by Annabel Lyon
All-Season Edie
All-Season
Edie
Annabel Lyon
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
Text copyright © 2008 Annabel Lyon
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lyon, Annabel, 1971-
All-season Edie / written by Annabel Lyon.
ISBN 978-1-55143-713-2
I. Title.
PS8573.Y62A45 2008 jC813’.6 C2007-907447-2
First published in the United States, 2008
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007942831
Summary: Edie copes with family tragedy and her “perfect” sister
during one tumultuous year.
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Cover and text design by Teresa Bubela
Cover artwork, lettering and interior illustrations by Alanna Cavanaugh
Author photo by Bryant Ibbetson
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
PO BOX 5626, STN. B
VICTORIA, BC CANADA
V8R 6S4
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
PO BOX 468
CUSTER,WA USA
98240-0468
www.orcabook.com
Printed and bound in Canada.
11 10 09 08 • 4 3 2 1
for Sophie and Caleb
Acknowledgments
Thanks to everyone at Orca and especially my wonderful editor, Sarah Harvey. Thanks to my family for giving me such a great childhood to draw from.
Thanks to Bryant, always.
Contents
Fishing with the Fat Boy
A Charm of Powerful Trouble
Stupid Christmas
Dancing with Mean Megan
Dexter in a Whack of Trouble
Sweet Revenge
Fishing with the Fat Boy
A warm car makes a good place to sleep, even when you have to share the back seat with sleeping bags and the big orange cooler, and the kettle is on your lap, and they still make you wear your seat belt. I listen to the raindrops hit the station wagon, landing heavily, like magnets dragged from the gray sky to the metal roof. I watch the water slurp down the windows and listen to the skreeking of the windshield wipers. I’m lulled by the rhythm, and I wonder why Mom and Dad find it irritating.
“I TOLD you to get replacements,” Dad says to Mom.
“You did not TELL me,” Mom says to Dad. “Do not raise your voice at me.” I roll my eyes and squint and press my lips together the way Mom does when she’s angry. That makes my face feel like a raisin. “EDIE,” Mom shouts into the back seat, and I flinch guiltily even though she can’t have seen me pull the raisin face. “Are you all right back there?” I don’t answer. I close my eyes quickly and wonder if I should fake a snore. Probably too obvious. “She’s asleep,” Mom says to Dad. Ha. Fooled you.
I wait for them to start talking about me, but they start talking about Dexter instead. I’m peeved. Dexter is my sister and the number two most common topic of conversation in my house at the moment. She’s thirteen—two years older than me—and for the first time she isn’t with us on summer vacation. Instead, she’s staying for two weeks with her best friend, Mean Megan. Mean Megan has long black hair and a swimming pool in her backyard, but she doesn’t have a cat. She can’t sleep over at our house because she’s allergic to my cat—ha. Dex has been asking to stay at Mean Megan’s house every year for as long as I can remember, but this year our holidays overlapped with the two-week dance camp that Dex and Mean Megan have been going to every year for as long as I can remember. Dad’s boss wouldn’t let him change his holidays, and Dexter and Mean Megan are ballet fiends.
Two weeks without Dexter: it’s a weird thing. “Do you miss your sister yet?” Dad keeps saying, like it’s a big joke, but I can tell Mom and Dad are anxious— they keep talking about her, and Mom keeps looking all distracted and calling me Dex by mistake—and it’s starting to infect me. I keep thinking things like, If Dexter were here now, what would she be doing? If she were listening to this conversation, how long would it take her to call me a doofus? Sometimes I hear her voice, just as if she’s right next to me. “People don’t smirk when they’re asleep,” she’s saying now. “Mom and Dad are just babying you along.” I can practically feel her flicking me in the temple with her fingernail. Infection is the right word. It’s like a sickness that makes me act all feverish, not like myself. I’m sure in a day or so I’ll settle down and enjoy not having someone pull my hair or make fun of my clothes or act all superior every two minutes.
The number one most common topic of conversation in my house at the moment is Grandpa, who had a small stroke a few days before we were due to leave. When I think about the word “stroke,” I picture a big hand coming down from the sky and stroking Grandpa, as if he were a cat. But the hand didn’t know its own strength, and it knocked him to the ground instead, making him bump his head, which was why he had to stay in the hospital overnight. “Grandpa is just fine,” Mom and Dad said at the time, but they also almost cancelled our holidays, so I’m not sure what to believe. At first Dexter was going to stay with Grandma and Grandpa to help out, but her dance camp would have meant too much driving for Grandma, who wanted to stay home and look after supposedly-fine Grandpa. So they worked out a compromise: Dexter would stay with Mean Megan, and Grandma would look after just-fine Grandpa. Instead of going to the Grand Canyon, we would go to one of the Gulf Islands, to a cottage on a lake less than a day’s ferry-and-drive away in case we had to go home quickly. “For Dexter’s sake,” Mom said, like I hadn’t noticed Dad taking his glasses off and rubbing his forehead seventeen times an hour, worrying about his own dad. I’m eleven. I’m not a child.
Somehow, after all that, here we are, driving to the lake. I wonder what the chances are of passing a Dairy Queen between here and the cottage. I wonder how long it will take to get from here to the cottage. I wonder where here is. I peek out the window through sly eyelashes, so they won’t guess I’m awake. Trees, mountains, rain. Trailers lumber past, followed by big logging trucks and occasionally a sleek white Winnebago with curtains and ladders and fancy yellow stripes. I decide I’m going to live in a Winnebago when I’m older. I start thinking about hot fudge sundaes and lying in bed inside a Winnebago with curtains the color of hot fudge, watching the road and the trees and the mountains melt past as it gets darker and darker. Then I really do fall asleep as we splosh and skreek and rumble toward our summer holidays.
“Wakey-wakey, Edie,” Mom says.
“No,” I say.
“We’re here,” Mom says. “Get out of the car and help carry things to the cottage.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“He’s phoning Grandpa from the office. Look—” Mom points down the hill and through the trees “—there’s the lake.” The air is cool and soft and gray. I extract myself from the car, stretching, and stand beside Mom and look. We are standing in a sloping forest of pine trees; in the distance we can just barely see the lake, like a bowlful of smoke. That’s when I first see the fat boy. He’s going down the path from the main office past the parking lot to the jetty, and we avoid looking at each other because we’re close to the same age. As quickly as
he appears, he’s gone.
Suddenly everything is very quiet and still, and we can even hear the water lapping at the shore with the sound of a hundred thirsty little tongues. The afternoon sky is darkening, and far away some invisible heartbroken bird is wailing and sobbing and listening to its own echoes before it grieves again. It’s like we’re standing in a dark misty space between rainstorms. I’ll be glad when we’re inside with some lights on and the smell of supper cooking on the stove, and later on a warm bed. The bird cries out again, and I shiver.
“Like, creepy,” says Imaginary Dexter, standing beside me and hugging herself. “Let’s go inside, quick.”
“Suits me,” I say. Mom asks me who I’m talking to.
The next morning I wake to the sound of birdsong. Not the mournful bird of last night; instead, these are squeaky, squirty little birds who know a sunny day when they see one. And it is a sunny day. Last night’s fog has already been seared from the lake, and there are shafts of sunlight tangled in the trees, promising a bright day.
Breakfast is miserable.
“You forgot the bread,” Dad tells Mom.
“So did you, I guess,” Mom tells Dad, in a way that sounds funny on the surface but doesn’t make anyone laugh.
“I hate flakes,” I say. “Isn’t there anything else? Is there a muffin? Is there chocolate? Is there cheese? Is there—”
“NO,” Mom and Dad say at the same time, the raisin twins. I eat a few mouthfuls of flakes and a couple of bites of a patchy banana while Mom and Dad carefully don’t talk to each other. Dexter and Mean Megan are probably having French toast and strawberries right now. I almost hope Grandpa will get worse again so our holidays will end so we can all just go home.
After breakfast, I sit with my legs hanging over the back of the itchy sofa, reading descriptions of campsites in the Canadian Automobile Association booklet and thinking of running away and living year-round in a tent and eating macaroni and cheese every possible day of my life. I’m very fond of cheese. Some days cheese is the only thing that makes life bearable. We’ll have supper and everyone else will have dessert—chocolate pudding or oatmeal cookies—and I’ll sit there eating cheese. Dad asks me why I eat cheese for dessert, and I answer that it helps pass the time. Dad asks me why I say that, but I don’t know.
Finally Mom gets tired of seeing me lying on the sofa. She says, “There’s a lake right there,” her finger jabbing toward the TV and beyond to the glint of silver behind the trees, “so will you please go and get into it if you’re going to lie around in your bathing suit all day? Why don’t you go boating or something?”
Boating?
So I go to the office, padding across the pine needles in my spongy blue flip-flops, flap-flap-flap, and ask the old man for a key to a pedal boat. He gives me a key tied to an empty bleach bottle—number seventeen—and a bright red life preserver. He wants to help tie me into it, but I know how from swimming lessons. I pad off down the path through the pine trees, flap-flap-flap, to the jetty.
The pedal boats are yellowy orange, like cheese, with a black stripe and steering wheel and black bumpers. They’re very beautiful, even though they’re meant for two people. Next time I’ll bring a book to put on the other seat and possibly even a sandwich. Imaginary Dexter would never come with me anyway; she’d just lie on the jetty, working on her tan. I find number seventeen. Down on the floor it’s wet, and there’s a daddy-longlegs stuck to one pedal. I scrape it off with my flip-flop and swiddle my foot around in the water, which is pretty warm, and scare some tadpoles. I get in with one wet foot and one dry foot, and then a voice says, “Don’t forget your pee eff dee.” At least that’s what it sounds like.
I look around, and I see the fat boy. I hadn’t seen him before because he’s lying in the bottom of a rowboat tied to the jetty, below the gunwale, with a hat over his face and no oars in sight. He’s the boy I saw in the parking lot right after we got here. The only other fat boy I know is Timmy Digby from school, who stole my gym bag one time and threw it into the boys’ washroom. He giggled frantically until I went in to get it, and then he blocked the door with his bulk and refused to let me out. I stood there, hugging my bag, looking at the blue tiles and the smelly ceramic lavatories and the smear of sunlight on the wall opposite the high window, and Timmy turned strangely sullen, slumped against the door. You have got to be kidding me, I thought. I wouldn’t fight him or beg. Eventually a teacher wandered in, and the two of us got detention.
I think about all this for a while and then I say, “What?”
He doesn’t move. “Your pee eff dee,” he says. “You should put it on. Otherwise you might fall into the water and sink and drown. They’d have to dredge the lake for your body, and when they found you, you’d be all swollen up and green, with seaweed in your hair and black lips and shells in your eyes. They’d have to bury you in a closed casket because no one would want to look at you, not even your parents.”
I think about all this as well. “What?” I say again.
He sits up suddenly, making the boat bob around a little. He brushes the hat from his face and squints at me. His face is very red. “It’s true,” he says simply. “That’s what happens. I read it in a book.”
I say, “What’s a pee eff dee?”
“Personal flotation device.”
“What’s that?”
“There.” He points to the innocent life preserver that I left baking on the wooden jetty.
“What’s a casket?”
“The box they bury you in when you’re dead.”
“So who’s going to die?” I say. “I can swim.”
“That,” the fat boy says mysteriously, lying back down in the rowboat and adjusting the hat over his face, “is what they all say.”
I watch him for a while. “Don’t you have a key?”
“Nope.”
“Where is it?”
“Up at the office.”
I wait a little longer but he doesn’t say anything. Then I say, more curious than generous, “Want me to go get it for you?”
“No, thank you,” the hat says gravely. “I don’t really feel like rowing at the moment. But thanks for the offer all the same.”
None of this is at all understandable, so I lean way over and grab my life preserver or pee eff dee or whatever and drag it over my head and pull out my hair and tie the straps around my middle. I unlock the bicycle lock chaining the pedal boat to the jetty. I start churning the pedals, shoving the jetty away at the same time while managing the steering wheel with one hand. “See ya, hat-face,” I call cordially. He waves, still lying down.
I zoom up to one end of the lake but there’s nothing happening up there, so I start to zoom down to the other end. Pretty soon I realize the lake is bigger than I thought, so I stop pedaling for a while and just float. That’s pretty peaceful, and I wish I had brought a book. I stare down into the water, which must be very deep because I can’t see the bottom. It just gets darker and darker, sort of see-through on top and velvety underneath. A creepy prickly feeling starts in the small of my back and climbs up to my neck as I think about how deep the water is, how big the lake is, how small I am, how I’m on top of all that water, and how, if I spring a leak, I won’t stay on top of it all for long.
“Don’t be such a drama queen,” says Imaginary Dex, who it turns out came along after all. She’s sitting in the other seat in her halter top and cutoffs, studying her cuticles, not even bothering to look at me. “You’re wearing a life preserver, plus you can swim. If you’re so scared, just go to where it’s shallow. I can’t believe you need me to tell you this. What are you, six?”
“What is so fascinating about your fingernails all the time, anyway?” I say.
“At least for me they’re not a food group,” she says. “Yours are disgusting.”
“Petal Blush is disgusting,” I say, naming the color of nail polish she’s always touching herself up with. It’s very light pink, the only color Mom will let her have. “Petal Blush.
Look at me, I’m an embarrassed petal. I farted and now I’m embarrassed. You have petal fart on your fingernails.”
“Jealous,” Imaginary Dex says, and then she’s gone. I hate it when she gets the last word.
I start pedaling again toward some wafty reeds that poke up through the water at the far end of the lake. It must be shallow where there are reeds. “I’m not afraid,” I say out loud, and the sound of my own voice in the middle of the big lake where no one else can hear it is a strange thing. “La la la,” I sing, listening to myself with great interest and pedaling doggedly. “Shoo-be-doo.” I wonder if there are fish who can hear me. I try to think of a fish song. “What shall we do with a drunken sailor, what shall we do with a drunken sailor,” I sing to the fish, “ear-lie in the morning?” It isn’t exactly about fish, but it’s close. I’ll ask my dad if he knows any fish songs. “Way, hey, and up she rises,” I sing, “ear-lie in the morning.” That’s a good idea, come to think of it: I decide to get up really early and take a boat out on the water and—and what? I start thinking about the fish again. Are there really fish down there? The old man at the office will know. I look into the water again and see sand and realize I’m coming up to the reeds.
They’re taller than I am in the pedal boat, like a floating forest. They’d make a wonderful place to hide. I imagine hiding in the reeds at night with a flashlight and a chocolate bar or some cheese. I imagine sleeping in a sleeping bag down in the bottom of a boat in the reeds, listening to the lapping tongues of the water and the rustling tongues of the reeds murmuring to each other, hearing the sad bird who only sings at night. I look down at the pedals and think it’ll have to be a rowboat, which reminds me of the boy sleeping in the rowboat tied up at the jetty. Strange.
