The afternoon had been chaos. Humiliating, unexplainable chaos. All around me, things were falling apart, though I wasn’t actually doing anything to cause it. That was the weird part, the part that made my heart race and my feet start sweating in my shoes.
There was no way I’d thrown a ball at Stacey Wasser, no way I’d driven the car up over the curb, no way I’d dumped a drink into Craig Lugweather’s lap. I’d been halfway across the lunchroom when Craig’s drink had spilled, and I didn’t have enough aim to hit the side of a bus with a ball, much less someone’s face. Even if it was a very wide, flat face.
Still, something deep down in me knew I was responsible. I’d done it, even if I had no idea how.
There was only one place I wanted to go: home. So I just started walking. I was halfway across the bridge when my phone dinged. Janis, texting me from Earth Sciences, the only class we had together.
where r u?
going home sick
lucky. winchester’s trying to crack a geode with a mallet
she’s been working on it for 15 min
she has the strength of a toy poodle
…
Then the dancing ellipsis hung there for a minute, like Janis was thinking about what to say next. I groaned. Janis was rarely at a loss for words, which meant…
i heard about driver’s ed
u ok?
u have to pay?
i hate my life
aside from that
look on the bright side
wut bright side?
there’s no such thing as bad pr
maybe if you’re a kardashian. not a high school junior
tru. you still want to have club 2day?
sure. i mean, what else do either one of us have to do?
c u soon
* * *
—
Everything in my life came back to babysitting.
Our “club” was a babysitting club. Janis and I had started it in seventh grade, and though things had changed over the years, we’d taken it seriously from day one. Dad had gotten us a burner phone to use for appointments (we still had it, even though it now probably belonged in a RadioShack museum), and Janis’s mom had photocopied our flyer and hung it up in all the faculty lounges on the university campus. “Call one number + reach four qualified babysitters!” it said. We were in business.
If it sounds just like “The Baby-Sitters Club” books, that’s because it was exactly like the books.
As the only person of color, Janis claimed Claudia, and there was no arguing that Janis also had the best outfits.
Chelsea Chatsworth was Stacey because she was from Ohio, which was closer to New York than the rest of us had ever been.
I should have been Kristy because the club had been my idea and we met in my bedroom, but the Kristy title went to Lacey Durbin, who played volleyball and had once been in a fight.
I was stuck with Mary Anne, even though my handwriting was atrocious and spelling had never been my strong suit.
But that was then, and this was now, and the club wasn’t much of a club anymore. Chelsea had gotten a job at the tanning salon so that she could meet the guys who worked at the sub shop across the street. (She was now orange and had a boyfriend who smelled like Havarti and Dijonnaise.) And Lacey played so much volleyball that her kneepads had permanently fused to her skin. They didn’t have time for babysitting anymore, so now it was just Janis and me. Though not for Janis’s lack of trying. She’d had regular jobs twice.
Her first go was at one of those places that made pizza-sized cookies, and she had to wear a white button-down, a brown visor, and a brown apron—which, let’s face it, was dressing like a cookie. Janis lasted about four days before she started writing Jenny Holzer quotes on all the demo cookies, and she finally got fired, because no one wanted to buy an M&M cookie cake that said “Men Don’t Protect You Anymore,” no matter how perfect the curlicue frosting.
Her second try was at Jammin Juice, where she got fired for listing the daily smoothie as a “white girl special with an extra entitlement boost.” Neither one of these firings was Janis’s fault. She was just too woke for corporate America.
Last summer, I picked up a couple of applications from around town, but I never got around to filling them out. Being a babysitter suited me, so I’d decided I was sticking with it. Besides, it was one of the few things that made me feel closer to my mom.
I didn’t talk about Mom that much, even though she was the storm cloud that hung over my head, the looming blackness that threatened to darken even my sunniest days. In short, Mom was crazy. I know. I know. You aren’t supposed to call people crazy. It’s insensitive. It sounds mean. But that’s the word that had been lodged in my head ever since I’d been in third grade, when Emily Sussman had come up to me on the playground, climbed into the swing next to me, and said “My mom said that your mom went crazy.”
“Oh,” I said, dragging the toes of my glitter oxfords in the dirt.
“And she also said that you can’t come over,” Emily continued, “because crazy runs in the family, and she doesn’t want any cuckoo kids in her house.” She laughed as she ran off.
Ever since then I’d lived by the belief that if I said “crazy” enough, maybe it wouldn’t hurt as much when other people did.
When I was three, things changed overnight. And by “things,” I mean Mom. I was too young to remember everything, but certain events are imprinted in my mind. She painted the living room windows black to keep “them” out. She got caught shoplifting small things—like plastic toys and jars of spices—when I was with her.
Emily Sussman’s mom was clearly a bitch, but what if what she’d said was true? Maybe crazy really did run in the family, and Mom’s present was my future. I didn’t want that. I wanted to keep my mind clear, my thoughts sane, and all signs of craziness—like thinking that objects moved by themselves—to myself.
There were a lot of ways I didn’t want to be like Mom, and there was a lot I didn’t know about her. But one thing I knew, and one way I wouldn’t mind following in her footsteps, was that Mom had been a babysitter. We had pics of her as a teenager, standing on a playground and holding a toddler upside down, his fat belly exposed, both of them laughing. She was wearing a badass outfit that included a denim motorcycle jacket covered with patches. She’d even had her own babysitting club, or at least, that’s what I thought Dad was talking about when he said she “had some group of women she always met with, and I know they did something with kids.”
I’d never get to ask her about it, because after one final incident, all traces of Mom’s momminess went away. Mom and me barricaded in the kitchen, and almost all of Spring River’s meager police force outside because they thought she had a gun, even though it was really just a banana wrapped in duct tape. The write-up in the newspaper quoted one of her old babysitting clients. “I can’t believe we ever trusted her with our children,” said a Mrs. Susan Gilliangham. Mom hasn’t lived with us since.
If I ever met Mrs. Susan Gilliangham, I would punch her in the face.
* * *
—
I loved my father, but he wasn’t exactly a pillar of emotional support, and I often wondered what it’d be like to have a mom I could talk to about real stuff. Like, if I told her about my super sucky day, would she say something to make me feel better? Would we laugh it off together? Maybe I wouldn’t even have such sucky days if Mom were still around.
Also I wouldn’t always be worried that I was going to go “crazy,” too. I couldn’t stop thinking about all this as I waited for Janis to come over, and when she finally appeared in my bedroom doorway, having let herself in like she always did, I was so grateful for the distraction that I practically jumped up and hugged her.
“Ready to get down to business?” she asked
, which was 97 percent a joke, because our babysitters club meeting was really just me and Janis hanging out, which was what we did every day, whether we had a “meeting” or not. Janis flopped herself down next to me, dangled her shoes off the edge of my bed, and tossed the burner phone onto a pillow. “I think we should get rid of this thing,” she said. “I was texting with Denise Arlington last night, and it took me so long that I think she thought I was drunk.”
I grabbed the phone and flipped it open. “How would people book us for jobs?” I asked.
Janis rolled her eyes. “They’d text you or text me,” she said. “You know, communicate like regular-ass people.”
I flipped the phone closed and placed it back on the pillow. I didn’t want to get rid of the phone. It made it seem like the club was still real, and I liked that Janis and I shared a number. “Let’s keep it for a while longer,” I said, “since it’s paid up through the end of the year.” Janis shrugged and then shoved it back into her backpack. She pulled out a copy of French Vogue and started to flip through it.
“Janis,” I said, “do you ever think about how much responsibility babysitting really is? Like, you’re in charge of a kid’s life.”
She looked up at me, an eyebrow arched. “Are you just now figuring that out?”
I shook my head. “No.” I swallowed. “I was just wondering about it recently.”
Janis flipped over onto her back so that she was staring at the ceiling. “I think about it all the time. I mean, can you imagine if a kid got kidnapped on your watch?” She licked her lips like she was relishing the thought. “It’d ruin your life, just like that When a Stranger Calls Back movie. You’d have to buy a gun and spend your whole college career looking for people painted like the wall. And then you’d have to go on all the talk shows to tell your horrifying story, and then write a bestselling book about it, and then in the movie version, the actress who played you wouldn’t really look anything like you, and her entire wardrobe would come from Kmart because the director had some asinine idea that she needed to be approachable. Or something like that.”
I sighed. Janis could be as extra as a side of guac, and that wasn’t exactly the opening for a heartfelt discussion about how scared I’d been last night. Before I could say anything else, her phone dinged with a text, and reading the message put her in a mood. “Ugh,” she said. “I have to go pick up my brother.” She started stomping around the room and gathering her things. “Maybe tomorrow’s look should be ‘family chauffeur,’ and I’ll get one of those little black hats, and wear a suit….”
“But isn’t that how you convinced your parents to get you a car?” I pointed out. “By telling them you could help give Jason rides?”
She looked up from stuffing a sweatshirt into her backpack and rolled her eyes at me. “Don’t take their side, Esme.”
“Never,” I said. “Text me later?”
She nodded and, with a scowl, headed back out the door.
It was still early, and I had no idea what I was going to do with myself for the rest of the night. I felt restless and anxious, and when scrolling for fashion inspo did nothing to settle my nerves, I got up and followed a trail of snores and snorts into the kitchen.
“Hi, Piggy,” I said, squatting down at the source of the commotion. “Hello, beautiful girl. How are you?”
Pig was my pit bull. Seventy-five pounds and as hard as a rock but with the temperament of a bag of fuzzy mashed potatoes or a couch cushion full of vanilla pudding. Pig had lived with us for about five years. One morning when I was twelve, Dad and I were at Costco buying Popsicles. It was the middle of the summer, and we had the windows rolled down. “Look, Dad,” I said. “A dog.” There she was, sitting alone in an empty parking space, not an owner in sight.
Dad looked over at her, and she got up and started to trot toward us.
“It looks like it’s coming over here,” Dad said. “Oh my God,” he said next, as she broke into a sprint. About six feet from the car, she launched herself into the air and sailed right into the back seat through the open window. I could have sworn she was smiling. Dad tried to cajole her out of the car, but she wouldn’t budge, not even for a bite of the corn dog he’d bought himself for lunch. He finally gave up and just drove home.
He kept saying he was going to make some phone calls and take her to the shelter in the morning, but that night, when she started snoozing with her head on his foot, all three of us knew she wasn’t going anywhere. I originally named her Marshmallow, but after a few nights of her snorts and snores reverberating through the house, she was redubbed Pig. I’d since learned to sleep through the snores, which meant I could now probably sleep through dynamite or an EDM fest outside my window.
I dumped some kibble into her bowl, and after she gulped that down, I put her leash on and took her for a walk. We only went around the block, because Pig was not especially athletic, and taking her for a walk was basically like dragging an RV down the sidewalk. When we got back to the house, Dad was standing in the kitchen, his face buried in an empty refrigerator.
I braced myself for an awkward conversation, knowing that our brief Mr. Dekalb–chaperoned phone call earlier was in no way the end of our driver’s ed discussion. But Dad’s phone started to ring. He grimaced at the caller, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and answered. “This is Dave.”
As soon as his back was turned, I scooted up the stairs to my room, shut the door, and sent him a text saying I had cramps and was going to bed early. Period problems work on dads like garlic works on vampires, and this was a guaranteed way to make sure he stayed away for the rest of the night.
I kicked off my shoes and climbed into bed, then realized that it was only seven-thirty and I’d outsmarted myself. My empty stomach grumbled, my phone was in the red at 6 percent, and food and phone charger were both back in the kitchen, where Dad was certainly off the phone by now, warming up a can of chili and getting ready to settle in for his nightly Law & Order marathon.
I had just enough power left to text Janis my look for tomorrow—car crash survivor—before my phone died, leaving me to a night of very quiet activities and, for lack of anything better to do, actually going to bed early.
* * *
—
I fell asleep quickly enough but slept horribly. My night was filled with dream fragments that felt real, those little scene snippets that leave an icky residue behind in your waking life. Twice, I woke up feeling like I’d been electrocuted, convinced I’d heard a little kid outside my second-story window, and I dreamed that I was standing in the middle of the football field at school, unable to move from a chalk line as a car reversed right toward me. Thankfully, my eyes popped open right before it hit.
When my alarm started howling, it almost felt like a relief. There was a moment when I considered pretending to be sick, but Dad would have seen through that in an instant, and rather than making me go to school, he’d have humored me. Let me stay home, but then insisted on taking me out to breakfast so we could talk about things. Over, and over, and over. Thanks. But no. I’d go to school and hold my head high and show them that it would take more than a dented—like, majorly dented—Corolla to keep Esme Pearl down.
All I had to do was watch myself every hour, every minute, every second of the day, to make sure I didn’t say too much about what had happened in that car, or do or say anything else that would reveal that I’d already bought a one-way ticket to crazy town.
The night before, I’d decided what I was going to wear without even looking at my clothes, and I have to say, this was one of my most unique talents. If I were a superhero, I would be “girl who doesn’t have to try something on to know if it will look good.” Could you imagine the villains I could take down with that one? I’d save the prince while the evil queen was still at home trying to decide which shoe looked best with her gown—the leopard pony-hair stiletto or the red Lucite block heel?
As I pulled out the pieces I’d decided on, I tried to shake off the last twenty-four hours, and I started to feel a little calmer as I got dressed. Crash Test Dummies was a nineties band that had one hit, where basically all they did was hmmm. I’d never heard of them, but I had looked them up after I’d found one of their T-shirts at a garage sale. The T-shirt was super weird, with the band made out to look like they were part of a Renaissance painting, and I paired it with acid-washed jeans that I’d cut into shorts, my scuffed floral Doc Martens, and black tights from Target that I’d frayed with mid-aughts Rodarte-esque cobweb holes. The whole look was very “backstage at the first Lollapalooza,” and I flashed my reflection a smile. The day might royally blow, but at least I could make sure my outfit kicked ass.
* * *
—
I got lucky. Dad talked about the wreck only for the first half of my ride to school. I apologized a lot, and made several promises to help pay for everything. This must have satisfied him, because then he switched to his favorite subject: Spring River football. When Dad met someone new, he could barely last five minutes before name-dropping that his best friend was the football coach. And I didn’t know which was lamer—that he expected this to impress people, or that some people actually were impressed. I couldn’t have given two farts about football, but I humored him by saying “Yeah” and “Really?” at what seemed like appropriate times. He pulled up in front of the school, and as I got out of the car, I thought I was home free. Then he called me back just as I was about to cross the sidewalk.
The Babysitters Coven Page 4
