In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard Page B

And he begins to cry in a soft, hopeless way. “Honey, I’ll… I’ll…”
    The thing keeps getting away from me. “You’ll what?” I say finally, trapping it against the side of the pot and bringing it
     to the surface. It’s thick and gray, with bumps on the top. Slightly furled on the end. It looks familiar but I can’t quite
     place it.
    “I’ll say
thiiis
about
thaaat,
” he brays, right at the moment I realize I’m stirring a tongue.
    “She says one more outburst like that and we’re sending you to the mental home,” Meg tells me. She’s brought a plate with
     Jell-O, peas, and a warmed-up sweet roll for my dinner.
    I can’t talk yet.
    “It wasn’t
human,
” Meg says.
    What around here is. I roll over and look out the window: Curly has been unwound from the tree and is staring mildly around.
     Down in Old Milly’s kitchen the Chinese checkers board is set up on the table, ready to go, all the marbles in the starting
     gates.
    “She’ll probably let you out of here if you go down and say you’re sorry,” Meg tells me, stuffing a wad of clothes under her
     bed and shaking out the bedspread to cover them. Mister Ed is picking her up to go to a double feature at the drive-in movie
     with a bunch of other girls. It would be good, clean fun except that the drive-in movie theater is closed for the season,
     which none of the parents have figured out.
    A car honks in the alley.
    “She’ll probably let you out anyway,” Meg says, pausing in the doorway. She looks pretty in her navy peacoat and eye shadow.
    Alone, I read for a while, a fat paperback I got out of the free box at the library.
The Carpetbaggers,
a book so squalid and overblown that it wouldn’t even stay bound: all the pages in the center have come loose and are out
     of order, so it’s slow going. When the phone rings I have to trace the cord from the wall to under Meg’s bed.
    “Why did you have to go home?” Felicia asks.
    “Family dinner,” I say.
    “What did you have?”
    “Jell-O,” I tell her.
    “I know, but what did they have?”
    “Some kind of Transylvanian meat,” I say. My grandmother’s second husband is a butcher, as crabby as he is bald. A tongue
     isn’t even the worst thing he’s given us.
    “Lucky,” she says. “We had pork and beans and green beans. I said to my mother, ‘These are both beans,’ but she didn’t care.”
    “What are you eating right now?”
    “Girl Scout cookies,” she says.
    “What kind?”
    “A whole thing of Savannahs.”
    “I hate Savannahs,” I say. Anything with peanut butter, actually. My mother told me that once when I was a baby, she opened
     a jar of peanut butter at the table, and when she looked over, I was gagging in my high chair.
    “So,” Felicia says, crunching, “I can’t wait to get in trouble.”
    The one-person fight takes off again downstairs (“I’ll tell you another goddamned thing! You better watch out!”) and I hang
     up just as there’s a knock at my door.
    It’s Ray. He’s got two bottles of Pepsi and two glasses of ice that he’s managed to carry upstairs.
    “I brung us pop,” he says.
    We end up skipping medicine ball and not getting caught for it. We walk by the office, we walk by the hall monitor, we sit
     on the front steps of the school without our coats, we go back in and make the rounds of classrooms where we have friends
     and stand outside the closed doors, waving at them through the portholes. Nothing.
    “We’re like ghosts who don’t yet know they’re dead,” I say to Felicia.
    “Ha, ha, nobody can see us.” She pantomimes pulling her shirt up. “Waaah! Get a load of this!”
    In the last five minutes of the hour we position ourselves down the hall from our friend Dunk’s math class. She saidFelicia’s blurter, Jeff Nelson, turns to the right when exiting, so we will start walking toward the classroom from that direction
     when the bell rings. As the clock hops its last seconds before the bell, Felicia places her