Get Real

by Betty Hicks

“Yeah,” said Jil. “You should hear her. She can already play better than—”

  “Penny’s a wonderful rider,” said Mom-2, “but I’m afraid a horse is out of the question. I mean, where would we put a horse?” She laughed this funny little laugh that sounded like a tiny machine gun, but cute.

  Jil and I filled them both in on every detail we knew about Carolina basketball. We told them about our first game, and how we’d worn tar-heel tattoos—tiny blue feet with black circles on the heels—on our faces.

  “Can I get one?” asked Penny.

  “We’ll all buy one,” said Jane.

  I was beginning to think of Mom-2 as Jane. She was more of a name than a number now that she had a face. Especially since it was Jil’s face.

  When we finally got inside the Smith Center, Jane and Penny ooohed and aaahed over the size of the huge domed building. Then we all got fake tattoos. Jane bought Penny two, one for each cheek, plus pom-poms. Jil and I each got one, and then we all went into the ladies’ room to put them on. All four of us were laughing like little kids, and were so hyped about the game that I thought we might explode.

  You could feel it in the air. Excitement. Everywhere. I mean really feel it. Like a vibration or a pulse. As if everyone in the building had tiny sparklers all over them, spewing electric energy in every direction.

  So now we’re in our seats. Taking everything in. All of it is blue.

  We’re passing a bucket of popcorn back and forth, and I’m picking up all the spilled pieces and putting them in a napkin to throw away later, when Jil yells, “Cut that out!”

  “Cut what out?”

  “Cleaning!” she shouts.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll try.” And I do try, but sometimes stuff like that happens without my knowing it.

  Penny loves the ram, who is actually a student dressed in a soft blue costume with curly horns. He high-fived her on the way down the aisle. I guess it’s hard to dress up as a heel with tar on it, so the UNC mascot is a ram.

  She’s loving the cheerleaders, too. They’ve already done so many backflips we’ve lost count. Right now, one of them is actually standing on the hand of a guy cheer-leader, who, amazingly, is holding her straight over his head with one hand.

  Suddenly the guy in the big ram costume saunters onto the court holding a huge toy gun that shoots free T-shirts into the crowd.

  “Penny! Look!” Jane laughs her cute little machine-gun laugh and points at him.

  Jil and I know better than to get excited. We’ve spent the last six years complaining about the fact that he never even aimed one in our direction.

  Maybe Jane and Penny have brought us luck, because all of a sudden the ram points the barrel straight up into the crowd where we’re sitting.

  Pop!

  I see it, heading straight toward me. A T-shirt, rolled up like a magazine, shot out of a giant popgun. Just when I think it’s going to sail over my head and land ten rows higher, it loses momentum and arcs practically into my outstretched arms. I grab for it at the same time Jil does. We both clutch opposite ends of the prize and fall back into our seats.

  “We got it!” shouts Jil.

  Everyone around us is smiling and saying, “Way to go, girls!”

  I let go of my end and say, “Here, Jil. You take it.” I’d kill to keep it, but after all, they’re her tickets.

  “No way,” answers Jil. “We both caught it. Fair and square. We both keep it.”

  “Can I hold it?” says Penny.

  “Sure.” Jil hands her the shirt.

  “How can we both keep it?” I ask. “Rip it in half?”

  “No, silly,” says Jil, shoving me playfully. “We’ll take turns. You keep it for a week. I keep it for a week.”

  “Cool,” I say. “Like when someone wins a trophy but they have to give it back at the end of the season so the next winner can have it.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Or like in that book, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, when all those girls share the same pair of jeans.”

  Jil high-fives me and says, “Even better.”

  So we giggle and call ourselves the Sisterhood of the Traveling Shirt.

  Then I notice that Penny has put on our blue-and-white shirt. Across the front, it says UNC TAR HEELS, NATIONAL CHAMPIONS. She’s grinning like crazy, waving her pom-poms, and screaming, “Go, Carolina!”

  Jane’s laughing and clapping.

  I nudge Jil and jerk my head toward Penny.

  Jil stares for a minute, obviously wondering what it means that Penny is wearing our shirt.

  “Uh, Penny,” says Jil. “It’s okay if you want to wear it. But … uh … it’s our shirt, you know. Mine and Dez’s.”

  “What?” shouts Penny.

  The game has restarted and the crowd is so loud Jil’s words get sucked up like dust in a tornado.

  “It’s my shirt!” shouts Jil.

  “I know! I know!” Penny shouts back.

  Satisfied, Jil and I go back to screaming, “Go, Heels!”

  The game is incredible. All of it. With only five minutes left, the lead has switched twenty times. It’s been tied twelve times. There have been at least eight awesome slam dunks, ten astounding where-did-he-come-from blocked shots, and so many bad calls from the short ref with slick hair that I’ve lost count.

  Foul on number 34, signals the other referee, holding up three fingers on one hand, four on the other.

  “What!” screams Jil. “He never touched him!”

  “Booooo!” I circle my fingers around my mouth and roar my disgust.

  “Get new glasses!” shouts Jane.

  “Get a new job!” shouts the man behind me.

  “Go to—”

  The crowd noise swallows the rest of it, but I know what he said.

  I turn to see if Penny knows what he said. Penny is asleep! Curled up in Jil’s and my shirt, sleeping like a baby, with people screaming their heads off all around her.

  Then I remember. It is late. And a school night. And she is only ten. But still … this is the Duke–Carolina game! And the score is tied!

  Jane leans across Penny and shouts something into Jil’s ear. Jil’s face drains completely of color. She stares at Jane as if she’s lost her mind. Frantically, Jil shakes her head. Then she points at Penny and says something I can’t hear. Jane answers something back.

  Jil returns to watching the game, cheering loudly with the crowd.

  “What?” I shout at her, grabbing her arm and shaking it. “What’d she say?”

  Jil faces me. Clearly embarrassed. “Jane wants to go home. It’s past Penny’s bedtime.”

  “What!” I scream. “But … but…” I search for words that will express my complete and utter amazement. Finally, I settle on, “What difference does it make? Penny’s already asleep!”

  “Exactly,” shouts Jil. “I pointed that out.”

  So, apparently, we get to stay to the end of the game. I go back to stomping my feet and shouting support to the players, to the rafters, to anyone, to everyone.

  With only two seconds left on the game clock, Carolina is up by three points. Duke has the ball, and their point guard is flying downcourt as fast as his feet will carry him. The crowd noise is deafening. Pandemonium is the only way to describe it.

  Just over the midcourt line, the Duke player pulls up and fires a desperation three-pointer.

  Twenty-three thousand people all hold the same breath.

  The ball soars through the air forever, then arcs, drops, and swishes through the net. Clean. Like a dagger in my heart.

  We’re going to overtime.

  The crowd sound switches from thunder to nothing. No sound at all. Not even a gasp.

  Penny wakes up.

  Jane says, “Sorry, girls. But we’ll have to go now.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Can an you believe it?” whispers Jil.

  We’re both lying in the dark, in my bedroom. Jil under the covers of one twin bed. Me in the other. Sup
posedly falling asleep.

  “No,” I grumble. “I can’t.”

  As a matter of fact, I will never believe it. But I don’t want Jil to feel any worse than she already does, so I try to find a bright side. “We could make it into the Guinness Book of World Records, you know.”

  “Huh? For what?”

  “For being the only four people in the history of the universe who ever left a Duke–Carolina game at the beginning of overtime.”

  “What? Oh.” Jil makes a nervous little rapid-fire noise that sounds chillingly like Mom-2’s laugh—the laugh I thought was cute, but now I’m not so sure.

  “No,” says Jil, “what I meant was, can you believe we won the game?”

  “Won it? I can’t believe we missed it!” I hiss across the dark space between our beds.

  “Oh, come on,” says Jil. “You got to hear it on the radio.”

  Is she for real? The radio? I heard the most exciting finish in the history of college basketball on a radio? If I’d been home, at least I could have seen it on TV.

  “Look. They had to drive all the way back to Greensboro,” Jil says defensively. “That put them home a whole hour later than us, ya know. And it was late. And Penny’s only ten.”

  The silence in the room is almost as deafening as the one that followed the three-point shot that sent the game into overtime. It’s probably just as loud as the silence immediately before the second overtime. Maybe even before the third one.

  But how would I know? I wasn’t there.

  Three overtimes! And I had to listen to all of them on a radio that was turned down so low—so as not to wake up the child who was still wearing my T-shirt—that I could barely hear it.

  And then, when we got to my house, Jane says, “I hate to wake her up. Can you wait until next week to get your shirt?”

  And Jil gulps and answers, “Okay.”

  I remember the gulp. I heard it. So, Jil does feel rotten about this whole thing. She has to. She just doesn’t want to admit it.

  Okay, I think. I can relate to that. Embarrassing family members. I can relate to that totally.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologize into the dark of the room. “It is a school night. And they probably have no clue how big that game is.”

  Jil’s sheets rustle. I hear a tiny whimper. The sheets rustle again.

  “Jil?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you crying?”

  “No.” Her voice cracks.

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Oh, Dez,” says Jil. And then all I hear is sobbing.

  I switch on my lamp. “Jil, it’s okay. Honest. Do you know how lucky I feel to have been there at all? I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Jil,” I plead, “stop crying. Please. I’m such a jerk!”

  “Turn off the light.”

  “If I do, will you talk to me?”

  “About what?” Jil is lying with her back to me, her arms over her head as if she’s protecting herself from someone swinging a baseball bat.

  “About everything!” I shout.

  “Fine,” Jil answers flatly. “Just turn off the light.”

  So, I do. And for the next hour, we talk about everything I’ve wanted to talk about since the day she met her mother. She even confesses that her parents were hurt.

  “Seeing them upset,” says Jil, “it killed me. But Dez, ever since I can remember, I’ve had this dream that my real mother is my fairy godmother. She has wings that I can see through, and she’s wearing a dress with soft fabric that floats around her like a cloud. And she fixes all my problems.”

  I’m picturing Mrs. Lewis, but I know Jil is imagining someone else.

  “Then I wake up,” Jil continues, “and I know how stupid that is. Only I can’t stop myself from dreaming it. “But I have this wide-awake dream, too.”

  I hear her nestling back under the covers.

  “Have you ever had someone tell you that you look exactly like their brother’s friend in Cincinnati or somewhere?”

  “Yeah,” I answer. “My aunt Mary says I look just like the girl who lives three doors down from her. And once, when I was going into a movie, somebody kept calling me Ginger, and—”

  “Exactly,” says Jil. “Well, I swear, it happens to me all the time. And every time, I wonder if I’m related to that person, or if I have a twin or a sister. And now I know.”

  “Are you glad you know?” I ask, hoping she won’t cry again.

  “Yes. Definitely.”

  I wish I could see her face to see if she’s lying, but I promised I’d leave the light off.

  “Even more, I’ve always wanted to know why she gave me away.”

  “Do you know now?” I ask softly.

  “Yeah. Because she had to. I mean, she was having a baby, and my dad wanted to marry her, but she didn’t love him. She thought she did, but when it came down to living with him forever, and raising a family, she just knew it wouldn’t work. And besides, she was only seventeen.”

  “She said giving me up was the hardest thing she’s ever done in her whole life. And every day since, she’s wanted to meet me, and tell me she loves me. But what really got to her were the pictures of me that Mom and Dad sent every year. They started looking more and more like Penny, and she wanted Penny to know she had a sister.”

  Something about that hits me wrong, but I decide I’m just being a spoiled brat about the missing T-shirt, so I shut up.

  “She remembers kissing me in the hospital, and wanting the best of everything in the whole world for me, and she knew she couldn’t give it to me. She didn’t have a job. And she wanted to finish high school.”

  “Did you tell her that you do have the best of everything? I mean, great parents and all.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did that make her feel better?”

  “Yeah. I guess. I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway, she said she’d promised my parents—no contact. Not until I was eighteen.”

  “So what made her change her mind?”

  “Oprah.”

  “Oprah!” I shrieked.

  “Yeah.” Jil giggled. “She saw some show where this adopted kid got reunited with her birth mother and everybody cried, kissed and hugged, and lived happily ever after. And Mom said, ‘If she can do it, so can I,’ and so she started calling Mom and Dad and bugging them.”

  I’m picturing poor Mr. and Mrs. Lewis. I’m also thinking how confusing it is that Jil just said “mom” twice in the same sentence and meant two different people.

  “Dez!” Jil says emphatically. “Stop freaking out. It’s okay. Mom and Dad keep acting all worried, too. They’re afraid I’ll get hurt, but this is a good thing. Honest. I’m happy. I love knowing who my mother is, and who my sister is, and that if my children end up being allergic to cantaloupe, I’ll know why, and—”

  “Jane’s allergic to cantaloupe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cantaloupe?” I repeat.

  “Yeah.”

  “What happens when she eats it?” I’m picturing Jane eating a piece of orange melon, then suddenly scratching her arms in an all-out frenzy. Or scratching her throat like mad. Would she claw at her throat? Or her arms?

  “It makes her throat swell up,” says Jil.

  “No kidding?” Then I think about that. “You mean, she could stop getting air?”

  “I don’t know. I guess. I hadn’t thought…”

  Jil stops talking. Suddenly I know that she’s picturing her own imaginary children not breathing.

  “I bet your kids won’t inherit that,” I say.

  “Really?”

  “Sure. I mean, you eat cantaloupe, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  For a minute or two, nobody says anything. I turn over in bed and sink my head into the pillow. It must be after one o’clock in the morning. Suddenly, I’m so sleepy. I wish we didn’t have to go to school tomorrow. I bet Jane lets Penny sleep in. I bet she writes her a note.

  Dear Teach
er: Please excuse Penny from school today. She ate cantaloupe and can’t breathe.

  A total lie, but for a good cause.

  Would my parents lie for me?

  I doubt it.

  Is there a difference between a mom and a parent?

  “Jil?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re happy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  “Totally.”

  “It … seems messy to me.”

  “Messy?”

  “Yeah. You know. Two moms. They have the same name. Don’t you—”

  “Dez.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I know who I am now.”

  I lie in the dark and think about that. Jil knows who she is. She is the biological daughter of Jane. The sister of Penny. The child of Mr. and Mrs. Lewis. Her children may or may not be allergic to cantaloupe.

  I hear her, but I still don’t get it.

  What about me? I don’t look like my parents. Okay, I’m tall like my dad, and sturdy like my mom. But that’s it.

  They’re messy. I’m neat.

  Dad likes poetry. I like verse.

  Mom likes weather and swamps. I like grand pianos.

  Who am I?

  Chapter Thirteen

  “‘Hark, all you ladies that do sleep.’”

  Dad’s voice creeps into my dream.

  “‘The fairy queen Proserpina bids you awake and pity them that weep.’”

  Oh, no. It’s not a dream.

  “Please, Mr. Carter,” Jil moans from the twin bed next to mine. “Don’t make us get up.”

  I roll over and stare. Just as I feared, it’s not the fairy queen Proserpina. It’s Dad, and he’s wearing his old, yellowed terry cloth bathrobe and gross-green bedroom slippers. “Go away,” I whisper, closing my eyes.

  “‘Golden slumbers kiss your eyes, smiles awake you when you rise.’”

  I open one eye. Sure enough. He’s smiling, just like his poem promised.

  “Dad. If I get up, will you stop rhyming?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Thank you.”

  I roll over and cover my head with my pillow. But I can still hear him.

  “Your mother and I knew it was a mistake to let you girls go to that game on a school night.”

  That game. I wonder if he even knows who won.