by Ann Braden
I hand it to my mom. Maybe getting his favorite shirt back will help him. “This, too?”
She eyes the plastic laundry basket that’s now full to bursting and has a crack in the side, and I think she’s about to say no, but she actually nods. And then in a move that’s remarkably similar to old, competent mom, she retrieves some duct tape from a drawer and sits down next to the basket ready to do some reconstructive surgery. “You must have some of your clothes that you want washed, too,” she says as she secures the tape around the plastic supports. “You should add a few things of your own.”
“Really?”
She finishes her taping job and hefts the basket up to her hip. “Yeah, I think I can carry a bit more weight.”
I look at her for a moment to see if she’s kidding, but she doesn’t seem to be, so I fish out a few shirts and a pair of jeans and toss them into the basket. Just like any good octopus, when there’s an opening, I know to slip through it.
She looks at the clock on her phone. “It’ll take me forty minutes to walk there, and then by the time I’ve gotten it all washed, I might as well wait for Lenny to get done with his shift and give me a ride home. It’s right on his way, so he won’t mind because it doesn’t use extra gas, right?” She glances at the kitchen. “Can you cover dinner? I know these last few days of the month are tight. And Hector’s been pretty fussy today. I think he’s teething.”
I watch as Hector chews on one of Aurora’s shirts and then shrieks. I can tell where this is going: he’s turning into one more screaming monkey. “I’ll figure something out,” I say.
My mom puts on her jacket and hoists the laundry basket onto her hip.
“Hey, Mom?”
She looks at me with her hand on the doorknob. “What?”
I picture Matt standing up at that podium making that joke.
“Do you ever feel … confident?”
“Confident?” She shakes her head as she pulls the door open. “The only confident I am is confident that life’s never going to get any easier than this.”
CHAPTER 10
But the next Sunday my mom doesn’t have to work, and neither does Lenny. Lenny goes out to help a neighbor who is having some car issues, Frank is watching the Weather Channel, and Bryce and Aurora are given the green light to pile into the big bed with my mom and Hector for cozy time.
Alone in the kitchen, I fix myself a frozen waffle and eat it looking out the window. All the trailers around us are gleaming in the sunlight. It’s one of those crisp, clear days that make you think winter might not be all that bad.
After I brush my teeth, I peek in at them in my mom’s bedroom. Hector is in the crook of my mom’s arm, playing with his toes, and Aurora is on her other side, her face buried in my mom’s T-shirt, like she can’t breathe in enough of her smell. Bryce has to be the lump that’s under the covers down by my mom’s knees.
My mom looks tired, but not as tired as usual. Like maybe Hector had one of his rare only-wake-up-twice nights.
She smiles at me. “It’s an attack of the snuggle bugs.”
Aurora burrows in deeper in response.
I sit down on the side of the bed near Hector and give his belly a tickle. It’s his giggle button—and it almost always works. He lets out a happy cackle.
My mom nearly giggles, too. She’s in a good mood today.
I decide to go for it.
“Can I take the bus down to the rec this morning?” I ask. “I promise to be back by two.”
“No later than two?” My mom’s brow furrows, but only slightly. She looks over to where the sunlight is shining around the corner of Lenny’s nice curtains. Then, she nods. “Just don’t miss the bus back. All my errands are on the other side of town this afternoon. I won’t be able to pick you up.”
I can’t put my coat on fast enough.
Soon, I’m out in that sunshine, with bus money in my pocket, responsible for no one but myself for four whole hours.
Fuchsia is sitting on the steps just inside the rec, like I was hoping she might be. She smiles, her finger twisting around one of her bright pink side buns. “You came! You ready for your little plastic foosball men to get destroyed?”
I wait for her to start grilling me about the crush thing, but after multiple days of me insisting there’s no such thing, I think she’s finally started to believe me. She tosses me a folded-up white paper bag, and I sit down on the stairs next to her. I reach into the bag to find a giant glazed donut.
“It’s a day old, but it takes a lot for a donut to go bad. Crystal brought home some almond tortes, too, but I know you don’t like almond stuff.”
“Thanks!” I say as I dig in.
Fuchsia’s mom, Crystal, who Fuchsia unaffectionately calls by her first name, works the early shift at the bakery and currently has full custody of Fuchsia. But that happened only after Fuchsia got sent to foster care for a bunch of years. One rainy day back in second grade her mom was so strung out on drugs that she couldn’t unlock the door to let Fuchsia into their apartment after school. Our teacher was still at school when soaked Fuchsia (then McKenna) turned up wanting to use the phone and the teacher asked questions and Fuchsia was too tired to lie. Supposedly, Fuchsia’s mom has kicked the habit—at least she convinced the judge who gave her custody again that she had—but it’s hard to know for sure. At least being able to bring home free baked goods is a perk.
When I finish eating my donut, I give Fuchsia’s bright pink, Sharpie-covered sneakers a kick. “So, do you want me to remind you what happened the last time we played?”
She stands up. “You know your goals actually counted for negative points, so my score was way bigger than yours.” She runs up the stairs before I can say anything in response.
Most of the kids who are at the rec on Sunday mornings play pickup basketball, so that means the game room is all ours. “I call red!” Fuchsia says, as I drop my coat on the pool table. “Those white guys were worthless last time I played you. When I tell them to block a shot, they’re supposed to block that shot.”
“It’s not their fault.” I stick a ball in and take a practice shot on goal with one of the white guys. “Their little plastic heads can barely believe my amazing skills.”
“Wait, you can’t start yet. I have to do my good luck dance first.” Fuchsia closes her eyes and plants her feet on the ground like she’s channeling supersonic powers from the blue-painted floorboards. She does finger-wiggling jazz hands and then moves into high knee lifts like in PE—with enough enthusiasm that I wonder if it’s possible for her knee to smash into her nose. “Spinning skills get ready,” she says. “Gonna spin it! Gonna win it!”
“Oh no,” I say. “It’s about being smooth.” I slide my arms through the air like the tentacles they are and shimmy around the table. “No matter how small that opening is, I’ll be slipping that ball right through it. It’s called being a foosball boss.”
“We’ll see who the real foosball boss is.” She rubs her hands together and then grabs the handles. “Spin to win.”
Fuchsia proceeds to spin her handles like a maniac for the next five minutes, missing the ball nearly every time it passes by. She doesn’t stop even when I score on her. “Spin to win!” she shouts over the thumpety-thump of the spinning plastic men as I collect the ball from her goal.
“How long do you think you can keep that up?” I ask.
“For forever. I promised Jane Kitty I’d score at least once the next time I played against you, so there’s no time for slacking.”
I load the ball back in. “Well, I hope Jane Kitty is ready to be disappointed because—”
Before I can finish my sentence, the ball rolls directly into Fuchsia’s spinning offensive line just as their red bodies whip around. And with an earsplitting smack, they whack the ball straight into my goal.
“SKILLZ!” shouts Fuchsia.
She stops spinning her handles and switches into her victory dance, windmilling her arms as she leaps around the room.
“I’m so glad you’ll have good news to share with Jane Kitty.”
Fuchsia whips her cue stick around until she’s leaning on it like a cane. “Yeah, we should probably stop here. I think that was my good luck of the week.”
So, we do. We move on to ping-pong and score based on who can hit the most surfaces around the room with a single shot.
CHAPTER 11
On the way to my bus stop on Wednesday I’m running my fingers through my hair because I didn’t have time to brush it, when I see Silas coming down the steps of his trailer. Except his dad’s truck isn’t in the driveway like it usually is. “Where’s your truck?”
Silas shakes his head and stares at the ground in front of him. “Still at the police station,” he mumbles.
“What? Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, except that one of the teachers at school called the police when he saw our shotgun in the back of our truck when my dad was picking me up after school.”
Silas is walking fast and I hustle to catch up to him. “What happened?” I ask.
“The police were nice enough. They got it that he was picking me up to go hunting. They just had to hold the truck overnight for ‘security purposes,’ but at least they gave us a ride to the woods around Squaretail Brook so we could go hunting, and my dad and I had a great time anyway. Still, that teacher wasn’t a fan of hunting.” Silas shakes his head. “If he eats meat he sure isn’t thinking about where it comes from.”
“You’re going to keep hunting, though, right?”
“Of course I am.”
I nod. “You better.”
He looks at me for a long moment. “So, aren’t you going to ask me what we found yesterday?”
I bite back a smile. “What’d you find?”
Silas stares up into the white sky. “More coyote tracks. Porcupine scat. And the newest snow was so dry that whenever some slid off a high tree branch, it was like shining bits of gold shimmering down in the sunlight.”
I stare at Silas. I get why he keeps his mouth shut as soon as he’s around other kids. Otherwise, people would stand in line just to beat him up.
“No signs of the bobcat?”
Silas grins. “Not yet.”
On the bus, I ignore the eighth grade boy who pretend-coughs some comment I can’t understand and lean my face against the window. I can see Matt’s house as soon as we turn the corner onto his street. His front door is open, and when the bus pulls up in front of his house I can make out his mom in the doorway with him, pushing a travel mug into his hand. She gives him a kiss on the cheek just as he heads toward the bus.
“Is that coffee?” someone calls as Matt makes his way down the aisle of the bus.
“Yeah right,” Matt says. “Banana peanut butter smoothie. I was up late working on that essay for social studies, and I didn’t have time for breakfast.”
I try to picture my mom pulling herself out of bed to make me a smoothie because I’m tired in the morning. As if she wasn’t exhausted. As if she didn’t have to take care of Hector. As if Frank wouldn’t throw a fit for getting woken up by a blender. As if we had a working blender. As if we had bananas.
As if.
The seventh grade hallway is already jam-packed with bodies and backpacks when I arrive. As I make my way through the sea of shrieks and the rattle of lockers slamming shut, the slits of my octopus eyes stay horizontal. Octopuses have these little sacs called statocysts that respond to motion and gravity, so that their eyes can be totally unfazed, totally steady. It doesn’t matter if the current whips all around and sends my tentacles off in some random direction, my eyes are always right side up. Never upside down.
Fuchsia is waiting for me at my locker wearing her black-painted jeans and shirt with intentional holes. When I get to my locker, she has her eyes closed as though she wasn’t just watching me make my way through the hallway. She lets out a huge sigh.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
She opens one eye. “Oh, hey,” she says. “When’d you get here?”
As though she wasn’t just watching me. She’s definitely not the Fuchsia who was dancing around the game room on Sunday. I start opening my locker.
She sighs again and rolls her eyes so slowly and dramatically that I wonder if her eyeballs are going to roll into the back of her head. She does not exactly have steady horizontal octopus eyes.
I give up. “What’s wrong?” I ask again.
“It’s all stupid.”
I jiggle my locker open. “What is?”
I hang up my coat while I wait for an answer, but she doesn’t say anything. I look at her and she’s twisting up a flyer someone was handing out about some student council fundraiser. The top of it says something about buying Valentine’s Day carnations for “Your Sweetie and Besties!” Mostly, though, she looks like she’s going to throw up.
I push my locker shut. “What’s going on?”
“Crystal and her goo brain decided we might be moving again.”
“What?” I say. “To where?”
“Just down the street like we always do. I guess there’s some guy, Michael, who’s gonna cut us a better deal on rent, but ughh … ” Fuchsia glares into my locker like it’s Crystal’s gooey brain. “I don’t want to move again. And this Michael guy seems super sketch. He started hanging around Crystal at the bottle deposit a few weeks ago. Then, he offered to give her a ride to Walmart, and she let him. She had enough sense to not let him drive her home afterwards, but here we are three weeks later, and who cares if sketchy Michael doesn’t know where we live because soon we’re going to be moving into his very own sketchy apartment.”
“Tell your mom you don’t want to go.”
Fuchsia shakes her head. “She waved some stupid custody paperwork in my face, and said I’ve got to do what she says.” Fuchsia rips a piece off the flyer. “That’s what she thinks.”
Crystal can turn into a full-on defensive lineman when she wants to. Like when she and my mom had the big falling-out that ended their friendship, it was like Crystal tucked her head and tried to plow my mom right over. “Jealous,” my mom said afterward. And, “That’s why you don’t poke your nose in other people’s business.” And Lenny added plenty of anti-Crystal words of his own.
Fuchsia turns around and kicks the locker she’s been leaning against. “And she doesn’t think I’d be able to bring Jane Kitty with me because this Michael guy doesn’t like cats.”
I shut my locker. “What are you going to do?”
Fuchsia rips off another section of the flyer and starts balling it up between her fingers. “She said she’d call the cops on me if I refused.”
I take a deep breath. “Are you sure this Michael isn’t an okay guy? Have you seen him being sketchy?”
“I can tell. He’s got sketch written all over him. Do you want to sign up to move in with him instead?”
“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” I say. “Maybe he’ll fall in love with Jane Kitty just like you did. You could even get your own room.”
“Yeah right.” She glares at me like I’m the one forcing her to move. “I’ll make sure you’re the first to know when I do.”
I try to keep my octopus eyes as steady as possible. “Well, what do you want me to—”
But Fuchsia cuts me off. “You know, maybe Crystal isn’t the only one who can make a big deal phone call, because all I’d have to do is call that DCF person and start telling them stuff.” Her eyes light up. “You know, I could tell her that. I could tell her that she’s in for it if she goes ahead with this.”
Several lockers down I hear laughter, and I turn to see a bunch of boys with Matt in the middle, telling some joke.
“And then if … ” Fuchsia is saying. “Wait. What are you looking at?”
I quickly look awa
y from the group of boys. “Nothing.”
“Oh!” Fuchsia throws the little paper ball at me. “I was totally right, wasn’t I? You do have some boy thing going on!”
“I do not.”
“Say it then,” she says.
“Say what?”
“Say: ‘There is not a single boy in this hallway that I could be interested in.’”
“You’re ridiculous.” And too loud.
“Say it.”
“You should get going to your homeroom,” I say. “Aren’t you going to get a detention if you’re late again?”
“Say it.”
I shake my head and walk away, past the boys—without looking at a single one of them.
“You didn’t say it!” Fuchsia calls after me.
Fuchsia might have been the only girl willing to be friends with me when I moved back to town in fifth grade, but she doesn’t always make it easy.
During this week’s Ace Period, Ms. Rochambeau is going on and on about supporting your position with evidence. Too bad I’m pretty clear on my position already. It’s: “I don’t belong in Ace Period debate club.” And I’ve got plenty of “evidence” to back it up.
Evidence #1: Hermit crabs in the science classroom don’t look down on me. The cat-drawing girl (whose name is apparently Lydia) is another story. I’m pretty sure she keeps shifting her notebook away from me. Matt hasn’t even noticed I’m here.
Evidence #2: The hermit crabs need me because no one deserves to live in a filthy tank. And Lydia and Matt definitely don’t need me.
Evidence #3: …
I stop when I realize Ms. Rochambeau is passing out worksheets. I sneak a peek at Lydia and then a super quick one at Matt. Both of them are already starting to read it. Hopefully, this can be like group work during regular classes where the other two people do the talking and my contribution is to not yell or throw up on anything.
And look. Twenty minutes later when it’s the end of Ace Period, my worksheet is throw up–free. Victory is mine! And I don’t care that Ms. Rochambeau raises her eyebrows when she picks up my worksheet and it’s blank. I’m here, aren’t I? No one can force me to do more than that.
