Everything Beautiful in the World

by Lisa Levchuk

  Driving back to Farmington, I look over at the graveyard where I stopped. None of the prayers I know seem right, so I make up an original prayer for my brother. Mainly, my prayer consists of picturing Tommy with his straw hat and his fishing rod in Heaven. The only words I use are to thank him for being there when I visited my mother.

  At the pharmacy, Emory is in the office making himself a drink.

  “Dale can drive you home,” he says.

  “No, he can’t. Dale doesn’t have a license,” I say.

  “I’ll stick around and work if you want,” I continue. “I’ll vacuum. I’ll even dust.”

  Emory must sense my desperation because he hands me a can of Endust and a rag and, shaking his head, returns to the drug counter. I carry my supplies to the gift area and look for something that needs dusting. In actuality, everything looks a bit dusty, so I begin with the statues. These statues are the kinds of things that you might see in a doctor’s office or in someone’s hospital room. My mother would never want one of these things in her hospital room, and I wonder if anyone in the world who was really sick and possibly dying would want a carved wooden statue of a nurse in a painted-on white minidress holding a sign that says, “Get well soon.” But I dust her anyway because you never know. More interesting to dust are the big Smurfs. I tell you this, if I were in the hospital, I would much rather receive a giant-size Smurf, because Smurfs are blue and they are always cheerful, no matter what job they have. Even when Papa Smurf is working as a coal miner or a firefighter, he looks happy. Smurfland is a pretty happy place. After using practically the whole can of Endust on one shelf of Smurfs, I realize that I’m not doing such a great job. The Smurfs look too clean, almost glowing and sticky-looking. That is when Mr. Howland comes into the store wearing his Ray-Ban sunglasses even though it is now officially dark out. It is not clear how he knew I was here, but how many places could I be?

  He, too, looks somewhat wrecked, but not in the same way my father did. He looks like he was recently shot out of a cannon and landed in the Farmington Pharmacy. I pretend not to see him and think about making a break for the back office. That plan presents immediate difficulty; it would require crawling down brightly lit aisles to avoid detection. I hold my ground. It doesn’t take long for Mr. Howland to see me. He strolls over to me and lifts his sunglasses and stares at me.

  “Have a happy Smurf,” I say, and hand him one of the blue babies in a carriage.

  “Why the hell did you do that?”

  Spooky old Emory is looking right at us from behind the pharmacy counter. He raises his Elvis Presley eyebrows as if to ask if I need help, but I shake my head at him.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Could you explain what you were thinking?” he asks.

  “Baby Smurf says art galleries are boring,” I say.

  He keeps staring at me. It is hard to tell whether he is angry or genuinely confused.

  “You really blew it,” he says.

  My sense is that this is in reference to the Dracula Principle. One of the key elements of the Dracula Principle is that you don’t draw unnecessary attention to yourself. But Mr. Howland doesn’t realize I don’t want to rely on Dracula anymore. My mother’s sickness has given me a kind of free pass to do whatever I want to do. I’m just tired of using it.

  “Patty called your father, and he said he’d heard from you. Otherwise we’d still be sitting on the bus in SoHo waiting for you to come back. Doesn’t that seem a tiny bit selfish to you?”

  Mr. Howland’s face looks extremely old, because he hasn’t shaved and he has a reddish beard springing out of his cheeks. He is so much older than the boy in the car who wants to go on a date with me. His expression changes, and he remembers something.

  “What is going on with Donna Clewell?” he asks.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Is she one of your teachers?” he asks.

  “She’s my Latin teacher,” I tell him.

  “Why is she calling me and leaving me notes saying that she needs to talk with me? Has she talked to you?”

  “Me?” I ask.

  “Come with me,” he says.

  My sense is that if I go with him we will go to the Secret Spot and have sex. I am tired of his scratchy old face leaving my skin red and irritated. I glance at Emory, who isn’t looking at us anymore. He is talking to Dale about some pharmacy-related issue.

  “I need to keep dusting,” I tell him. “I spent so much time in Smurfland that I haven’t even gotten to these wooden doctors and nurses yet.”

  “Come on,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  “No,” I say.

  “Edna, don’t do this,” he says.

  He says those words angrily. While it is a relief that someone is finally angry at me, I’m tired of Mr. Howland’s anger about everything wrong in the world. I’m sick of being the one good thing in his otherwise rotten life. I can tell that he wants to fix this situation; he wants to make things with me the way they were. But for the second time that day, I walk away from him. This time I go straight to the back of the store with my empty can of Endust and hide behind Emory. Emory knows exactly how to act and sets up a big shield between me and Mr. Howland, who is still standing in the gift section looking pissed.

  “Tell me when he’s gone,” I say.

  “He’s gone,” Emory says.

  “Are you sure?”

  “All clear,” he promises.

  As I go to the phone in the office to dial my father’s number, I wonder for a moment where Mr. Howland will go and what will happen to him. His clothes are hanging from bushes. If this were a movie, Ms. Clewell would be the character who opens the casket and sees Dracula sleeping in his coffin. As far as I know, Mr. Howland’s mother is already dead, and depending on what Ms. Clewell intends to do, it is unlikely that he will get a free pass. As I am thinking, my father answers the phone and I tell him that I am at the pharmacy and can he come and pick me up. At this moment I appreciate Emory’s lack of either nosiness or curiosity more than I can say. He lets me sit in the back room and doesn’t ask me any questions at all. Mrs. Mooney has scheduled me for nine o’clock the next morning, a fact that would normally upset me, it being Saturday, but at the moment it feels sort of comforting to know that in the morning I will be back with the statues and the Smurfs and even with Emory himself.

  After waiting several minutes, I wave goodbye to Dale and stand on the sidewalk in front of the store. This is not exactly the resolution for me, because I feel like something I’ve been trying not to think about is becoming something I can’t avoid. My father’s car is heading toward me and I wave. He pulls up next to the curb. He even opens the door for me. Inside, I don’t know how to start the conversation. He leaves the parking lot without saying a word.

  “Are you mad?” I ask.

  “Should I be mad?”

  “I think so,” I say. “I did leave New York without anyone’s permission.”

  “Well,” he says.

  “And then I ran away from you,” I add.

  “Your mother is worried,” he says.

  “Did you tell her?” I ask.

  “Yes, I told her of your escapades,” he says.

  “Is she mad?”

  The conversation is leading me to believe that my mother is not dead and that I badly misinterpreted my father’s expression when I saw him outside his office.

  “If you wanted to see her, why didn’t you go with me?” my father asks. “Why did you make this so dramatic?”

  My father is not big on drama. I would tell him why everything had to happen the way it did, but I see no point. I have learned that you don’t necessarily need to tell everyone everything. My mother might get it, but my father would never see how a person could feel responsible for everything that happens in the world, even things that happened when she was practically a baby. My father is having another one of those mental conversations with himself. I look at the mole on his cheek, the mole that used to talk, and suspect that, whi
le there is a certain resemblance, it was not my father climbing the stairs with me in the ghoul dream. Back then, I hadn’t even met the ghoul from that dream.

  When we get home, my father goes to his strange room with his spooky creatures and I go up to my room with my big poster of Van Morrison and my collection of tennis trophies. I lie on my bed and close my eyes, and the next thing I know I am crying really hard, sobbing even, and I’m glad that my father is downstairs watching G.I. Diary with the sound up very loud because I wouldn’t want anyone to see or hear me right now. But standing in the doorway is Kippy. She trots her furry gray self over to my bed and places her little paws on the edge of the mattress. I lift her up and touch her nose, which is cool and moist, another good sign. And although she does not give me kisses or consolation, she does curl up next to my leg and close her eyes.

  As I lie there, it occurs to me that Mr. Howland was onto something with the Dracula Principle. It can take people a long time to see what is right in front of them. But, in the end, he was wrong. People do care about what’s happening to you, even when you are certain they don’t. They care about you even when you don’t care about yourself. I wonder how I’m going to explain all this when people like Ms. Clewell and Patty’s mom and even my mother start asking questions. I guess I’ll have to tell them the truth; that it’s all about the pipes and stinking smoke and lopsided mugs and broken posters of artists sitting in the bushes. Whether you like it or not, the truth can look pretty bad sometimes. Regardless of what happens to Mr. Howland, I think I’m ready to tell someone the whole story.

  Sitting on my dresser is the sculpture Mr. Howland made of my body that I swiped on one of the days he was absent. I get off the bed and open the window, because the evening air is warm and I can smell the flowers that my father planted around the house. My first idea is to chuck my own body out the window and into the bushes below, but the sculpture would still be there, and in a sense, it’s still my body. Instead, I take it over to the closet and put it on a shelf in the back. I’m going to keep it as a reminder of everything that happened. If Mr. Howland becomes famous, it might even be worth money someday. The bracelet is a different story. It is giving me a spooky feeling of wearing shackles, so I toss it out the window and try not to see where it lands.

  Want to know another strange thing? Sometimes getting caught is the best thing that can happen to you. I’m going on a real date, and I might even start to like that kid John from Christian Brothers. And while I probably won’t talk for a while about sex or about Mr. Howland and all that with Dr. Chester, I will talk, because whether you can tell or not, I feel better lately. If I’m lucky, I might even find out what and where Limbo is. I might even decide to get baptized, just to be on the safe side. Looking outside, I decide that even if none of it happens, the good stuff I am thinking about, my mother is still alive. And I am still alive. And despite the fact that my brother is not alive, I am pretty certain no one killed him. My father thinks my mother could come home soon, and even though her homecoming might end my life of free passes, the fact that she is alive and that she forgives me is more than I deserve. It could be the most beautiful thing in the world.

  Copyright © 2008 by Lisa Levchuk

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2008

  www.fsgkidsbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Levchuk, Lisa.

  Everything beautiful in the world / Lisa Levchuk.— 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Toward the end of the disco era, seventeen-year-old Edna refuses to visit her mother, who is in a New York City hospital undergoing cancer treatment, and barely speaks to her father, who finally puts her in psychotherapy, while her crush on an art teacher turns into a full-blown affair.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-374-32238-0

  ISBN-10: 0-374-32238-4

  [1. Coming of age—Fiction. 2. Family life—New Jersey—Fiction. 3. Teachers—Fiction. 4. Cancer—Fiction. 5. Psychotherapy—Fiction. 6. High schools—Fiction. 7. Schools—Fiction. 8. New Jersey—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L572313Eve 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2007016603

  eISBN 9781466851634

  First eBook edition: July 2013

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Begin Reading

  Copyright