Kari

by Libba Bray

  Besides annoying me senseless and searching for signs of nonexistent hair growth on his upper lip, Theo’s greatest passion was for Ina Godda Nagilah, the world’s only acid klezmer band. As far as I knew, their only gig was the bar mitzvah of the drummer’s cousin in Spartanburg. The cousin still blamed the band for his lousy money haul.

  We pulled onto the access road, and I thought about my chances with Connor. Even though I’d made a complete fool of myself, even though he had a supermodel girlfriend, still I found myself hoping.

  Just stop it, Kari, I ordered myself. I mean, it was time to face certain facts. Connor was dashing off to a glittering party in a BMW full of carefree popularity. I was stuck driving Vampirella and the Klezmer King around in a car that would have embarrassed even Elvis.

  The Odd Dobbinses. That’s what we were called around town.

  It hadn’t always been that way. As recently as four years ago, I could see isolated snapshots from a time we didn’t talk about. My parents teaching Isis, the former Rachel Dobbins, how to ride a bike. Click. Mom wearing makeup and a starched white oxford shirt. I’m eating Goldfish and reading Anne of Green Gables behind her. Click. Theo all summer brown and freckly, running through the backyard sprinkler after Frisky when he was only a pup. Click.

  And Daddy, looking serious by the BBQ grill, wearing a Because I’m the Chef, That’s Why apron over the bad heart that would kill him three months later. So many times I’d looked at him and never seen the thing that mattered.

  Click. Click. Click. But that was all before. Before we’d had to move into the Castle of Abnormality with my mom’s mother, Lila, who raised iguanas and other creepy crawlies for fun. Before Theo had traded his boyish tan for fish-belly-white skin and a weird band. Before Mom had let her hair grow long and frizzy and started reading meaning into tea leaves and leftover spaghetti. Before Rachel became a gothster with a made-up name and the whole school started thinking of us as separate. Outsiders. Freaks.

  Theo had been quiet for a whole thirty seconds. It was a stretch for him. “Okay, if you won’t let me play the radio, I guess I’ll have to sing,” he chirped. “Ready, campers? Kum-ba-yah, my Lord. Kum-ba-yah…”

  Isis writhed in mock pain. “It burns! It burns!”

  “Theo! Cut it out,” I shouted. “Or I’ll tell Mom.” Okay, as threats go, it was just one step above “I know you are, but what am I,” but I was driving. Plus it worked.

  “You can’t tell Mom. She’s working to night.”

  “Where?” I asked. Not that I really cared.

  Isis piped up. “She’s telling fortunes for some rich people over in Silver Shores.”

  I wasn’t exactly loving my mom’s fortune-telling business. It didn’t help refute the alien Dobbins theory.

  “Hey, Eyesore…,” Theo called out to Isis. It was a dance they did.

  “Isis is not amused.”

  “Yeah, whatever. Listen, in a fair fight do you think Dracula could kick Batman’s butt?” Theo proposed.

  “Isis is not interested in having this conversation.” She wasn’t the only one.

  “I mean, hypothetically. Batman has some cool gear. But then again, Dracula has that whole undead vibe going on.”

  Isis plopped her black-booted feet onto the headrest. The broken laces of her Dr. Martens tickled my neck. In the rearview mirror I could make out her Ministry sticker on the tongue of one boot, although it read YRTSINIM in the mirror.

  “Do you mind?” I said, elbowing her foot.

  Sighing, Isis sat up and dangled her arms over the front seat. “First of all, Batman is really playboy Bruce Wayne. He’s still mortal. And—here’s the crucial part—he’s a comic book character. Dracula is based on a real fourteenth-century scaremonger named Vlad the Impaler.”

  “Ooh. Not a happy name at all. What do you think, Kari?”

  “I think you should join a youth club. Maybe wear some decent clothes now and again,” I suggested.

  Isis snorted. “Lila says that’s totally bourgeois thinking.”

  “Yeah, well, news flash—Lila is sixty-seven years old and insists that her own grandchildren refer to her as Lila so people will think she’s still an ingenue. Her thinking isn’t totally reality based. Are you with me, Rachel?”

  “It’s Isis. If you have any further questions for me, you can send them care of isis@realgoth.com.”

  “I’ll be sure to do that,” I scoffed. I started searching for signs of Nan’s silver-blue BMW and totally missed my exit.

  “Hang on,” I said, streaking across a lane of traffic and onto the exit ramp.

  At that very moment something scaly, damp, and long scampered across my foot.

  “Ahhhhhhh!” I jammed my foot on the brake and screeched to a stop. I threw open the car door and leaped up on the hood just as the engine died. A large green lizard crawled out the open door and onto the busy road. It was Lila’s pet iguana, George. What was he doing there?

  “Somebody grab George!” I screamed. George logged on to my antireptile vibe and made a move toward me. I camped out on the hood, feeling the warm engine burning against my legs, possibly saving me from years of shaving duty.

  The light was about to change. Two cars back, someone was laying on the horn like there was no tomorrow. Forgetting my temporary iguana phobia, I leaped over George and stormed past an irritated man in a Volvo.

  “Hey, moron!” I shouted, then stopped dead in my tracks. It was Nan and the Gap kids. And Connor.

  Connor yelled out, “Dobbins! What are you doing here?”

  “My car stalled,” I answered robotically. I couldn’t let them see the car. I had to divert them somehow. “You’re probably better off backing up and getting back on the Loop.”

  “Hel-lol!” Jen said. “We can’t back up onto four lanes of traffic. We’ll have to go around.”

  I was about to experience a drive-by humiliation. I stood completely transfixed as Nan pulled her gleaming Beamer even with the Jesus mobile. I willed the light to turn green, but it stayed as red as my cheeks.

  “Nice Honda,” Nan said with a laugh. “Who’s that in the back? The Addams Family?”

  In a flash Theo jumped onto the back of the convertible, brandishing George over his head in both hands. “I can’t control him! He must feed, feed, feed!”

  With a chorus of high-pitched screams and the screech of tires, Nan sped off, sending Theo and George tumbling into the bushes by the side of the road. A thick cloud of gray gravel dust floated over the spot where moments before, my evening had sunk to a new all-time low.

  Five minutes later, with George secured in an old shoe box, we inched toward home. All I could think about was going upstairs to my room, kicking off my shoes, and sending in my application for the witness relocation program.

  chapter 2

  It was just past 8:30 P.M. when we drove up to our rambling, Munsters-style house. Lila had kept a torch burning for us. That’s not a figure of speech. There was an actual tiki torch aglow on the front lawn. Its eerie light cast long, wavy shadows over the faces of Lila’s fake Easter Island statues. Three carved wooden gods with great big bellies bloomed along our walkway like yard gnomes on steroids.

  Our next-door neighbor had complained when Lila installed them during her primitive-art phase. Eventually he backed down. Everybody backed down when it came to Lila.

  I was trudging up our front walk, wanting to be alone in my misery, when a blowtorch screamed to life a few feet away and made me nearly jump out of my skin. Lila held something over the torch, then snapped it off again.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you,” my grandmother said without looking over at me.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Feeding Hefty.” Hefty was one of her pet snakes. She owned three. As a herpetologist, Lila had taught at the university and traveled the world, collecting interesting reptiles of all kinds. Long ago I’d learned to share my Cheerios with horned frogs and pull back my covers every night to check for unwanted visitors.
r />   “You need a blowtorch to feed Hefty?”

  “He likes things grilled, you know.”

  How I longed for one of those cuddly grandmas who bakes fudge and tells you your skirt is too short.

  Lila marched toward me. In the light of the tiki torch her makeup looked harsher than usual. Bright orange lipstick circled her thin lips. She was wearing her favorite outfit—a lime green, psychedelic print polyester top with matching gaucho pants that she’d had since the sixties. If this outfit were an animal, you’d have to shoot it and put it out of its misery. Gray wisps of real hair stuck out from beneath her red pageboy wig. It was her date wig.

  “Nice ensemble,” I said. “Will you give it back to the wax museum when you’re through?”

  Lila pursed her lips playfully at me. “For your information, missy, I toured Madame Tussaud’s with none other than the nephew of Winston Churchill when I visited London in ’55. He was quite smitten with me.” Hefty slithered across Lila’s arm.

  “Did anybody call?” I was waiting for a call from my best bud, Jared. He was working on a new comic book and promised to give me a shout once he’d finished for the night.

  “I don’t bother with that machine. It’s so bourgeois.”

  “I’m into bourgeois human contact with the outside world. You should try it sometime.”

  “You’re very impertinent, did you know that? Hold on. Something came for you in the mail.” Lila exhaled loudly and strode toward her gardening table, where a stack of mail was waiting, and handed me a large, official-looking manila envelope. In the darkness I had to strain to see the rubber-stamped return address: New York University.

  I felt a little sizzle of excitement start in my feet. My college application was here at last. I made my way over the broken flagstones toward the front porch, cradling the precious envelope in my arms.

  “Watch out for my arachnid project. It’s on the porch!” Lila called after me.

  Sure enough, a tarp was stretched across the paint-splattered front porch. Various dead spiders had been superglued to the tarp with their Latin classification names listed beneath them in calligraphy.

  Lila fired up her blowtorch again. “It’s going to look wonderful in the entrance hall, don’t you think?”

  For the billionth time I wished myself out of this carnival of kooks and into a dorm room at NYU. I knew my family was “different,” but I was different from my family, which made me the oddest Dobbins out. And the loneliest.

  I opened the door and our mutts, Fric (formerly Frisky) and Frac, came tearing out, barking loudly. I could hear Lila cursing at them to stay back as I closed the door behind me. The house was in its usual disaster state. Books and magazines were stacked on every windowsill. The walls of our living room glowed with a sickly mustard color that my mother insisted was “warm Tuscan gold” when she painted it. It was more of a “sinus infection yellow.”

  * * *

  -Tom’s of Maine toothpaste

  -Bugles

  -Coppertone, SPF 45

  If energy is neither created nor destroyed,

  then why am I so tired all the time?

  * * *

  The hallway by the stairs sported a large corkboard where Isis could post notes about her needs at the grocery store along with her particular philosophy of the day. Tonight it featured a large index card reading After discovering my answering machine behind the Cheerios box in the pantry, I dusted it off and hit the red button. Beep. Theo, it’s Eugene. Where are you? Band practice starts at eight. Not five after eight, man. We’re professionals— Theo’s obnoxious fellow band geek. I hit erase. Beep. Hey, Kar, it’s me. Dee. Real World is a repeat. Major boredom. Did you know that even Sarah Bledsoe is having a Sweet Sixteen? I can’t believe my birthday’s in the summer when everybody’s gone. I’m bummin’. Call me. Beep. Sweetie, it’s Mom. Party sounds nearly drowned her out. Do me a favor? Collect Isis’s grocery list and leave it on my nightstand? Thanks, honey. Beep.

  I took the stairs two at a time and undid the combination on my door. Then I flipped off my shoes and put on my old, worn slippers with the Daffy Duck heads on the front.

  I needed mood music for such an important moment. Every good director has to know how to set the scene. Flipping through my alphabetized CD rack, I scanned over the E’s, F’s, and G’s till I hit the H’s and Lauryn Hill. Phat beats filled the room as I carefully slit open the envelope with my father’s silver letter opener and pulled out my application to the nation’s top film school.

  Let the rest of the sophomore class scope each other out at party after party. While they were killing brain cells, I was getting the jump on my college education. While they were playing tongue hockey, I was turning my passion for film into a career. While they were laughing and partying, I was…sitting on my bed. Alone.

  No—bad thinking, bad! Bad!

  I was planning every move in my glorious future! I was perfectly in control.

  I spun out a little fantasy of myself accepting an Oscar for my first feature film, Confessions of a Teenage Social Reject. I’m wearing my borrowed Armani gown and half a million in jewels from Harry Winston. As I thank the people who helped me become the most successful female director in the history of cinema, Jen Appleton is watching from her trailer home with her ten children. Nan Tatum is sorry that she didn’t invite me to her party and that she weighs over three hundred pounds because of an unfortunate gland problem. And Connor Reese is secretly cutting out pictures of me from Vanity Fair and wishing for what could have been.

  The first two pages of the application were your basic 411—name, social security number, etc. It was the third page that got a little hairy.

  At the top of the sheet were two sentences followed by a blank space: Please list all extracurricular activities in which you have been involved, including clubs, organizations, charity work, internships, travels abroad, etc. Also list positions held, leadership roles assumed, awards and honors received, special projects hosted, and any other pertinent information that you would like to share with the acceptance committee. Note: The committee invites the submission of student films.

  I read it three times. It didn’t get any better.

  I was completely undistinguished. I’d been a member of the Spanish club for exactly one quarter. I’d sung with the Buccaneer Chorus till our choir director suggested I just mouth the words. And I didn’t have a single film to submit. My hopes had just gone from zero to sixty and back to zero again in under two minutes.

  The threat of a deep funk was looming. In need of a distraction, I punched number one on my speed dial.

  A raspy voice answered after three rings. “Hi. I’m actually here right now, so if you want to leave a message, you’ll have to call back after the sound of the tone.”

  “Skip it, Jared, it’s me.”

  “Karnage. What, you mean you aren’t donning the taffeta for Nan Tatum’s Sweet Sixterror party?”

  “Does everyone know about this party but me?” Great. Even Jared, the most antisocial person I know, had the download on the party of the century.

  “Jen Appleton was blabbing her drill team mouth about it in study hall.”

  Okay. I felt a little better.

  “I was just gonna watch Duck Soup on the nine o’clock movie. Wanna watch it together over the phone?”

  “Can’t. Gotta work on my application to NYU.”

  “Finally came, huh? Well, don’t let me keep you. You’ve only got, what, sixteen months till the deadline.”

  “I’m a planner, okay? That’s what separates the men from the…nonplanning men.”

  “Nice turn of phrase. Do I detect a cloud of tension in your Technicolor world?”

  I slid off the bed till my scalp touched the floor. It was still my favorite position for major phone confessionals. Something about all that blood rushing to the head makes a girl say things. “It will take me more than sixteen months to make the list unless I can suddenly become an underprivileged Inuit with a mantel full o
f trophies and a heart murmur.” My father’s sweet, stern face watched me from a frame on my nightstand. I was instantly sorry I’d said that thing about the heart murmur.

  “You lost me, Kar.”

  I read the dreaded passage to him.

  “Whew.” He whistled in appreciation. “These guys do not play around. So the Kar-meister is in desperate need of upping the social profile, eh? You’ll think of something.”

  Was he crazy? I couldn’t redeem myself in just over a year. I’d have to become a whole new person. Lying there with my head on the floor and my heart in the basement, I felt irritated that Jared didn’t understand how important this was to me. “It’s going to take a miracle.”

  “Well, miracles happen every day. Besides, no one can cross the i’s and dot the t’s like you can. Or is that the other way around?”

  “Thanks for your support,” I growled.

  “Look,” Jared said, like it was painfully obvious. “They said you could submit a student film. So make one.”

  “You don’t understand. I’d have to come up with an idea. Write a script. Rehearse some actors. Shoot it. Edit it. Correction—find some money and shoot and edit it. You can’t just jump into making a movie.”

  “Sure you can. If you’re not a complete control freak.”

  “I am not a control freak!”

  “Of course not. Every sophomore updates a to-do list by the minute. Kar, you practically line up your shoes with a slide rule every night.”

  I glanced over at my partially open closet. A neat row of shoes smiled at me from inside. “Look. I just like things a certain way. That doesn’t make me uptight.”

  “Whatever. Maybe you should take a few tips from Dee. She’s got the laid-back vibe.”

  Dee was my best gal pal. She was good-natured, but I hated being compared to anybody and found wanting. “Maybe you don’t know Dee as well as you think you do.” It was such a stupid, second-grade thing to say.

  Jared, as usual, saw me and raised me. “Guess not. I saw Dee in the cafeteria the other day. She’s really done that morphing thing girls do.”