The Opposite Of Tidy

by Carrie Mac

  “Junie?” Wade held her shoulders and turned her so he could see her face. “You’re being serious?”

  Junie nodded. “You can’t even imagine what it looked like down here before. There’s no way I can even begin to describe it. There just aren’t enough different words in the English language for ‘garbage.’ This is a huge improvement. It hasn’t looked this good for years.” Junie stepped onto the carpet, blackened with dirt and neglect and mould and shit and damp. It squelched underfoot. They’d started to pull up the carpet nearest the bathroom, revealing the concrete below. “I can’t even imagine how hard this was for my mom.” She shook her head, marvelling. “I’m surprised she isn’t hospitalized. Or drugged.” Junie laughed. “Then again, maybe Kendra’s clinical psychiatrist guy comes with a stocked pharmacy.”

  “Tranquillizers,” Wade said. He hadn’t stepped off the stairs. “A beautiful thing.” He was trying to be funny. Junie could tell by his tone. But he just sounded weird. Junie knew why.

  “You think this is gross.”

  Wade said nothing. He held her glance, and then slowly nodded. “It’s a lot to take in, let’s put it that way.”

  “It’s okay, Wade. It is gross.”

  “Okay. Yeah, kinda gross, to be honest. Sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize,” Junie continued. “Of course I know that. But it’s an improvement. I almost wish that you’d seen it before, so you’d know how much better this is.”

  Wade leaned against the stair rail and gave her a sad little smile. “But you didn’t give me the chance. Remember?”

  “Yeah. I remember. And I’m sorry. But if you think this is gross, can you imagine how you would’ve reacted seeing it before?” Junie wanted out of there all of a sudden. She shouldn’t have brought him down there. Not even Tabitha had been down there for years and years. It was a mistake. “I’m sorry.” She spun, and was happy to find that they’d cleared a path to the basement door that led outside, to the steps that climbed up to the back yard. It had been blocked by a heap of broken furniture for as long as Junie could remember. They’d probably been using it to cart out the overwhelming quantities of trash. The door was warped from the damp rot that pervaded the basement, and sticky after not being opened for so long, but it gave after she yanked hard.

  Junie stumbled up the concrete steps, gulping in the fresh night air. Wade followed her. She’d thought he would, but still, she wasn’t sure she wanted him to. Being this honest . . . showing him how bad her house was . . . it was too raw. Too real. It hurt her heart in a way that felt dangerous. Like she was ruining herself. Forever. Like she was betraying the carefully spun web of lies that had served her so well for so many years. Like she was losing herself to the truth. Like she was losing herself, period.

  “I hate this.” She collapsed onto the damp grass, feeling the cool wetness seep through her clothes. It felt good, to feel something real and earthy instead of the nebulous muddle inside her head. “I hate all of this mess.”

  Wade sat on the grass beside her. “I can see why.”

  “Can you?” Junie didn’t turn to him when she said it. She stared up at the sky. It was a clear night, but she couldn’t see many stars with the city lights sharing the dark. She kept staring up, hoping the night sky might unzip and invite her in. Dark, cool refuge. She’d stay up there until this was all over, watched over by the constellations. Delphina, Orion, Perseus.

  “I can.” Wade lay back too. He put one arm under his head, and slipped the other under Junie’s.

  Junie felt almost warm with him near her. He radiated heat. She turned toward him. From the crook in his arm, she could see the angle of his jawbone. She reached up a finger and traced it, stopping at his chin. He lifted his head so he could see her.

  “Thanks,” she said. “For letting me explain.”

  Wade nodded, silent for a moment. “You know, when I saw Royce on the couch and thought he was dead . . .” Another long pause. “When my first instinct was to film him. It made me think of your mom.”

  “Yeah?” Junie barely whispered. “How come?”

  “The way that she’s just letting them in. To film everything. So raw, you know? Like being naked in front of the whole world. I don’t know if that’s okay.”

  “Because it’s a talk show?” Junie worked hard to keep the defensiveness out of her voice. “Because, other than that, how is it different from your documentaries?”

  “I know, right?” More silence. “I would film this.” He sat up and gestured at the house. “I would film all of it, if it were for a documentary. I don’t know how it’s different.” It was dark, but not so much that Junie couldn’t see him shrug. “I’m trying to figure that out. I just wanted to tell you that. That I get that it’s not all black-and-white.”

  “I wish it were. I wish I could just wave a magic wand and all of a sudden my mom and I would be living in a different house. A perfect house. That’s how I’d like to deal with it.”

  The two of them lay back down for a while and watched the stars until they both got a chill. “Well, the magic wand didn’t work,” Junie finally said. “Come back inside the horror with me?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll show you my room.”

  He squeezed her hand. “I thought you’d decided it was off limits or something.”

  She’d already told him that her room was the tidiest space in the house, along with the upstairs bathroom. She’d told him so that he wouldn’t think she chose to live like this. She’d told him so that he would know that she was different from her mother. To prove that she was neat. Orderly. Organized. Of course he wanted to see it. But there was something behind that request. An urgency that Junie could relate to. There was a bed. They were alone. There was a natural progression of events ahead, and Junie wasn’t sure she knew how to handle herself.

  “Not off limits, no. But I have to call Tabitha first. Super-quick. Then I’ll show you. Okay?”

  “Okay.” He grinned at her. “You can tell her that I will be the perfect gentleman. Tell her not to worry.”

  Junie left him outside and hurried in to find the phone. When Tabitha answered, Junie rushed an explanation of what had happened at her father’s, and afterwards.

  “So let me get this straight,” Tabitha said. “You and Wade are alone at your house, and your dad thinks you’re staying with your mom, and your mom thinks you’re staying with your dad, and Wade’s brother doesn’t care where he stays.”

  “I never said that,” Junie said. “He might have a curfew. I don’t know.”

  “Just . . .” Junie could hear the anxiety in Tabitha’s voice. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Meaning, don’t have sex.”

  “Exactly.”

  Junie sucked in a loud breath. “Really?”

  “Junie!” Tabitha yelled. “Do I have to come over there? I can bring a deck of cards. We could play cribbage. How about that? Sound good?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t be stupid. Or I will come over there. Armed with my Hello Kitty cards and popcorn. It could be fun.”

  “I’ll be good?”

  “You’ll be good!”

  “I’ll be good.”

  “Good.” Tabitha sighed. “Because you know I hate playing card games.”

  Junie said goodbye and hung up the phone. She stared at it for a moment, as if it might ring and the voice on the other end would tell her what was coming next.

  Junie went back outside to find Wade on the back step, still gazing up at the sky.

  “You talked to Tabitha?”

  Junie nodded.

  “Is she coming over to chaperone?” He stood up and took her by the hand. “Not that I want her to, but I’d understand if she was.”

  “She threatened to.” Junie’s heart raced. “Do you play cribbage?”

  “The card game? No. Why? You’re going to teach me?”

  “Maybe. Come on. Let’s go inside.”

  She led him ups
tairs to her room. “See?” she said as she pushed open her door. “My oasis.”

  “That’s not surprising.” Wade slung a damp arm across her shoulders. “Even your handwriting is neat.” They stood there side by side for a few awkward moments until Wade finally dropped his arm and went ahead into the room, plopping down on the edge of the bed. “I promise I won’t bite, Junie. Seriously.”

  Junie took a tentative step into the room. No guy had ever been in there. Other than her dad, and that didn’t count. Really, no one had ever been in there, besides Tabitha and Junie’s parents and her grandma. And that one time that Mrs. D. came in. Other than that, no one had ever set foot in there. It was bizarre that she had a boy in there, and no one was home to stop her.

  Junie reached to plug in the fairy lights she’d strung after getting the idea from her room at Evelyn’s. She switched off the overhead, so that the tiny punches of glow dangling around the room were the only light. Junie sat beside him on the bed, not touching him. If she did touch him, she wasn’t sure where she would stop.

  He reached for her hand, and they sat there like that for a very long, awkward moment. Eventually, he fell back, still holding her hand. “Coming?”

  Junie laid back too, staring at the fairy lights, her heart pounding. She changed her mind and sat back up. He did too.

  “Want to play cards?” He laughed, a short laugh that Junie had never heard before. So he was nervous too. That made everything seem a lot easier.

  “Seriously, you could teach me to play crib.” He brushed her bangs off her face and kissed her. Junie felt as if all the bones in her body had melted, leaving her a floppy, spineless soup of person.

  “I hate crib.”

  He kissed her again. “Me too.” And again.

  “Wait.” She put a hand on either side of his face and held him away as he leaned in one more time. “Wait.” But she didn’t know what to say after that.

  “For?”

  For what? Junie searched her brain for the next thing to say and came up empty. She was all feeling, and all of it was in her stomach, and lower. She’d lost her brain somewhere on the back lawn. She put her hands to her own head, willing her thoughts to pull together. “Don’t you have to get home? It’s a school night.”

  “I don’t have to go anywhere.”

  So much for that.

  “I’ve got to get out of these wet clothes. And so do you.” As soon as she’d said it, Junie realized how it sounded. “I don’t mean that we—”

  “Of course not—”

  “I’ve got pyjamas. For both of us.”

  Wade laughed. “I’m not wearing some pink flannel capris with puppy dogs on them.”

  Humour. Thank God. It was what she needed to get back on track. She slapped him playfully and pushed herself off the bed. She went to her bureau and pulled open the drawer where her pyjamas were neatly folded in sets. She pulled out a black-and-green-checked flannel bottom and a big black T-shirt. She tossed them at Wade.

  “That’s as unisex as I can find.”

  “You said ‘sex.’” Wade pointed at her.

  Junie had to laugh. Then so did Wade. And just like that, it got easier by another notch again.

  She rummaged through the drawer, wishing she had something a little cuter than her usual ratty old cotton sets. She settled on a purple pair of short bottoms with lace on the trim, and a white tank top that was a little snug on her.

  “I’ll change in the bathroom,” Wade offered.

  When he came back, he asked if she could put their wet clothes in the dryer, and Junie had to admit that their washing machine and dryer hadn’t worked in several years.

  “I take laundry to Tabitha’s house once a week or so. My stuff, anyway. My mom just wears the same thing over and over. And when it gets really bad, I take a load of her stuff to the laundromat.” From the look on Wade’s face, Junie got the idea that taking your laundry to the neighbour’s was just one more thing that didn’t fit within the box called “normal behaviour.”

  Junie hung their wet clothes on the shower rod in the bathroom instead. When she went back to her room, Wade was already under the covers. He’d pulled a book off the shelf and was thumbing through it.

  “I thought I’d read you a bedtime story. Better than crib. Serves the same purpose, right?”

  Junie climbed in beside him, her heart thumping so loudly she could barely hear herself speak. “What’s the book?”

  “Grimm’s Fairy Tales. ‘Rabbit’s Bride.’”

  He started reading. “‘There was a woman and she had a daughter and they lived in a beautiful cabbage garden.’”

  “Who knew there was such a thing?” Despite the fact that she was lying in bed with a boy, Junie yawned. It had been a very, very long day.

  Wade kept reading. Junie knew it was a very short story, only a couple of pages long, but even still, she was asleep by the end of it. Her night was busy with dreaming, in which Wade was a rabbit with long whiskers and tall, soft ears, and she was the girl he talked into coming into his hut. And she went, happy to leave the cabbage garden behind her.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The front door slammed and Junie woke with a start. For a moment, she was confused. This was her room. This was her bed. But there was a boy in it, which did not make any sense whatsoever. And then all that had happened the night before thundered into her thoughts like an earthquake. She sat up with a start, clutching the blankets to her, even though she was wearing pyjamas and had nothing to hide—except for the events of the night before, from her mother. Wade slept soundly beside her, tucked against the wall. He lay on his stomach, his hands shoved under the pillow, as comfortable as if he’d slept there all his life, while Junie had spent the night tossing and turning and dreaming of marrying rabbits.

  Loud voices drifted up the stairs.

  “Oh my God.” Junie suddenly realized the severity of the situation. There was no way Wade could get out of there without everyone finding out. “Get up!”

  Wade sighed and rearranged his limbs and pulled the covers up higher. But he didn’t wake up. Junie thought she heard Kendra’s assistant’s voice.

  “Wake up, Wade! They’re here! The Kendra people!”

  He sat up, groggy. “Huh?”

  “The Kendra Show people.” Junie leapt off the bed and pulled a pair of jeans over her pyjama bottoms. She tugged on a sweater, fetched Wade’s clothes and chucked them at him. “Get up! We have to get you out of here.”

  “Wha—?” Wade rubbed his eyes. “Okay. I’m up. I’m on it. Operation Hide the Evidence.” He flung the covers off and was on his feet, wrestling himself into his clothes.

  They crept to the top of the stairs. “They can’t know that I was here, either,” Junie said. “I’m supposed to be at my dad’s, remember?” The two of them crouched as the boom operator brought his gear in through the front door. Charlie Falconetti came in behind him, BlackBerry to her ear.

  “Gotcha, babe. Understood. Hang on, Kendra . . . disaster pending.” She pulled the phone away from her ear and hollered at the boom guy, “What the hell you doing with that? Take it downstairs.” She returned to her call with Kendra. “So yeah, Marla’s a friggin’ mess. A total train wreck. I don’t know what kind of television you’re going to get out of this, babe. It’s bad, Kenny baby.”

  Junie and Wade exchanged a look.

  “Yeah, well,” Charlie continued, “you’re a friggin’ saint, then. Because I’m not so sure I agree. This place is the worst I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying a lot.”

  Junie wished she could cover Wade’s ears. She didn’t want him to hear Charlie talking about her mom, her house . . . her life like that. Wade caught the pained expression on her face. He gave her a wink, and then stood up.

  “Hey!” Wade called down the stairs. “We can hear you, in case you give a shit.”

  Charlie looked up the stairs. “Oh, Christ. Disaster pending, part two. Gotta go, babe.” Phone still in hand, she started up the stairs. “Hey,
Junie. Good morning! And you’re Wade, the guy who stormed off in a huff, right?” She reached out her free hand, but Wade didn’t shake it. With a calculating glance at the two of them, their tousled hair and the open bedroom door behind them, Charlie grinned. “Well. Looks like you know a little something, and I know a little something.”

  “You can’t tell my mom!” Junie blurted. “Please, Charlie. Don’t tell her we were here.”

  “What is she going to tell?” Wade put a steadying hand on her shoulder. “That we got here before the crew? Big deal. You’re an early riser. Me too. We both got up early and met here. What’s wrong with that?”

  That was good. But Junie had already blown it, and Charlie knew it.

  “So I take it that your mom doesn’t know about you two being here all night. And I take it that she wouldn’t take it so well. Correctamundo, kids?”

  “We just got here,” Wade insisted.

  “Right.” Charlie raised her eyebrows. “Look, I’m taking my leverage where I can get it. We all know that Marla has no idea that you spent the night with Mister Lover Boy here. Come on, fess up. Let’s not waste time.”

  “Of course she doesn’t know,” Junie said. She sank down onto the top step. “Please don’t say anything. She’d kill me.”

  “She probably would,” Charlie said. “So I won’t tell Marla if you don’t tell her what I said to Kendra. And you don’t tell Kendra that you heard me at all. Deal?”

  “Deal.” Junie sighed with relief. “Thank you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re thanking her for. I still say we just got here.” Wade shrugged. “But okay. Deal.”