Mosquitoland

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published in the United States of America by Viking,

  an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015

  Copyright © 2015 by David Arnold

  “Glass, Concrete, and Stone”

  Words and music by David Byrne

  ©2004 Warner Bros & Nonesuch Records

  All rights administered by Warner Bros

  All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of RZO Music, Inc.

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Arnold, David, date–

  Mosquitoland / David Arnold.

  pages cm

  Summary: “When she learns that her mother is sick in Ohio, Mim confronts her demons on a thousand-mile odyssey from Mississippi that redefines her notions of love, loyalty, and what it means to be sane”—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-698-16540-3

  [1. Voyages and travels—Fiction. 2. Runaways—Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Mental illness—Fiction. 5. Stepfamilies—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.A7349Mos 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014009137

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI

  1: A Thing’s Not a Thing until You Say It Out Loud

  2: The Uncomfortable Nearness of Strangers

  3: Northbound Greyhound

  4: Abilitol

  5: The Sixth Letter

  YALOBUSHA COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI

  6: Sometimes You Need a Thing

  7: A Metamorphosis Begun

  8: Recall

  9: A Metamorphosis Completed

  10: Inventory

  11: Hyena vs. Gazelle

  NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

  12: Anomalies

  13: Everything Sounds Better on Vinyl

  INDEPENDENCE, KENTUCKY

  14: Grammatical Shenanigans

  15: Effing Attitude

  16: White Rabbit

  17: Firework Thoughts

  18: Caleb

  19: The Talismans of Disappointment

  20: Run, Run, Run

  21: Rooftop Revelations

  22: The Mistress of Moxie

  23: The Many Perfections of Beck Van Buren

  24: The Coming Together of Ways

  25: Our Only Color

  CINCINNATI, OHIO

  26: Remember the Rendezvouski!

  27: The Many Flaws of Beck Van Buren

  28: Devou Park

  29: Architectural Apathy

  30: Kung Pao Mondays

  31: Liquid Good-byes

  32: The Homestretch

  ASHLAND, OHIO

  33: Peach Gummies

  34: Ashland Inn

  35: Olfactory Lane

  36: BREAKING NEWS

  CLEVELAND, OHIO

  37: Best for Her

  38: Stick Figure Redemption

  39: Sunrise Mountain

  40: The Drive Back

  41: Behind the Curtain

  42: New Beginnings

  Acknowledgments

  For Stephanie and Winn,

  the whys behind my whats

  JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI

  (947 Miles to Go)

  1

  A Thing’s Not a Thing until You Say It Out Loud

  I AM MARY Iris Malone, and I am not okay.

  2

  The Uncomfortable Nearness of Strangers

  September 1—afternoon

  Dear Isabel,

  As a member of the family, you have a right to know what’s going on. Dad agrees but says I should avoid “topics of substance and despair.” When I asked how he propose I do this, seeing as our family is prone to substantial desperation, he rolled his eyes and flared his nostrils, like he does. The thing is, I’m incapable of fluff, so here goes. The straight dope, Mim-style. Filled to the brim with “topics of substance and despair.”

  Just over a month ago, I moved from the greener pastures of Ashland, Ohio, to the dried-up wastelands of Jackson, Mississippi, with Dad and Kathy. During that time, it’s possible I’ve gotten into some trouble at my new school. Not trouble with a capital T, you understand, but this is a subtle distinction for adults once they’re determined to ruin a kid’s youth. My new principal is just such a man. He scheduled a conference for ten a.m., in which the malfeasance of Mim Malone would be the only point of order. Kathy switched her day shift at Denny’s so she could join Dad as a parental representative. I was in algebra II, watching Mr. Harrow carry on a romantic relationship with his polynomials, when my name echoed down the coral-painted hallways.

  “Mim Malone, please report to Principal Schwartz’s office. Mim Malone to the principal’s office.”

  (Suffice it to say, I didn’t want to go, but the Loudspeaker summoned, and the Student responded, and ’twas always thus.)

  The foyer leading into the principal’s office was dank, a suffocating decor of rusty maroons and browns. Inspirational posters were plastered around the room, boasting one-word encouragements and eagles soaring over purple mountain majesties.

  I threw up a little, swallowed it back down.

  “You can go on back,” said a secretary without looking up. “They’re expecting you.”

  Beyond the secretary’s desk, Principal Schwartz’s heavy oak door was cracked open an inch. Nearing it, I heard low voices on the other side.

  “What’s her mother’s name again?” asked Schwartz, his timbre muffled by that lustrous seventies mustache, a holdover from the glory days no doubt.

  “Eve,” said Dad.

  Schwartz: “Right, right. What a shame. Well, I hope Mim is grateful for your involvement, Kathy. Heaven knows she needs a mother figure right now.”

  Kathy: “We all just want Eve to get better, you know? And she will. She’ll beat this disease. Eve’s a fighter.”

  Just outside the door, I stood frozen—inside and out. Disease?

  Schwartz: (Sigh.) “Does Mim know?”

  Dad: (Different kind of sigh.) “No. The time just doesn’t seem right. New school, new friends, lots of . . . new developments, as you can see.”

  Schwartz: (Chuckle.) “Quite. Well, hopefully things will come together for Eve in . . . where did you say she was?”

  Dad: “Cleveland. And thank you. We’re hoping for the best.”

  (Every great character, Iz, be it on page or screen, is multidimensional. The good guys aren’t all good, the bad guys aren’t all bad, and any character wholly one or the other shouldn’t exist at all. Remember this when I describe the antics that follow, for though I am not a villain, I am not immune to villainy.)

  Our Heroine turns from the oak door, calmly exits the office, the school, the grounds. She walks in a daze
, trying to put the pieces together. Across the football field, athletic meatheads sneer, but she hears them not. Her trusty Goodwill shoes carry her down the crumbling sidewalk while she considers the three-week drought of letters and phone calls from her mother. Our Heroine takes the shortcut behind the Taco Hole, ignoring its beefy bouquet. She walks the lonely streets of her new neighborhood, rounds the skyscraping oak, and pauses for a moment in the shade of her new residence. She checks the mailbox—empty. As always. Pulling out her phone, she dials her mother’s number for the hundredth time, hears the same robotic lady for the hundredth time, is disheartened for the hundredth time.

  We’re sorry, this number has been disconnected.

  She shuts her phone and looks up at this new house, a house bought for the low, low price of Everything She’d Ever Known to Be True. “Glass and concrete and stone,” she whispers, the chorus of one of her favorite songs. She smiles, pulls her hair back into a ponytail, and finishes the lyric. “It is just a house, not a home.”

  Bursting through the front door, Our Heroine takes the steps three at a time. She ignores the new-house smell—a strange combination of sanitizer, tacos, and pigheaded denial—and sprints to her bedroom. Here, she repacks her trusty JanSport backpack with overnight provisions, a bottle of water, toiletries, extra clothes, meds, war paint, makeup remover, and a bag of potato chips. She dashes into her father and stepmother’s bedroom and drops to her knees in front of the feminine dresser. Our Heroine reaches behind a neatly folded stack of Spanx in the bottom drawer and retrieves a coffee can labeled HILLS BROS. ORIGINAL BLEND. Popping the cap, she removes a thick wad of bills and counts by Andrew Jacksons to eight hundred eighty dollars. (Her evil stepmother had overestimated the secrecy of this hiding spot, for Our Heroine sees all.)

  Adding the can of cash to her backpack, she bolts from her house-not-a-home, jogs a half mile to the bus stop, and catches a metro line to the Jackson Greyhound terminal. She’s known the where for a while now: Cleveland, Ohio, 947 miles away. But until today, she wasn’t sure of the how or when.

  The how: a bus. The when: pronto, posthaste, lickety-split.

  And . . . scene.

  But you’re a true Malone, and as such, this won’t be enough for you. You’ll need more than just wheres, whens, and hows—you’ll need whys. You’ll think Why wouldn’t Our Heroine just (insert brilliant solution here)? The truth is, reasons are hard. I’m standing on a whole stack of them right now, with barely a notion of how I got up here.

  So maybe that’s what this will be, Iz: my Book of Reasons. I’ll explain the whys behind my whats, and you can see for yourself how my Reasons stack up. Consider that little clandestine convo between Dad, Kathy, and Schwartz Reason #1. It’s a long way to Cleveland, so I’ll try and space the rest out, but for now, know this: my Reasons may be hard, but my Objectives are quite simple.

  Get to Cleveland, get to Mom.

  I salute myself.

  I accept my mission.

  Signing off,

  Mary Iris Malone,

  Mother-effing Mother-Saver

  RETRACING THE STICK FIGURE on the front of this journal makes little difference. Stick figures are eternally anemic.

  I pull my dark hair across one shoulder, slump my forehead against the window, and marvel at the outside world. Before Mississippi had her devilish way, my marvelings were wondrously unique. Recently they’ve become I-don’t-know-what . . . middling. Tragically mediocre. To top it off, a rain of biblical proportions is absolutely punishing the earth right now, and I can’t help feeling it deserves it. Stuffing my journal in my backpack, I grab my bottle of Abilitol. Tip, swallow, repeat daily: this is the habit, and habit is king, so says Dad. I swallow the pill, then shove the bottle back in my bag with attitude. Also part of the habit. So says I.

  “Th’hell you doing in here, missy?”

  I see the tuft first, a tall poke of hair towering over the front two seats. It’s dripping wet, and crooked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The man—a Greyhound employee named Carl, according to the damp patch on his button-down—is huge. Lumbering, even. Still eyeballing me, he pulls a burrito out of nowhere, unwraps it, digs in.

  Enchanté, Carl.

  “This is the bus to Cleveland, right?” I rummage around in my bag. “I have a ticket.”

  “Missy,” he says, his mouth full, “you could have Wonky’s golden fuckin’ ticket for all I care. We ain’t started boarding yet.”

  In my head, a thousand tiny Mims shoot flaming arrows at Carl, burning his hair to the ground in a glorious blaze of tuft. Before one of these metaphysical Mims gets me into trouble, I hear my mother’s voice in my ear, echoing a toll, the chime of my childhood: Kill him with kindness, Mary. Absolutely murder him with it. I throw on a girlish smile and my mother’s British accent. “Blimey, that’s a lovely uniform, chap. Really accentuates your pectorals.”

  The Leaning Tower of Tuft calmly chews his burrito, turns, points to the open door. I throw on my backpack and ease down the aisle. “Seriously, old chap. Just dynamite pecs.”

  I’m out the door and into the squall before he can respond. I don’t suppose that’s what Mom would have meant by murdering with kindness, but honestly, just then, that was the only me I could be.

  Flipping my hoodie over my head, I cross the station lot toward an awning, hopping a half-dozen rising puddles. Underneath the canopy, seven or eight people stand shoulder to shoulder, glancing at watches, rereading papers, anything to avoid acknowledging the uncomfortable nearness of strangers. I squeeze in next to a middle-aged man in a poncho and watch the water pour over the edge of the awning like a paper-thin waterfall.

  “Is that you?” says Poncho Man, inches away.

  Please don’t let him be talking to me, please don’t let him be talking to me.

  “Excuse me,” he says, nudging my JanSport. “I think your backpack is singing.”

  I sling my bag around and pull out my cell. The dulcet tones of Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” echo off the walls of our little canvas-and-water prison. Stevie only croons when Kathy calls, altogether negating the sentiment of the lyrics.

  “That’s sweet,” says Poncho Man. “Your boyfriend?”

  “Stepmom,” I whisper, staring at her name on the LCD screen. Kathy preloaded the song to be her “special ring.” I’ve been meaning to change it to something more appropriate, like Darth Vader’s “Imperial March” or that robotic voice that just yells “Warning! Warning!” over and over again.

  “You guys must be close.”

  Singing phone in hand, I turn to face this guy. “What?”

  “The song. Are you and your stepmother close?”

  “Oh yeah, sure,” I say, summoning every sarcastic bone in my body. Leaving the phone unanswered, I toss it in my bag. “We’re tight.”

  He nods, smiling from ear to ear. “That’s terrific.”

  I say nothing. My quota for conversations with a stranger has officially been met. For the decade.

  “So where’re you headed, hon?” he asks.

  Well, that’s that.

  I take a deep breath, step through the mini-waterfall and into the rain. It’s still falling in sheets, but I don’t mind. It’s the first rain of autumn, my favorite of the year. And maybe it’s this, or the adrenaline of my day’s decisions, but I’m feeling reckless—or honest, maybe. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference.

  Turning toward Poncho Man, I notice his eyes are wet and shiny, but it’s not from crying or the rain. It’s something else entirely. And for a split second, I have the peculiar sensation that everyone and everything around us has dissolved. It’s just the two of us, cursed to face one another amid the ravenous elements of this bus station for all of forever.

  “You know,” I yell over the rain, breaking the curse. “I’m sixteen.”

  The other people under the awning a
re staring now, unable to ignore the uncomfortable nearness any longer.

  “Okay,” he says, nodding, still smiling with those glassy eyes.

  I push a clump of sopping hair out of my face and pull the drawstrings of my hoodie tight around my head. “You really shouldn’t talk to young girls. At bus stations. It’s just creepy, man.”

  Soaked to the bone, pondering the madness of the world, I stomp through puddles to the doors of the Jackson Greyhound station. Next to Gate C, a short man in a tweed hat hands me a flyer.

  LABOUR DAY SPECIAL

  FOUR $DOLLAR-FIFTY GENERAL TSO CHICKEN

  WHY U PAY MORE? DROP BY! WE FAMOUS!

  The flyer is a domino, the first, tipping over a row of memories: a blank fortune knocks over Labor Day traditions, knocks over Elvis, knocks over fireworks, knocks over the way things used to be, knocks over, knocks over . . .

  From a thousand miles away, I feel my mother needing me. This is a thing that I know, and I know it harder, stronger, fuller than I’ve ever known any other thing.

  Four days until Labor Day.

  Ninety-six hours.

  I can’t be late.

  3

  Northbound Greyhound

  September 1—afternoon

  Dear Isabel,

  So I’m bored. On a bus. Stuck next to an old lady who keeps leaning over like she wants to start up a conversation. To maintain sanity, I shall write.

  Labor Day is Reason #2.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking. Really, Mim? Labor Day? And rightfully so. What’s so special about the first Monday of September that the government would shut down the country in its honor? Honestly, if it weren’t for school closings and extended happy hours, I’m not sure anyone would know it exists.

  But I would.

  One Labor Day, six or seven years ago, Mom stood up in the middle of dinner and asked if I’d like to go for a walk. Dad kept his head down, toying with the food on his plate. “Evie,” he whispered without looking up. I remember laughing because it looked like he was giving his food a name. Mom said something about the digestive benefits of exercise after eating, grabbed my hand, and together we walked out the door, down the hushed streets of our subdivision. We laughed and talked and laughed some more. I loved it when she was like that, all young and fun and eager to keep being young and fun, and it didn’t matter what happened the day before or the day after, all that mattered was the Young Fun Now.