This was the worst sound she had heard up to this point of life. Worse than fingernails on a chalkboard, worse than a spoon digging into the stiff, top layer of sugar, even worse than the POP sound her neighbor’s cat made when its owner rolled over it in the driveway. Void’s laugh trumped all of those.
She had never heard it before and yet, as it crescendoed, alien as it was, she recognized it intimately. It was everyone who had ever laughed at her, all laughing at once.
“Stop it,” she said.
The laugh continued, like a choir.
“I said stop it.”
He was just like the rest of them. He wasn’t her friend at all. She reached down and pulled out big girl words.
“Fuck you! Get out!” Words she heard Ma say to boyfriends. Ma would say them quietly, but Beddy was yelling. “I never want to see you again!”
The laugh continued. When would he come up for air? Did he breathe? What would make him stop?
“What if I didn’t give you anything anymore?” she said. “Would you still come back?”
He stopped.
“Why would you do that?” he said.
She snatched the popsicles from his hands and strode to the window and opened it. She made sure he was watching, then tossed them out. He ran to the window, and they both watched them roll down the roof, the red one slower because the exposed stick kept catching on shingles as it wobbled, and into the rain gutter.
“Why did you do that?” he said. His voice was always inflectionless, but at that moment she could have sworn it sounded hurt, confused. He clambered out onto the roof, and when he was halfway to the gutter, she shut the window behind him. He seemed not to notice. Just picked up the popsicles where they lay nestled in the gutters, dusted off the leaves, and placed them both in his mouth at once. When she latched the window with the little hook-shaped lock, he looked up. The wood of the two popsicles stuck out like tusks.
Did he know that this was it? His face, being what it was, was unreadable.
She latched the window and drew the curtain across. She shut her door, but it had no lock, so she pulled a chair in front of it. In the weeks that followed, he begged for food at her window. After mealtimes, if she was in her room, the knock would come. Rap, rap, rap on the glass. Most times she just ignored it. Sometimes, she would peek out of her curtain and wave him away. One day, when it was raining, she opened the window and he misunderstood, and when he approached she gave him her poncho. Every day he begged, and every day, she refused him. She knew she was going to have to do it until he believed her.
+ + +
“We need to talk about something,” Ma said while they cleaned the kitchen, Beddy doing the dishes from atop a step stool, Ma wiping the counters.
Beddy froze. Ma knew she was pregnant. Or she knew she’d taken her gnome. Ma had a way of knowing everything.
“I was getting so worried there when you were eating all the leftovers,” Ma said.
She exhaled. But kept her guard up just the same.
“Um, I wasn’t the one-”
“I know you tried to blame it on Brian, and for a while, I believed you.”
“He loves those goddamn midnight snacks,” Ona piped in from the living room as she watched TV.
“Right, I said I believed her,” Ma said over her shoulder. She turned back to Beddy. “That was really starting to tick me off, having to make dinner every night. No leftovers to, you know, actually be left over.”
Beddy bowed her head as she dried a dish with a towel. Her hair fell over her face like a shroud. She didn’t like getting haircuts because it meant no longer being able to hide if she needed to.
“When I cornered him, he said that’s impossible, because he’s in a weight loss contest at work. Twenty dollars times…I don’t know how many people work there. And he wants to win, so he tells me he’s stopped snacking. And you know what? I didn’t notice till he told me, but he is slimmer. No way it was him.”