Cath watched the eggs. She was biding her time. “We still have to go shopping for Christmas dinner. Do you want turkey? Or we could do lasagna—in Grandma’s honor. Maybe lasagna tomorrow and turkey on Christmas—”
“I won’t be here tomorrow night.” Wren cleared her throat. “That’s when … Laura’s family celebrates Christmas.”
Cath nodded and folded the omelette in half.
“You could come, you know,” Wren said.
Cath snorted. When she glanced up again, Wren looked upset.
“What?” Cath said. “I’m not arguing with you. I assumed you were doing something with her this week.”
Wren clenched her jaw so tight, her cheeks pulsed. “I can’t believe you’re making me do this alone.”
Cath held up the spatula between them. “Making you? I’m not making you do anything. I can’t believe you’re even doing this when you know how much I hate it.”
Wren shoved off the counter, shaking her head. “Oh, you hate everything. You hate change. If I didn’t drag you along behind me, you’d never get anywhere.”
“Well, you’re not dragging me anywhere tomorrow,” Cath said, turning away from the stove. “Or anywhere, from now on. You are hereby released of all responsibility, re: dragging me along.”
Wren folded her arms and tilted her head. The Sanctimonious One. “That’s not what I meant, Cath. I meant … We should be doing this together.”
“Why this? You’re the one who keeps reminding me that we’re two separate people, that we don’t have to do all the same things all the time. So, fine. You can go have a relationship with the parent who abandoned us, and I’ll stay here and take care of the one who picked up the pieces.”
“Jesus Christ”—Wren threw her hands in the air, palms out—“could you stop being so melodramatic? For just five minutes? Please?”
“No.” Cath slashed the air with her spatula. “This isn’t melodrama. This is actual drama. She left us. In the most dramatic way possible. On September eleventh.”
“After September eleventh—”
“Details. She left us. She broke Dad’s heart and maybe his brain, and she left us.”
Wren’s voice dropped. “She feels terrible about it, Cath.”
“Good!” Cath shouted. “So do I!” She took a step closer to her sister. “I’m probably going to be crazy for the rest of my life, thanks to her. I’m going to keep making fucked-up decisions and doing weird things that I don’t even realize are weird. People are going to feel sorry for me, and I won’t ever have any normal relationships—and it’s always going to be because I didn’t have a mother. Always. That’s the ultimate kind of broken. The kind of damage you never recover from. I hope she feels terrible. I hope she never forgives herself.”
“Don’t say that.” Wren’s face was red, and there were tears in her eyes. “I’m not broken.”
There weren’t any tears in Cath’s eyes. “Cracks in your foundation.” She shrugged.
“Fuck that.”
“Do you think I absorbed all the impact? That when Mom left, it hit my side of the car? Fuck that, Wren. She left you, too.”
“But it didn’t break me. Nothing can break me unless I let it.”
“Do you think Dad let it? Do you think he chose to fall apart when she left?”
“Yes!” Wren was shouting now. “And I think he keeps choosing. I think you both do. You’d rather be broken than move on.”
That did it. Now they were both crying, both shouting. Nobody wins until nobody wins, Cath thought. She turned back to the stove; the eggs were starting to smoke. “Dad’s sick, Wren,” she said as calmly as she could manage. She scraped the omelette out of the pan and dropped it onto a plate. “And your omelette’s burnt. And I’d rather be broken than wasted.” She set the plate on the counter. “You can tell Laura to go fuck herself. Like, to infinity and beyond. She doesn’t get to move on with me. Ever.”
Cath walked away before Wren could. She went upstairs and worked on Carry On.
* * *
There was always a Simon Snow marathon on TV on Christmas Eve. Cath and Wren always watched it, and their dad always made microwave popcorn.
They’d gone to Jacobo’s the night before for popcorn and other Christmas supplies. “If they don’t have it at the supermercado,” their dad had said happily, “you don’t really need it.” That’s how they ended up making lasagna with spaghetti noodles, and buying tamales instead of a turkey.
With the movies on, it was easy for Cath not to talk to Wren about anything important—but hard not to talk about the movies themselves.
“Baz’s hair is sick,” Wren said during Simon Snow and the Selkies Four. All the actors had longer hair in this movie. Baz’s black hair was swept up into a slick pompadour that started at his knifepoint widow’s peak.
“I know,” Cath said, “Simon keeps trying to punch him just so he can touch it.”
“Right? The last time Simon swung at Baz, I thought he was gonna brush away an eyelash.”
“Make a wish,” Cath said in her best Simon voice, “you handsome bastard.”
Their dad watched Simon Snow and the Fifth Blade with them, with a notebook on his lap. “I’ve lived with you two for too long,” he said, sketching a big bowl of Gravioli. “I went to see the new X-Men movie with Kelly, and I was convinced the whole time that Professor X and Magneto were in love.”
“Well, obviously,” Wren said.
“Sometimes I think you’re obsessed with Basilton,” Agatha said onscreen, her eyes wide and concerned.
“He’s up to something,” Simon said. “I know it.”
“That girl is worse than Liza Minnelli,” their dad said.
An hour into the movie, just before Simon caught Baz rendezvousing with Agatha in the Veiled Forest, Wren got a text and got up from the couch. Cath decided to use the bathroom, just in case the doorbell was about to ring. Laura wouldn’t do that, right? She wouldn’t come to the door.
Cath stood in the bathroom near the door and heard her dad telling Wren to have a good time.
“I’ll tell Mom you said hi,” Wren said to him.
“That’s probably not necessary,” he said, cheerfully enough. Go, Dad, Cath thought.
After Wren was gone, neither of them talked about her.
They watched one more Simon movie and ate giant pieces of spaghetti-sagna, and her dad realized for the first time that they didn’t have a Christmas tree.
“How did we forget the tree?” he asked, looking at the spot by the window seat where they usually put it.
“There was a lot going on,” Cath said.
“Why couldn’t Santa get out of bed on Christmas?” her dad asked, like he was setting up a joke.
“I don’t know, why?”
“Because he’s North bi-Polar.”
“No,” Cath said, “because the bipolar bears were really bringing him down.”
“Because Rudolph’s nose just seemed too bright.”
“Because the chimneys make him Claus-trophobic.”
“Because—” Her dad laughed. “—the highs and lows were too much for him? On the sled, get it?”
“That’s terrible,” Cath said, laughing. Her dad’s eyes looked bright, but not too bright. She waited for him to go to bed before she went upstairs.
Wren still wasn’t home. Cath tried to write, but closed her laptop after fifteen minutes of staring at a blank screen. She crawled under her blankets and tried not to think about Wren, tried not to picture her in Laura’s new house, with Laura’s new family.
Cath tried not to think of anything at all.
When she cleared her head, she was surprised to find Levi there underneath all the clutter. Levi in gods’ country. Probably having the merriest Christmas of them all. Merry. That was Levi 365 days a year. (On leap years, 366. Levi probably loved leap years. Another day, another girl to kiss.)
It was a little easier to think about him now that Cath knew she’d never have him, that she’d
probably never see him again.
She fell asleep thinking about his dirty-blond hair and his overabundant forehead and everything else that she wasn’t quite ready to forget.
* * *
“Since there isn’t a tree,” their dad said, “I put your presents under this photo of us standing next to a Christmas tree in 2005. Do you know that we don’t even have any houseplants? There’s nothing alive in this house but us.”
Cath looked down at the small heap of gifts and laughed. They were drinking eggnog and eating two-day-old pan dulce, sweet bread with powdery pink icing. The pan dulce came from Abel’s bakery. They’d stopped there after the supermercado. Cath had stayed in the car; she figured it wasn’t worth the awkwardness. It’d been months since she stopped returning Abel’s occasional texts, and at least a month since he’d stopped sending them.
“Abel’s grandma hates my hair,” Wren said when she got back into the car. “¡Qué pena! ¡Qué lástima! ¡Niño!”
“Did you get the tres leches cake?” Cath asked.
“They were out.”
“Qué lástima.”
Normally, Cath would have a present from Abel and one from his family under the tree. The pile of presents this year was especially thin. Mostly envelopes.
Cath gave Wren a pair of Ecuadorian mittens that she’d bought outside of the Union. “It’s alpaca,” she said. “Warmer than wool. And hypoallergenic.”
“Thanks,” Wren said, smoothing out the mittens in her lap.
“So I want my gloves back,” Cath said.
Wren gave Cath two T-shirts she’d bought online. They were cute and would probably be flattering, but this was the first time in ten years that Wren hadn’t given her something to do with Simon Snow. It made Cath feel tearful suddenly, and defensive. “Thanks,” she said, folding the shirts back up. “These are really cool.”
iTunes gift certificates from their dad.
Bookstore gift certificates from their grandma.
Aunt Lynn had sent them underwear and socks, just to be funny.
After their dad opened his gifts (everybody gave him clothes), there was still a small, silver box under the Christmas tree photo. Cath reached for it. There was a fancy tag hanging by a burgundy ribbon—Cather, it said in showy, black script. For a second Cath thought it was from Levi. (“Cather,” she could hear him say, everything about his voice smiling.)
She untied the ribbon and opened the box. There was a necklace inside. An emerald, her birthstone. She looked up at Wren and saw a matching pendant hanging from her neck.
Cath dropped the box and stood up, moving quickly, clumsily toward the stairs.
“Cath,” Wren called after her, “let me explain—”
Cath shook her head and ran the rest of the way to her room.
* * *
Cath tried to picture her mom.
The person who had given her this necklace. Wren said she was remarried now and lived in a big house in the suburbs. She had stepkids, too. Grown ones.
In Cath’s head, Laura was still young.
Too young, everyone always said, to have two big girls. That always made their mom smile.
When they were little and their mom and dad would fight, Wren and Cath worried their parents were going to get divorced and split them up, just like in The Parent Trap. “I’ll go with Dad,” Wren would say. “He needs more help.”
Cath would think about living alone with her dad, spacey and wild, or alone with her mom, chilly and impatient. “No,” she said, “I’ll go with Dad. He likes me more than Mom does.”
“He likes both of us more than Mom does,” Wren argued.
“Those can’t be yours,” people would say, “you’re too young to have such grown-up girls.”
“I feel too young,” their mom would reply.
“Then we’ll both stay with Dad,” Cath said.
“That’s not how divorce works, dummy.”
When their mom left without either of them, in a way it was a relief. If Cath had to choose between everyone, she’d choose Wren.
* * *
Their bedroom door didn’t have a lock, so Cath sat against it. But nobody came up the stairs.
She sat on her hands and cried like a little kid.
Too much crying, she thought. Too many kinds. She was tired of being the one who cried.
“You’re the most powerful magician in a hundred ages.” The Humdrum’s face, Simon’s own boyhood face, looked dull and tired. Nothing glinted in its blue eyes.… “Do you think that much power comes without sacrifice? Did you think you could become you without leaving something, without leaving me, behind?”
—from chapter 23, Simon Snow and the Seventh Oak, copyright © 2010 by Gemma T. Leslie
TWENTY-ONE
Their dad got up to jog every morning. Cath woke up when she heard his coffeemaker beep. She’d get up and make him breakfast, then fall back to sleep on the couch until Wren woke up. They’d pass on the staircase without a word.
Sometimes Wren went out. Cath never went with her.
Sometimes Wren didn’t come home. Cath never waited up.
Cath had a lot of nights alone with her dad, but she kept putting off talking to him, really talking to him; she didn’t want to be the thing that made him lose his balance. But she was running out of time.… He was supposed to drive them back to school in three days. Wren was even agitating to go back a day early, on Saturday, so they could “settle in.” (Which was code for “go to lots of frat parties.”)
On Thursday night, Cath made huevos rancheros, and her dad washed the dishes after dinner. He was telling her about a new pitch. Gravioli was going so well, his agency was getting a shot at a sister brand, Frankenbeans. Cath sat on a barstool and listened.
“So I was thinking, maybe this time I just let Kelly pitch his terrible ideas first. Cartoon beans with Frankenstein hair. ‘Monstrously delicious,’ whatever. These people always reject the first thing they hear—”
“Dad, I need to talk to you about something.”
He peeked over his shoulder. “I thought you’d already googled all that period and birds-and-bees stuff.”
“Dad…”
He turned around, suddenly concerned. “Are you pregnant? Are you gay? I’d rather you were gay than pregnant. Unless you’re pregnant. Then we’ll deal. Whatever it is, we’ll deal. Are you pregnant?”
“No,” Cath said.
“Okay…” He leaned back against the sink and began tapping wet fingers against the counter.
“I’m not gay either.”
“What does that leave?”
“Um … school, I guess.”
“You’re having problems in school? I don’t believe that. Are you sure you’re not pregnant?”
“I’m not really having problems.…” Cath said. “I’ve just decided that I’m not going back.”
Her dad looked at her like he was still waiting for her to give a real answer.
“I’m not going back for second semester,” she said.
“Because?”
“Because I don’t want to. Because I don’t like it.”
He wiped his hands on his jeans. “You don’t like it?”
“I don’t belong there.”
He shrugged. “Well, you don’t have to stay there forever.”
“No,” she said. “I mean, UNL is a bad fit for me. I didn’t choose it, Wren did. And it’s fine for Wren, she’s happy, but it’s bad for me. I just … it’s like every day there is still the first day.”
“But Wren is there—”
Cath shook her head. “She doesn’t need me.” Not like you do, Cath just stopped herself from saying.
“What will you do?”
“I’ll live here. Go to school here.”
“At UNO?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you registered?”
Cath hadn’t thought that part through yet. “I will.…”
“You should stick out the year,” he said. “You’ll lose you
r scholarship.”
“No,” Cath said, “I don’t care about that.”
“Well, I do.”
“That’s not what I meant. I can get loans. I’ll get a job, too.”
“And a car?”
“I guess.…”
Her dad took off his glasses and started cleaning them with his shirt. “You should stick out the year. We’ll look at it again in the spring.”
“No,” she said. “I just…” She rubbed the neck of her T-shirt into her sternum. “I can’t go back there. I hate it. And it’s pointless. And I can do so much more good here.”
He sighed. “I wondered if that’s what this was about.” He put his glasses back on. “Cath, you’re not moving back home to take care of me.”
“That’s not the main reason—but it wouldn’t be a bad thing. You do better when you’re not alone.”
“I agree. And I’ve already talked to your grandmother. It was too much, too soon when you guys both moved out at once. Grandma’s going to check in with me a few times a week. We’re going to eat dinner together. I might even stay with her for a while if things start to look rough again.”
“So you can move back home, but I can’t? I’m only eighteen.”
“Exactly. You’re only eighteen. You’re not going to throw your life away to take care of me.”
“I’m not throwing my life away.” Such as it is, she thought. “I’m trying to think for myself for the first time. I followed Wren to Lincoln, and she doesn’t even want me there. Nobody wants me there.”
“Tell me about it,” he said. “Tell me why you’re so unhappy.”
“It’s just … everything. There are too many people. And I don’t fit in. I don’t know how to be. Nothing that I’m good at is the sort of thing that matters there. Being smart doesn’t matter—and being good with words. And when those things do matter, it’s only because people want something from me. Not because they want me.”
The sympathy in his face was painful. “This doesn’t sound like a decision, Cath. This sounds like giving up.”
“So what? I mean—” Her hands flew up, then fell in her lap. “—so what? It’s not like I get a medal for sticking it out. It’s just school. Who cares where I do it?”
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