Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,35
come to him in a dream and told him Peterson had come back and killed her, skinny Peterson who didn’t even like to kill the beetles that slipped into their blankets every night, but nonetheless he’d held Peterson at gunpoint until Ramirez came in and snapped him out of it. Another time, he got convinced Jones really was going to kill him one day, and ran up to him outside of mess hall, grabbing for his pistol; three or four guys had to pull him off. Once, in the daytime, he thought he saw one of the dead girls, bold as brass, standing outside on the street they were patrolling. He went to shake her by the shoulders, ask her what she’d been playing at, pretending to be dead all this time, but he’d only just grabbed her when Ramirez pulled him off of her, shaking his head, and when he looked back at the girl’s tear-streaked face before she ran for it like there was no tomorrow, he realized she was someone else entirely. Ramirez put an arm around him and started to say something, then seemed to think better of it. He looked down the road at the place that girl had just been.
“The fuck you think she’s running to so fast, anyway? Someone ought to tell her there’s nowhere to go.”
Sometimes Esther called him Daddy. When it started out, it seemed harmless enough. They were always going places that encouraged fantasy. Chuck E. Cheese’s, where the giant rat sang and served pizza. The movies, where princesses lived happily ever after. The zoo, where animals that could have killed you in their natural state looked bored and docile behind high fences. Glitter Girl, Esther’s favorite store in the mall, where girls three and up could get manicures, and any girl of any age could buy a crown or a pink T-shirt that said ROCK STAR. What was a pretend family relationship, compared to all that? Besides, it made people less nervous. When she’d introduced him to strangers as her babysitter, all six feet and two hundred and five pounds of him, they’d raised their eyebrows and looked at him as though he might be some kind of predator. Now people thought it was sweet when they went places together.
“This is my daddy,” Esther told the manicurist at Glitter Girl, where Georgie had just let Esther get her nails painted fuchsia. She smiled at him conspiratorially. He had reminded her, gently, that Mommy might not understand about their make-believe family, and they should keep it to themselves for now.
“Day off, huh?” said the manicurist. She looked like a college kid, a cute redhead with dangly pom-pom earrings. Judging by the pocketbook she’d draped over the chair beside her, she was working there for kicks: if the logo on the bag was real, it was worth three of Georgie’s old army paychecks.
“I’m on leave,” he said. “Army. I was in Iraq for a year. Just trying to spend as much time with her as I can before I head back.” He sat up straighter, afraid somehow she’d see through the lie and refuse to believe he’d been a soldier at all. When they’d walked in, she’d looked at him with polite skepticism, as if in one glance she could tell that Esther’s coordinated clothes came from Target, that he was out of real work and his gold watch was a knockoff that sometimes turned his wrist green, like perhaps the pity in her smile would show them they were in the wrong store, without the humiliation of price tags.
“Wow,” she murmured now, almost deferentially. She looked up and swept an arc of red hair away from her face so she could look at him directly. “A year in Iraq. I can’t imagine. Of course you’ll spend all the time you can with her. They grow up so fast.” She shook her head with a sincerity he found oddly charming in a woman who worked in a store that sold halter tops for girls with no breasts.
“Tell you what, sweetheart,” she said to Esther. “Since your daddy’s such a brave man, and you’re such a good girl for letting him go off and protect us, I’m going to do a little something extra for you. Do you want some nail gems?”
Esther nodded, and Georgie turned his head away so the manicurist wouldn’t see him smirk. Nail gems. Cherry blossoms. The things people offered him by way of consolation.