Free Sister Golden Hair: A Novel by Darcey Steinke Page A

she said. “Go off to freakland and do your freakazoid things!” She hurried down toward her duplex, her clogs sounding on the asphalt.
    “Don’t mind her,” Jill said. “She’s a double-dutch bitch.”
    I felt as if my brain had been scooped out with an iced-tea spoon. As Jill talked about Sheila her words moved around the empty space inside my head. True, I was walking up the incline, but I had no sense of my legs moving, just a floating feeling, like a dust mote careening around in an angle of light. I watched Jill’s mouth move.
    She had a painfully long, pale face and hair that fell limply around her cheekbones. At her mother’s parties, men with mustaches drank beers. Along with watching Jill and her sister make bubbles, I’d also watched them play badminton, hitting the birdie back and forth. As the night wore on, their games got more surreal. I’d seen them volley both an ice cube and a banana.
    While her mother didn’t allow after-school visitors, Jill said if I agreed to hide in her bedroom I could sneak inside 11B. But we’d have to be quiet. We slipped through the screen door into the living room and I was confronted by a number of smells: sandalwood, beer, and some third thing I’d never smelled before. The couch sagged and the coffee table was covered with puddles of dried wax. An Indian-print bedspread hung behind the TV and there was ivy dangling from a macramé holder in front of the window. It was identical to the hippie crash pads I’d seen on TV and in movies, but different because instead of grown-ups in tie-dye shirts and macramé belts, it was filled with children. Beth, Jill’s third-grade sister, sat on the floor surrounded by math books. Ronnie, her older brother, was slumped on the couch watching General Hospital .
    Neither of them looked in our direction. Upstairs, Jill had the same room as mine, though hers was decorated more sparsely, with a mattress on the floor and a cardboard dresser. She’d taped pictures from magazines up on the wall, mostly baby animals andphotographs of sunsets. In one corner, a giant stuffed panda, whose name was Barnabas, slumped over as if he’d been shot in the back.
    “I didn’t talk to you at first,” Jill whispered, “because I wasn’t sure I could trust you.”
    “Why are you whispering?” I said.
    Jill pointed to the wall.
    “My mom is sleeping.”
    She told me how in sixth grade Sheila had pretended to be her friend but once Sheila got her braces off she’d told everyone at school that Jill was a dirtbag.
    “She announced that I had leg spasms, which was true, but it only happened once. And she said my farts smelled like dog food.”
    “Whose farts smell good?”
    “Hers,” Jill said. “They smell like cinnamon.”
    She shook her head.
    “She’s just the worst sort of person,” Jill went on, “two-faced and a bitch.”
    Jill cast her eyes down to her blanket, a nubby afghan of triangular blue and pink strips.
    “Were you planned?” she asked.
    This was a common question. If you were planned it meant your family wanted you, you’d come into a friendly spot, you were loved. But if you weren’t planned, that was a whole other story.
    “I was,” I said. “But my little brother wasn’t.”
    My parents had never actually admitted this, but my mother had implied it a few times.
    “None of us were planned,” Jill said. “Not a single one.”
    It was hard for me to figure out how this could be true. But before I could ask Jill more about it, her face got very serious. She was suddenly deadly serious.
    “Before we can be friends,” she said, “you need to know that the Bamburgs are a tragic family.”
    “In what way?”
    “In just about every way you can imagine,” she said. “You name it, we’re tragic.”
    She pulled out a drawer.
    “For instance—”
    She took out a black comb with dandruff lodged in the teeth and a key chain with a Harley Davidson medallion. She laid both on the bed.
    “That’s it, that’s all