Page 38 of The Big Easy & Other Lies
“And after that?”
I climbed out of the car. “I don’t know. I’ll see you in the morning.” She waved and pulled out, and I faced my house with a sigh. It had a slightly weathered exterior, but we were outside the Garden District boundaries, so no one harassed us about keeping up appearances. New Orleans wasn’t a homeowner’s association kind of place. A slight hint of decay clung to almost everything. It was all part of the mystique.
Delphine’s house looked like all the others in our neighborhood. Old but not in bad shape. My great-grandparents had bought it when their textile business took off before the Great Depression hit. It had stayed in the family ever since. Delphine paid a landscaping service to maintain the outside often enough to keep people from asking questions. She suspected that everyone from the meter reader to the cable guy would narc her out to the city authorities for the mess inside, and she lived in fear that she would be the one to lose the family home.
That was why it was impossible to tell how bad things were by looking at the outside. I’m sure it was some big metaphor for my life, but in purely practical terms, it was a good thing. I didn’t want anyone poking around either because there was no way I wouldn’t be referred to the Department of Children and Family Services. I’d probably be pulled out for my “health and safety” before I could even pack a bag, and there was no telling where I’d end up. At least with Delphine I knew what I was dealing with.
This one girl in my third-grade class was a foster kid. We used to play together at recess. Her name was Mandy and her mom was in jail, which she mentioned like it was no big deal. She’d been placed with a foster family that already had a couple of other foster kids. One of them, a fourteen-year-old boy, gave her a black eye one night after a fight over the TV. Mandy was only in school for two more days, and then...she wasn’t. I never knew where she went, but I never forgot that black eye or the scary thought that the people in charge could move you around with no explanation. Or that they could put you in a place where bigger, meaner foster kids could hit you.
The front porch floorboards creaked under me, and I wasn’t all the way through the door before Delphine hollered for food. Ten minutes later, I set a microwaved tray of meat substance beside her and tried to make a break for upstairs, but she stopped me.
“I’ve been thinking about that owl picture.” She took a long drag on her cigarette and then tapped the ash into her Budweiser ashtray. “I don’t think it’s in a frame. I think it’s rolled up in a tube or something.”
No way.
No freaking way had I spent nearly two weeks looking for the wrong-sized thing. I clamped down on my rising temper because the idea of another confrontation with her made my chest hurt. I took a deep breath to ease the pressure and tried to wrap my brain around this detail. “You’re saying that I shouldn’t look for a big framed picture anymore?”
“My, aren’t you quick,” she said, and I clenched my teeth. “I used that frame for something else, a painting your mother did of an oak tree. I rolled up the owl and stuck it in one of them cardboard tubes for keeping blueprints or something.” Immediately I wanted to abandon the owl and look for the oak tree. But that would have to wait.
“Okay,” I said. “I need to go to the library and do some research for capstone. Can I borrow the car, and then I’ll look for the owl when I get back?”
She stirred herself to twist and look at me. “No, you may not. Your capstone is not the end-all and be-all of everything. I’m using the car to run out to bingo at the senior center. You can do your research on the computer web.”
So, good news and bad news. I really did need to get to the library to sit in the magazine section and see whatElleandIn Stylewere spotlighting, and now I’d have to figure out how to do that through a combination of bumming rides and our less-than-stellar New Orleans bus system. On the upside, she’d be gone. Out of the house.
“I better get cracking.” I hustled up the stairs before she could think of something else she needed and fired up my laptop. I poked around on some architecture sites, and then a couple of fashion blogs. I had a clear aesthetic for my Urban Renewal concept, but I had to execute the designs of my life for Aidan Helm. That meant constant tweaking and refining, always shying away from a costume-y feel. I did enough of that for theater arts. My collection needed to read as innovative and edgy but still refined. Mrs. Broussard had nearly flipped when I showed her my initial sketches. “These are so much better than Color Splash,” she’d said. “I’ m going to have a hard time letting go of your other sketches, the ones I saw on accident, but these are insanely good. Push it even further, Cam. Push it further than you think it can go.”
I missed the other sketches too. I thought of them as my Rococo sketches, the designs only Mrs. Broussard and I had seen. They were a love letter to my mom, but that was exactly why I wasn’t putting them out for everyone else.
Man, I missed her. I picked up Trista and leafed through the pages where her swamp friends make beautiful gowns for her while she sleeps so she can go to the ball.
For the first dress, my mother had painted a sunrise, its rays creeping across the ground to light on a dress lying near Tear Girl who stares down in amazement.
Trista reached out to touch it in wonder. “Where did this come from?” she asked. Lala the bird called to the water which suddenly churned and broiled. The bluegills erupted, leaping and dancing for Trista, but they did not shine in the sun. Suddenly she understood. Their beautiful iridescent scales had formed the fabric of the dress, and Lala pushed it toward her once more. The dress fell around Trista’s ankles and swept the ground in a soft whisper, flashing a hundred shades of blue as the light struck it.
Before I could flip to the next page and see Prince Sterling’s reaction to Trista in her magnificent dress, my cell phone chimed and startled me.
It was a text from Rhett.Meet me at Daddy-T’s at 8. You’ll be back by curfew. If your curfew is 10.
What the...? I texted Livvie with his message and the question,What does this mean?
She texted back.It means you better find something hot and sexxxy to wear to Daddy-T’s.
Yeah, right. As if I had a closet full of club wear.I don’t do hot and sexy.
A long pause went by before her reply.I have no idea how to respond to this.
And then I shrieked when I realized it was from Rhett.
Chapter 15
I stared at my text to Rhett like it was a nest of water moccasins in my hand.
I don’t do hot and sexy.
I called Livvie. “I have to crawl into a black hole of humiliation and die.”
“That’s unfortunate. Because why?”
