Four Hands

Janey wants me to teach her to pray. She’s never been to church, only seen inside of one on her TV, so she kneels by my bed and presses her palms together. “Like this, right?”

Janey has the longest, blackest hair in all of fifth grade. She’s also the biggest bitch. I’m onto this, how the longer your hair is, the meaner you are. I cut mine at my shoulders, so I can go either way. Janey’s runs the center of her back, a slick, braided spine. In my dreams it’s the rope we yank in tug-of-war, a tree swing that slips free, one I stretch after as I lift into the air, through the hole in the ozone layer, and into the black.

Janey has a lot of reasons to pray, but right now she’s after an A in math. An A comes with a Hello Kitty cruiser and pink helmet to match, her mom promised. Her mom, who is best friends with my mom since they met the first day of high school and began saving together for their dream car, a purple Trans Am. My mom makes me go to church and Janey’s makes her go to ballet, and usually we both think she has the better deal, but Janey’s not sure now given her problem with numbers, how she can’t understand them on the right side of the dot. She flips her braid over her shoulder and waves me closer. “Talking to God is going to be a lot easier than me learning decimals.” She takes my hands and flattens them between hers, like four hands are better at praying than two, like it’s as simple as math she understands.

Janey thinks I’m good with God because of my trip last summer to Circus Circus, where my mom had set my brothers and me loose on the games floor, each of us thumbing a roll of quarters in our pocket. Now Janey wants to hear it again. “Just the part about the Ring-a-Bottle,” she says. “I don’t care how many times your brothers farted in the car.”

I say how the moment I laid eyes on the game, it felt like time bent. Like someone muted the TV and put it on slow-mo. All the mouths in the middle of words. I pushed up to the counter with my last quarters, and with the three rings they paid for, I crossed myself—I can’t say why. When I looked out over the table of glass bottles, I knew the first ring would catch, knew it like my grandma knew my grandpa had been hit by a minivan, like my mom knew about my dad and his dental hygienist. After it happened, I pointed at the prize above my head—a panther, almost as tall as me, with thick fangs and no privates. Janey thinks the holiest part is how I dream different with it in my room. Instead of tarantulas in my rain boots and snakes slithering into my bed, it’s me losing at tetherball, a little bit of going to school naked. Embarrassing, maybe, but nothing that will kill me.

Janey’s at the end of my dresser now, peering into the panther’s eyes, her nose inches from its fangs. At a middle school party a few weeks ago she tongue-kissed her older brother’s friend, so things like fangs don’t scare her anymore. “Show me how to make the cross,” she says.

I’m still sore at her for last weekend, when she planted an eyeliner on me in CVS and didn’t tell me until we got home. I’ve got no good reason to do what she says. “What if it wasn’t God? What if it was Circus Circus?” I say. “Did I tell you about the lady in the leotard riding the man in leather who was riding a motorcycle inside a cage in the air? Anything could happen there.”

“What if?” Janey says, running her hand over my panther’s back. “What if I tell everyone you still wet the bed like a baby?” I don’t, but that won’t stop her from saying it. “Huh, bed-wetter, how about that?”

See? Biggest bitch.

I push her back to the bed and onto her knees. “All right then,” I say, and I go for it: “Close your eyes. Talk to God in your head. Say please a lot. Tell him everything you’ve ever done that’s bad and ask for forgiveness. Better say it out loud so I can tell if you say it right.”

She closes her eyes but then pops one open to look at me. “Well, go on,” I say, my face straight. She arranges her prayer hands in front of her heart and starts, starts so hard her forehead goes ugly with wrinkles. She’s saying dear god forgive me, forgive me for switching costumes on Halloween and hitting all the houses twice, for peeing on my brother’s toothbrush when he shoots my Barbies with his air gun, for wiping boogers under Julie Mell’s desk and telling everyone she’s a nose-picker.

“You think that’s good?” Janey asks.

“Maybe a little more to make sure. You really want the bike, right?”

She keeps on, about putting dog poo in her neighbor’s mailbox and how she killed a salamander because she was curious. She’s clicking her heels together as fast as she’s talking, her palms pressing flatter, and I’m thinking how if her dad were here, he’d slap her for all of it, send that braid flying, because maybe somebody should. But he’s been gone for a year and she still says he’s on vacation in Aruba. I’m about to tell her that’s enough when her voice catches and her face twists up like her forehead. “And no one likes me,” she says loud. It’s the sound that sets off a landslide. One boulder, then another, then a whole house crashes down. What follows is harder to understand because she’s mad and sad and red and starting to slobber. “Why did you make me so mean?” she says finally, sucking for air.

I’ve seen plenty of Janey’s fake crying, but this real crying is awful. It’s my dream in reverse where now I’m on earth and she’s the one slipping into the dark. I feel a fire growing in my throat.

“Put your head down,” I say, and I sit behind her. I slip off the rubber band at the end of her braid, and work my fingers through until it loosens and her hair tents around her and makes her look small. Then I brush it slowly while she sniffles, and I feel glad for not having to see her face.

“That thing with the salamander, that’s not okay.”

“I know.”

“And dog poo? That’s just gross.”

“Are you going to tell anybody?”

“No.” I move next to her and put my palms together. My room feels strange, like it might be in orbit; it might be on its way to Mars. With the curtains drawn I don’t know if it’s my backyard out there or a black hole. I close my eyes and see Janey and I at our prom, Janey with this blue satin dress and these huge boobs. I see us smoking cigarettes in a bar with deer heads on all the walls and guns mounted everywhere in between. I see Janey parked on a cliff above the ocean, her head bent over the steering wheel, her black hair cut jagged and blunt. It’s that feeling again, that I know what comes next. I wrap an arm around her shoulder and whisper, “Hold on to me.”