Chapter 10 Secret Keeper Girl
You didn’t need to be a kid detective to know something big was going down. Beau Sykes was at his bedroom window when he heard the front door slam. That alone would have been extremely suspicious. Slamming doors was forbidden in the Sykes house. He set his binoculars aside and looked down to see his mother heading for her car. She was in a rush, though she was trying hard not to look like it. A second later, his father raced across the lawn after her. When he reached the driver’s side, he grabbed the door handle. There was only time to try it once before Melody Sykes sped off down the street, almost taking her husband’s hand with her.
Beau took a step back from the window and grinned. There was nothing he loved more than seeing something he wasn’t meant to see. Everyone in Troy thought his parents were perfect. Only Beau and his brother knew any different. He’d been keeping tabs on them for almost eleven years, taking note of all the things they tried to keep hidden. Like the bottle his mother had stashed away behind the beans in the pantry. Or the time his father slapped his mom for sticking her nose in his business. But when Beau heard the sound of a car firing up in the driveway, he knew what had just happened was bigger than the other stuff. Beau returned to the window and watched his father scrape the paint off the mailbox post as he backed out of the drive. Beau couldn’t believe his good luck. They’d left him all alone.
It might be his only chance. He couldn’t miss it. There was no telling when he might get another. Beau lifted his binoculars and trained them at the target—Lula Dean’s house. He could see the lady in her kitchen, talking on the phone as usual. His mother’s friends whispered about her like she was some kind of monster, but Lula never seemed to run out of people to talk to. Beau’s mom had hauled him over for a visit at least once a week since Lula started her committee. If you stayed quiet and kept your ears open at Lula Dean’s house, you could hear secrets about everyone in Troy. It was too bad Beau still had no idea what most of them meant.
“What’s a hysterectomy?” he’d asked his mother after he heard Lula fake whisper that Beverly Underwood had gotten one.
“It’s a lady thing,” his mom had responded. Then she’d looked worried. “Don’t say that word in front of your father. He doesn’t want that kind of talk in his house.”
Beau’s father had a lot of rules, and Beau was always discovering new things they couldn’t discuss in their house. He tried his best to be careful, but only days later, he had a question he just couldn’t keep to himself. “So if a woman has a baby, but she doesn’t have a husband, does that mean her baby came from God?”
His mother spray-painted a wall with a mouthful of sweet tea. He’d patted her on the back while she coughed up what she’d inhaled.
“Where on earth are you getting these ideas?” his mother demanded once she’d wiped down the wall with a wet paper towel. “Has Peter been telling you things?”
Peter was Beau’s teenage brother and an endless font of information. But like all the best secrets, that one had come straight from Lula Dean. Beau figured it was best not to tell his mom he’d heard Mrs. Dean talking about someone in town. A detective never reveals his sources. So Beau shrugged and said he didn’t know where his ideas came from.
He kept quiet for a long time after that. But then, one day, he was reading in the living room while his mother chatted on the phone with a friend and he picked up on a snippet that scared him to death. “Mama, I heard you say you were bleeding like a stuck pig. Are you okay?”
He couldn’t understand why that question got him marched across the kitchen and sent straight up to his room.
“It’s something gross that happens to women,” Peter had confided later that evening. “Their cooters bleed for a few days every month.”
Beau wasn’t 100 percent sure what a cooter was. But if it was anything close to what he imagined, the idea was ridiculous. “What? Why? No, you’re kidding. Stop joking around!”
“No joke,” said Peter, clearly delighted to have shocked his brother so badly.
“Where does the blood come from? Does it hurt? Does is spurt out or just ooze? Do they have to wear Band-Aids on their butts?” Beau had so many questions, but his brother didn’t have any answers.
“Hey,” Peter whispered. “Have you ever seen a naked lady?”
Beau shut up and shook his head. He figured it must have something to do with all his questions. Why else would Peter ask?
Peter pulled out his phone and scrolled through his saved pictures. Most were selfies, with a few group shots of Peter’s equally dumb friends. Then he stopped at a photo he’d swiped off the internet and turned the phone to face Beau. A woman in a fur coat and boots stood beside a snowman with a huge pecker. Beneath the coat she was completely naked. “What does this make you feel?”
Beau stared at the picture. He felt a lot of things. Fear, fascination, and concern that the lady might freeze. He’d never made a snowman before, and he wondered if it was normal to give one a penis. “What do you mean? What am I supposed to feel?”
“You’ll find out soon. Unless you’re gay. Then Dad’s gonna kill you. Don’t tell anyone that I showed you.”
“Okay, but what about the blood?”
“Oh, right. That.” Peter didn’t seem keen to return to the subject. “Part of them falls out every month. If you don’t believe me, just look under the bathroom sink. That’s where Mom hides her bandages.”
That night, Beau quietly locked the door as his bath ran. Then he crouched down and carefully opened the cabinet beneath the sink. His brother hadn’t told him what to look for. He figured it probably wasn’t bleach or drain cleaner. Then he spotted a pink plastic bag toward the back, partially hidden behind rolls of toilet paper. Pink was the lady color. Boys were supposed to avoid it. He’d hit the jackpot.
Beau reached in and pulled the bag out, careful not to knock anything over. The writing on the front said, Soft, Breathable, 100% Protection.
Protection from what? Beau wondered. He opened the bag and removed a thick pad of cottony material with stickers on one side. He couldn’t imagine what it might protect someone from, but it had to be bad if it was making them bleed that much.
Beau wrapped one of the pads up in his dirty clothes. After his bath, he planned to continue his investigations. But as he walked back toward his room, the pad slipped out of his bundle of laundry. It made no sound at all when it landed on the hallway carpet. Beau hadn’t even realized he’d lost it.
“Excuse me, what is this?”
Beau turned to see his father. He had the personality of a giant if not the stature. He held the pad pinched between two fingers—like something revolting that he’d rather not touch.
“I don’t know what that is,” Beau said, and that was the truth. No one in the family would have dared lie or talk back to Randy Sykes when his face was that red. “It was in the cabinet.”
“Why was it mixed up in your clothes just now?”
Beau felt the blood draining out of his face. “I was going to do some research.”
“Research on what? Being a girl?”
“Yeah.” The word flipped a switch. Beau saw his father was about to explode. “No—on why they need those things,” he added quickly. “I don’t want to be a girl.”
“I would hope to hell not. You should thank God every day you weren’t born one of them. And be glad you don’t need to know what these nasty things are.”
After that, the pad haunted him. Until then, Beau hadn’t spent much time thinking about girls and women. He knew they were different from boys and men. Women had babies and took care of the house. Men went to work and shot things on the weekend. Women smelled better and had less body hair. Men had penises and could pee wherever they wanted.
He knew men and women were different. That much was obvious. But it hadn’t occurred to him that the females he knew might all be hiding a horrible secret. Something so awful that even his dad—the mayor of Troy—couldn’t bear to discuss it. Beau asked around at school. A lot of boys wouldn’t go anywhere near the subject. His friends, with varying degrees of reluctance, shared what they knew. The blood came out of women’s vaginas. They called it a period. It meant a female was ready to make babies. That was the most terrifying thing of all. Beau did not want any babies. He started keeping his distance from girls.
But try as he might, Beau couldn’t avoid them all. He had to sit next to girls in class. They flirted with him at recess. They grabbed french fries off his tray at lunch. In the past, he’d enjoyed the attention. He liked all the girls in his class, aside from Tiffany, who was mean as a copperhead. Now he couldn’t stop thinking about what they were hiding.
Then one day he was turning in a math quiz, when he accidentally knocked his teacher’s handbag off her desk. As they both scrambled to collect the contents that lay scattered across the floor, Beau came across a little white cotton bullet in a clear plastic wrapper.
He snatched it up and handed it straight to Ms. Throgmorton. Beau was convinced that he was her favorite. And he knew for a fact that she was his.
“Is this protection?” he whispered. “Are you all right?”
The teacher laughed and blushed. For the first time, he wondered if the secret might not be that bad. “It is. But I’m fine. Thank you, Beau.”
Beau stood there. He couldn’t waste the opportunity. “I’ve never seen one of those before. What is it?”
“Your mom and dad haven’t told you?” She was still smiling.
“No,” he said. “We don’t talk about stuff like that in our house.”
That was when Ms. Throgmorton’s face got all serious. “Then I’m afraid I can’t, either.” She must have seen how disappointed he was. “I’m sorry. It’s against the rules for me to discuss these things without your parents’ permission. I could lose my job.”
Beau turned and headed for his chair. If the secret was awful enough to make a teacher lose her job, he wasn’t sure he wanted to continue his investigations.
“But hey.” Ms. Throgmorton waved him back. “You know there’s a place you can go with all your questions. The public library. That’s what it’s for.”
“I’m not sure if I want to know any more.”
Ms. Throgmorton leaned closer. “The truth isn’t as bad as you think,” she whispered. “It’s just human biology.”
After school, Beau headed for the library, but people from the television station were blocking the front steps. Someone had found something terrible in the baking section. An eighth grader watching from the sidewalk was telling everyone it had to be a book about cannibalism. What else could be so bad?
When Beau got home and switched on the TV, he found out it had been a book about dirty cakes. When the cover flashed quickly on the screen, Beau thought it looked a lot like something one of Peter’s friends had brought over.
The library was shut down for two days after that. Not that it mattered, anyway. Beau was no longer allowed to go to the library by himself. He could only use the family computer when his parents were in the room, so that was another dead end. And then, one day, God smiled on him. Lula Dean opened a library right across from his house.
Right from the start, Beau knew there was something unusual about Lula’s library. People liked to visit at strange times. The postman often added books instead of taking them out. And then, a little over a week after the library opened, Beau was sitting on the window seat in his room one night when Bella Cummings stopped by. He watched her look around all sneaky-like and slip a book onto the shelves. He couldn’t read the title from a distance, but he could see the spine was pink. The next morning, he set off for school thirty minutes early. He needed to see the book before anyone else could get their hands on it. When he laid eyes on the title, he knew his prayers had been answered. Secret Keeper Girl, it was called.
“Did you find something you like?” a woman called just as Beau began to reach out. Lula was standing on her front porch in her speed-walking gear.
Beau had shrieked and sprinted for school.
The book sat there for the next twenty-four hours, taunting Beau from across the street. He had never wanted anything so bad in all his life. But someone had always seemed to be watching him. Until now.
Moments after his parents sped off in their cars, Beau was down the stairs and out the door. He stopped on the stairs and ran back inside to get a plastic bag. Then he casually walked around the side of the house, whistling a peppy tune. He made a point of looking both ways before he crossed the street. As he stood in front of the little library, he heard Lula pass by an open window, talking on the phone.
“They’re saying what happened back in high school was an open secret, but I swear to you, Jemma, no one ever told me!”
Beau opened the library door, took out the bright pink book, and dropped it into his plastic bag.
His heart was racing as he walked back to his own front door. Only when he was inside and the door closed behind him did Beau breathe easy. He took a moment to recover, then he raced up the stairs and into his room.
Secret Keeper Girl. This was it. Beau took a deep breath. No matter how disgusting it was, he promised God he’d always be nice to his mama. And Ms. Throgmorton. Especially Ms. Throgmorton. He turned to the first page and began to read.
Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret.
Oh no, Beau thought. It’s only page one and she’s already asking God for help.
But he summoned his courage and kept reading. A few chapters in, he let down his guard. There’d been no gory bits so far. It was just a book about a girl getting her period, which turned out to be a normal thing. In fact, he was a little ashamed that he’d been so freaked out by it. The story was pretty good, though, and the girls in it were funny.
More than anything, Beau was thankful he had something to read, because he hadn’t been allowed downstairs since his dad had returned. Randy Sykes and a bunch of men were sitting around the dining room table. His mom had come home, too, but she hadn’t made dinner. He could hear her crying in her room. He would have gone to comfort her, but he had a feeling that was not what she wanted.
It was after dark when he heard his brother bounding up the stairs. Then his door swung open. Peter ducked inside, a bag of ranch-flavored Doritos in his hand. He closed the door and stood there with his back against it, as though he’d just made a narrow escape.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“Oh!” Beau had forgotten about the bright pink book in his lap. “I swear. I was just curious!”
“What?” Peter saw the book. “Dude, I don’t give a shit if you’re gay. Dad just resigned as mayor.”