Stella fake-snored.
“Snore all you want.” I stood on my skates, and nearly wiped out. “At least you can snore in your own bed in your own house and not have to shack up with your grandparents and then move who even knows where?”
She gave me a sad look and stood on her skates. “Come on.” She grabbed my hand. “Let’s skate it out.”
It was hard to say no to someone wearing a purple sat-in one-piece jumpsuit who had blown her hair out in big feathery waves.
I was a bit wobbly at first since we hadn’t skated in a few months, but I found my groove and got lost in the music and the lights reflecting off the disco ball that hung over the center of the oval rink. They sprayed across my dress like confetti and I felt just plain happy. Across the rink, on the opposite side, the light drizzled on my parents, who were skating side by side, lazily but somehow confidently, too. My dad reached out and took my mother’s hand.
I wondered how my cow pie was doing and felt what might have been a twinge of regret.
Stella and I skated like crazy for forty-five minutes, then took a break on a bench near the lockers. Or at least I thought we were just taking a break, but Stella said, “My mom’s actually picking me up in ten.”
“What? Why?”
“I’ve been feeling bad about it since Thursday, but I can’t keep it a secret either.” Stella blew some hair out of her eyes. “I’m starting private classes with Miss Emma to prepare a solo for the competition.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Why do you feel bad about it?”
“Because it’s expensive and I know you probably can’t, well, you know.”
I hadn’t even considered doing a solo.
Stella just nodded. “Yeah, my mom really wanted me to. And I really want to. I mean, dance is my passion. So she paid for a choreographer and now I need to meet with them and pick a song and I’ll need extra sessions with Miss Emma.”
“Wow.” I felt, somehow, dumb. “I’m happy for you.”
“Thanks.” She hung her skates over her shoulder as she stood, back in her normal shoes, looking short. “We’ll talk later, okay?”
She went to the edge of the rink, waited for my mom to skate toward her, and said, “Thanks! My mom’s here to pick me up!”
“Already?” My mom looked at me and back at Stella.
“Yeah, we’ve got a busy day!” Stella waved and took off, toward the arcade games near the exit, where my dad was shooting hoops.
Mom said, “Come skate with me.”
So I did.
“I requested a few songs from Xanadu,” she said, smiling a little. I had to work hard to smile back.
10.
Bernadette was sitting at the kitchen table when we got home after picking up Angus.
“Holy cow,” my mom said, and I nearly laughed. “What’s that smell?”
“A lot of folks were wondering the same thing.” Bernadette’s arms were crossed in front of her chest.
“Did someone track something in on their shoes?” Mom looked around at the floor.
“No,” Bernadette said. “I opened some windows but it didn’t really help. As you can tell, it’s pretty pronounced. I explained that, of course, it was surely a one-time thing. It seemed to be originating here or up there.” She pointed at the loft.
“We’ll handle it before the next showing, whatever it is,” Dad said.
At which point I realized I didn’t have a plan for getting the fecal matter out of the beanbag and out of the house.
“Anyway, we had some pretty interested parties today.” Bernadette collected her things. “I imagine at least one of them will want to come back and make sure the smell is gone. So we’ll have another open house next weekend. After that we’ll probably move to appointment only and see how we’re doing.”
“Okay,” my dad said. “Thanks for everything. We’ll get to the bottom of it for sure.”
I really almost laughed.
When my parents were walking Bernadette to the door, I saw an opportunity. I ran upstairs, grabbed the beanbag, pulled out the bag of stink, and went to my room, where I figured I’d hang it out the window until I could get rid of it a better way. But out the window I saw Bernadette, getting into her car, which faced the house. If I opened the window and hung the bag out, she’d see me for sure. So I just waited.
“Kate!” my mom called out.
“Be right there!”
And waited.
“Come on, Bernie,” I said softly.
I could hear my mother coming up the stairs.
The car still wasn’t pulling out.
I thought the whole thing was going to end with me in major trouble for sure, but finally the car started moving.
Bernie’s head went out of sight.
I opened the window and hooked the bag onto the hinge again.
Just in time.
“It even smells in here.” I fanned the air in front of my face when my mother arrived at the doorway. “I just opened the window so hopefully that’ll help.”
“Yes,” she said, sniffing. “It does seem to be fading, though, doesn’t it? Anyway, why did Stella take off in such a hurry?”
Maybe this was my chance to explain about troupe. About how we couldn’t move yet.
“Oh, she’s doing private dance classes now,” I said. “She’s going to do that dance troupe thing and also compete as a soloist in the competition in June.”
My mother sighed and sat on the bed and I thought maybe she’d ask me about troupe—what the details were, whether I wanted to do it, whether there was a way to make it work, whether I wanted to compete as a soloist, too, and how much it would cost.
She said, “I know you feel like you’re the only one this is unfair for.”
That’s it? Really? That’s all you’ve got? She was trying to tell me I shouldn’t be sad and mad and everything—and she wasn’t even doing it well!
She seemed done.
“You and Dad,” I said. “You need to, you know, make more money than you do or something.”
“Okay, Kate.” She got up and drifted out of my room. “We’ll do that. We’ll go out and become millionaires any day now, just you wait.”
I lay there for a while, looking out where the balloon on the FOR SALE sign bobbed in the wind. I reached out the window and threw the bag of turd into the front yard, then went downstairs and out the front door. I picked up the bag and walked around the back of the barn, where I hurled it into the woods. A few kittens I’d startled took a few leaps to another spot and settled again. “Sorry!” I said. They were already starting to get big.
I stopped at the FOR SALE sign on my way back up to the house, and untied the balloon. I let it go and watched as it went way high into the air, where it got so very tiny and then, finally, popped and disappeared in the sky’s blue oblivion.
My stomach felt all twisty so I went inside to find my mom. She was lying on their bed, staring up at the way-high beams overhead. My parents’ room, their walk-in closet, and their bathroom had walls that ended at normal height but no proper ceilings, just the peaked underside of the roof. All of which meant there wasn’t a ton of privacy since it all just opened up to one big space and the stairs down to the living room. Even with the door to the bathroom closed, you could pretty much have a conversation with someone down in the kitchen.
When I was little, I’d wake up and climb into bed with my parents and we’d find owl faces and birds and deer with antlers in the knots in the wooden beams overhead. I climbed up onto the bed now and stared up at it with Mom, spotting some familiar shapes. The knot that looked like the man on the moon.
By the quarter-circle windows up near the ceiling, two flies were banging against the glass. “You think something is rotting up there?”
“Probably.” My mother rolled over onto her side, curled up some, and pulled a throw over her legs.
“Are you going to try to find out?” I asked. The flies were pretty gross.
“Whatever i
t is will disappear eventually.”
“What about the wasp’s nest by my window?”
“Every time we have it taken down, they just build a new one.”
It’d be nice to live in a house that had no nooks or crannies for wasps to make homes in or for rodents to die in. Maybe we’d downsize to a sleek apartment on the high floor of a building in some cute downtown area.
Then something out the floor-to-ceiling window at the end of the room caught my eye. I got up and spotted a flock of wild turkeys parading along the edge of the woods by the stream. They looked like visitors from another planet. I wanted to know if they knew their destination, and how they had all learned to stay together like that. Did any one of them ever just decide to up and move away to start anew? They disappeared down the stream toward the Nickersons’ house.
I wondered if Pants had seen them, maybe hidden behind a tree.
I knew I was only delaying the inevitable.
I knew the day would come when the sale would happen.
I knew I wasn’t going to miss the bees or dead flies—and I definitely wasn’t going to miss the stinkbugs or Troy, who sometimes came home at midnight with the radio THAT LOUD—but I was going to miss the way living at Big Red was always at least a little bit interesting, and sometimes just plain beautiful.
I went into my room and pulled out the dance troupe permission slip and forged my mom’s signature. Why should I be the only one who couldn’t do it?
Down in the arts room, I made a diorama of my parents’ room, drawing knotty shapes on wooden sticks on the ceiling and putting the three of us in bed—with me as a little kid, half their size—looking up in wonder.
11.
It was one of those weird things about us that Naveen and I barely talked on the bus. For whatever reason, seating was all boys with boys and girls with girls, and you mostly talked to who you sat with and no one thought to mess with that, not even me. I’d told Stella that the stink had been effective, but she didn’t seem impressed so it wasn’t until lunchtime that I got to enjoy my success.
“It worked!” I said to Naveen, as Stella wandered over to the lunch line. I held up a hand, which he high-fived, grabbed, and held for a second. His hand was warm, soft. “People were totally grossed out.”
“Excellent,” Naveen said. “So what’s next?”
“There’s another open house next weekend.” My hand felt tingly from his.
“So you’ll need more cow pie?” He rubbed his hands together.
It was cute how excited Naveen was, considering the topic.
“Or did you save it?” he asked.
“Yikes. I threw the bag into the woods.” I hadn’t actually thought to save it. Though I guessed that it would have been smart. I could probably find it again. Because the idea of going back to Depler’s wasn’t exactly thrilling.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I should mix it up. Do something different so Bernie doesn’t catch on.”
“Bernie?”
“The realtor’s name is Bernadette but Bernie makes her seem like a less worthy foe.”
Naveen laughed. “Kate: one. Bernie: zip.”
“Exactly.” I reached into my bag to find the list of things that smell. “What else was on that list of yours?”
I didn’t even need to find the paper.
“Spoiled food,” Naveen said. “Dead animals. Mildew. Cigarettes.”
“The dead animal thing could work. If we could find one. Sometimes there are dead moles in the yard, but I don’t know.”
“It’s not the most reliable plan,” he said, “without the rodent in hand for a proper assessment of the stench potential.”
Stench potential! Where did he even get this?
“There are flies coming into my parents’ room. So it seems something dead is already around. Maybe I can find it?”
“Upstairs in the crazy room with no real walls?” Naveen furrowed his brow. “So the dead thing is probably in the roof?”
It wasn’t ideal. Even if I were brave enough to try to get up there, there was the not-so-small issue of having to use a ladder and needing someone to hold the ladder.
“What’s in your lunch box?” I asked Naveen as we reached our usual tables. “Anything that’ll stink really bad in a few days?”
“Almond butter and jelly sandwich. Sorry.”
I sat down at “my” table, which was next to the table Naveen shared with some of his guy friends. Stella appeared with her tray and sat down across from me, her earbuds in.
“I know!” I said to Naveen. “I’ll raid the fridge this afternoon. For stuff that’ll really stink by the end of the week. And I’ll take it from there.”
“Where are you going to put it to rot, though?” He bit his sandwich. Stella wasn’t even listening.
I couldn’t exactly keep it in my room. And outside there was the possibility of raccoons and wild animals having a feast. But then I remembered yet another forgotten project of my parents.
“The composting bin!” I said. “They stopped composting like two years ago.”
“As previously discussed”—Naveen smiled—“you are shockingly good at this!”
“I know! It’s like I’ve found my calling!”
Then Naveen started talking to his friends and I turned to Stella, who was humming along to her phone.
“Hello?” I said, waving a hand in front of her face. “Whatcha listening to?”
“Oh.” She pulled out her earbuds and put them away. “I’m sorry. I’m out of it.”
“What is it?”
“It’s the song I’m dancing to. For my solo.”
“Can I listen?”
“You sure?” She winced and made a sorry face.
“I’m sure, Stella. It’s not like I even want to do a solo.”
“Everybody wants to do a solo,” she said.
I just looked at her for a second; she obviously had no idea what she sounded like. “I guess I’m not everybody.”
She got her earbuds out again and I listened to the song. It was pretty, but it wasn’t the best song I’d ever heard, and I felt glad about that for a second, then guilty.
“I like it,” I concluded.
“Well, I love it,” she said. “It’s totally perfect for me.”
I went back to studying my lunch. “What foods should I raid the fridge for that smell bad fast?”
Stella picked at her turkey sandwich. “I don’t know, Kate. Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“I’m trying to make it to the end of the year. I’m trying to stay for Dance Nation. I thought you’d want that, too.”
“Of course I do.” She looked down at her fingernail. “But you need the parent permission form signed.”
“Don’t worry your pretty head about it, Stella. I’ve got it all figured out.”
I didn’t, but I wanted her off my back.
Megan and her two sidekicks, Corinne and Natalie, walked up to our table. Megan said, “I saw a ‘for sale’ sign on your house.”
“Yeah? So?” I took a bite of my sandwich, even though I was suddenly not very hungry.
“So where are you moving to?”
“Another house.” I bugged out my eyes. “Duh.”
“Where?”
“Not sure yet.” Another bite. “We’re looking around, trying to find just the right place.”
Megan looked at her friends. “Pretty much anything you find is going to be nicer than that old place, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Totally. We’ve seen some really awesome places already.”
Megan and her friends walked off and I felt kind of pleased with how I’d handled that.
“Why did you do that?” Stella said.
“Because it’s none of her business what’s really going on.”
“But she’ll find out eventually.”
“I’m not going to tell her. And you’re not going to tell her. And Naveen doesn’t speak to womenfolk other than us.” At his table, he was la
ughing really hard about something, in a way that lit up his whole face.
Stella was flattening her aluminum foil. “Just so you know, I’m inviting her to my birthday party.”
“Please tell me that’s an April Fools’ Day joke.”
It was, in fact, April first.
June thirteenth still felt like a lifetime away, but I was one week closer.
“No joke.” She wiped her mouth with her napkin and looked at me. “I mean, you’re moving or maybe moving and I don’t have a ton of friends. Anyway, there’s a minimum at the karaoke place for kid parties.”
“You’re having a karaoke party?” This was bigger news than Megan being invited. “Oh, man, that’s awesome. I always wanted a karaoke party.”
“It’s not my fault you haven’t had one.” Now she crumbled her tin foil into a ball.
“Uh,” I said. “I never said it was.”
“I know. I just, well . . . check this out.” Stella dug around in her backpack and pulled out some small squares of paper. “It’s the invitation I’ve been working on with my mom. And look, you’ll get this slip of paper and you can preselect three songs.”
The invitation was a picture of Stella seated at a piano and dressed up like a rock star with a lacy top and funky hair. Above her it said, GIRLS ROCK MAGAZINE’S GIRL OF THE YEAR TURNS 13. Then the party details ran down the side.
“This is going to be amazing!” I was picturing us doing totally over-the-top coordinated goofball dance moves. I studied the date. “Two weeks!”
“And . . . ,” Stella said, taking the invitation back. “I’m inviting boys!”
And then my whole fantasy went poof.
“Noooooo,” I said. “Why?”
“Because it’ll be fun. Because I like boys.”
For whatever reason—probably the same reason the bus seating was the way it was—people had pretty much stopped having boy/girl parties when we were maybe six. So for years birthdays had involved just us girls at the spa in town, or roller-skating, or pumpkin-picking. I liked it that way. It was easy. No pressure. Karaoke with boys sounded very much like something other people did. Older people.
I read through the guest list she held out to me and saw Naveen’s name.
My Life in Dioramas Page 5
