Sometimes Rita pretends to be sick so she can stay home from school. She and her mom watch television in the morning, talk shows where the hosts interview celebrities about their workout routines or the best place in Italy to buy cashmere sweaters. Once, an actress got down on the floor and demonstrated how stretchy she was. She credited her trainer who came to her mansion four days a week and stretched her for ninety minutes. It’s like being born again, she said. On those days, her mother drinks nothing but coffee until noon and is extra nice to Rita.
Rita’s sweaters come from thrift stores. They smell like floor cleaner and the sweat of the women who used to wear them. Sometimes the sweat smells lemony and Rita pretends the woman worked in a factory where her job was to squeeze lemons for lemonade, but her mother says no, canned lemonade is made from fake lemons. Rita soaks the sweaters in the bathtub with a squeeze of dishwashing liquid and each time she presses the water out, there’s a little less of the person who wore it, like having a funeral for clothes. Rita’s mom says the sweaters were probably dumped there by women who buy new clothes every season, maybe even a celebrity like the actress on the talk show who pays to get stretched.
At school, the mean girls refuse to share a table with Rita because she smells like Goodwill, so the teacher, Mrs. Birdsong, puts her at a table with Davie Gray, who makes odd noises under his breath and fills his lined tablet with pictures of guns and monsters. Mrs. Birdsong is plump with white hair, and looks like the wife of Santa Claus if Mrs. Claus were mean. She pinches cheeks or arms and flicks her index finger at their heads whenever one of them does something she doesn’t like, which is pretty much all the time. If they complain, she’ll say. “That’s the way the cookie crumbles, huh?”
The week before Thanksgiving, Mrs. Birdsong hands out erasers and chalk and pencils and tells them it’s important to be prepared, to use whatever they have for ammunition against an active shooter. The plan is not to run and hide, but to fight, fight, fight. Mrs. Birdsong gives Rita a bandana for a mask and toy gun that belonged to Mrs. Birdsong’s grandson and looks uncomfortably like a real gun. At the count of three, Rita is to kick down the door and enter the classroom, the signal for the students to throw at her, and throw hard. Rita goes home with a black eye and blood in her hair where a pencil point struck and a note from the school nurse telling Rita’s mother that she might want to take her to urgent care or even an emergency room to test for lead. Poisoning is highly doubtful but still possible.
For the rest of the school year, Rita stays home. In the morning, her mother drills her on the names of the state capitals and the times tables through nine. After lunch, her mother switches from coffee to whiskey and they watch soap operas where the women are beautiful and glossy and fall for men who dump them. And it’s okay, it is, but sometimes Rita misses the way the light shone through the window at school, how it made gold squares on the floor that ticked forward through the afternoon until they disappeared.
