching band formed a perfect heart around them. She did not imagine this: strange, quirky Cawley with wafer cookies on his breath offering to kiss her as some sort of charity mission, like he could collect karma points for it to post into some little karma booklet and trade it in for prizes later.

Leta pulled her sweater down over the roll of softness around her middle. “Um, thanks, but…”

The metal stairs clanged with the arrival of the senior-citizen exercisers. Cawley took Leta’s hand, leading her quickly into the dark of the rarely used men’s restroom down the hall.

“The door has a lock,” he said, and she heard it click. It occurred to Leta that she should probably be a little scared, but it didn’t seem like this was really happening to her.

“Okay, here goes,” Cawley said.

In the dark, Leta sensed Cawley’s face homing in on hers from above. He was a good four inches taller than she was, and Leta had to angle her head up and to the side. There was a bit of ticklish fuzz on his upper lip, and his breath was warm and vanilla-cookie sweet. They went in for the kiss at the same time and bumped noses hard.

“Ow!”

“Sorry,” Cawley said.

“It’s okay.” Leta rubbed the sting away.

Cawley touched her arm. “Try again?”

This time, Cawley angled her face slightly sideways, a slight adjustment that avoided another nose collision. His lips mashed against hers. Leta held perfectly still and wondered what she was supposed to do now. Was she supposed to be overcome with passion? Was it supposed to come naturally or did you have to practice? God, she should have tried Frenching her pillow like Agnes told her to, because now, here she was in the community theater men’s bathroom trying to kiss a boy and feeling nothing but embarrassed and slightly repulsed. His hand found her waist and she flinched at his touch.

Cawley pulled away. “Sorry. Did I get your boobs?”

“No!” Leta laughed in embarrassment.

“’Cause I wasn’t trying to, I swear.”

“No, it’s fine if, um…it’s okay.”

Cawley’s mouth pressed against hers again. His hand slipped back to her waist and Leta tried sucking in her stomach but then she didn’t have enough air to actually kiss and she had to let it go. His tongue lay on hers like a piece of fish she hadn’t decided whether she wanted to eat or eject. Should she do something with it? If so, what? Maybe she should dart it in and out quickly, cobra-style?

Cawley stopped. “Not so wide,” he whispered.

“Sorry,” Leta said. She’d opened her mouth big like going to the dentist, in order to give his tongue room. Now, she closed it, and it was a little better. They kissed for a few more seconds and Leta broke away. Her face was warm and her upper lip was sweaty; she had the overwhelming desire to escape. “We should probably get back before somebody comes in.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll go first and you can follow. But not too closely, okay? Count to twenty. No, count to fifty. Okay? Fifty?”

“Your wish is my command,” Cawley joked.

While Cawley was counting to fifty in the bathroom, Leta made a beeline for the smoke-filled theater management office to ask if she could stuff envelopes for the upcoming pledge drive instead of painting flats. The manager, Mr. Weingarten, handed her a fat stack, and Leta wedged herself in a far corner between a file cabinet and an enormous fake plant where she couldn’t be seen. The kiss was a letdown, not at all like the kisses she saw on TV. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to do it again. Leta spent the rest of the hour licking away the memory of it until her tongue was dry as cotton. At five o’clock, she bolted, but Cawley caught up with her at the civic center’s front doors.

“Sorry,” Leta said, her words rushing out on a weak stream of breath. “Weingarten made me stuff envelopes.”

“Drag-a-mundo.” Cawley smiled. “Hey, thanks, you know, for earlier.”

Leta’s face grew hot. “Sure. Well, I gotta go. My mom’s waiting.”

Cawley leaned in, and Leta practically fell through the doors, running for the safety of her mother’s car.

“Hey, see you over at the Frankenstein Place,” Cawley called after her.

Leta pretended not to hear.

HOT PATOOTIE—BLESS MY SOUL!

“Did he kiss you? Oh, my god—details!” Agnes squealed into the phone.

Leta pulled the phone cord as far as it would allow onto the back patio, closing the door to a small crack. The concrete was cold under her bare feet. Through the window she could see her mother on the couch reading a biography of one of the presidents, her hair in rollers and her mouth set into a hard line, as if the book were disappointing her somehow but she was determined to read till the end.

“Yes. Sorta. I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? Did y’all kiss or not?”

“We…did?”

Agnes screeched on the other end so that Leta had to hold the phone away from her ear. “Oh, my god! I can’t believe you kissed Creepy Cawley!”

“He is not creepy. He’s actually pretty funny. And nice.”

“For a weirdo.”

“You know what? Forget I said anything. God.”

“I’m sorry,” Agnes said, but she was still laughing a little, and Leta wasn’t sure she really meant it. “So, tell me—was he any good? Oh, my god, did he try to feel you up?”

“No?—”

“Did you know he’s adopted? Like he thought his grandma was his mom but it turns out his Aunt Susie in Oklahoma is his real mom. She gave him up to his grandmother so she could go to college and get on with her life. I guess he found it out last year. He asked his mom—his real mom—if he could come live with her in Oklahoma, and she said no.”

“Oh,” Leta said. She didn’t like that Agnes knew something about Cawley that she didn’t.

“Jay McCoy told me they got drunk once in a field and Cawley got quieter and quieter, and then, all of a sudden, he stood up and started screaming at the top of his lungs and hitting at this old oil drum. Remember last year when he broke his hand and he said it was a botched alien probe? Well, that’s what really happened.”

Leta could see Cawley in her mind then—the uncooperative blond hair, the crooked smile, the gap between his two front teeth, the secondhand-store bowling shirt he wore that said “Eugene” on the pocket. All those things she’d always found comforting about him now seemed turned; he’d gone from dorky-cute to intolerable in one phone call, and she couldn’t seem to reverse it.

“Roger and I almost did it today,” Agnes said suddenly.

Leta sank to the ground out of sight of the window. “You what?”

“I want to do it with him,” Agnes said as if she were planning a class trip.

“Are you sure you want to have…” Leta lowered her voice to a whisper. “Sex with him?”

“Who are you on the phone with?” Leta’s mother appeared on the porch, startling her.

“The Kremlin!” Leta snapped, her heart beating wildly.

“You shouldn’t joke about that sort of thing. You never know who’s listening in.”

“What’s your mother’s problem now?” Agnes snarled on the other end.

“She thinks the FBI’s tapped our phones.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Agnes whistled.

“Give me the phone.” Her mother made a swipe for it, but Leta dodged her. “It’s nearly ten o’clock, Leta Jane. Tell Agnes good night.”

“I’m not finished.”

“It’s late!”

“I’m not finished!” Leta held fast to the phone.

“Well, don’t stay on too long. It’s a school night,” her mother said. She padded silently to her room and closed the door with a soft thwick. Leta knew she’d won this round, but suddenly, she wished she hadn’t. It didn’t feel safe; it was like she’d taken her first steps in space only to find that her line wasn’t anchored to anything and she was hopelessly adrift.

“I better go,” Agnes said. “My dad just got home.”

“We have to talk, though,” Leta insisted. “Do you wanna go to the mall tomorrow?”

“Can’t. I’m going to Roger’s.”

“Oh,” Leta said. “Okay.”

“Not for that,” Agnes scoffed. “I’m sitting in on his band’s rehearsal.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, I know! Isn’t that so cool?”

“Wow,” Leta said again.

“Don’t let your mother drive you too crazy.”

“I won’t.” When Leta hung up, she realized they’d never finished talking about her sort-of-maybe first kiss, and all her unasked questions settled inside her, heavy as sand.

That night, Leta embraced her pillow, imagining Tom’s face in the whiteness above her. “I love you,” she said, because you were supposed to say that when you kissed. She pressed her lips to the pillow. Her tongue ventured out, meeting with an unwelcoming, cotton starchiness that robbed her mouth of all moisture.

With a sigh, she flipped the pillow over, wet spot down, and stared at the wall. In the next room, Stevie’s TV was on. She could hear the drone of it, all the shows and commercials blurring into one another. Stevie was talking, too, saying words that she knew didn’t match—cat when he meant house, football instead of man. She wondered if it made any sense to him and if it mattered that no one else understood. Was it lonely not to be able to communicate with other human beings, or was it a relief to stop trying?

Across the hall, soft, strangled cries came from her mom’s bedroom. It reminded Leta of a nature show she’d seen once where a bear cub had caught its foot in a trap. It cried for help, and when none arrived, its cries became a muted yelp it used to comfort itself until sleep came. Leta turned away from the sounds in her mother’s room. She pressed herself closer to the wall and let the TV’s soft, repetitive noise lull her to sleep as if she were five and her parents were having a dinner party, their muffled voices in the living room a soothing wall of sound that stood between her and the rest of the world.

Leta awoke to the sound of Stevie screaming and her mother shouting. Still dazed, she stumbled into her brother’s room. Her mother had him pinned to the bed, but she was no match for him. His arm caught her across the face and she flew back, blood pooling at her lip. Stevie shook for a second and settled.

“It’s over,” Leta said, but she was trembling.

“I didn’t sign up for this.” Her mother stifled a sob. She held up a blood-smeared hand. “I need to change him now.”

Leta knew this was her cue to leave, so she turned on the little TV again, working the rabbit ears until the image was clear, letting the soft constant sound numb them all into a sleepful waking.

SCIENCE FICTION/DOUBLE FEATURE

On Friday, Leta went to Rocky Horror alone. She’d never gone without Agnes, and as she got out of her mother’s car wearing more makeup than usual, she felt adrift. Standing in the lobby by herself, she searched for a new tribe of Rocky fans to join, but they all seemed complete already. Jennifer had added a red wig to her outfit, and Leta imagined using Riff-Raff’s gun to laser it to pieces.

“Leta?”

Leta turned around to see Miss Shelton standing behind her with some of her friends.

“Hi, Miss Shelton.”

“Amy, please!” her student teacher laughed. “Hey y’all, this is one of my students, Leta. Are you here for The Rocky Horror Picture Show?”

“Yeah, I come every—well, most every Friday,” Leta said.

Miss Shelton’s eyes widened, and Leta enjoyed feeling like she was part of the secret club. “Cool. Are you here by yourself?”

“Yeah,” Leta admitted.

“Why don’t you come sit with us? We’ll save you a seat,” Miss Shelton said.

“Okay. Thanks.”

“Who is that?” It was Tom. He was talking to her. Tom. Talking. To her.

“She’s my teacher, um, a friend,” Leta answered.

“Huh,” Tom said, watching Miss Shelton head for Theater 2. He turned back to Leta with a smile. “Sprite, right?”

“Yeah.” Leta grinned. He knew her drink!

“Maybe later I’ll come find you guys. Save me a seat.”

“Sure,” Leta said, and it was like she’d swallowed the sun.

This was only the second time Miss Shelton and her friends had seen the movie, and Leta enjoyed playing Rocky Horror tour guide, showing them when to throw things, prompting them on comebacks. She didn’t even care that Jennifer stood up in front of her seat to dance. Miss Shelton laughed at all the right parts and even some that Leta didn’t understand. When Leta sang along to “Sweet Transvestite,” Miss Shelton high-fived her, and Leta couldn’t wait to tell Agnes about it. Maybe Agnes would be jealous of her new friendship with Miss Shelton, who was super pretty and cool and in college.

Toward the end of the movie, during the floor show, Tom slid in next to Leta, taking the empty seat she’d dutifully saved for him with her jacket.

“Are those guys in makeup?” Tom whispered, and Leta felt it deep in her belly.

“Yeah,” she whispered back, relishing the nearness of his perfect ear.

“Huh. This is a weird movie, man.”

Leta stared at him. “You mean you’ve never seen it before?”

“Huh-uh. Not my thing.”

“Oh, my god, it’s like the best movie ever. Nothing’s as good as Rocky,” Leta said.

“I know one or two things,” Tom said and winked. “You want anything from the concession stand?”

Leta shook her head, and Tom reached in front of her to tap Miss Shelton on the arm. “You want anything? Coffee, tea, me?”

Miss Shelton laughed, and a woman with crimped hair and a maid’s outfit shushed them. Tom made a face, and even though Leta didn’t want the lady to be mad at her, she giggled anyway.

When the movie had ended, and they were huddled in the harsh glare of the theater lobby, Miss Shelton put her arm around Leta. “That beat hell out of Texas history, huh?”

“Yeah,” Leta said, but her eyes were on Tom.

“I gotta close down the place,” he said. “But, hey, let’s do the Time Warp again.”

“Sure. Okay.” Leta was still grinning. “See you next Friday for sure!”

“Yeah. See you then. You, too,” Tom said to Miss Shelton.

At the Popcorn on Wednesday, Cawley and Leta put the finishing touches on the set for Our Town. In the week since their kiss, Leta had managed to avoid him—taking a different hallway to classes, carrying all her books so as to skip her locker, ducking into the girls’ bathroom when necessary. But now they were at the Popcorn together, and Leta was determined to keep things strictly professional.

“Could you hand me those?” Leta pointed to a wad of tissue-paper flowers the size of a tricycle.

“Jennifer Pomhultz told Scotty West’s brother that she’s going to dance with the regulars at Rocky Horror this weekend,” Cawley said, holding the flowers in place.

“So?”

“So? We gotta show up and take her down.” We. He was already making them into a couple. “I’ve got it all figured out. My grandmother can drive me over around nine o’clock, and drop us off at the Pizza Hut. Then we could just walk over to the Cineplex from there later.”

“They’re pretty strict about IDs,” Leta said, letting the staple gun rip.

“But they let you in. Just tell ’em I’m your cousin or something. Your kissing cousin,” he joked.

Leta’s face went hot. It had been a mistake to kiss Cawley. She couldn’t be seen with him, not now that she had a shot with Tom. “Actually, I-I may not be able to go this weekend. I think my dad is coming. And, you know, we’re doing, like, family stuff.”

“Yeah, but the show’s not till midnight.”

“Sorry.”

“But Jennifer Pomhultz is trying to take your spot as Columbia! You have to go!”

“You’re not the boss of me, Cawley!”

Leta’s finger slipped on the staple gun, nearly catching Cawley’s thumb, and Leta thought of the gun going off, the bullet shattering her brother’s temple.

“Stupid!” she hissed, and she wasn’t sure who or what she meant by it.

That night, Leta’s dad called. His flat tones echoed over the phone, all the way from Connecticut, which sounded like a state you had to put together yourself from a kit. “Hey, kiddo, how’s eighth grade treating you?”

“Okay,” Leta said.

“How’s Agnes? Is she behaving?”

“I guess. You know Aggie.”

Her dad laughed. “Well, Stevie sounds good.” There was a pause. “Your mom getting on okay?”

Leta flicked a glance toward her mother, who was stirring anger into the pot of noodles on the stove. “Yeah.”

“Good, good. Good.”

Leta wanted to ask her dad when he was coming home. She wanted to know if he missed them, or if they were faint as the ghostly images on a negative. She wanted something she couldn’t name and she hoped he’d know what it was.

“Well, take care of yourself, kiddo. Lemme have another crack at your mom, there, okay?”

“Sure.” Leta handed off the receiver, ducking under the cord.

Her mother’s voice dropped to a wounded whisper. “I just don’t think I can do this anymore, Dean, I really don’t.”

When her mother had gone to sleep, Leta took the picture of Columbia she’d torn from a movie magazine and taped it to her bathroom mirror. From under the sink, she took out a box of red dye, coating her head and setting the egg timer for thirty minutes. Once she’d washed it out, she chopped at her lank strands, going shorter and shorter until her hair was just below her ears. It didn’t hang exactly even, but it wasn’t too bad. The dye was darker than she’d imagined—a deep auburn. It made her eyes greener and her skin more sallow. But most importantly, it made her seem older. Leta pulled on her winter cap so that her mother wouldn’t see the new hair before Rocky Horror. After tomorrow, it didn’t matter if she was grounded.

In the hushed dark of the kitchen, Leta swilled antacid straight from the bottle, wiping the gluey liquid from her mouth with the back of her hand. She tested the locks and checked the thermostat before opening the door to Stevie’s room a crack. He was sleeping. In the corner, the TV was all static, and the screen was as white as the surface of the moon.

SUPERHEROES

For the first time in nearly two months, Agnes and Leta were together on a Friday night, but they wouldn’t be together for long.

“You little shits better not get into trouble,” Diana said. “If I get grounded because of you, you’re both dead.”

“If I get in trouble, you get in bigger trouble,” Agnes said.

“Don’t make me kill you,” Diana said. She flipped them the bird before driving off.

The girls waited in the parking lot. From here, they could see the cars cruising the strip, making the endless loop from the Pizza Hut at the south end to the Sonic at the north.

Agnes ruffled Leta’s short red bob. “Your hair looks amazing.”

“Thanks. You look pretty. You’ve got protection, right?”

Leta and Agnes had seen films in their sex ed class about how easy it was to get pregnant, even if it was your first time. To Leta, watching the films seemed like trying to imagine living in a foreign country.

Agnes unzipped the pocket inside her purse to show Leta the small foil pouch. “All taken care of.”

A minute later, Roger rode up on his motorcycle. He nodded to Leta. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Leta answered. That was usually the extent of their conversations.

Agnes got on the back of the bike and put her arms around his waist. She rested her head against his back. It was funny how some people just seemed to fit.

“Don’t let Jennifer Pomhultz take your spot!” Agnes shouted. “And good luck with you-know-who!”

For a few minutes after Agnes left, Leta sat on the car hood, searching for Tom’s Camaro.

“Hey, I thought you couldn’t make it tonight!” Cawley called, startling her.

“I…it was sort of last minute,” Leta stammered.

“Cool! We can sit together.” Cawley slid in next to her on the car hood and put his arm around her shoulders.

“Um, I’m sort of meeting some friends here.”

“Okay, so we can all sit together.” He nuzzled her neck, and Leta flinched. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m just not—people might see us, you know?” Leta said, swallowing hard.

“What, are you embarrassed to be seen with me or something?” Cawley asked.

“I didn’t say that!”

“So what is it?” Cawley looked her in the eyes then, and she knew he wouldn’t go until she gave him the truth.

“I’m waiting for a guy,” Leta said at last.

Cawley shoved his hands in his pockets. “You could’ve just told me you didn’t want me to come.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want you to come, I just…” She stopped and pressed the backs of her hands to her eyes. She was making a mess of things. Why was it that the one person she wasn’t sure about was the only person who was sure about her? “I just wanted to go out with somebody else, okay? I’m allowed to do that, aren’t I? I mean, it’s still a free country and everything.”

“Yeah. Free country.” Cawley slid off the car hood and walked away from her, toward College Drive.

“I’ll see you at the Popcorn,” Leta added. It was a stupid thing to say. In response, Cawley kicked a trash can hard and it spun, nearly toppling over.

“Dammit, Janet,” Leta said to no one but the cars.

In the litter-strewn field behind the Cineplex, Leta finally found Tom in a tight huddle of older kids. She approached the pack cautiously, trying not to attract too much attention, waiting for them to notice her. When no one did, she cleared her throat.

Tom’s head popped up. He squinted at her.

“It’s me, Leta,” she said, patting at her new hair.

“Oh. Right. Hey, Lisa,” Tom said.

“Leta,” she corrected softly.

“Wanna party? Hey, make room for Lisa,” Tom instructed and Leta was ushered into the fold. A joint came her way, and she passed it to the pimply ticket-taking guy on her left.

“I can’t. I have an ulcer,” she offered by way of explanation.

“Don’t old men get that?” he asked, taking a hit.

“Some people just produce more stomach acid?” Leta said and immediately wished she hadn’t. “Anyway, it’s okay. I took my medicine.”

“How come you’re all dressed up like that?” one of the girls asked.

“For the movie. I’m Columbia.”

One of the guys snickered. “You’re Columbian? Can we smoke you?”

They all laughed then, and Leta didn’t understand why, but she wished Agnes were here and they were sitting in the warm movie theater throwing toast and singing like before.

“Hey, Leta!”

Leta turned to see Miss Shelton wobbling over on platform sandals. Her boobs quivered like unset gelatin. Everyone stared.

“Hi, Miss Shel—Amy.”

Miss Shelton gave Leta a little hug, like an older sister, and Leta was overcome by happiness. It would be okay. Everything would be okay. “I didn’t know you liked to party.”

“There’s a lot people don’t know about me,” Leta said, hoping it made her sound mysterious, a spy working undercover whom everyone took to be a dork but whose hands were actually lethal weapons.

“That was the last joint, but if you want to get high, I’ve got some primo weed in my car,” Tom said.

Miss Shelton grinned. “Let’s go.”

She hooked her arm through Leta’s and they followed Tom through the parking lot, over potholes and broken stubs of concrete barriers meant to keep the cars from banging into one another. Leta stole a glance behind her. A clump of fans stood behind the rope, and Leta had a fleeting wish to be with them.

Tom’s car smelled of cigarette smoke and new leather. Leta climbed behind the seat into the back while Miss Shelton and Tom sat in the front.

“Got this from a friend who was in Mexico,” Tom said, licking the rolling paper and forming a tight white missile of weed. Leta’s stomach fluttered. She didn’t want Tom to think she was uncool, but she didn’t want to get high, either.

“Ulcer,” she mumbled apologetically, and Tom handed off to Miss Shelton who took a hit and held it for a long time.

“You go to Texas Community?” he asked her.

“Umm,” Miss Shelton choked out. “Poly sci.”

“Cool.”

The joint went back and forth a few times, and Leta’s head felt balloon-light from the secondhand smoke.

“Nice car,” Miss Shelton said, exhaling smoke.

“Yeah? Thanks.” Tom’s eyes were glassy; his smile seemed liquid. “You like Ozzy?” He popped Blizzard of Oz into the Camaro’s stereo. “Crazy Train” filled the car.

“Bose speakers,” Tom shouted over the searing guitar licks. “Just put ’em in yesterday.”

Leta glanced nervously at the line forming for Rocky Horror. It snaked into the parking lot. “We should probably get in line.”

“Nah, it’s cool. I’ll just sneak us in the back way,” Tom said, his fingers lost in their air-drumming reverie, his eyes still on Miss Shelton.

Just then, Leta caught sight of Jennifer, who had added a bowler hat to her ensemble. “Are you sure we can get seats? That line looks pretty long and they’re letting people in….”

“It’s just a stupid movie. You’ve seen it a million times, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, it’s just…” Leta stopped. How could she explain that it was more than a movie to her? It was her home—the one consistent thing in her life. It didn’t matter how many times she’d seen it, she still got that funny feeling by the end that she’d been somewhere, that she had somewhere to go still.

Miss Shelton sat up and turned around in the front seat. “You know what that movie’s about, don’t you?”

Leta nodded. “Um, it’s about this couple who gets lost and they find this castle inhabited by aliens, and it’s a takeoff on all those 1950s horror/sci-fi movies where…”

“Sex,” Miss Shelton interrupted. “It’s about sex.”

“All right!” Tom gave a laugh and a high five to Miss Shelton.

“Come in!” Miss Shelton shouted. It was a line Leta never really got in the movie and she didn’t get it now, but it made her uncomfortable. She wanted out of the Camaro. She wanted to be standing in that line ahead of Jennifer Pomhultz, Agnes by her side singing out loud. She wanted to find Cawley wherever he was and say she was sorry.

“I’m just gonna go get in line,” Leta said.

“Suit yourself.” Tom opened the door, and Leta stumbled into the parking lot. In her fishnets, gold jacket, and new short hair, she felt suddenly exposed, as if people could see all the way through to her soul. Behind her, Tom gunned the Camaro’s motor and drove off with Miss Shelton, leaving her alone.

The movie was already starting when Leta sneaked in. She’d missed making a big entrance with her new hair and outfit. The place was packed, and Leta had to take a seat on the far left, stumbling over annoyed people on her way in. For the first time in months, Leta didn’t sing along. Instead, she watched the audience illuminated by the bright of the movie screen, their worshipful faces washed in a flickering blue, the light as inconstant as everything else. They sang, laughed, and spat back lines on cue. When the “The Time Warp” began, Leta was too tired to get up. Instead, Jennifer Pomhultz went onstage. The crowd urged her on, and by the end, she owned the part of Columbia. Jennifer took a little bow to wild applause while Leta sat numbly, her hands tucked under her sweaty thighs, feeling the fishnets bite into the skin of her palms.

When Frank-N-Furter sang about going home, a small spot of pain flared behind Leta’s ribs. Sitting here with everyone singing the same words, she suddenly felt lost and small, like an alien whose spaceship had crashed on a foreign planet where there were three moons and nothing in the sky looked right to her. The film ground to a halt, freezing on an image of Frank-N-Furter tossing playing cards so that the cards hung in the air. The audience booed and hissed as the lights came up and a manager walked to the front.

“Leta Miller? Is there a Leta Miller here?”

Leta raised her hand shyly.

“You have a phone call. Follow me, please. Sorry, folks. We’ll get the show going again in a minute.”

Leta’s cheeks burned as she moved up the aisles, past the annoyed audience members. Behind her, the lights dimmed and the movie started up sluggishly.

In the manager’s office, she took the call. “Hello?”

“Leta?” Her mother’s voice sounded small and desperate. “I’m at the hospital. With Stevie.”

“Is he okay?”

“I can’t leave. I called Mrs. Jaworski. She’s coming to pick you up. Wait out front.” And she hung up.

Mrs. Jaworski showed up in her Impala, her hair still in rollers, and they drove in silence to the hospital. It had rained, and the asphalt shone under the street lights.

Leta stared out at the road and felt her heart beating faster. Was Stevie dead? She allowed herself to imagine that moment: Her father coming home, neighbors and church members bringing by casseroles, her friends consoling her, Cawley forgiving her. Maybe then her mother could stop feeling so angry and pay attention to Leta again.

Mrs. Jaworski pulled the Impala up to the bright white lights of the hospital’s front entrance. She kept the engine running.

“Thanks,” Leta said.

Mrs. Jaworski patted her leg, and when Leta looked at her face, she could see that the old woman had taken the time to put on her orange lipstick. It lit up the dark like a flare. “I have a brother, lives in Alaska. A real pain in the ass. Family. They’re nothing but trouble.”

Leta nodded numbly and went in. On the way to the ICU, Leta caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror by the nurse’s station. She didn’t recognize anything about herself and it was startling. Quickly, she put her hat on, tucking the ends of her new hairdo underneath, but it didn’t help.

Her mother sat in the waiting room on an orange vinyl chair whose stuffing was popping out at the seams. She held fast to a white Styrofoam cup. In the corner above their heads, a TV was on but the sound was off.

Leta slid as quietly as possible into the seat beside her mother. “What happened?”

Her mother’s voice was flat. “He had a seizure. I found him on the floor, coughing up blood.”

“Is he gonna be okay?”

“It was a bad one. But he’s stable now. He’s stable.”

“So he’s gonna be fine,” Leta said, and she found that she was relieved after all. “Did you call Daddy?”

Her mother nodded. “He was going to fly home from Hartford, but I told him it was okay. We’re okay.”

We’re not okay, Leta wanted to scream. “You should have let him come.”

Her mother waved it away like she did most of what Leta had to say. “He’s working on that big account. And besides, the flights are so expensive.”

Her dad should be here. More than anything, she wanted him to be here. She wanted them to sit at the kitchen table and admit that everything had changed and none of them could stop change from happening; change was no one’s fault. They’d all been so careful, but Leta was tired now and she wanted to come off watch. She removed her cap, and her mother paled.

“Jesus God Almighty, Leta Jane Miller, what did you do to your HAIR?”

Leta put a hand to her newly shorn locks. It felt good against her skin, like freedom. “It’s just henna. It’s not permanent.”

“Nothing ever is.” Her mother crushed the flimsy cup and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. “I was going to start my master’s degree, but I guess that’s gone now. I guess I’m just not supposed to do anything. I should never make plans.”

“Stop it,” Leta said. “Just…stop.”

They sat in the hallway on unforgiving plastic seats under hospital lights that bleached them into gray ghosts of themselves while orderlies moved up and down the hallway, pushing carts stacked with laundered sheets, plastic water pitchers, tissue boxes, cups of ice—small comforts for the sick and weary.

“I’m sorry we’re too much for you,” Leta said, and she wished it hadn’t come out sounding sarcastic, because she meant it sincerely.

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” her mother answered, but she hesitated, and the pause held the truth. Leta’s mother reached over like she was going to hug her. Instead she picked a piece of popcorn off her sweater. “We’ve just had a scare is all. Everything’s okay now.”

A doctor called Leta’s mother over for a hushed conference by a gurney. Leta stared up at the ceiling until her eyes burned. She blinked fast, but the tears came anyway. It seemed a good time for tears. She cried for the way things had been, the way they would never be again. She cried for Agnes in a backseat with Roger, Agnes who had left Leta alone in a between-world of horse models and Rocky Horror and kissing boys in bathrooms. She thought about Jennifer’s perfect dance steps, the way she’d let that faker steal the moment from her, and she cried harder. A nurse passing patted her shoulder and then she was gone.

Later, Leta took a cab back to her house while her mother stayed on at the hospital. It was late, around three in the morning, and the street was hushed. A soda can glinted in Mrs. Jaworski’s grass. Leta picked it up and tossed it in the big green trash can beside her garage.

“Leta?”

Leta started at the sound of Agnes’s voice. She was sitting on the front porch, huddled under Roger’s jacket, looking small and frail.

“I was waiting for you. I figured you’d be home about an hour ago.”

“I was at the hospital. Stevie had another seizure.”

“Oh, my god! Is he okay?”

Leta only shrugged. “For now. I thought you were at Roger’s.”

“I was. Roger and me, we…you know. We did it,” Agnes said, and Leta couldn’t be certain if there was pride or sadness in it.

“Oh. Um, congratulations. I mean, was it…are you okay?”

Agnes’ bottom lip quivered. She started to cry. “I’m so stupid.”

“Aggie. Hey. What happened? Did he do something…weird?”

“No!” Agnes said, laughing through tears. “He was super nice to me. Look, he gave me his motocross ribbon.” She opened the jacket so that Leta could see the red ribbon pinned to her shirt.

“Hey, you won first place in the Losing Your Virginity contest,” Leta joked. Agnes burst into fresh sobs, and Leta felt a surge of panic. “Sorry. It was just a joke….”

“It’s not the stupid joke.” Agnes dragged her fingers over her eyes and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “It was fine, I think. It was nice. He told me I was pretty. I just…” She shook her head and took two deep breaths. “I’m different now. I can’t go back. You know?”

“Yeah. I know.”

Agnes’s face screwed up into fresh crying. “I started thinking about my mom, how I wished I could tell her about it. That’s totally stupid, isn’t it?”

“No,” Leta said. “Of course not.” Her breath came out in a puff of dragon smoke. When Leta and Agnes were kids, they’d put straws to their mouths and blow out, pretending they were smoking like the smiling women they saw in magazines who played tennis or lounged poolside, looking impossibly glamorous. In the yard, the trees stood small and naked. The sky above the houses was dark and unreadable, and Leta shivered in the cold.

“I really do love your hair. It’s totally cool.”

“Thanks,” Leta said. “My mom had a cow.”

“Even better,” Agnes said with a giggle. She quieted. “If I call Diana to come pick me up now I’ll never hear the end of it. Can I stay here?”

“Sure,” Leta said.

The house was full of shadows. Leta turned on a lamp that only illuminated the emptiness of the living room. Leta gave Agnes a pair of her pajamas and they pulled the quilt off Leta’s bed and spread it over the carpet in her room.

“Oh, Charlie!” Agnes took Leta’s Appaloosa from its place on the horse shelf and gave him a kiss. She tucked Roger’s jacket under her head and clutched Charlie to her chest. The girls lay together on the floor, shoulders touching, and talked about who was the cutest guy in TeenBeat, whether Leta should let her hair grow out or keep it short, if it would be totally fourth grade to stage Rocky Horror with the Barbies in the morning. As Agnes’s words became softer and fewer, fading at last to a light snore, Leta stared at the glittery flecks in the ceiling and imagined they were stars winking out a message only she could understand.