“So I can do it?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Oh, thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou! You’re the best daddy in the whole world!”
She ran to him and hugged him tightly.
“Whoa, whoa, don’t spill my drink,” he said with a laugh.
She withdrew and beamed at him. He smiled back.
“Juliet, huh?” he said. She nodded vigorously. “My little girl.”
Still smiling, he moved past her into the living room. Sally’s heart nearly burst with pride.
“You better get dinner started, baby,” he said.
“Yes, sir!”
She grabbed a pot out of the cupboard, filled it with water, and then set it on the stove to start boiling. Then she went to the pantry and got out two boxes of macaroni and cheese and set them on the counter.
“Dad,” she called out.
“Yeah, baby,” he replied.
“Do you think Mom will come?”
He didn’t answer right away. Sally risked a glance at him. He was sitting on the couch, not looking at anything in particular.
She hated reminding him of her mother. This happened every time she did. He was hunched over, his drink gripped firmly in his hand, his shirt rumpled, and his thinning, mousy-brown hair slightly disheveled. He looked completely defeated, sad. It broke her heart, seeing him like this.
“I don’t know, Sally,” he said. “You can ask her.”
“I’m gonna!” she said. “And this is, like, a really big deal. It’s the kind of thing she responds to.”
“Just,” he began, but he stopped and sipped his drink. “Just don’t get your hopes up too high. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“I won’t,” she assured him.
She wasn’t worried. Mom would have to come to something like this. Sally was her daughter, and this was her big debut. Mom was busy and had trouble making time to see Tommy and her. It was her new job. She couldn’t help it. But she would make an exception for this. This was important.
Sally smiled to herself. Everything was going to be perfect. She was going to get to play Juliet, everyone at school would respect her, Mom would come to see her, she’d realize she’d been missing too much and commit to seeing Sally and Tommy more, and Dad would be happy. He’d want to drink less. Who knew? Sally might even hit puberty and look like a real Juliet before the show opened. They had two months. Anything could happen.
Yes, it was all going to be perfect. Soon, life would be fine.
Four
Sally heard a clinking. She saw a gold coin rolling down the hall. It turned a corner and continued out of sight down the adjoining hallway.
Then she heard another sound, a whisper – a deep and ominous whisper – coming from behind her.
“Shakir! Shakir! Shakir!”
It gathered strength with each repetition, growing louder and more intense.
Sally turned around to see a pack of frightening dogs charging up the stairs. They were large – bigger than she – with strong, wide legs and thick, white hair and wolfish faces. Their eyes were the most malevolent red imaginable, and their jaws dripped with hungry drool. They growled excitedly and surged straight towards her.
She ran. She could hear their claws skittering on the tile floor, struggling to find purchase. She could feel their breath hot on the backs of her legs.
She rounded the corner. The first two dogs had trouble on the slick surface, and the remainder crashed into them, sending the whole pack tumbling down the hallway. But the dogs at the back recovered quickly and renewed the chase.
Panting desperately, she ran from door to door looking for shelter. Every one of them was locked. She struggled briefly and then moved on. The dogs gained ground.
At last, she found one unlocked. She opened it and rushed inside. She slammed the door shut just as the lead dog crashed into it. The force of the blow knocked her backward. Terrified, she returned quickly to the door and locked it. The rest of the pack arrived and barked and growled angrily at the glass window on the top half of the door.
“Hello, Sally,” a voice said behind her.
She turned around, startled. A woman in a heavy, black cloak sat on the desk. She wore the hood up, casting her face in shadow. All Sally could see was a lily-white chin, blood-red lips, and long, blonde hair that trailed out of the hood and rested immaculately on her shoulders and chest. The woman smiled at Sally and seemed oblivious to the attack she had narrowly avoided.
“Who are you,” Sally asked.
“I am Zelda,” the woman replied. “I want to show you something.”
She gestured, and Sally turned and saw a girl in a red dress and cape standing across the classroom. The girl looked up. She had a wolf’s head.
Sally started to scream, but then she realized that the girl didn’t actually have the head of a wolf. She was wearing a mask.
The girl held up a piece of yellow construction paper. She folded it in half. Then she produced a scissors and cut a semi-circle into the paper, allowing the excess material to fall to the floor. She cut half a crescent moon into the bottom of it. After some more folding, she cut another half circle into it. Then she unfolded her work and held it up for Sally to see. It was a smiley face.
Sally cocked her head quizzically and was about to ask what it meant, when the girl tore the paper into tiny pieces. She cupped them in her hands and then blew them at Sally like they were confetti. They vanished as though they had never existed.
Sally turned to Zelda. The strange woman simply smiled and offered no explanation.
Turning back, Sally watched as the girl lifted her mask. Underneath, was the smiley face she had made out of construction paper, perfectly restored. The girl removed it and offered it to Sally. There was nothing but blackness in its place.
Sally recoiled, horrified. She stumbled back towards the desk. Zelda wrapped her arms around Sally and whispered into her ear.
“When this reappears, you’ll be able to get the key,” Zelda said.
“What?” Sally said, turning to Zelda in confusion.
She never got an answer, though. The door broke open, and the dogs leaped at her.
Sally woke up screaming. She clawed at her pillow and kicked at her comforter trying to get away from the wolves. Even when she came fully awake, the image of them stayed with her. She sat up in bed and flung up her arms to defend herself.
Tommy stood in her doorway, illuminated by the moonlight. From what she could see of his face, he looked terrified.
“Are you okay,” he asked.
Sally’s heart pounded in her chest. She panted with fear.
“Sally?” Tommy said.
Finally, she came fully back to reality. She was safe in her room. It had only been a dream.
“Sally, say something,” Tommy said, sounding worried.
“It’s okay, Tommy,” she managed. “I just had a bad dream.”
He didn’t look reassured. Sally put her hand on her chest in a vain attempt to slow the beating of her heart.
“C’mere, Little Man,” she said.
He came forward hesitantly. She was still breathing heavily. When he got to the edge of the bed, Sally hugged him to her.
“It’s okay,” she soothed, half talking to her brother, half to herself. “I just had a really scary dream. It took me a minute to figure out I was awake.”
“I get those,” Tommy said.
“You do?” she said.
“Yeah.” He looked up from her chest to meet her gaze.
“What do you dream about?” she asked.
“Monsters chase me, and then this wicked witch eats me,” he said.
“Oh, Tommy,” she said. “That’s horrible!”
He nodded and buried his head in her chest again. Sally stroked his hair. Then a thought occurred to her.
“Have you had dreams like that lately?” she asked. He nodded. “How often?”
Tommy didn’t answer right way. She got it. He was worried
about his own nightmares, and it disturbed him that his big sister had them too. Not only did she understand his fear, she began to share it.
“Every couple of days,” he said.
“Oh, Tommy, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Listen, if you have a bad dream and you wake up in the middle of the night, you can come sleep with me, okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
Sally hoped they could chase each other’s demons away.
***
On Saturday, Sally went to the mall with Alison. She didn’t have much money – only a few dollars – but it would be enough for a treat at the food court.
Sally loved the mall. It was magical. There were so many things to buy and see. Everything offered the promise of a new world. The Gap suggested she could be popular. The movie theater offered adventure. Spencer’s could make her clever. And Victoria’s Secret said that, some day, she would be truly desirable.
She and Alison could get lost in these fantasies for hours. They discussed how the right outfit would make them the envy of Roosevelt Middle School. They imagined themselves pulling the horrible gags they could buy at Spencer’s on their classmates.
“Could you imagine getting Molly Richards to try garlic gum?” Alison said.
“I’d rather trick her into sitting on a whoopee cushion,” Sally said. “She needs more embarrassment in her life.”
It didn’t matter that they rarely had enough money to make an actual purchase. Dreaming about the consequences of those buys was its own fun.
After three hours, the girls were exhausted. They plopped themselves down at the food court and ordered their favorite treat – soft pretzels and lemonade. Alison liked to lick the salt off the pretzel first, which Sally thought was kind of gross. Sally ate hers slowly, letting the warm dough melt in her mouth as the salt made her tongue ache for a drink. Then she would wash it down with the lemonade and rejoice in the way the tartness of the beverage would make her cheeks pucker. She tried to imagine any pleasure being as good as the sensation of pretzels and lemonade, but she couldn’t do it. Even the idea of kissing Brian Pomeroy didn’t seem as though it could compare.
“Question Game time!” Alison said.
“Okay,” Sally said, “but I’m not talking about Brian, Romeo and Juliet, or kissing.”
“You’re no fun,” Alison said, putting a pouty look on her face.
“Take it or leave it,” Sally said.
“Fine, but you have to go first then.”
“No way!” Sally said. “You’re the one who asked to play.”
“Merde,” Alison said.
“What?”
“It’s French for ‘shit’,” Alison replied.
“They teach you to swear?” Sally said.
“Ha! No. That’s one of the words I had to research myself.”
“All right,” Sally said taking a sip of lemonade. “Ask your question.”
Alison played with her straw, poking at the ice cubes in her cup. Her face screwed up in consideration. After thinking, she turned her blue eyes on Sally.
“If you fell off a tall bridge,” Alison said, “do you think you could survive if you turned the fall into a dive so that you cut the water cleanly?”
“I think so,” Sally said without much hesitation.
“I think so too,” Alison said. “But my dad says that when you fall from a great height, like off the Brooklyn Bridge, the water is like concrete. You’re going so fast that it kills you just like if you jumped off a building.”
Sally thought about that for a moment. It didn’t sound reasonable to her. Water was softer than ground.
“That’s why people jump off bridges to kill themselves,” Alison went on. “They don’t drown in the water. They die from the impact.”
“But what about those cliff divers?” Sally said. “They jump off cliffs into water, and they don’t die.”
“Right,” Alison said. “That’s why I think if you fell off a bridge, you could save yourself by turning it into a dive. You’d have to make yourself perfectly straight and maybe put your hands together, but if you could cut the water cleanly, I think you’d be all right.”
Sally chewed on that thought for a moment. It sounded right. Then something else occurred to her.
“What if you were going so fast that when you hit the water, you didn’t stop? You just kept going down?” she said.
“You’d slow down,” Alison said. “Water’s thicker than air.”
“But what if by the time you stopped, you were too far from the surface to get back? You’d drown before you could swim back to the top. Do you suppose that’s possible – that even if you saved yourself, you might die anyway?”
Alison continued to look at Sally, but she was clearly thinking about the question. Sally thought the prospect was horrible. She couldn’t think of many things worse than saving your life only to die because the save was worse. All things considered, if she was going to die from falling off a bridge, she’d rather be crushed by the impact of hitting the water than drown because she’d dived too deeply. Drowning sounded a lot worse.
“Arch your back,” Alison said at last.
“What do you mean,” Sally asked.
“You know, like, when you go off the high dive at the pool?” Sally nodded. “Well, when you do that, you arch your back to avoid hitting the bottom. It causes you to curve around and shoot up towards the top, right?” Sally nodded again. “So if you executed a perfect dive off the bridge, then arched your back once you got into the water, you wouldn’t go too far down. Then you’d just have to tread water or do the dead man’s float until someone came to get you.”
Sally nodded. She thought Alison’s explanation sounded right.
She put another bite of pretzel in her mouth and let the salt dissolve on her tongue as she tried to think of a question to pose to her best friend. After a moment, she had one, and she washed her pretzel down quickly, so she could ask it.
“Have you ever been in love?” Sally said.
“Hey, I thought we weren’t talking about that kind of stuff,” Alison protested.
“I said I’m not talking about Brian or about kissing him,” Sally said. “I didn’t say we couldn’t talk about stuff like love.”
“Cheater.”
Sally smiled. She sucked a little more lemonade through her straw.
“That’s a dumb question anyway,” Alison said. “You’ve been my best friend for, like, ever. You’d know if I’d ever been in love.”
“Things might have changed,” Sally said. “You could be in love right now, and not told me yet.”
“Like I wouldn’t share that!”
“So are you,” Sally asked.
“No,” Alison said, giggling. “But Andrew Baker’s pretty cute. I could be in love with him, I think. If I had to be in love with somebody.”
“Andrew Baker?” Sally said. “He’s, like, in the eighth grade!”
“I know,” Alison said dreamily. “And he plays goalie for the soccer team.” She got a faraway look in her eyes. “But I’m not in love with him. I just think he’s gorgeous.”
Sally understood that. She knew that people didn’t fall in love right away. First, you liked someone. Then maybe you dated for awhile. Then you fell in love.
“Have you ever been in love,” Alison asked.
“No,” Sally said. “What do you suppose it’s like?”
Alison pursed her lips. She swirled the ice in her cup for a moment.
“I think,” she answered, “you feel like there’s no one else in the whole world. The only person that matters is the guy you’re in love with. You just want to do whatever he wants and will make him happy. And you’re in love with him because he makes you feel the same way, like you’re the most special girl there ever was. He’d do anything for you because you make him happy.”
“That can’t be right,” Sally said after a short pause.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s all storybook-like. Real lif
e isn’t like that.”
Her father had been devoted to her mother, and she’d left him anyway. He’d done everything she asked, would have done anything she commanded. He was desperately in love with her, and it hadn’t mattered a damn.
“It must be different somehow,” Sally said.
“How,” Alison asked.
“I’m not sure,” Sally said. “Maybe it’s like you say, where you feel all special. But it’s something else too. Look at my parents. I thought they were in love, but they must not have been.”
Maybe her father had been in love with her mother, but she hadn’t been in love with him. But if that was the case, why would she have married him? It didn’t make any sense.
Sally sighed. Life never did seem to work out like the storybooks.
“I don’t know,” Alison said as though she had read Sally’s thoughts. “Look at Molly Richards. She always seems to get everything she wants. Maybe only some people get to live life like in the storybooks.”
“She didn’t get the part of Juliet,” Sally said. “She wanted that pretty bad.”
Alison got a thoughtful look on her face. She chewed her lower lip.
“That’s true,” she said. “She gets a lot of the things she wants. My dad likes to listen to this song by the Rolling Stones called ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want.’ Maybe that’s how it is with Molly. She can’t get everything she wants, but she lives the storybook life so she gets most of the things she wants.”
Sally gave the idea some thought. She was pretty sure things didn’t work that way, but the theory was interesting.
“So maybe,” Alison continued, “only certain people get to have that fabulous special love that you read about in the storybooks.”
“What about the rest of us,” Sally asked.
“How do you know you won’t get one of the storybook loves?” Alison countered.
“Because I’m not that special. Romeo and Juliet is the only cool thing that’s ever happened to me. And I figure everybody gets lucky once in a while. But when the show is over it’ll all be back to normal.”
Alison was silent for a long time. Sally knew she was formulating an answer, but it was clearly giving her difficulty. Several girls laughed uproariously at another table. Sally watched them, trying to figure out what was so funny, but she couldn’t tell.
Little Red Riding Hoodie: A Modern Fairy Tale Page 4
