Wabanaki Blues Read Free

another universe. I wish I could step through one of my grandmother’s painted leaf portals, right now, and get the hell out of here.
    The picture inside the toppled frame on Dibble’s card-table desk catches my eye. It shows a much younger Dibble leaning against a classic Coupe de Ville in the arms of a hot guitarist in a stylish straw hat. It would appear that Millicent Dibble is a music lover. Perhaps this is a photo of Mr. Dibble, but I doubt it. I’ve never seen her wear a wedding ring.
    Overhead, thunderous footsteps signal that the opening bell has rung. I imagine my fellow seniors, texting one another about where they’ll hang out after school and party to celebrate surviving their last Mia Delaney Day, not to mention four years at Colt High. Meanwhile, I’m isolated on the last day of my senior year, maybe even forgotten, just like Mia. My thoughts roll downhill, dangerously close to the murky bottom. Mom’s shrink warned me not to let this happen. “Keep your mind on the mountaintop or you’ll wind up like your mom, at the base of the valley.”
    Everybody in America has some dumb theory about depression. Bilki says working on her murals was her way of fighting it. I imagine painting sloppy crimson graffiti on these walls with my bloody finger. I enjoy imagining that because I know Mom would hate it. She’d prefer these walls remain blank because she says blank colorless spaces help her think. She hates the woods because they’re too cluttered. Some Mohegan and Abenaki Indian she is.
    Mom inherited neither her family’s artistry, nor their love of trees. She has nothing in common with Bilki. She calls her mother’s fall foliage murals “inveigling,” claiming they draw people in against their will. Granted, my ex-best friend Lizzy sprained her wrist trying to stick her hand through the mural Bilki painted on my bedroom wall. But Mom has no right to talk about inveigling people. With her beauty, she inveigles by simply walking into a room.
    My heart races at the sight of a pile of messy dark curls on the floor by the sink. They say Mia had dark curly hair. I tell myself I’m seeing things and close my eyes. I refocus, and reopen them. Sure enough, it’s only a dirty rag mop. I still don’t like it. I edge as far away from it as possible and pretend to be somewhere happier—frying trout with Bilki in our kitchen, jamming with Lizzy at her brownstone next door, locking lips with Beetle on Rocky Neck Beach. Don’t laugh at that last one. It could happen. He’s a fanatic fledgling guitarist. You should see the expression on his face when he watches me play Rosalita. It’s so beautiful that I almost forget the horrible things he did to me—like his Halloween Facebook posting that read, “Do you like horror?” next to a picture of a vampire, Frankenstein, and me. Beetle swore he was only mocking the Black Fang band tee shirt I was wearing with the salivating red-eyed dog on the front. But I’m not that gullible.
    The day of that Halloween posting, I contemplated jumping off the roof of City Place, the tallest building in Hartford. I texted my ex-best friend Lizzy, “Wanna die, yeah, wanna die,” borrowing a line from the Beatles’ Yer Blues . She instantly wrote back, “take a sad song and make it better.” You see, we text Beatles lyrics to one another when something powerful happens. We started doing it to make fun of Beetle’s obsession with the Beatles, as his almost-namesake. Right after his toxic Halloween post about me, she showed up at my doorstep−bursting with her usual frizzled blond Cherry Coke cheerfulness−and shoved a lit cigarette and a flask of maple whiskey at me. The smoke burned my throat, but the whiskey was worse. It tasted like someone spilled Tabasco sauce on my pancakes. After the third big gulp, I didn’t care about the taste.
    The sad truth is I love Beetle and