For Friday show and tell, Rita shares what she found in the gutter on the way to school. She walks head down and finds many things: single mittens, discarded fast food boxes and once a soggy five-dollar bill that she dried out on the radiator and tucked between the pages of her locked diary. She keeps the key to her diary around her neck so her mother can’t snoop at what she’s written or the pictures she’s drawn. Her mother snoops often, pawing through Rita’s drawers for the bottles of whiskey and the cigarettes she’s sure Rita has hidden from her.
The thing in the gutter isn’t money, she sees that as soon as she scrapes the mud from it, but a sheriff’s badge—not a real one, of course, but real enough. The mud leaves a rim of dirt under her nails that she scrubs off in the bathroom before first bell. The school nurse has talked to Rita’s mom about her dirty hands and neck and the fact that she smells like an ashtray, although the nurse had said a smoking household. Rita learned about the dangers of smoking households from a movie in health class, how bad cigarettes are for everyone and not just the smoker. The movie was narrated from the point of view of aliens who’d landed on earth in a silver space ship and were fascinated by the mad urge of humans to stick a lit cylinder of tobacco in their mouths and breathe. A teenage alien, a boy with one eye and a bean-shaped head, was caught by his dad smoking a cigarette with a teenage girl who said it was what all the cool kids did and the teenage alien of course wanted to be cool. That was followed by a long talk with his alien father, who had three eyes—apparently eyes were a sign of wisdom or maturity—about the dangers of following the crowd and the bravery required to be an individual. Their discussion ended with the alien dad and son knocking their heads together in an alien hug. A lot of the class was bored by the movie and fell asleep, or they jeered the stupid ending and threw spitballs at the screen in the dark. But Rita couldn’t stop thinking about the movie. For weeks afterward, Rita thought about the possibility that aliens were out there circling earth in their spaceships, keeping an eye on her and her mother.
When it’s time for show and tell, Rita’s the first to raise her hand, something she never does because she never has something to share. The other girls show off their Barbies in sports cars or baby dolls that announce when they’re wet or hungry or tired. The boys bring cap guns they’re forbidden to fire and video games that they demonstrate for the class. Rita passes the badge around so they can admire its shine and the word SHERIFF in raised letter. She tells them it was part of the goodwill package presented to the group of aliens by the mayor of their town, that the aliens had pretended to be happy to accept it but were secretly dismayed when they looked up the word SHERIFF and learned that he carried a gun. The word “force” isn’t in their vocabulary, especially when it came to laws. There were no guns, no need for guns, what did they want with this shiny thing? Also, the points were sharp and some of the aliens had ripped open parts of their alien selves, so they dropped it in the gutter for Rita to find and here she is, okay?
That’s very interesting, Rita, the teacher says. Thank you.
She walks to her seat and sits down just in time to catch Mikey Reynolds twirl his index finger next to his head: Crazy. But she’s not, she’s sure of it, just as sure as she is that the aliens will come for her someday. They’ll appear as a supernova, an explosion that will pinwheel out like a celebration. All Rita has to do is step out and follow the path of light to the waiting spaceship, happy as hell to live among them and not smell like a cigarette.
She’ll leave the key to her diary so her mother can read what Rita wrote about her: how she hated it when her mom brought home guys from whatever bar she was working in, too-young guys who promised to marry her, but split after a few weeks for Alaska or Marrakesh. How, when she wasn’t drinking, she was a good mom.
Maybe she’ll even miss her.
