Surviving the Applewhites

by Stephanie S. Tolan

  “Sounds like everybody’s up,” Lucille said.

  Heavy footsteps came down the stairs, followed in a few moments by others. Voices came from the kitchen, along with considerable clattering and banging of dishes. The hammering, which had stopped briefly, began again. “Pop Goes the Weasel” gave way to “Hickory Dickory Dock.” Jake leaned against a bookshelf full of encyclopedia volumes stacked in random order and watched Lucille dig through the mess on the computer desk. Now and again she came up with a legal pad or a spiral notebook or a stick pen. She put these on his desk. After a while the smells of coffee and bacon drifted into the schoolroom, and Jake’s mouth began to water.

  “Have you had breakfast?”

  Jake shook his head. He hadn’t felt much like eating at his grandfather’s.

  “Can’t promise what it is—nobody got groceries this week. But whatever, you’re welcome to have some. We want you to make yourself at home.”

  Lucille led Jake to the kitchen. Randolph was standing at the stove, frowning ferociously and poking at a pan of frying bacon with a long fork, a steaming coffee mug in his other hand. He glowered at them as they came in. A towheaded boy who looked about four years old was sitting on a tall stool at the counter, singing about an itsy-bitsy spider at the top of his lungs. The moment he saw Jake, he stopped singing and stared, his mouth open, his blue eyes wide and round.

  “Destiny,” Lucille said. “The youngest Applewhite.”

  At the kitchen table behind another vase of dying flowers sat Sybil Jameson, wearing a tattered robe and jotting notes on a yellow pad with a thoroughly chewed pencil. There was a bowl of soggy cereal in front of her. She looked over her reading glasses and nodded somewhat vaguely at Jake before going back to what she was doing.

  A voice that Jake recognized instantly came from behind the open refrigerator door. “Where’s the cantaloupe? I distinctly remember there was one last piece of cantaloupe in here last night!” Cordelia emerged from behind the door, dressed in a purple leotard, her hair in a long braid down her back. Jake caught his breath. Even first thing in the morning she was beautiful. “Mother! Hal’s been stealing food in the middle of the night again.” There was no answer. “Mother!”

  Sybil Jameson looked up. “What did you say, dear?”

  “I said, Hal’s been stealing food in the middle of the night.”

  “I wouldn’t call it stealing. He has as much right to eat as the rest of us.”

  “If he wants to eat, he can come to meals with the rest of us. I had my mouth all set for cantaloupe!”

  Her mother didn’t answer. She was writing again.

  “Our new student’s here,” Lucille said.

  Cordelia nodded at Jake. “Hi.” Then she turned back to her mother. “I wish you’d go up and talk to Hal! My morning’s completely ruined. I wanted cantaloupe!”

  “Bacon’s ready,” Randolph said, fishing a piece out of the pan and waving it in her direction. “I found a whole package. You can have bacon. And pumper-nickel toast.”

  “Oh, right! And then everybody can start calling me thunder thighs.” Cordelia took a container out of the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of thick, disgusting-looking green liquid. “I’ll be out in the dance studio. My whole afternoon was ruined yesterday, so I’d appreciate it if everyone would stay away and let me work.” She tapped the little boy on the shoulder. He was still staring, silent and goggle-eyed, at Jake. “That means you, Destiny—and the ‘poor little goatses,’ too!”

  Then she was gone, the glass of green gunk in hand, and Lucille was offering Jake a seat at the kitchen table. The little boy stared at him intensely as he sat, then climbed down from his stool and came to stand at Jake’s elbow.

  “How did your hair get that color?” he asked. Even if Jake had intended to reply, he couldn’t have. The boy went right on, leaving no time for Jake to squeeze in so much as a syllable. “Did it just grow that way? Mine just growed. My hair’s blond. Did you know they don’t gots a blond crayon even in the sixty-four box? I think they should, don’t you? Lots of people gots blond hair. What do you call your color? I bet they gots a crayon for it. I like it! And how do you make your hair all stick up in points like that? When I wake up in the morning, mine sticks up sometimes. But not in points. Mommy always combs it down. Can you comb your points down?” The boy took a breath and kept going. “Does it hurt to have that ring sticking through your eyebrow? It looks like it hurts. How come you gots so many earrings? What does your shirt say? Is that a pirate skull? It doesn’t have the crossbones like a pirate flag. I like pirates. I wanna be a pirate when I grow up. And a painter. And a king. If you—”

  Lucille put a plate of bacon and toast in front of Jake. “Don’t mind Destiny. He can go on like that all day.”

  “It’s better not to get him started,” Randolph said, as if it had been Jake’s fault. “And will you stop that infernal hammering!” he bellowed up at the ceiling.

  Chapter Five

  When she finished her breakfast, E.D. had gone out to the meadow with her butterfly net and camera. Winston had lumbered along with her. She was hoping to finish the collecting part of her butterfly project. It was the project she most hated to think of sharing with Jake Semple. First of all, she wouldn’t trust a kid like that with anything as beautiful and fragile as a butterfly. Second, it was her favorite project, and she was very, very nearly finished.

  The project plan was to catch, photograph, and catalog every butterfly in the book Butterflies of the Carolinas. She’d started in August and gone out every single day, starting in the meadow where there were usually at least a few, and then covering every square inch of Wit’s End. She’d found every one of them, from the tiny gray hairstreak to the big eastern tiger swallowtail, except one. If she could find that last one—the great spangled fritillary—now, today, she could close out the main part of the project and keep from having to let Jake loose on the world with a butterfly net.

  She’d been out for two hours now, and the sun was getting hot. Sweat was dripping into her eyes and running down her back under her T-shirt. She’d been around the property once and was back in the meadow. No great spangled fritillaries. The only butterflies she had found were the ordinary little cabbage whites and sulphurs she had already caught millions of times. And two red-spotted purples. She couldn’t understand it. If she could find both the monarch and the viceroy, which looked almost exactly alike, and get photographs that showed how to tell them apart, why couldn’t she find a fritillary? Winston, his short legs and his chest all muddy from wading into the pond for a drink, was flopped in the shade of the honeysuckle by the fence. She was beginning to feel like flopping with him.

  “E.D.! Wait for us.” Lucille was waving at her from the other side of the meadow. “We’re doing the grand tour.” Jake Semple was with her, his scarlet hair flaming in the sun. E.D. sighed. Maybe she could just not mention the butterfly project. Maybe she could say she was studying the life cycle of slugs for natural history.

  As Lucille and Jake tramped through the woods, crossed the creek, and skirted the pond, E.D. trailed behind them, with Winston trailing behind her. All the while, she kept her eyes peeled for a great spangled fritillary.

  At Lucille’s vegetable garden, Winston flopped in the shade again while Lucille explained to Jake that nature spirits had told her to make the garden round instead of rectangular and that they came into her dreams sometimes to give her advice about planting and cultivating. Jake rolled his eyes several times during her explanation, and even groaned once or twice. E.D. was so used to her aunt’s weird notions that she’d forgotten how strangers tended to react. Jake was being disgustingly rude, but Lucille didn’t seem to notice.

  At the goat pen Lucille made E.D. tell the story of the rescue of Wolfbane and Hazel because she said she got too choked up to tell it herself. As E.D. explained how the goats, abused, abandoned, and starving, had turned up in the Applewhites’ woods in the middle of the winter, Lucille’s eyes brimmed with te
ars. Jake, unmoved, leaned on the fence, his nose wrinkled against Wolfie’s ever-pungent odor. E.D. had read somewhere that future serial killers began by abusing animals. She made a mental note to alert someone if he started hanging around the goat pen.

  When Wolfie got that crazed look he sometimes got in his eyes and charged the fence, smacking into the fence post right where he was standing, Jake barely flinched. The kid was not normal, E.D. thought. Grown men had been known to flee in terror from Wolfie when he got that look. Just a week ago one of Hal’s UPS deliveries had been dumped on the driveway instead of brought up to the house because Wolfie had gotten out of the pen and terrorized the driver.

  On the way to show Jake the wood shop, they passed Zedediah’s cottage, where Paulie stood on his t-perch in the shade of the narrow front porch. The parrot looked up from picking at one foot with his beak, raised his green, yellow, and red wings, and swore a long stream of colorful curses. Jake swore back. “Don’t encourage him,” E.D. said. Jake swore some more. Two of a kind, E.D. thought. Birdbrains, both of them.

  In the wood shop Zedediah and Archie were both at work, Zedediah at the lathe turning spindles for one of his trademark rocking chairs and Archie carving a series of complicated lines and squiggles into the legs of a turtle-shaped object. “End table,” Archie said when E.D. asked. “One of the pieces for the gallery show.”

  Zedediah turned off the lathe and took off his safety glasses. “Lucille get you set up with a desk in the schoolroom yet?” he asked Jake.

  Jake nodded.

  “Good. Don’t think that just because there isn’t a teacher standing over you every minute, we don’t take education seriously. The most important thing you’re going to learn while you’re here is who you are and what you’re made of.” E.D. thought they were all likely to learn that about Jake. She was quite sure she didn’t want to know.

  When they got to the cottage that was the dance and music studio, they didn’t go in. The strange, cacophonous music Cordelia had written and recorded for her ballet was blaring from inside. Lucille told Jake just to peek in the window so he could see the studio without disturbing Cordelia while she was rehearsing. He stood there with his nose pressed to the window glass a lot longer than he needed to just to see the floor-to-ceiling mirrors they’d put in, E.D. thought.

  When they’d finished the tour, without E.D. seeing even a single butterfly, much less a fritillary, they went back to the schoolroom, where Winston collapsed under the computer desk and began, almost immediately, to snore. It occurred to E.D. that the dog didn’t get enough exercise.

  “Why don’t you show Jake your curriculum notebook?” Lucille said. “He can see what interests him most and get started. I’m going to get rid of these poor bouquets. They’re pulling down the energy of the whole room.”

  E.D. wished she’d written up some bogus projects to send Jake off in completely different directions from her own—something like the history of the pickle industry, or the place of the preposition in English grammar. But it was too late. She got out her notebook and opened it on the top of what used to be Hal’s desk. Jake was leaning against the computer desk, his arms folded across his chest.

  “Aren’t you going to look at it?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Well, duh! This is a school. We’re a class. And this is what we’re doing.” It occurred to E.D. that she was sounding as if she was in favor of this whole idea. “Suit yourself,” she said. She got out the Civil War novel she had started, settled at her desk, and pretended to read.

  He began wandering around the room, picking things up and putting them down again. “Where’s your TV?” he asked after a while. She pretended to be too engrossed in her reading to hear. “I said where’s your TV?”

  She sighed. “There’s one in Zedediah’s cottage.”

  Jake swore. “You mean there isn’t one anywhere else in this whole place?”

  “We don’t watch much television,” E.D. said. Sometimes, especially when her friend Melissa was talking about the cable channels she watched all the time, E.D. wished they were like a normal family, with cable and a TV set in almost every room. But just at this moment, she was glad they weren’t. “We have better things to do with our time.”

  Jake swore again. E.D. made an effort to focus on her book.

  After a while she heard Jake slump into the seat at his desk. “I don’t see any math in here. Don’t you do math?”

  She looked up. He had actually opened her curriculum notebook. “We do math online. You’ve already been signed up for the same course I’m doing, with the same tutor.”

  “Could’ve saved themselves the trouble,” he said.

  E.D. ignored him and went on reading. She’d actually managed to get engrossed in the story.

  By the time Lucille had come back from disposing of the wildflowers, Jake had turned on the computer. “No games!” he said when she came in.

  She smiled. “No games.” She clicked off the power on the power strip the computer was plugged into. “And no using the computer without signing up first.” Jake swore. Lucille took no notice. “Now then, you’ve seen the curriculum—what would you like to start with?”

  Jake shrugged. “Who says I want to start?”

  Lucille clapped a hand over her mouth. “How thoughtless of me. Giving you an open-ended choice like that on your first day. It’s bound to take you a little time to get used to the way we do things.” She looked around the room, and her eyes lit on the Butterfly Project chart. “Butterflies!” she said. “Perfect! There’s an empty space on E.D.’s chart that needs filling. How about the two of you go out and see if you can find a—what is it?” She peered more closely at the chart. “A great spangled fritillary. That’ll get you back outdoors and it won’t seem so much like schoolwork.”

  E.D. groaned. If Lucille was going to start deciding what they were supposed to work on when, why couldn’t she decide they should start with the Civil War or A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

  “Get the net out again,” Lucille told E.D. She turned back to Jake. “You’ll settle in in no time. You’ll see. Human beings are almost infinitely adaptable. This is all going to work out brilliantly!”

  A few minutes later E.D. and Jake were headed back out to the meadow with Winston tagging after them, huffing noisily as he waddled along. E.D. kept hold of the net. She caught a fiery skipper to show him, explaining carefully that she didn’t kill them and mount them, she only photographed them and let them go again. “This is one I already have,” she said as she opened the net and let it fly away. “You can read about them all in the book.” As she spoke, a black swallowtail fluttered over the honeysuckle and into the meadow, the sun catching the spots of yellow against its black wings.

  Jake snatched the net from her hand and went after it. He swept the net and missed, swept again, and the butterfly wavered up and over the fence, then disappeared into the branches of a sweet gum tree on the other side. Jake swore. “Stupid thing to do, catching butterflies.”

  “So don’t! You can do something else for natural history.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t intend to be here long anyway.” Jake swung the net lightly across the tops of the grass and weeds, sending puffs of thistledown into the air.

  Good, E.D. thought. “Where do you intend to go?”

  Jake shrugged and swept the butterfly net at a dragonfly that veered sharply, changed course, and sped away. “Back to Rhode Island.”

  “Yeah? Dad says your social worker told him there aren’t any more foster families there who’ll take you. If you go back, they’re going to send you to Juvenile Hall. They must have some kind of school there. You’d probably like it better than this one. At least the other students would be more your type.”

  Jake didn’t say anything. He just struck at the tall grass as if the net were a scythe—one way, then the other—scattering seed heads and blossoms of Queen Anne’s lace.

  Chapter Six

  Jake sat on the front porch
steps of the main house, earphones in his ears, his Walkman radio clipped to his belt, picking at a bit of loose rubber on the sole of his shoe. He hadn’t been able to find the sort of station he wanted, so he’d had to settle for Top One Hundred hits. It was the first time he’d been alone all day. E.D. had gone off somewhere, and Lucille had told him he could do whatever he wanted till dinner.

  She hadn’t said when dinner would be. Or what. He wondered what sort of food they served where his parents were. Better, he bet! It was just possible, if the meals here were anything like lunch—Archie had fixed tofu burgers that Jake had found so completely inedible he’d fed his in bits to the fat old basset hound under the table—that the question of whether he would stay or not would be irrelevant. He’d starve to death.

  He kept replaying in his mind what E.D. had said out there in that field full of weeds and bugs. That if he didn’t stay here there was no place to go except Juvenile Hall. That’s what his social worker had told him when she called to talk to him about the Creative Academy. “This is your last chance,” she’d said. But people had been saying stuff like that to him all his life. They hadn’t really meant it. Did they this time? Did he dare take the chance?

  It had been easy to blow off Traybridge Middle School. Everybody—kids, teachers, even the principal—had been scared of the bad kid from the city. Bad kid. Living up to that label was what Jake did best. All during the Jake Semple Reign of Terror, he hadn’t really thought about what would happen next. Now he knew. This was what. Wit’s End and the Applewhites. But what about after this? Would they really send him to Juvie?

  “The other students would be more your type,” E.D. had said. He thought about the guys at home who’d gone to Juvie. The druggies and the ones who bragged about the guns they could bring to school if they wanted to. It was one thing to be thought of as the bad kid from the city. It was something else again to be locked up with real ones.