Aunt Lisa opens the door.
“Oh, Zoey,” she says. She grabs me into a hug and kisses the top of my head. I lean into the hug for a moment. I miss my aunt and uncle. I miss having a grown-up around.
“And you,” she says, reaching out for my little brother. She knows better than to envelop him but just puts her hands near Ben without touching any Ben proper.
“Hi, Aunt Lisa,” he says.
“I’m Pete,” says Pete, sticking out his hand. Aunt Lisa folds him into her arms.
“I’m Aunt Lisa,” she says. Letting go, she smiles at us. “Come in, come in.”
We go inside, through the tiled foyer and into the living room, which has a blue canvas couch, a dark green rug, a big TV, and no books. Uncle Henry is sitting on the couch, on the phone. He’s wearing a pair of blue jeans that look as if they were designed to give off the appearance of belonging to a person who works in construction. Uncle Henry is a lawyer, mostly handling divorces and drunk driving-type stuff.
Dad, who sometimes encourages me to consider law school, one day, in the future, says it’s an “honest way to earn a living,” though he always sounds a little sarcastic when he says it. Mom always said that being this kind of lawyer, living in a subdivision filled with vinyl siding, is boring and beneath her little brother, who “had so much potential.” Mom really liked saying to Aunt Lisa, “Don’t you think he has so much potential?” to which Uncle Henry would reply, “You’re talking about my lost potential, Julia? Really? How’s being a housewife working for you?”
Aunt Lisa has a PhD herself, which she isn’t exactly making the most of—she sometimes teaches a couple of classes at some local community colleges. This sounds cool, but she always says, surprisingly cheerfully, that she’d get paid more to work at McDonald’s. There’s no way to get a higher-paying academic job in this part of the country. And that would be the moment she’d change the subject to the Boston Red Sox, or kiss me on the head and say that I was looking more and more beautiful every day. Or at least that’s what used to happen.
“It took us more than ten hours to drive here,” Ben says to Aunt Lisa.
“That’s a long time,” she says.
“Why were the police here?” I ask.
“We had a break-in tonight,” she says. She strokes my hair.
“What happened?” I ask. I can feel my stomach doing flips, my hands clenching again. I reach out for another hug.
Aunt Lisa kisses the top of my head. “We’re okay, baby,” she says. “It doesn’t look like anything was stolen. Your uncle and I weren’t hurt. Someone came into the house while we were out at dinner and … I don’t know what they did. Nothing seems to have been touched. They left a cigarette in the toilet is all. You know how I feel about smoking. But it could have been worse. It’s unnerving is all.” She points at Uncle Henry, who drinks beer from a bottle as he listens to whatever is being said on the other end of the line, and explains he’s on the phone with the alarm company to find out why the warning sirens didn’t go off.
Warning sirens are going off in my head. Oh no. No no no no no.
“But how are you?” she says. “Why are you coming to visit now? Don’t you have school?”
“Shit,” I say in a panic. I look toward Pete. His face looks frozen.
“It’s not that big of a deal, I don’t think,” Aunt Lisa says. “Nothing got stolen. We’re just a little shaken. It’s strange to come home and discover that somebody has been rummaging through your things.”
“Hey, kids,” says Uncle Henry, getting off the phone. He looks just a little bit like my mom. Enough to make me feel her presence, but not enough for it to be overwhelming. He taps my brother on the arm and gives me a slightly beery-smelling hug. He holds out his hand to Pete.
“Henry Booth,” he says to him.
“Pete Ashburn,” Pete says.
“You kids hungry?” Uncle Henry asks.
“Can I talk to you?” Pete says to me.
“We’ll go out to the car and get our bags,” I say to Aunt Lisa and Uncle Henry. “Just be a sec.”
“I’ll help you,” says Uncle Henry, who laughs when he sees Pete’s old Volvo.
“Do you get twelve miles to the gallon in this boat?” he asks.
“Fifteen,” says Pete.
“I used to have a Chevy Nova,” says Uncle Henry. “Teal. That got, like, six and a half. It also got me a whole buncha girlfriends.”
We carry the bags into the house. My bag, made of a ballistic-grade and extremely unattractive mauve synthetic material, is heavy. Why did I pack as if I were never coming home again?
Uncle Henry takes my bag up the stairs and into the room I always stay in. It’s a little guest room where Aunt Lisa also does crafts like scrapbooking. This should have been a kid’s room. I don’t know why they don’t have kids. Aunt Lisa would be a great mom. Maybe it’s not too late. I don’t really know how old Aunt Lisa and Uncle Henry are. They are grown-up age. I believe they are in their early or mid-thirties. I don’t think that is too old to have kids.
There is some religious-looking, through not actually religious, artwork purchased from T.J. Maxx on the walls. It’s a pair of large pictures, orangey-brown, showing a sunset over the water. You can see some black-silhouetted birds flying, too. Mom, predictably, hated this artwork as much as she hated everything about this house. She said that you should not get artwork from the same place where you buy discount underpants. My unattractive suitcase is also from T.J. Maxx, incidentally.
Ben’s bag goes into Uncle Henry’s study. He’ll sleep on an air mattress in there, amidst the golf clubs and the dusty boxes with printers and other computer equipment that never gets set up. I don’t know where Pete will sleep. I wonder if Aunt Lisa will have him sleep in my room. That seems improbable, but exciting. But improbable. And also inappropriate, considering that Pete and I haven’t even really kissed. I blush even thinking about the various sleeping possibilities.
“Why don’t you leave your bag here,” I suggest to him, pointing next to Ben’s bag.
“Okay,” he says. He seems to have bigger things on his mind than our sleeping arrangement. I blush again.
We go back downstairs. Ben is drinking milk at the kitchen table, which is a kind of blond wood, with a vase of pretty flowers in the middle of it. Aunt Lisa is cooking eggs.
Pete, Uncle Henry, and I take seats at the table. Uncle Henry asks me about school. I make up answers. He asks Ben about the economy. Ben says some technical-sounding things about the S&P 500 (which I believe relates to stocks, or maybe bonds, but definitely not horsies) to which Uncle Henry says, “Very interesting. I’ll have to talk to my financial advisor about this.”
We all look up at Aunt Lisa as she comes over with the pan of eggs, spooning them out onto our plates. Aunt Lisa says she’s keeping chickens at the house now, on top of the alpacas.
“Fresh eggs every day,” Aunt Lisa says. “Wait till you taste the yolks. They’re so thick and rich and yellow. You’ll never want to go back to supermarket eggs.”
“How are the alpacas?” I ask Aunt Lisa.
“We’re trying to sell them,” she says. “But the market’s kind of bottomed out. You know it’s against the law to eat your own alpacas?” She shakes her head. “I don’t agree with your father’s politics about much, but I am concerned about the nanny state sometimes. Telling me what to do with my own investment animals!”
“Where is your father?” says Uncle Henry. “Don’t you have school? Do you think he’d want to buy the alpacas?”
“We have the week off,” I say tersely, before Ben can say something truthful or factual.
“Why didn’t your father come with you?” he asks. He drinks some more beer. I feel like he’s putting weird emphasis on the word father.
“Aren’t the eggs delicious?” says Aunt Lisa. “And the best part is that once the hens are too old to stop laying, then we can eat them. It’s a ‘use the whole animal’ philosophy. Very Native American.”
“It’s way past my bedtime,” says Ben.
The eggs really are delicious. It really is way past Ben’s bedtime. I’m fading, too.
“Where should I sleep, Mrs. Booth?” Pete asks.
“Lisa,” says Aunt Lisa. “I’ll make up the couch.” As we eat and she scoots off to procure bedding, Uncle Henry asks, “And why did you just decide yesterday to come visit?”
“We just haven’t seen you for a while,” I say.
“Why didn’t your father come?” he asks.
“Oh, you know Dad,” I say.
Uncle Henry drinks some more beer. “How is your father?” he asks. “Still wacky?”
“Um. I guess,” I say.
“Yeah?” says Uncle Henry. “Do you kids need money? I know your dad isn’t working.”
Oh boy. This again. This used to be a fun little thing, back when we lived in Rhode Island. Uncle Henry would get tipsy and then, haha jokingly, harangue my dad for not earning enough money to keep my mom in a well-enough-appointed manner. He’d harass my dad about what Uncle Henry called his “increasingly asinine and cockamamie political views, no, I’m kidding, you know I love you, Jacob.” Dad would tell him to butt out. Mom would then tell Dad to butt out, though she seemed to enjoy the kerfuffle a little, as did Uncle Henry. Aunt Lisa would cook eggs. This is even less fun now.
“I’ve got to get Ben to bed,” I say.
“Okay,” says Uncle Henry. He drinks the rest of his beer and looks like he wants to say something. He doesn’t say anything.
“Thank you for letting us stay,” I say.
“Kid, you’re always welcome here,” he says. “Your dad and I may not always see eye to eye, but you’re family.”
Pete follows Ben and me upstairs. “I really think we should leave tonight,” he says to me, quietly, when we get upstairs.
“No,” I say, surprising myself with my adamance. “Why?”
“It’s not safe,” he says. “Not for us. And not for your aunt and uncle.”
“The cigarette was obviously just to scare us. We’re scared! They win! But they aren’t going to hurt us. Not while we’re still got the unfinished J-File,” I say, probably too loudly.
I don’t especially believe any of what I’m saying. I just don’t want to leave. But then Ben chimes in.
“I think we should stay as well,” he says. “It seems statistically unlikely that the person who left the cigarette in the toilet would return to the house tonight, knowing that we are likely to be under increased police surveillance. At least seventy-nine percent unlikely.”
“Good point,” I say. “Yeah.”
“Plus my back hurts,” Ben says. “That backseat is terrible.”
Pete looks wary, and weary, and very nearly furious, and says, “Okay. But we are leaving first thing in the morning.”
“Okay,” I say to him. “Okay?” I say to Ben.
“I’d really like to stay and finish the notebook,” Ben says. “I think our odds of getting Dad home safely vastly increase with a complete notebook.”
I look at Pete. “I don’t think so,” he says. “Morning.” He turns and heads back downstairs. His hunched shoulders convey unhappiness.
I put Ben to bed on the blow-up mattress and come downstairs to say goodnight to Uncle Henry and Aunt Lisa. Pete lays on the couch, watching the big television and looking … stony.
“It’ll be okay,” I say to him.
He looks at me with an almost bewildered expression on his face. I don’t know what to say or do. I sit on the couch for a second. The covers are pulled up to his neck. He looks younger than he is. I say, “Thank you, Pete.”
“You’re welcome,” he says, reaching out to grab my arm. His hand rests there for a long moment. He lets go.
I go up to my room and get into bed. I feel so frustrated and nervous and scared and disappointed. We won’t be drinking Del’s frozen lemonade. We won’t be going to the beach. We’re not going to drink Awful Awfuls. It’s just the one real-life, confusing, and hellish kind of awful, not the chocolate-flavored, delicious double awful I’d been so looking forward to.
I’m trying not to cry from disappointment, not to regret too much the things we won’t have. Because I have to stay focused on the one thing that I can do, and have to do, while we’re here.
IT’S HAPPENING
Chapter Twelve
Molly told me, a while ago, she never wanted to see me again. I’d had sex with her ex-boyfriend. It was my first and only time having sex. And I honestly didn’t think she’d care that much, seeing as she was, disposition-wise, pretty bohemian for a teenager. Plus, she just never seemed that into him.
As it turns out, I guess she was into him enough.
Her stupid boyfriend. His name was Donald. Donald! Can you imagine splitting with your best friend over some guy named Donald? I would have answered that question in the negative not so long ago.
Donald is good at drawing. He is a year older than we are, is sweet, and, since he turned sixteen, will come pick a person up in his Jeep if it is snowing out and the person wants to get out of the house. He knows how to do some tricks on a skateboard. We’ve known him since elementary school, when he used to give us the good parts of his lunch (homemade cookies; my lunches had mini carrots for dessert) and let us use his bike when we wanted it. Then toward the end of junior high school, he and Molly started to date. It seemed sort of halfhearted while they were dating, at least to me. He drove her places and bought her things.
But he’d always done that. She seemed … I don’t know. Not in love. Just in like. They liked a lot of the same subtitled movies. And many of the same artists, whose works featured things like decaying animals and full bosoms. But apparently these shared interests, plus hanging out all the time, was not enough to sustain their relationship. They broke up after about two years.
So, that was a long time to be halfheartedly together, I will admit. But neither of them seemed really upset after the breakup. They stayed pals. So did Donald and I. We’d always liked each other. Before and even during the time that he and Molly were together, sometimes we’d sit on the couch together, under a blanket, and talk. Sometimes we’d hug. It probably wasn’t appropriate. After they broke up last summer, when I turned sixteen, it seemed less inappropriate. Still not perfectly appropriate. But less inappropriate.
We went to the movies together one time after he and Molly broke up, just Donald and me. The movies up the street from my parents’ old house. It was supposed to be a funny movie. It wasn’t a funny movie. We stayed through the whole thing, though, and shared a popcorn mixed with peanut M&Ms that he bought, of course. We held hands. He drove me home. Came inside to hang out some more. My parents were already in bed. We decided to have some schnapps from their dusty, rarely used liquor cabinet. Make that I decided. Donald was up for anything. Schnapps, no schnapps. It tasted like sweet, peachy fire. My brother wandered downstairs while we were drinking the schnapps. He saw the bottle on the table.
“You’re drinking Mom and Dad’s liquor?” he asked, sleepily. “What is that?”
“A little schnapps,” I said. I giggled. This all seemed hysterical.
“It’s funny that Jews drink an alcohol originated by German monks,” said Ben. “They thought it had medicinal purposes.”
“I’m feeling very healthy,” Donald said. He laughed.
My brother smelled the liquor. “Peach,” he said. “Peaches originated in China, though the name suggests that the fruit originally comes from Persia. Peaches have been cultivated in China for thousands of years. About four thousand years, in fact.” And as he did most nights, Ben poured a glass of milk, drank it, scratched himself in the crotch, and went back to bed.
It got to be one in the morning, two in the morning, two thirty. Donald started off on Dad’s leather reading chair while I lounged on the somewhat severe wool couch, shoes off, feet akimbo, hair spilled over the throw pillows. But over time our seating arrangement shifted. I invited him to sit
with me on the couch. Then Donald and I sat on the severe couch together under a blanket, watching infomercials. And cuddling. He smoothed my hair with his hands.
It was easy, once we were tucked in, for me to kiss him. And at that point, I seized an opportunity, by way of seizing my best friend’s ex-boyfriend’s pants zipper. I was tired of being a virgin. No one I knew was a virgin anymore. (Note: it’s possible I didn’t know that many people.)
Donald, not a virgin, had a condom. We used it. The experience itself was not especially loving, or exciting, or painful. It lasted a little while, long enough to get through part of an ad for something called the ShamWow!, and I felt a little bit embarrassed as it was happening, plus a little curious how one cloth could do so many different things. But I was glad to do it.
And then, sweet relief, it was done.
Afterwards, I said to Donald, my new lover (ew gross), “I need to go up to my room so my parents don’t catch us here.”
“Good idea,” he said. He stroked my hair again. And then I fell asleep.
My father found us in the morning. He shrieked. Donald jumped up. The condom was now stuck to a part of him that my parents—and, arguably, me—should never have seen. I covered myself tightly with the blanket, willing all this not to be happening. As with all the things I tried to control mentally, this trick did not work. It was happening.
My mother heard the commotion. More Trasks then saw Donald in his most private of ways. Mom also saw me, on the couch, wrapped in blankets, trying to die on the spot.
“Jacob, let’s go get a new couch today,” Mom said to my dad. Then she left the room. Dad followed. He busied himself with some project in the backyard. Mom went into the kitchen for breakfast. Donald got dressed and went home. He’d always gotten along so well with my parents before this.
I suspected he wouldn’t join us on the back deck for grilling on hot summer nights anymore. He and Molly used to both come over for that. Dad would cook steaks on the grill. Mom would ask my friends if they thought she needed a facelift, and that sort of thing. She’d dole out what seemed like really misguided advice about love. Dad would rail against the government. Ben would recite facts about whatever obscure subject was catching his attention. All the weirdness, and there was a lot of it, these evenings were really fun and cozy, and they’re over.
Save the Enemy Page 12
