by Ann Braden
“It’s just us,” I say.
“Zoey Albro! I asked you to check on them! Lenny’s pans are going to be impossible to get clean later if I let this stuff harden.”
Why are clean pans more important than a functioning fuse box? It’s been a long time since my mom made any sense. At least the light from the other trailers makes it easier to walk across the rest of the living area.
When I push open the door to our bedroom, it’s pitch-black and nothing seems to be moving.
“Bryce? Aurora?”
All I hear in response is a whimper coming from their bed.
I quickly make my way through the dark, stepping on battlebots and other little plastic toy parts as I go. I hear the whimper again.
“Bryce?” I put my hand out toward the sound and find him. He’s trembling. I hear a muffled sob and feel Aurora lying next to him. She’s shaking, too.
“We … we … ” Bryce starts, but his words disappear into a hiccup.
“Are you guys okay?”
Another hiccup. More whimpering.
“What’s wrong?” I say.
“We … we can’t see!” Bryce finally sobs. “We can’t see anymore!”
I let out a long breath. They’re not hurt. They’re not sick.
“Is it because we got Frank mad at us?”
I squeeze each of their hands. “Oh, you sillies, it’s just that the power is out. Your eyes still work fine.” I crawl across the bed to get to the window and pull the curtains to the side. “See? You can see the icicles coming off of the neighbor’s roof, right?”
In the glow from the neighbor’s motion-sensor porch light, I can make out their faces. Bryce is biting his lip, but it keeps quivering anyway. Aurora has Petunia the Sea Turtle in a death grip and is sucking on one of her flippers. Their eyes are still fixed in a state of terror. My mom and I have gone through the power going off plenty of times, but Bryce and Aurora were too little to remember. What are they supposed to think when all the lights go out—when suddenly there’s no Mickey Mouse night-light and no warning?
Bryce turns toward Aurora and wraps his arm around her, his nose buried in her hair. “At least we get hot dog bites.”
I try to swallow, but it catches in my throat.
Aurora sniffs and looks at me. “You gonna tell us when they ready?”
Her eyes. Why do her eyes have to be so hopeful?
“Guys, I’m so sorry … There aren’t any hot dog bites for us.”
Aurora lets out a wail.
Bryce shuts his eyes, curls into a ball, and covers his ears with his hands. “No! No! No! No!”
I slide in next to them so I can wrap them both up tight. They both instantly burrow into me, Aurora at my shoulder and Bryce’s head driving into my stomach.
“I’ll tell you a story instead, okay?” I say.
I never knew I could tell stories—or ’tories as Aurora says—until one day when Bryce had woken up from one of his nightmares and couldn’t get back to sleep no matter how much I rubbed his back. I had made up stories all the time before that to get myself out of trouble—like having to explain to my mom how I ended up with a new can of Easy Cheese from Cumberland Farms—but bedtime stories? Not so much. Thankfully, Bryce and Aurora don’t exactly care (or know) that I’m just making it up as I go along. And telling stories means I get to spend time in a world where the person in charge of what happens is me.
Tonight I start with three kids who live in a castle and don’t have electricity, and I go from there. And who cares if I take some parts from the Batman movie and some parts from a documentary I once watched about Genghis Khan? The main thing is that the kids triumph over evil and that Bryce and Aurora both fall asleep.
After they’re both breathing evenly, I stay where I am, lying between them, staring out at those icicles. They’re like teeth waiting to chomp someone. Because the problem is that real life isn’t like a story—I’m not in charge, and it’s usually the good guys who get chomped.
But if I were an octopus, those icicles wouldn’t get me. I would squish my body into a ball and jet away—fully camouflaged, of course.
I slither out from Aurora’s arms, find a pencil on the floor, and take the debate packet out of my pocket. I only have one page left, and I position myself at the window so I can use the neighbor’s porch light. I go back and forth about whether it’s a good thing that a baby octopus starts out life the size of a pencil eraser, because the eraser on my pencil is pretty darn small. But I decide to include it because anything that can start out floating around defenseless in the ocean that size—and then defeat the odds to grow into this powerful creature—has to mean business.
I fill out those remaining blanks. Every single one.
Just as I finish, the front door slams and I hear Lenny’s voice. There’s some fumbling around and a thump like Lenny might have just smashed his toes on something. He curses.
“I’m so—sorry,” I hear my mom stammer.
“Well, it sure isn’t my fault we’re in this mess,” Lenny snaps.
I can totally believe it’s my mom’s fault. Recently it’s like she can’t do anything right.
“I thought I filled out the form right. I thought for sure we’d get approved for assistance—” my mom starts.
Lenny interrupts her before she can say anything more. “In there.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about until I hear their bedroom door shut, and I realize they’ve disappeared inside it. They almost never argue about money or bills or anything really when I can overhear them.
The neighbor’s light goes out, and I’m back to being completely in the dark.
In so many ways.
So it wasn’t the fuse box—it was the power company who cut us off. In our old life, Mom got really good at filling out the form for financial assistance to take care of it. But she hasn’t exactly been a take-care-of-it mom for a while now.
And she sure isn’t the one left holding Aurora and Bryce when everything falls to pieces.
I take a deep breath. An octopus might start out defenseless, but it sure doesn’t stay that way.
On a wave of octopus arms, I roll across our bedroom, sliding around the battlebots, checking the distance to my mattress so I don’t trip over it, and simultaneously reaching for the doorknob with one of my tentacles. I silently roll across the main room, my skin changing to match snoring Frank and his recliner as I pass by. Just around the corner, in the entryway, the washing machine sits up against the wall. It’s broken (except for when it pretends to work and turns all of our clothes gray), but that doesn’t matter now. I scale it, one sucker at a time, until I’m on top of it, right next to the section of wall that got all soft from a leak awhile back. Right where Bryce’s lightsaber made a hole last summer when he and Lenny were play-fighting. It’s a hole that leads right into my mom and Lenny’s bedroom, and my hunch was right: I can hear what they’re saying from here. If I put my eye up against the hole I can even see them.
Because that’s the thing about an octopus: it knows it needs to hide its soft, squishy body out of sight, but if anyone bothered to take a closer look at the hole in the reef, they’d see a big, unblinking octopus eye staring out at them.
Through the hole I can see Hector sitting in the middle of the bed, waving my mom’s phone/flashlight around like a strobe light. Lenny is organizing his undershirt drawer with an actual flashlight, completely oblivious to the disco dance party room that he’s in.
That’s another thing about getting to live with Lenny in this trailer: it is seriously neat and tidy and organized. In our last apartment, pre-Lenny, the countertop was rotting around the edges, so you’d realize halfway through washing dishes that water had been pooling downstream into the carpeting. We basically spent our six months in that apartment ducking under the five clotheslines that crisscrossed the main room and smelling like we lived in a swamp.
Lenny’s trailer, on the other hand, is the opposite of a swamp. His bathroom is t
he most non-moldy thing you’ve ever seen.
“I told you I delivered that form last week,” he’s saying. “You believe me, don’t you?”
My mom, sitting near Hector on the bed, dodges to the left to avoid being whacked by her strobe light phone. “Of course I believe you.”
Lenny starts laying his undershirts out on the bed to refold them. “You can’t always blame someone else.”
My mom bites her lip and looks away. “It’s just that I spent a whole day on that form. I thought I filled it out right.”
“But how would you even know if it’s right?”
I want to look away. She didn’t used to be this much of a mess. But I force myself to keep my octopus eye pressed against the hole, wide and unblinking. Why is she the one that all four of us kids are related to? Why can’t it be Lenny instead? All confident and competent. No one at school would mess with me if I were like him.
“I—I know,” my mom stammers. “But I asked Connor to look at it first, and he thought it—”
My mom’s voice falters.
In the disco light, I can make out Lenny shaking his head. “Really? Really?” He stops folding and crosses the room to be right next to my mom. “You really showed all the private details about our lives to Connor?”
Connor waits tables at the Pizza Pit, too, and he’s basically the only friend my mom has right now. He’s also totally awesome, but Lenny never seems to be a big fan of his. I don’t know if it’s because Connor’s gay or if it’s because of something else.
Hector drops my mom’s phone and starts crying. “I thought he could help,” my mom says quickly. “He’s not someone who would judge us or anything, and he doesn’t get all flustered with forms like that and—”
Lenny hands my mom’s phone back to Hector and then wraps his arms around my mom from behind. I remember him wrapping her up like this when they first got together and how she would close her eyes and lean her head against his shoulder like there was nowhere else to be in the world.
“We can take care of our own business ourselves,” Lenny says. “You’ve got me taking care of you now.”
My mom has her eyes squeezed shut, but it’s not like before when she’d be looking all calm. It’s more like how Bryce looked when he accidentally crashed into Lenny’s tower of alphabetized DVDs, and he closed his eyes tight as if that’d make the mess he’d made go away.
I scoot down off the washing machine. I can’t stand to see my mom’s face looking like that. If she could do stuff right the first time around, it wouldn’t have to be like this.
CHAPTER 3
In the morning I wake up to the sound of Lenny’s car pulling out of the driveway. The electricity still isn’t back on, but the sun (that rebel) has started to lighten the sky for free.
Another thing about Lenny is that he’s never late to work. Even though his part-time job at the auto parts store has him leaving before seven, he’s still on time. On time and as clean-shaven as you could possibly get. Between Lenny’s obsession with his lather shaving brush and his insistence on paying attention to little details like clocks and his car’s odometer, he’s basically the exact opposite of my mom’s other boyfriends with their varying degrees of scruffiness and whose main talents were eating all the food in our fridge.
Well, Bryce and Aurora’s dad, Nate, wasn’t bad. He was kind, and those times he took me hunting were super fun. But then he stopped hunting and started drinking, and you can’t hold down a job and take care of kids when you’re like that. He’d just look out the window of the camper van we lived in back then like the answer was out there. I mean, maybe it was, because my mom told him loads of times to go to AA meetings—but he never went.
Things went south between him and my mom one day when we were at the boat launch. He had been trying to convince Bryce to go swimming with him, but Bryce couldn’t swim and Nate was drunk and didn’t exactly remember that. Evidently, being yelled at by your girlfriend in front of your kids and a whole bunch of kayakers wakes up something inside you, and he drove off in the camper van and didn’t come back.
I push myself up on my mattress until I can see Bryce and Aurora. Bryce had one of his nightmares last night, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at him now. They’re both still breathing deep like two little squirrely-haired Darth Vaders. I hate waking them up. It’s like you’ve finally won the lottery of peace and quiet and then you rip that winning ticket to shreds and dump a bucket of angry, screaming monkeys on your head.
I pull on my own clothes and brush my hair, and then perch myself next to them on their bed and give them each a little nudge. “Bryce … Aurora … Time to get up.”
Just a few years ago, my mom was the one waking me up. She’d sing this little good morning song even though she can’t carry a tune. That was when she had to keep a bag of frozen corn on her face to numb the pain from rotting teeth—because some people have parents who remind them to brush their teeth, but my mom’s didn’t. Still, she was determined not to take ibuprofen because she was pregnant with Aurora and had heard it could hurt the baby. She finally had to sell our beat-up car to scrape together the money to get those teeth extracted. She got five of them pulled, but the worst was the week after that. Because there we were with no car, fifteen-month-old Bryce who was coming down with an ear infection, and Aurora about to be born—and two more teeth started throbbing.
That was before we found the octopus DVD. And that was definitely before Lenny saved the day and paid for a new set of teeth for my mom.
I give Bryce and Aurora each another nudge, but it’s like trying to wake up two rocks. I start to pull the bedspread off them. Bryce grabs hold tight, curls into it, and growls. Monkeys growl sometimes, right? It can’t always be oo-oo-aa-aa. Aurora, with her eyes still closed, pinches her face together tight.
“You got to get up,” I say.
“You’re not Mommy,” Bryce growls back. “I don’t have to listen.”
“Not Mommy!” Aurora echoes.
Every day it’s like this! Does it matter that it was me who told them a cool story last night? No.
“You know Mommy has to sleep in because she has to wake up for Hector in the night,” I remind him.
I don’t point out that she never stayed in bed like this when Bryce and Aurora were babies. I’ve peeked in on her enough mornings recently to know that she’s probably lying in the fetal position and that if I ask when she’s going to get up, she’ll say, “Soon.” But she won’t. I’ve stopped hoping to see her before I leave for school. And being rejected like that is not what Bryce and Aurora need to start the day.
“You’re not Mommy!” Bryce yells at the top of his lungs.
Screaming monkeys. Flippin’ screaming monkeys.
Twenty minutes later, I’ve managed to get them out the door and to the corner of our road in the trailer park where the Head Start bus picks them up. Bryce is still in his pajamas, and Aurora insisted on wearing a skirt and a T-shirt even though it’s January in Vermont. But they’re both wearing winter coats, so that’s something. And everyone brushed their teeth for at least a minute—that’s one of my mom’s nonnegotiable rules. And thankfully Frank kept sleeping through the whole thing.
When I’m finally on my way to my own bus stop, I see Silas come around the corner of his trailer. He’s in seventh grade like me, and he and his dad have a good spot at the end of the row, so that when they look out the window on one side it’s all trees.
“Hey,” I call.
Silas glances up from under his camo trucker hat. “Hey,” he says back. He climbs over a grey mound of snow left from the plows and catches up with me.
“What’s up?” he asks.
Silas has the kind of freckles that make you want to connect the dots to form constellations and dragons and things. Other kids give him a hard time because heaven forbid if you’re a boy and you have a habit of crying when you’re sad. But he’s nice.
Still, I’m not about to let my mouth run about not having
electricity. “Not much,” I say.
Silas kicks a chunk of ice, and it skids along the road. “Aren’t you going to ask me?” he says.
“Ask you what?”
“What’s up?” he says.
“Oh.” I watch him as he plods forward in his steel-toed boots, his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the line of trees beyond the trailers. There’s something about Silas that’s different from anyone else I know. “What’s up?” I ask.
“My dad and I went hunting this weekend.” He drops his voice. “For bobcats.”
I look around. “Why are you whispering? Is that illegal?”
He shakes his head. “Open season until the second week of February. It’s just … ” He pauses and glances at me like somehow we’re part of some awesome conspiracy. “The bobcat is the most challenging game there is. Pure stealth. In the whole state only a couple dozen hunters will be successful this year.”
“Why? Are they really rare?”
Silas keeps his eyes on the trees. “They’re around. But you’ve got to be like a cat to find them. And there aren’t as many places to track them now … You remember that big town meeting about guns last year?”
I nod. That meeting was one of the other rare times that Frank got out of his chair and left the house. He even took his .22 rifle down from the shelf, cleaned it, and put it back up before he went. He always keeps it there in case the government goes all “tyrannical.” And he made Lenny go to the meeting, and Lenny made the rest of us go. It seemed like it was one bunch of people trying to tell another bunch of people what to do. And who likes being told what to do? Especially if the person doing the telling didn’t grow up here and doesn’t get how things have always been.
“Well, those anti-hunting people put No Trespassing signs up in their woods. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to give up,” Silas says. “We tracked both sides of the public land along Squaretail Brook, all the way down that hillside to where it runs into the Beal River.” He raises his eyebrows. “We didn’t find a single sign of bobcat.”
