I found out the meaning behind Chantal’s smile a couple of days later, when Mrs. Bobbie called Omega and me back to her bedroom.
Earlier that afternoon, the ranch girls had spilled out of the bus and streamed down the long red-clay drive, ready to get down to the business of the weekend. We’d slung off our backpacks in our bedrooms and scattered to our own activities for a few hours. Fridays were chore-free. For Omega, that meant trooping off with the other Super Tramps, toward the lake and the clubhouse.
For me, it meant figuring out wherever Chantal happened to be and making sure I was as far away from that place as humanly possible. Sometimes that was the clubhouse, but the last couple of times I’d gone down there, Mr. Al had shown up, and Omega had told me to scram. I was happy enough to comply. I’d made a chart for myself of all the books I’d finished since Mr. Al had first taken me to the enormous library in Macon after we’d gone to pick up my new glasses. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was my seventeenth. And anyway, I’d spied on them before, and all they ever did was sit around and smoke lumpy-looking cigarettes.
Our small Christian school’s puny football team was playing a nearby public school that night, and Mrs. Bonnie had promised that Mr. Al would load all us girls in his ancient minivan and take us to the game. Not only that, she said we could swing by the pizza parlor with the old-fashioned pinball machines beforehand. But around four o’clock, when I saw Omega and Mr. Al approaching me where I sat cross-legged on the dock with Harry Potter, my gut flip-flopped nervously.
Omega’s head hung low and her eyes kept to the ground. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her like that—she usually had such a defiant tilt to her chin. Alarm rippled through me, even though they were still several yards away. All my foster-kid alarms were going off, in fact, readying me for fight or flight. I closed the book, laid it to one side, and I scrambled up. Began methodically popping my knuckles, one by one.
“Hey, Daphne-Doodle-Do,” Mr. Al said when they reached the dock. “I need you to come on up with me to the house. Mrs. Bobbie wants to talk to y’all for a minute.”
I glanced at Omega, but didn’t move. Omega was staring at the ground, her shoulders hunched into her hoodie like she wanted to disappear.
“What about?”
“Come on now,” Mr. Al said. “It’ll be over before you know it.”
Which must’ve meant he didn’t know what this was all about either. But that wasn’t a surprise. It hadn’t taken me but a week at the ranch to figure out that Mrs. Bobbie was the ringmaster and Mr. Al was the clown that cleaned up the elephant poop. Now that I thought about it, he was looking every bit as miserable as Omega.
My palms pricked with adrenaline. I wondered if the trouble was about what Mr. Al and the Super Tramps did outside the clubhouse. I didn’t know any specifics, but maybe Mrs. Bobbie had suspicions and she wanted me as a witness. I didn’t want to tell on anybody, but I also didn’t want to make Mrs. Bobbie my enemy.
My mother was long gone. Never coming back for me—that’s what the social worker and lawyer had told me as they’d driven me to the ranch in the lawyer’s shiny red car, which smelled like Christmas trees and hot plastic. The courts had signed parental rights over to the ranch until I turned eighteen, and because they were designated as only a “children’s institution,” they didn’t have the legal authority to place me for adoption. I’d stay here until then, and afterward get to go to college, maybe, if I made good grades and one of the state schools awarded me a scholarship. Omega said there were tons of scholarships out there, that she was probably going to go to FIT up in New York, then get a job in fashion design.
If I betrayed the Super Tramps, they’d never let me back in the clubhouse, and I’d be left to handle Chantal on my own. On the other hand, if Mrs. Bobbie wasn’t happy with my answers, she might send me to a different house—maybe the blue-shingled one at the other end of the road where Mr. Barry, an ex-marine, woke the girls up at four thirty every morning before school and made them do exercises, then cook their own breakfast. Or I could be sent back to my caseworker. Even though she hadn’t returned to check on me since she dropped me off, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t take me to another group home. I’d heard about those homes where the people took in foster kids for the money.
That fat fuck. Chantal must’ve done this. She must’ve tattled to Mrs. Bobbie about the clubhouse or what went on in the woods or something. She was the cause of this—she was the cause of all my problems, the root of all evil. That fat, ugly, mean fuck. I wanted to shove the heel of my hand right into her stupid upturned nose, a move that I’d heard could kill a person.
I could kill her. The words made my scalp prickle deliciously and the adrenaline surge from my hands all the way through me. The simple thought of Chantal being dead settled my nervous stomach. I wrapped my arms around my torso, tucked my book under my arm, and followed Mr. Al and Omega up to the house. I wasn’t scared any longer. A new power nestled safely inside me, a hard little nut no one could crack.
Fat fuck, I repeated silently to myself the whole way up to the house. Not the whiny way Chantal said it to me, but the way Tré and Shellie had flung it casually over their shoulders at me the first couple of days I was at the ranch. Just an afterthought, a bad girl’s inside joke. And then it hit me—the name-callers had only been Tré and Shellie. Omega had never said anything mean to me, not one thing, not once. She’d intimidated the hell out of me, but she’d only ever spoken to me in a kind way.
Warmth filled me, an unreasonable optimism. We’d stand together against Mrs. Bobbie, whatever happened. Omega was my friend. My sister.
Mr. Al ushered us into the bedroom, where Mrs. Bobbie sat at her sewing table, a huge swath of gauzy mauve fabric cascading around her chair and over her lap. She was in charge of making all the pillows and curtains for all the houses at the ranch. She kept her back to us, the whir of the machine filling the air. I wondered for a brief, wild moment if there was a new girl already on her way to replace me, and these were the new curtains for her room. Chantal and I had white plastic blinds. Maybe Mrs. Bobbie thought the new girl should have curtains.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Bobbie sniffed at Mr. Al. “You can go, hon. And don’t let them girls hang around outside the door. We need privacy.” She flicked her hand at him, then went back to arranging the fabric under the needle, folding and pushing and smoothing the material. Her thick French-manicured nails tapped on the machine. Mr. Al nodded at me and Omega. When the door clicked shut behind him, I attempted to catch Omega’s eye. She wouldn’t look at me.
Mrs. Bobbie turned to us, her blue eyes wide. They looked like doll’s eyes, flat, expressionless. Empty. “Ladies,” she declared. “Do you know why you’ve been invited back here, to my private rooms?”
She said it like her bedroom and bath comprised a whole wing of Versailles.
We shook our heads dumbly, and the woman heaved an enormous, pained sigh.
“Because what we have to discuss is very”—she glared at me, then Omega—“very private.” Then, reaching under the avalanche of neatly arranged fabric, she drew out a pair of rainbow-striped girls’ underwear. She held them aloft between two fingers, her face puckered in distaste. “What is this?”
“They’re underpants,” I piped up, eager to set things right, sooner rather than later. Mr. Al and Mrs. Bobbie’s bedroom smelled funny. And I couldn’t help looking at the bed and wondering what went on in it. I knew about sex, but I couldn’t imagine sweet, puppyish Al doing things like that to shellacked Mrs. Bobbie with her perfect hair-sprayed hair and enormous boobs. “They’re Omega’s underpa . . .”
My voice trailed off. Omega’s face was a stone, and Mrs. Bobbie was smirking. I glanced from one to the other, struggling for a foothold.
“Give them back,” Omega growled. Her ominous tone made me shrink inside.
“Not until you explain what they were doing in her”—at this point she waved the panties in my direction—“backpack. They were found in Daphne’s backpack with this message written on them.” Bobbie looked at the panties and read theatrically: “9-27 midnight.” She looked at Omega. “That’s the night of the camping trip, isn’t it? September twenty-seventh. Daphne, did you promise to deliver these underpants to someone? To a boy?”
Omega pivoted and leveled her destroying laser-beam stare at me. Like she’d flipped a switch, I began to shake. “I don’t know how they got in my backpack. I’ve never seen them.” I thought back to the last time I’d had laundry duty with Chantal. Her smile as she’d sent me on my way.
“Yes, you do,” snapped Mrs. Bobbie. “You know and you’re gonna tell me right now or I swear, I will snatch you up and march you down the drive and cut you loose.” She shook the panties some more and they danced like a puppet. Omega pressed her lips together—her beautiful, perfect bright-pink lips—and kept her narrowed eyes on me. They paralyzed me. I guessed she wanted to know how I’d ended up with a pair of her panties as much as Mrs. Bobbie did.
“You want me to cut you loose, little girl?” Mrs. Bobbie bellowed. “Is that what you want?”
I shook my head. I could feel warmth beginning to creep into my neck, the tears rising. I thought I might throw up as well. And now I had to pee really bad.
“Jesus wants you to tell the truth, Daphne. Don’t you know that?”
I didn’t, not on any kind of literal level, but I nodded my head anyway.
“Jesus don’t want me to turn you out on the road, because there’s all sorts of things—people—out there who don’t necessarily care about a little girl’s purity. They do awful things to little girls out there. Shoot them. Stab them. Choke them with ropes. Tie them up with duct tape and throw them in the back of the trunks of their cars and drive them to the woods—”
Omega cleared her throat, and Mrs. Bobbie shut her mouth abruptly.
“I didn’t . . .” I began. But I couldn’t finish. I honestly could not conjure up a lie that would satisfy Mrs. Bobbie and get both of us off the hook.
“Chantal told me,” Mrs. Bobbie spit out, growing impatient with her interrogation.
At that, even Omega looked dumbfounded.
“Told you what?” I asked.
“Don’t play games with me, missy!” Mrs. Bobbie screamed. Then she collected herself, dabbed at the liner smudge beneath her blue shadow–ringed eyes. “I know you’re protecting her.” She flapped the panties in Omega’s direction. “Daphne was supposed to deliver your panties to a boy. As a message”—now the underwear snapped in my direction—“and I caught you.”
Omega was silent. I was silent. Mrs. Bobbie looked overwrought.
“I’m only glad your sin was exposed before you had the chance to follow it through.” She drew in a tremulous breath. Stood. “Omega. I have had my fill of your whoring behavior. Your whoring and sneaking and laughing. Your attitudes.”
The room suddenly felt so warm, so filled with hate, I couldn’t breathe.
Mrs. Bobbie jabbed her finger in Omega’s direction. “You listen to me and you listen well, missy. You will not agree to meet a boy. You will not so much as look at a boy until you leave this house. You are a child, not an adult. Sex is for the sanctity of marriage. For two married adults such as Mr. Al and myself. It belongs in the marriage bed, not out in the woods, in the dirt. Am I clear?”
She was inches from Omega now, and I saw clearly Mrs. Bobbie was wrong. Omega was an adult and this was an argument not between a woman and child, but between two peers of equal standing, each with their own particular weapons of warfare. I also recognized I had no idea what this battle was being fought over. I just knew I didn’t have a part to play in it. I didn’t belong here, and I wanted out.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Bobbie,” I said. She didn’t look at me.
Omega grabbed the panties. Her face was burning but her eyes were grim. She turned, as if about to leave.
“No camping trip,” Mrs. Bobbie shrilled at her back. “Neither of you. You’ll both stay behind. Here with me, to do chores.”
Omega hesitated for a fraction of a second, then wrenched open the door and stormed out. I waited a moment longer, wringing my hands, wondering if I was dismissed, or if I should stomp out like Omega. Mrs. Bobbie didn’t even bother to look at me. She sank on the bed, her fingers picking imaginary lint from her pilled black trousers. Smoothed and cupped her hair. Smoothed and cupped, smoothed and cupped.
“There you go,” she croaked. But I didn’t think she even realized I was still standing there. “See how you like that, Mr. Sneaking Off to the Woods.”
I crept out as quietly as I could and went and climbed into my top bunk. I fell asleep and slept through the pizza and the football game. But it turned out it didn’t matter, because Omega and I had been forbidden from going to that too.