Free Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett Page B

of cards. “I told you you’d regret it. I said you were an idiot.”
    Justin says, “You’re not helping.”
    Safety pins.
“Have you ever owned many safety pins?”
    “You’ve asked me that before.”
    Cuff links, spare change, rubber bands.
If the bowl is spun fast enough it makes a turbulent sound, and its wants become
cuff change, key links, spare paper bands.
“Plum was talking to her just now. Hanging out the window like Juliet.”
    “They’re friends.” Justin tucks the dope under his pillow, resumes the corpse position. “Plum went to David’s party, and now she and Maureen are friends.”
    Cydar lifts his head, and across the dark room the brothers exchange the kind of glance that might have passed between brother gunslingers, or brother mobsters, or brother politicians. They understand one another’s inconveniences; they are uncommonly reliable; they are faithfully in-league. “She saw your car in the street today. She thought it had broken down.”
    Justin says nothing immediately; under the bed, the minuscule dogs continue to bark. Cydar hears the squeak of the tape that’s rolling in the machine. Kiss,
Dynasty,
Justin’s playing it to death. “The situation is becoming complicated,” he eventually acknowledges.
    Cydar cannot help but be angered. “It’s not for nothing they advise against shitting where you eat.”
    “Yet again,” his brother sighs, “you’re just not helping.”
    The bowl spins like chance, round and around. “Maybe it will be all right,” Cydar suggests. “It might be good for Plum to have Maureen as a friend. Someone older. Smarter. I don’t think Plum . . . does very well.”
    “It’s a complication,” Justin says shortly.
    “Well, what are you going to do about it? Lie here and hope it goes away?”
    “Will that work?”
    Cydar’s lip hooks; he halts the bowl with such suddenness that it tips. “Rubber bands.”
    “My least favorite.”
    “More useful than safety pins.”
    “Debatable,” says Justin.
    Cydar idles a moment longer before turning his back on the siren bowl. “Well, good luck with all that,” he says, moving to the door. “You know where I am if you need me.”
    “Yeah,” his brother answers. Sleeping with the fishes.

 
    T HE RUBBISH BINS weren’t emptied overnight, and the dented metal drum contains a vile mess of orange peel, squashed banana, shattered crackers, snapped laces, balls of cling wrap, icy-pole paddles, torn foolscap, masticated chewy, sucked and spat-out sweets. Flies loop the inside of the bin like racing cars; there is the odor that is the universal companion of garbage, subterranean and punchy, innately unclean.
    Plum stands beside the bin, lunch in hand. Today it is Strasbourg with sauce. If she breathed the sandwich deeply she might smell the kitchen at home, the blade of the knife, the scarred chopping board. She might smell Fa eating breakfast, Cydar smoothing the headlines, Justin asleep upstairs. More than anything she might find her mother’s hand layingout the Strasbourg so it doesn’t overlap the crust, tamping the bread lightly, cleaving the sandwich in two. Binding the meal in rainbow wrapper, pressing out the air so the bread will be soft when Plum eats it, with no gritty scalp of staleness.
    She thinks of Maureen, who in the garden last night had looked like a white angel pacing a heavenly cemetery. Plum wants to be thin, but mostly she wants the angel to look at her with pride. Still, after she’s laid the sandwich in the bin, she has to move away quickly, thinking sturdy thoughts. The assembly bell is ringing, so she has an excuse to run.
    At recess she meets her friends underneath their tree. Something exciting has happened overnight: Rachael has seen the Youth Group leader walking on the street. “But what did he
do
?” Victoria urgently needs to know. “Did he remember you?” Of course the boy-man had remembered Rachael — he’d been staring at her throughout the entire Youth Group