36
beth
Spring came so fast that year. We were walking around the Quarter and the sun was beating down; it smelled like spices and spring flowers in the air. It was the second week in April, and we were strolling along the streets of the French Quarter Festival. I hadn’t realized there would be so many people there, but Meg had begged me to come with her since she was riding with Laurie and Jo and didn’t want to be the third wheel. So, we rode in Laurie’s driver’s black car, which smelled like new leather and Laurie. I still didn’t know how rich his family had to have been to afford a driver at an Army base. Jo and Laurie talked about taking a trip to Cambodia after she graduated. Meg said she would hate to be trapped on a flight that was so long, but wanted Jo to post a bunch of pictures on Facebook.
I stared out the window mostly, and Meg was on her phone. The drive to the Quarter was easy—just a straight shot down Highway 90 and we were there. The drive was so quiet compared to the streets of the festival; we were dropped off as close as we could get to Jackson Square. People were scattered on the patches of grass that dotted the square. Mostly everyone was eating. A couple were eating what looked like a crawfish platter out of an aluminum catering pan. My senses were on overload, from the different smells to the loud voices. I loved the aromas because I loved food, but not so much the ninety conversations that were going on around me.
“How fucking awesome is this?” Jo shouted. She radiated excitement, and Laurie tried to keep up with her as she bounced around us. “God, I love this city!” She twirled around in circles, and the bottom of her swing dress bloomed around her thighs like a dew-dripping flower with its stem squeezed between someone’s fingers, twisting around and around.
Laurie watched her like he was spellbound. I didn’t blame him. Jo had a confidence that most people would never have, and she had no fear. It didn’t bother her that some people were watching her in her excitement. Laurie’s cheeks were blushed, and his long blond hair was waving a little at the ends.
“What should we do first?” Jo asked us. She couldn’t keep her eyes on one thing, but I couldn’t blame her.
There were stalls and stalls of different types of traditional New Orleans cuisine, and booths selling everything from handmade soaps with local hibiscus to cone-shaped bags of kettle corn using, of course, sugarcane grown in the New Orleans area. I could hear a marching band close by.
“I’m starving. Let’s get food,” Laurie offered.
I didn’t care what we did.
Meg had walked over to a booth selling what the little hand-painted sign said was ALL NATURAL COSMETICS. Jo followed her and Laurie trailed along. We waited for Meg to try on a deep purple shade of eye shadow before we moved along to find food. Laurie was like a kid in a candy store, naming all the options:
“Blackened-catfish po’ boy! Crawfish étouffée!” Laurie’s Italian accent was stronger when he spoke words that were closer to other languages.
He was reading all the signs to us as we stopped at every booth to gawk over handmade rings with big colorful stones and hand-sewn purses made from dyed cotton. I grabbed a pink–and-yellow one for Amy, who was at home with our parents for the afternoon. Our dad had become increasingly irritable since being home, and he still wasn’t able to move his legs. We only had a few more months, maybe a year, to find a place to live, since he was going to be medically retired, and that in itself made the house unsteady like a farmhouse table with a broken leg. Aunt Hannah’s friend owned a couple of houses somewhere that he needed tenants for, but Amy was pissed off that she would have to change schools. We could stay at Fort Cyprus; Meredith tried to convince my dad that we should, but he wanted to move away from the post, even though all of his doctors would be there.
Jo became an adult overnight. She was always going: driving Amy somewhere, working, or taking my dad to appointments. Her free time was spent watching the news and bickering with our dad about who was the better night-show host, and Laurie was still a steady shadow behind her. She took my dad for walks, and they picked flowers for my mom to put in her hair like she used to every spring and summer in Texas. I didn’t know which one had that idea. I guessed my dad. Jo was also spending so much time sitting on the living-room floor with Laurie, her laptop resting on a stack of pillows.
She had been writing so much more than before. Sometimes Laurie would write, too; otherwise he would listen to music or watch whatever Meredith had on the TV, or he would be sleeping.
Jo was better served out in the wild. I was not. All of the conversations around me sounded like a ringing in my ears, and everywhere we walked seemed more crowded than the block before. The best way to describe it would be to say that I felt like I was standing on a stage, spinning in circles, while twenty people tried to hold a conversation. No one was actually looking at me, I knew that, but the logical reality didn’t change the way my body and mind reacted to the noise.
I followed my sisters and Laurie to the back of the line for Antoine’s Restaurant so Laurie could try their famous Baked Alaska with chocolate sauce. He smiled when Jo asked if it was actually chocolate, and she nudged his shoulder with hers. Jo was tall, but Laurie’s legs seemed to take up half of his body, so even Jo looked short next to him. While we waited for his food, Jo pointed to a jazz band playing as they walked down the street. A small crowd was following them, and the music became louder and louder the closer they got to us.
Jo seemed happiest when she was with Laurie—well, outside of when she was tapping away on the laptop. She said things around him that surprised me and helped even me get to know her better. She scrunched her nose at the fish in his hands, and he asked her if she wanted to smell it. She scowled. They were playful, and it was a nice thing to see in Jo. Her mood had been so up and down since Dad had come home. All of us were handling the adjustment differently, and Jo was trying so hard to keep it together.
“Too many choices,” Jo said by the third street we walked down.
Laurie was eating as we walked and somehow managed not to leave so much as a spot on his white shirt.
I couldn’t decide either, and there were just so many people everywhere. Since I had left school, besides taking a trip to the grocery store, I was never around huge crowds like this. We got to a stall selling mood rings, and one of them caught my eye. The stone was yellow, sitting on a dark band that looked and felt like metal.
“How much is this one?” I asked the girl behind the table.
She looked to be about my age, maybe a little older, and had straight black-as-ink hair with steely-gray ends. It was cut to sit about an inch above her shoulders. Her dark eyes had glitter under them—like fairy dust sprinkled on her cheeks—and she was dripping in jewelry. When she stood up, I looked at her chest; it was covered in shimmering gold glitter. It looked like paint almost, and she was wearing layers of necklaces, all different, but somehow they all flowed together.
“Hmm, that one is twelve. It’s a mood ring.” Her voice sounded familiar, but I was sure I had never seen her before. I would have remembered. She looked like a Gypsy from a movie. Her nails were black and sparkly, and she was wearing a long printed dress with no bra underneath. The sides of the dress were slits, so I could see her rib cage covered in what looked like henna tattoos. I couldn’t read the words on her left side and didn’t want to be all gawky and socially awkward.
“I’ll take it,” I said, touching the ring. I looked back down at the rows and rows of mood jewelry. There were bracelets and other styles of rings, earrings, bangles.
“Everything is ‘buy two, get one free,’ ” the girl offered. “Did you see these?”
I looked to Meg at my side, assuming the jewelry girl was going to be looking at Meg. Usually that’s what happens when, like now, Meg wore a sundress with a plunging neckline.
“These are glass.” The girl’s fingers waved over one of the rows of rings set in black-lined cases. “And these are quartz.” She pointed to a smaller display box with maybe a dozen rings.
They were all pretty, and most of them were a deep blue while resting in the case. The one in her hand was yellow, and a dark green one was in the back row of the quartz box. The forest-green stone was set in a thin line of metal that looked like a vine. A little leaf was even set right at the bottom curve of the oval stone.
“I’ll take the green one, too. Did you make these?” I asked.
A jazz band full of elderly men danced and played on the street behind me. My sisters and Laurie were waiting a few feet away. Meg was licking at the pink-and-blue spun cotton-candy cone in her hand. She pulled off a big piece and popped it on her tongue.
“I did. I’m Nat.” Her long nails pointed at the sign on the table. It said NAT’S LAIR in deep purple paint against a piece of black chalkboard.
“I’m Beth. Nice to meet you.” I pushed my hand out between us and she looked down at it, her lips turning into a smile.
“Nice to meet you, Beth.”
“You can also call me Bethany,” I told her for no reason at all.
She made eye contact with me. “You can call me Natsuki if you want to, but only my parents call me that.”
“Natsuki,” I repeated, and it felt a little funny on my tongue.
“It’s Japanese. It means ‘moon.’ ” Her name fit her well.
“It’s cool. I don’t know what Bethany means, and no one actually calls me that.” I thought I saw something sparkle a little besides the glitter shining in her eyes.
Nat seemed like a character from a book or a sweet creature from another world when she laughed. Her body moved with her laughter, and she cupped her mouth. Her fingers were covered in rings, all different metals and shapes and stones. Her entire ensemble was like a costume, and she was far prettier than any other girl I’d seen since we moved from Texas, at least. The bangles on her wrists sounded like a wind chime when she grabbed a calculator from the table and started punching in numbers.
“You get to pick your free one now.”
“Anything?” My eyes rested on a black-and-purple necklace. The gems were matte and not shiny at all, but it was beautiful.
“Not that.” She laughed. “Something of equal or lesser price.” She paused and nodded. “See, my parents always say I’m a horrible business owner, but obviously, they’re wrong.”
“Obviously.” I laughed with her and noticed the way she kept looking at my mouth.
I knew better than to think she was staring at my mouth for any reason other than my having something stuck in my teeth, or maybe if I was like Meg and wore lipstick. But I hadn’t even eaten anything yet that could have been stuck, and I wasn’t wearing lipstick. When I looked at her long eyelashes and shimmering cheeks, I wished I had listened to Meg and let her put more on my face than BB cream and mascara.
“Take your time. I mean, there’s a huuuge line behind you,” she said with an eye roll, and I actually looked behind my shoulder.
No one else was there.
She was funny, and suddenly I felt incredibly plain standing outside this magical stall full of interesting jewelry and a Gypsy-like girl who made it by hand. I was wearing a green T-shirt that said NEW YORK on it, even though I had never been there, and jeans that were ripped at the knees when my mom brought them home from American Eagle. Looking at Nat’s sandals and the toe rings decorating her toes, I tucked my feet under the tablecloth so she couldn’t see my unpainted toenails.
I decided to get my mom a midnight-blue ring with a black band. When I handed it to Nat, she smiled and picked up the calculator again.
“Homeschooling didn’t help me with my math skills,” she said after two attempts at figuring out the tax. “Wait, do I even need to add tax?”
“I have no idea.” I shrugged. She was homeschooled, too. It made her even cooler to me.
“You know what?” She grabbed a little green bag from below the table and opened it. “You’re my first paying customer of the day, so no tax for you.”
I thanked her as she tucked my pieces into the bottom of the bag and filled the empty space with white tissue paper.
“I hope you like the jewelry, and if you don’t, just pretend you do?” Nat lifted the calculator to show me the price, $25.
“I thought it was twenty-four? You were right about the homeschooling not helping your math.”
I hoped that she would know I was joking, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made a joke to someone who wasn’t part of my family, or Laurie.
Fortunately, she caught on just fine and smiled. I wondered how old she was. How did she already have a business and I didn’t even think I was going to know what I wanted to do with my life when I turned eighteen? Jo knew what she wanted to do right after graduation; so did Meg. Amy probably even knew at twelve. Nat knew and was out selling her jewelry at the festival.
I glanced over at my sisters again to make sure they were still nearby and saw a group of girls my age approaching the booth.
“Thanks again.” I handed Nat two twenties from my pocket and she pulled a five and a one out of a brown leather bag and waved bye to me.
When I walked up to Meg, Jo, and Laurie, Jo was leaning against Laurie’s back, and he was taking a picture of the top of their heads? I didn’t ask why. They started doing that a few weeks ago. They even started taking pictures of all the food I made at home, and people on social media would comment that they wanted it or about how good it looked. Amy kept telling me that I should post videos of myself making food on some website she watches, but I didn’t see where the time or courage would come from. Between my dad being home and my aunt Hannah coming over every other day to eat, to ask for gas money, or to sit on the porch with my mom while she had a drink or two, it was a lot. I also had schoolwork to do; I was so close to finishing my credits for ninth grade. I couldn’t wait to be in eleventh, and I definitely couldn’t wait to turn sixteen.
Jo said sixteen was transformative, and I saw something change in her when she turned sixteen. Meg, too. Just as I was thinking that eighteen and nineteen changed Meg so much, too, she wrapped her arm through mine.
“What did you get, babe?” She looked down at the bag in my hand.
As we walked, Meg tried on the jewelry. She held her hand up and spread her fingers. I remember the sun shining through each one.
“These are fucking cool, Beth. How many did she have?” Meg reached past Laurie to Jo, who was just behind him.
“Oooh!” Jo said admiringly.
“We should go back there before we leave tonight,” Meg offered.
I nodded, sort of wanting to go back to the jewelry stand, too. I should have gotten Aunt Hannah a necklace, maybe a black and amethyst layered one to wear to Spirits. The bar practically glowed moody dark colors that I associated with the Crescent City. My aunt Hannah seemed to almost never work anymore, but I thought maybe it just felt that way because she was coming over to the house so much more.
“Okay, so what’s the plan? Do we want more music or more food, or what? We can grab a spot on the grass in front of Jackson Square where we came in and eat there. There’s going to be fireworks over the river tonight.” Laurie pointed behind me toward the Mississippi River, where rainbow colors would burst and bloom over our heads.
“What time is it now?” Jo asked, and instead of waiting for anyone to answer, she raised Laurie’s wrist and checked his watch. “It’s seven now, so we have about an hour of sunlight left.”
We agreed to find a place on the grass and took turns getting food. A band was going to be playing at eight anyway, then the fireworks were scheduled for nine. I hoped that the grass wouldn’t be too crowded by the time the show started, and when I looked around the festival, it seemed to have changed a little since we arrived. In just over an hour there were fewer kids, and more plastic cups full of alcohol in the hands of people swaying just a little more than before. The voices of said people were louder, too, and I suspected that the higher the moon rose, the rowdier the people would get.
The moon made me think of the jewelry girl, and I wondered if the moon made her bloom, too.