Brittany Bends

by Grayson, Kristine

  Eric’s eyebrows go up. “He’s a political leader or something? And taking a picture would cause a revolution?”

  “No, no,” I say, because that’s not what I meant. “It would be—like getting naked pictures of Beyoncé online. You know, everyone would be talking about them and some people would want to know if the pictures are fake, and stuff like that.”

  I’ve already said too much. Mom’s going to be mad.

  “Who is your dad?” Eric asks.

  I shake my head. How do I answer that?

  I’d say, Zeus. Eric would say, Some guy named Zeus? And I would say, No, the real Zeus, and he would say, There is no real Zeus, and then he’d get mad at me.

  “He’s like...” I sigh. “Where I’m from, he’s like one of the most important people ever. But it’s hard to explain.”

  “And Mom knows this?” Eric asks. Apparently my answer was good enough for him.

  “Not when she met him,” I say. “My dad is weird-looking, but women seem to find him really attractive.”

  Understatement of the century. Maybe the understatement of a thousand centuries. I have no idea how my dad, who looks like a bull in human form, became catnip for women, but there you have it. And I also know for a fact that he thinks using magic to make someone have sex with you is just wrong.

  (Don’t ask me how I know that. It’s not right that a daughter should know that about her dad, but I do, because of this case that came up when me and Crystal and Tiff were Interim Fates and, yuck!)

  “And…” I bite my lower lip, then realize I’m doing it, and stop, and finish, “Mom’s not supposed to talk about it. None of us are, because, y’know. Daddy’s married.”

  “So’s Mom,” Eric says, clearly not understanding what I mean.

  “No,” I say. “Daddy was married when he met Mom. And he’s still married.”

  To the same jealous, nasty woman. Sometimes I thought Daddy deserved Hera, and sometimes I wonder if Hera would be nicer if Daddy were nicer, and sometimes I wonder if they would’ve been two different people (and the world a different place) if they hadn’t met.

  Eric has gone pale. He looks really and truly shocked, like he never heard of anyone having babies “out of wedlock” before.

  “Oh,” he says. “Wow. So when your dad took you, how did he explain it to his wife?”

  I shrug. I don’t like to think about the details of Daddy’s and Hera’s relationship.

  “She’s come to expect stuff like that over the years,” I say.

  “Oh, wow,” Eric says again. He has, like, a million ways to say “oh, wow,” each one different. This one is quiet and full of shock. I think everything I’ve told him today shocks him.

  I wipe at my face with yet another napkin. The car is shuddering, but I can’t tell if it’s the wind or because a car this old and rusty doesn’t like having someone mash his foot on the brake for so long.

  “God, that’s so messed up,” Eric says, which is major swearing for him. “I had no idea. So when Mom is saying stuff like, ‘be careful, you could end up in a bad place,’ she’s speaking from experience.”

  I nod.

  He pats my hand—the one without a crumpled napkin. “I’m so sorry, Brit. I had no idea.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, even though it isn’t. “I’m not supposed to say anything. Please don’t tell Mom I mentioned Daddy.”

  Eric nods, then he takes his thumb and forefinger and moves them across his lips. Took me almost a month after I moved here to realize that means my lips are sealed, and even longer to understand that the gesture is supposed to replicate sealing. (To me, it looks like zipping, but what do I know?)

  He puts the car back into gear, then looks at me again. “You okay to go home?”

  “Yeah,” I say quietly.

  “All righty, then,” he says. “But while I drive you, you practice.”

  “Practice what?”

  “Being happy,” he says. “You got a job. And I know it’s weird for you, but everyone will think it’s weirder if you’re not happy about it.”

  I’m biting my lip again. I look at him, then nod. He’s helping me. That’s so sweet.

  And it’s so strange to practice being happy.

  But you know what? I never have. And I haven’t been happy a lot, even when I was living with my sisters on Mount Olympus.

  So that seems like pretty good advice in general.

  If only I knew how to do it.

  FOUR

  THE JOHNSON FAMILY Manse sits on a narrow road a few blocks and an large busy highway away from Lake Superior. The Manse is not a manse at all. (I had to look up the word. Tiff would’ve been so proud of me. [Or she would’ve rolled her eyes and said, About time, Brit.].)

  Manse means vicarage (which I also had to look up) and the Johnson Family Manse certainly isn’t a minister’s house. That definition made me hoot with laughter when I saw it.

  That leaves the other definition: mansion. And the Johnson Family Manse isn’t a mansion. It isn’t even an aspiring one. I think, maybe, the name of the house is some kind of joke, but I’m not sure.

  I think about that every time I arrive at the Johnson Family Manse. It’s half-hidden in a grove of really large pine trees that Karl says need to be cut down, and Mom says are necessary for shade in the summer to keep the house cool, and Lise says just keep the neighbors from seeing how crummy the house actually looks.

  I’m not sure I’d call it crummy. But it’s definitely a work in progress.

  The Johnson Family Manse is a two-story sprawling building that retains none of its original shape. I’ve paced it. I’ve tried to see the original bones, and I can’t.

  The Manse has a huge yard, which takes up most of the block. The yard slopes downhill to what Mom calls a stream and everyone else calls a puddle. (I think everyone else is right, because there’s a beginning and ending to that “stream” and the beginning is on the north side of that slope and the ending is on the south side—not very big at all. But apparently, everyone understands that Mom needs her delusions.)

  Most of the yard’s behind the house, and Karl has used some of that space to expand the driveway. Right now, the Johnson Family owns four cars. Mom has one, Karl leases one (whatever that means), and Lise has one that she bought with her own money (and Ingrid says that was a big fight; Ingrid’s good for gossip). Eric has the rust bucket, of course.

  Which he parks, right now, in the space just behind the two-car garage, next to three rusted Weber grills, a rusted kid’s wagon that was probably red once, and a whole collection of shovels. The rust bucket fits right in next to all of that, like it’s part of stuff about to be thrown out.

  He puts the shift in park and the entire car rocks, then groans. The groan is new. Eric frowns.

  “I’ve really got to fix that,” he says to himself.

  But he’s been saying that about shutting down the car ever since he became responsible for driving me around, so I don’t wait for the next sentence, which is usually, Did that sound different to you, Brit?

  The wind isn’t quite as cold back here, because the garage blocks it. Most of the winds in this town come off Lake Superior, and even though we can’t see the lake from our house (or from the street for that matter), the lake’s still this huge presence in our lives.

  It controls the weather, and sometimes I think it controls the entire town’s mood.

  I wrap my purse strap around my right hand and use my left to shove the car door closed. It slams with a bang and the car groans again. I wince. About two weeks after I moved in, I slammed the car door, and the muffler clattered onto the driveway. Eric yelled at me, and everyone else told me to ignore him, because up to that point, he’d attached the muffler with a metal coat hanger, which I guess is not the way mufflers are usually attached to cars.

  I square my shoulders and take a deep breath. The air smells faintly of fish from the lake. My heart starts to pound as I approach the small flight of stairs leading up to the back doo
r. The metal railing on those stairs isn’t rusted; Karl keeps it in tip-top shape, because if someone trips going up (or down), they’ll fall and “do a header” onto the driveway, meaning they’ll have to go to the hospital.

  I guess it happened to some friend of theirs shortly after they moved in.

  No matter why he does it, I’m grateful now, because I need that railing to stay upright. My right foot throbs, but it’s not really the problem. The problem is that these shoes are so tight, the bottoms of both of my feet have gone numb.

  I pull open the screen door, then slowly push open the solid wood interior door because if you open it too fast from the outside, you might slam it into someone who is standing by the kitchen table.

  We don’t eat at the kitchen table—it only sits four—but whoever is cooking that night often uses it to chop things or roll out bread or something. If it’s not being used for cooking, groceries are sprawled on top of it, waiting for someone (whoever is assigned) to put them all away.

  We’re all assigned some chore or another. There’s a big long list written in multiple colors on the whiteboard beside the back door. The list separates out our regular duties (all the time) from our weekly duties.

  That whiteboard is the one reason some of the younger kids loved it that I moved in, even though I caused bedroom, bathroom, and space issues. I ended up with chores too, and many of mine were the simple ones that the little kids do because Mom wasn’t sure I knew enough about the way the Greater World works to do stuff like cook dinner on a real stove. (I didn’t, not when I moved in. Lise, Anna, Eric, and Mom are teaching me now, along with Ingrid.)

  I step inside. It’s hot, like it always is in the kitchen, and Beauregard, the gigantic brown dog, gets up from his bed next to the stove and runs toward me. I’ve never liked dogs much, but Beauregard and I have come to an understanding.

  Mostly, I have to understand that he loves me, and will shove his cold nose in my crotch as a greeting whenever he sees me.

  His tail wags, and I deflect the nose, and as I do, Ivan steps into the kitchen from the refrigerator room, clutching a gigantic package of hamburger. It’s almost as long as his forearm.

  “Hey,” he says, which is his way of saying hello. Ivan is shorter than me. (He’s also shorter than Ingrid, and that makes him mad). He has hair as blond as mine, and it always needs a trim except for a few strands near his crown that stick straight up. They look like a little hand waving hello.

  My eye always goes to those strands first, and then to the birthmark along his left nostril that can, in the right light, look unfortunately like a booger that’s been unattended for much too long.

  “How’d it go?” he asks.

  Everyone in the family knows about my job interview. It became this big production:

  •Help Brit figure out what jobs to apply for

  •Help Brit fill out applications on paper

  •Help Brit fill out applications online

  •Help Brit manage her expectations

  •Help Brit prepare for her first interview

  •Help Brit dress for her first interview

  •Help Brit cope with the idea that she might never get a job, despite all that work

  I felt like a dumb little kid who couldn’t do anything, and that feeling comes back up now. I’m about to tell Ivan, in a rather gloating tone, that I got the job, when Eric barrels into the door behind me, nearly making me stumble.

  “Brit’s going to talk to everyone at dinner,” Eric says, glaring at me.

  He doesn’t want me to dole this information out to one person at a time. He believes that in the Johnson Family, no one should ever tell one person something because “gossip can spread like wildfire since the family’s so big.”

  He has no idea what a big family really is, and he doesn’t know anything about gossip. Gossip about my family (Okay, my dad’s family) has turned into myth and legend and just straight-up lies.

  Plus, most of those stories leave out how painful gossip can be. Sometimes the gossip’s painful because you’re the center of it, and sometimes the gossip’s painful because you’re not being discussed at all.

  Ivan sets the hamburger on the counter, and Beauregard ambles over there. He can almost put his nose on the countertop, so Ivan has to fight him off.

  There’s a super large pot on the stove. The burner beneath it is glowing red, and as Ivan stirs that, the smell of olive oil and garlic rises. Anna comes into the kitchen from the basement door and she’s carrying a gigantic unopened package of brown sugar, a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, and one of the super-size bottles of Heinz Ketchup.

  Anna’s as tall as I am and thinner. She has an angular face and sky blue eyes. She wears her wheat-blonde hair feathered, but that’s the only difference between us. It’s so obvious that we’re sisters, it seems like we should be as close as me and Tiff and Crystal.

  But we only just met a few months ago, and every time I see Anna’s face, I feel like I’ve been magicked to a place filled with strange mirrors because I’ve never been in a place where everyone looks like me. Usually I’m the person who stands out, rather than the one who blends in.

  “Brit!” she says as if she hasn’t seen me for days. “How’d it go?”

  “I just asked her.” Ivan has his back to me as he does something on the counter. “But Eric says she can’t say until dinner.”

  “Hey, you can’t do that.” Anna piles everything she carried on the table. For a minute, I think she’s talking to me, but she’s not. She goes to the counter and takes a huge serrated knife out of Ivan’s hands. “I said you could help if you didn’t touch the knives.”

  Ivan is knife-crazy. And sword-crazy. And blade-crazy. He loves online gaming, and thinks someday he can be a superhero/warrior if he just learns the tools of the trade.

  Which means he wants sword-fighting lessons. Mom says he can take fencing next summer as his summer class, but I have no idea why she tries to placate him by telling him he can build a fence when he really wants to learn how to swing a broadsword.

  “You need help?” Eric says to Anna, using a tone that clearly states he’ll help her if there’s trouble, but he won’t help for any other reason.

  “No, go read about integers or whatever you do.” Anna shoves Ivan to one side. “I told you get the burger. I didn’t say you could cut up the onions and green peppers. For one thing, you have to peel the onion first.”

  They’re busy, and Eric has already left the room.

  If you can call the kitchen a room. It took me a long time to do that. Because the kitchen doesn’t have a lot of walls, or maybe it has too many, only they’re not really walls, they’re more like strips of wall that might someday grow up to be pillars.

  The kitchen was once closed in, or at least that’s what Eric says. Karl got “a bee up his butt” (Eric again) and decided to make the kitchen “open concept” but never really finished. So Karl took out the walls that didn’t carry the weight of the second story, making sure that the parts that remained could handle the weight so the house wouldn’t collapse in on itself.

  Now the kitchen has more entrances than solid walls. I just came in the back door, which, as far as I can tell, was always in that spot. The basement door (which closes) is kitty-corner from the back door, and directly across from the back door is the missing wall/hallway that leads to the dining room.

  The entrance to my left opens to the refrigerator room, because Mom got some kind of coupon or prize or something and won this stainless steel restaurant-size refrigerator with matching freezer, and of course none of that fits into the real kitchen. But the refrigerator does let the food stay organized. (The little labels that Mom glued to the shelves [like Milk only!] help.)

  There’s a second freezer in there for the deer meat from hunting season, and a third freezer for the fish that some family members catch on weekends, and behind all of it is a door that I can’t touch, built into the wall, and locked with a combination padlock and one of those
touch security locks. That’s the gun cabinet, which I’ve only seen inside of once. Filled with long guns (rifles?) and two smaller guns on a shelf.

  Karl won’t let anyone who’s not certified near the gun cabinet, and he changes the combinations every three days, only telling the trusted three (Mom, Lise, and Anna—the only ones qualified) what the combination actually is.

  When you stand, like I am, right in front of the back door, you face the table and the stove, where some cabinets remain. The sink is to the right, and it’s a huge sink. (They call it a “farm sink,” for reasons I’ll never understand.) Next to the basement door is another door that leads to the garage. (You have to go down some steps to get there.)

  If I come in the house through the back door, it always takes me a minute to get my bearings. When I first moved in, I’d always take the wrong door, usually ending up in the refrigerator room, facing the gun cabinet. Everyone thought I was obsessed with the guns, when really, I was just lost.

  The smell of sweet onions hits me, and I blink. Anna is scraping a cutting board into the gigantic pot. I see onions and green peppers.

  Ivan grins at me as he grabs the brown sugar off the table. “Sloppy Joes,” he says happily. It’s his favorite meal and he asks for it all the time, so apparently, Mom decided he needs to learn how to cook it.

  I nod. I know Ivan. He’s going to ask more questions about my job interview.

  “Where are the buns?” I ask before he can open his mouth again.

  “Oh, dang!” he says.

  “Ivan,” Anna says, sounding just like Mom. “Language.”

  “Sorry.” He heads to dry storage, which is a cabinet near the double doors to the basement and garage.

  I use that moment to make my escape.

  Only Beauregard notices. He watches and whines just a little. I get a sense he would follow me if he could.

  The animals in the household—and there are always a bunch of animals—love me. I have no idea why. If I didn’t keep my door closed, they’d join me on the bed, like they did when I first moved in. In fact, the animals were one reason why I got my own space in the first place. (It’s not fair to call what I have a “room.”)