I hate that she has been asked by more than one guy.
“Are you going to say yes to either of them?” Mandy asks.
“I don't think so. I'm waiting for someone else to ask me.”
“Who?” half the team choruses, probably worried that Kiki has set her sights on their potential prom dates.
“I'm pretty sure Julian Paynter is going to ask me, and I'm going to go with him,” Kiki says, glancing back at me. She leans forward, acting like she's letting the girls in on a big secret, like they have all suddenly become her confidantes. “I think the whole reason Allen and I had problems is because Julian liked me so much. Allen probably didn't know it until after we started dating because Julian was too shy to say anything. So when Allen found out, he broke up with me, for Ju-lian's sake. Plus, Allen's probably gay anyway; I think he was using me as a beard or something.”
A few of the girls laugh when she says this.
Kiki speaks as if there's no doubt that what she said is true. I freeze. I know I need to do something, but all I can think of involves running at her, screaming, jumping on her back, and clawing at her perfect face. I could ask Kiki if her lunches taste as good coming up as they do going down. I could tell everyone what I heard in the bathroom. I could spread rumors about her, the way she always does about me, make her look ridiculous for once. But I am frozen. And even if I weren't, I don't know if I could expose Kiki.
Ana speaks before I can, though. “Kiki, Julian already has a date. He's going with Mia. He asked her a while ago. Right, Meems?”
Every girl in the room turns to stare at me.
“Yeah. He did.” This is my chance to tell it like it is, to get Kiki back for all the lies she's told, all the rumors and mean things I know she's said about me. “And my brother isn't gay.” Beautiful. Way to stick it to her. That'll show her, Mia.
For a moment, Kiki looks scared and embarrassed, but in a millisecond her face has turned back to stone. When she speaks, her voice is even. “I think I'd be a better judge of that than you would, sweetie. How nice of Julian to ask you. He must really be looking out for you… with everything that's been going on with your family and all.”
How does Kiki know anything about my family? I am too stunned to say anything.
Ana comes to my rescue. “Is that why guys ask girls to prom, then, Kiki? And you've been asked twice already?”
The ability to be catty and cruel must be genetic; I've watched enough reality television, talk shows, and soap operas to have picked it up by now if it's a skill you can learn, but I can't think of anything to say. I'm outmatched.
“I think I forgot my water bottle,” I say as I retreat.
In the girls' locker room, I imagine what I could have said to Kiki, how I could have won. I think about my mother, how she stayed in her room all day when my father left, even though she had asked him to leave. Maybe I've inherited more than just her nose and eyes.
WHEN I WAS FOUR YEARS OLD, MY DAD SPENT AN ENTIRE afternoon trying to teach me the Greek alphabet. He was reading an old book in Greek for graduate school; I asked him what it was, and he decided to teach me the Greek alphabet. He taught it to me as a song, to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and we sang it together to my mom and Allen that night. I only remember the first four letters now, but I remember clearly how it felt to hold Dad's hand and sing.
MY DAD E-MAILED US FROM PERU TO TELL US HE HAD A SUR-prise for us and that he wanted us all to meet for dinner the night after he got back.
“Maybe he bought me a llama. I Googled Peru and it said a lot about llamas. I saw some pictures. Llamas look like a cross between camels and ponies… and ostriches,” Keatie says as we drive to the restaurant.
Allen laughs. “I doubt he bought you a llama, Keater. He probably brought us a bunch of hideous sweaters, and I bet his surprise is something like he wants to take us all to Peru this summer. If we're lucky it'll be that he wants to move there.”
Since Dad moved out, he has ignored Al. I mean, we've all seen a decline in Dad-attention, except for Keatie, maybe, who insists on having daily conversations with my dad about anything she can think of just so she can keep him on the phone, but it's worse with Al and Dad. They always had trouble getting along before, but now it's like they're having some kind of silent face-off.
“Prepare to be llama-fied,” Al tells us when we arrive at the restaurant.
Allen steels his face when we get out of the car. He looks like he's about to be tortured by terrorists looking for government secrets.
We tell the hostess we're supposed to meet my dad.
“Right,” she says. “They're waiting for you. Follow me, please.”
I don't understand why she said “they” until I see the table she is leading us to. My dad, tanner than normal, is talking to a woman sitting next to him at the table.
Dad stands when he sees us. “Kids… hello. Good to see you.” He takes the woman's hand and she stands up. “This is Paloma.” He acts as if this should mean something to us.
We stand there, quiet.
She reaches toward us to shake our hands. “I am Paloma. Of Peru.”
Keatie takes her hand and shakes it limply.
I put my hand out to shake Paloma's; Al shoves his in his pocket.
Dads glowers at Al and gestures toward the table. “Well, come on, have a seat. Let's order.”
We slowly take our seats. Keatie insists on sitting next to my dad, wedging herself in between him and the Peruvian, who I end up sitting next to. She smiles hopefully at me, and I smile wanly back. Allen sits next to me.
“Why is she here?” Keatie asks as soon as she is seated. “Is she going to clean your apartment?”
I lower my head in embarrassment and hope that this woman doesn't speak English very well.
Keatie's limited experience with Hispanic women has been her close association with our Latin American housekeepers, who also sort of acted as babysitters to her. Now that we're all old enough to watch and clean up after ourselves, we don't have a housekeeper. Anyway, none of them were anything like Paloma. They were all kind of round and motherly; not Paloma—she's wearing a tight black minidress and strappy high-heeled shoes. I wonder where Dad found her, and if she hiked around the jungle in outfits like that.
“Paloma is, uh, my, ummm, my new special friend,” Dad stammers.
“What do you need a special friend for? You don't even have time to play with us,” Keatie reminds him.
Allen and I look at each other and smirk. No one is going to give Dad any help on this one.
“Yeah, Dad, what are you going to do with a special friend?” Allen asks.
Dad says something about how Paloma showed him her country and now he is going to show her his.
“So it was kind of this thing where you were like, ‘Hey, Paloma, you show me yours, I'll show you mine.’ Something like that, Dad?” I try to sound like I am genuinely trying to help him out.
Dad ignores me.
At that moment everyone at the table looks in Paloma's direction to see her reaction to the argument that centers around her. She is applying lipstick and looking into the mirror of her compact but quickly puts the stuff away when she realizes that our conversation has ground to a halt.
“Sorry,” she says, her accent thick. “Everything okay?” she asks, smiling, trying to figure out what to say.
“So she does speak English,” I say aloud, before I can catch myself.
Before Dad can say anything, Allen is on his feet. “I gotta go.”
I stand up. “Yeah, me too. Early-morning practice.”
Keatie looks confused. I try to motion toward the door with my head.
“What?” she asks.
“Do you want to stay or go?” I try not to sound mean.
“Go, I guess.” She looks like she is about to cry as she gets up from the table. “But we didn't even eat. And Dad has surprises.”
“If he has any more surprises, I'm sure he'll bring them over later,�
�� Allen says, putting his hands on Keatie's shoulders and turning her in the direction of the restaurant's entrance. “We can eat at Wendy's.”
Although Keatie could eat nothing but chicken nuggets for the rest of her life and die happy, she doesn't quite accept this bribe the way she normally would. Once she's gotten her nuggets, she eats only one and a half before handing the box to me and telling me she's full.
I nibble on my bacon cheeseburger even though I'm not hungry, either.
When we get home, Keatie tells my mom about Paloma. “Daddy made a friend named Paloma in Peru and now she's visiting Daddy and she speaks Spanish. Allen wouldn't shake her hand.”
When she hears this, Mom looks the way she did when we were at this Indian restaurant and she found out that her curry was made with goat meat. “Hmmm,” she says.
Allen tries to make her feel better. “She's nothing, Mom. She's just visiting. And she's an idiot, she barely put a sentence together.” I've noticed that Al does this a lot with Mom, tries to take care of her.
That night, I fall asleep imagining Dad's reasons for bringing Paloma home with him. Maybe he's just trying to make Mom jealous. I bet he'll ship Paloma back to Machu Picchu as soon as Mom takes him back. I run through this scenario twelve times in my head, unable to make myself believe it, no matter how hard I try.
KEATIE'S SCHOOL IS HAVING A RECYCLING DRIVE, AND WHICH-ever class brings in the most paper, cans, and whatever else to be recycled wins an ice cream party. She is plundering the house for all things recyclable and keeps interrupting me while I'm trying to choreograph.
“Is this recyclable?” she asks, holding up a milk carton, with milk still in it.
“No,” I tell her. “Stick to cans and paper.”
She's back again five minutes later, hefting a plastic Stater Brothers bag. “What about these?” she asks, taking out some empty bottles.
“Yes,” I tell her, annoyed. But when I look again, I notice that they are vodka bottles. “Where did you get those?”
“I'm not telling.”
“Keatie,” I say in my most authoritative voice, “tell me.”
“Okay, fine. From our big trash can outside. I couldn't find anything else in the house, so I looked in the trash. They were in there.”
Weird. My mom isn't a big drinker…. At least, I don't think she is.
“Well, stop going through the trash. It's gross.”
Keatie goes back upstairs and I can hear her shuffling around, still searching.
WHEN THURSDAY ROLLS AROUND, I AM STILL FREAKED OUT about my dad and the Peruvian woman. So much so that I forget that I don't actually answer any of the questions Lisz asks me. When she asks me, “How have you been? What's been going on?” I blurt out, “My dad got back from Peru on Tuesday,” without even thinking.
“I didn't know he was in Peru,” Lisz says.
Having trapped myself, I decide to give it to her straight for once. What the hell. Things can't get much worse on the Dad front anyway. “Yeah, he joined a hiking club after he moved out and they hiked to Machu Picchu. We saw him last night.”
“Oh. So how was it seeing him again?”
“Weird. He brought a woman. Home with him. From Peru. A Peruvian. He wanted us to meet him for dinner, and when we got there, there was this woman waiting for us at the table. My dad introduces her and says she's Paloma from Peru. And she goes, ‘I am Paloma; I am of Peru.’ She doesn't speak much English, I guess.”
Lisz looks like she's trying to hide a smile. “Does your dad speak Spanish?”
“Yeah. He speaks it all the time for his job.”
“That's right,” says Lisz, “I forgot.” She looks a little embarrassed. I wonder if she ever gets her patients' lives and problems confused. She looks at me expectantly. Probably not.
I finish the story, leaving out the parts about Mom's sad, scared face and Allen's refusal to shake Paloma's hand. Those things seem too personal. Lisz asks a few questions about my feelings toward Paloma (“I don't have any feelings about her: I don't even know her”) and then our time is up. I am kind of embarrassed that I didn't have to use the jar, that I've actually discussed part of my life, however tiny it was, with a shrink.
As I wait in the waiting room for Allen to finish his session with Lisz, I do my history homework. Surprisingly, I am able to concentrate for the first time in weeks; for once, what I read actually makes sense. If I didn't know better, I'd think that talking had actually helped somehow. But that's ridiculous. How could the recap of a disaster possibly do anything to clean up the wreckage?
WHEN WE DRIVE HOME, I ASK ALLEN WHAT HE TALKS TO Lisz about.
“None of your business. What do you talk to her about?”
“I talk to her about you, mostly,” I say.
He believes me for a split second. “You do?”
I try not to laugh.
“Whatever. You do not. Why do you care what I talk to her about, anyway?”
“Well, do you answer all her questions?” I watch his face, so I can see if he's lying.
“I think so. Why?”
“Do you always tell her the truth?”
“Why wouldn't I?” He makes eye contact with me briefly.
“Because she asks about personal stuff. And what if you don't want to tell her all of it?”
“I guess you just tell her you don't want to talk about it. But so what if you do tell her personal stuff? She's not going to tell anybody anyway. She can't. It's illegal.”
“It is? Then why does she always talk about the conversations she's had with you during our sessions?”
He turns up the radio and doesn't respond.
I wonder what would happen if I did tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
HALEY AND I HAVE THIS CLASS CALLED ETHICS, AND EVERY Monday the teacher puts up an “ethical dilemma” that the kids in the class have to answer and write about. This week's dilemma:
A building is burning down. Two people are alive inside, and only one can be saved. One of the people is your ninety-year-old grandmother, who is immobile and has to use a respirator to help her breathe. The other is a nineteen-year-old man who was recently released from a juvenile detention center. Whom do you save and why?
Questions like these aren't very interesting to me, and as I try to come up with an answer, one thought repeats in my head: Me. I'd save myself.
HALEY'S FAMILY DOESN'T COOK. OKAY, THEY DO, BUT ONLY once or twice a week, and they almost always make one of the following three meals:
(1) chicken pasta salad.
(2) stuffed shells (my personal favorite).
(3) chicken or vegetable stir-fry, depending on who cooks. Vegetable if Haley's sister Starr is cooking—she'll eat meat, but she won't touch it or cook it; chicken if Haley is cooking. Haley will touch and cook meat for the rest of her family, but she won't eat it, so she always makes a little for herself without chicken. I've asked her why she doesn't just make veggie stuff, and she says it's because she's cooking for her family, not just herself, so she likes to make them what they like. I told my mom about this and she said, “Haley is an old soul, Mia. A good friend to have.”
Sometimes when Haley's brother Max comes home from college and visits, he makes fish sticks, because they're his favorite. No one really eats them but him.
There are seven kids in Haley's family and both of her parents work, so rather than Haley's mom cooking every night, what they usually do is put one of the kids who can drive “in charge of dinner.” This means that the person takes Haley's mom's ATM card, gets some money from the machine, and buys food. There's always a huge supply of cold cereal, Easy Cheese, Wheat Thins, and yogurt on hand at Haley's house, but for actual meals, you have to bring in supplies. Sometimes the person in charge of dinner feels ambitious and goes to the grocery store and makes one of the three standard meals, but usually the person buying the takeout will go to one of four restaurants:
(1) Fiesta Time.
(2) SuperSubs.
(3) Kin
g Phillip's Spaghetti Barn (where they always get pizza; the spaghetti is pretty gross).
(4) Chopstix (it's a Chinese place, of course).
Before my parents went AWOL, my mom always cooked for us, five days a week, without fail. We'd help her out once in a while, but Mom always planned the meals and just told us what to chop and when to add it. Lately, though, she's made a habit of thawing, warming, or microwaving rather than cooking, and that's only when she doesn't call from work and tell us to get takeout or pizza, or give us directions for how to microwave, thaw, or warm our own meals.
Mom leaves a message on my cell phone during dance practice; I listen to it on the late bus home.
“Would you mind being in charge of dinner tonight, sweetie? I'll be home a little late, and I thought you could just throw together a salad and some spaghetti or something. If you need anything from the store, call Allen and ask him to bring it home when he gets off work. He's got a short shift today, he'll just be there until six. And could you pick up Keatie on your way home from practice? She's at Chewy's. I love you. You're a big help.” She makes a kissing sound. “Mmmmmwah. Thanks.”
Images of King Phillip's spaghetti and fish sticks flash through my mind. I can see where this is going.
Haley comes over to help me cook. We have all the ingredients we need to make stuffed shells except the shells and the ricotta cheese, which Allen brings home.
He drops a grocery bag onto the counter. “This should be good. You cooking. Do you want me to invite your lover to come over for dinner so that he can see your domestic side?” He must be in a really good mood. He's never encouraged me to hang out with Julian before.
“Shut up.”
Haley laughs.
Allen puts his arm around her. “Now that friends of siblings are no longer off limits, what do you say about you and me, Haley? Wanna give it a shot?”
“You remind me too much of my own brothers. Sorry.”
“Hey, I understand, but if you ever change your mind, you know where to find me, eh?”
Notes on a Near-Life Experience Page 7
