Rain beats on the roof and the air is moist and clammy, making a perfect reading atmosphere, but my mind drifts to Starla, and what she might be doing right now. Did she have to slog all the way out to Larkin’s in this weather? Is she sitting up there on her chair, monitoring some maniac swimmer with a death-wish-by-lightning-bolt? Are she and D the only two people at work today?
I imagine D slumped behind the register in the empty store while Starla sits out in the downpour, scheming up her next revenge tactic while also secretly hoping that D will stride out into the thunderstorm and sweep her up into an Epic-worthy embrace. Although on a glance, Starla’s arms appear stronger than D’s.
Later, Judith drops me off at a dark house. I hang up my wet Windbreaker and scan the fridge. Nothing. Nothing is on the stove or in the oven, either. Is it my imagination or has Roy been slacking on his duties lately? Last week, we ate bread-crumbed fried mozzarella sticks three nights in a row.
A voice from nowhere says, “We’ll order pizza.”
“Mom?”
She’s in the living room, all knotted up in Granny Morse’s armchair. Something is wrong. For one thing, her hair looks terrible, and Mom never has bad hair days. At any given moment, Beth Ann Morse’s hair is reliably clean, conditioned, blown dry, and anti-frizzled. As a walking advertisement for Style to Go, her good grooming is practically mandatory.
“Did you forget your rain hat?”
“I had to rush home.” She shakes out a tissue and honks into it.
“Why?” It’s not cold, but Mom has the afghan wrapped around her shoulders. “Are you sick?”
“Doesn’t something feel different to you?”
I look around. Except for the fact that we are standing in gloom, everything looks the same. Is Mom protesting my poor cleanup of last week? No, she’s waiting for me to notice something else.
“Roy’s gone,” she says, as if it were the most obvious thing. “He moved out.”
I walk into the living room and snap on the lamp. Now I see that it’s not just her hair. Other parts of Mom are looking bad, too. Her red-rimmed eyes, her rain-speckled shirt, the coral lipstick that hit only the general concept of her lips.
“What happened?”
“Beats me! A rough patch is normal in any relationship!” She blows her nose for emphasis. “How could I know Roy was so restless? He wouldn’t even let me give him a ride to the bus station. He said the road was calling him.”
Of course Roy would have to turn good-bye into country music. But Mom’s sad mood is real enough.
“I don’t know what to say. I’m really sorry.”
She waves me off. “You never liked Roy.”
“Well, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sorry.”
“Get us a large, with anything but mushroom, okay? There’s money in my wallet.”
I try to think of a comforting quote. “A roving heart gathers no affection.”
Sadly, Mom has never been receptive to a Bartlett, no matter how fitting. “And order us a salad, too.”
“Okay.” Suddenly I remember back to my wish that Roy would just leave. I am not superstitious by nature, but the coincidence sends a twinge of guilt through me. “So I’ll be in my room,” I say, “if you want to talk or something? I won’t lock the door.”
She nods. Her head droops like her battery is dying. I snap off the lamp. I figure the internal soundtrack to Mom’s life, most likely a mellow, acoustic guitar, sounds better in the dark.
A Greater Loss
“MY HAIRSTYLES NOTEBOOK is missing.”
The kids look up from their bowls of breakfast ice cream.
“Are you sure?” asks Evan. “When was the last time you saw it?”
I calculate back. I hadn’t been using the notebook since last week, when I started reading Dunces. Then on my Saturday trip to the library, my favorite librarian, Miss Kitamura, had presented me with a book called Obasan.
“I’ve been holding it especially for you, Irene, since you’re my best reader,” she said. As hairstylishly unpromising as it had looked, I accepted it, my dilemma being that Miss Kitamura is Japanese and Obasan is by a Japanese author, and to refuse to take it seemed a personal snub against Miss Kitamura, who had helped strategize my Golden Bookworm victory with her many excellent recommendations.
Then I ended up reading Obasan in the library all day to avoid being at home, where Mom kept calling in every five minutes to check if I’d heard from Roy.
Unfortunately, now Obasan won’t let me put it down until I find out the secret of where Naomi’s mother ran off to.
“That notebook is always, always in my bag.” I rummage through it again.
“Not always-always. You left it like fifty different places in the house last week,” Lainie reminds me. “You were using the back of it while we were doing paper dolls. But I’ll go check and see if it’s upstairs.” She scampers off.
“Nope!” she calls down five seconds later.
“Look harder!” I shout up.
“Can I go ride bikes with Zaps?” asks Evan.
“Nobody’s going anywhere until we find my notebook,” I tell him. “We’re going to take this whole place apart.”
For Lainie and Evan, taking the whole place apart really means throwing around the couch cushions and banging cupboards so the end result looks as if someone lifted the house off the ground and shook it like a snow globe. I’m not sure how much actual searching is accomplished, but in times of frustration, the banging is usually the point. I rattle drawers and slam closet doors. My stomach is getting squeamish. Where could I have left it?
“Maybe it’s at your house?” asks Lainie.
“Maybe. I don’t know.” I press my palms to my eyes, trying to Visually Project, like in that news story I read about police psychics. My Visual Projection is a melted ice-cream puddle of Larkin’s and sunshine, bike rides and books, Starla and paper dolls. “I guess it could be anywhere.”
“I need to finish my breakfast before I start looking again.” Lainie zips off to hide in the kitchen.
Evan and I bang around a few more minutes before he gives up, too. “It’s just a lame-o doodle book, anyhow,” he huffs. “I don’t see what the big deal is.”
I whirl on him. “The big deal is it’s my future business!”
“Well, if you want my opinion,” Evan says loftily, “you’re not the right person to be a small-business owner.”
“That’s not your opinion!” Lainie shouts from the kitchen. “You’re only copying what Mom said about Irene last night!”
“What?” Picturing the Prior family discussing me over the dinner table is a really bothersome image for me, which isn’t lost on Evan. His eyes get big and round.
“No, all I . . .” Evan backs off me a step. “Mom was just saying . . . I mean . . . hey, don’t look at me like that, Irene, okay?”
“You don’t trust I could do what your mom does? Or my mom? You think I’m not as capable as either of them?”
For a second, I think Evan might turn and bolt upstairs, but he holds his ground. “Be mad if you want, but didya ever notice how Mom acts in her store? How she can remember eighty-six things all at the same time? The nuts and bolts, Mom calls it.” He twists his mouth, scrutinizing me. This expression makes him seem wiser than his age.
I know what Evan’s getting at, but I refuse to make it easy for him. “You don’t think I’m a nuts-and-bolts person?”
He pauses, then plunges. “No. You’re more of a sit-around person.”
“Okay, so basically you’re telling me that I’m lazy?”
“Not lazy, just—you know how you are, Irene. How you sit doing those ladies’ heads and you don’t hear if Poundcake’s scratching to come in or notice other stuff going on around you.”
“Evan,” I begin, “that notebook is my research. I don’t draw heads to amuse myself. I draw heads because I have to.”
“You’re taking this as an insult, and that’s not how I mean it,” says Evan.
It’s true and he’s right. In the back of my mind, I fear Judith’s job. And Mom’s. The nuts and bolts of Style to Go got me in trouble. Fill the shampoo dispensers, sweep up the hair, fold the towels, show Mrs. Gonzales to the changing room. It was too much to keep track of, my mind would get scrambled and inevitably I’d make a mess, just like poor, fat Ignatius—only his loving mother didn’t thwack him with the back of a hairbrush every time he screwed up.
“So what did you all decide I should do with my life?” I ask.
“Start a paper doll company!” hollers Lainie.
“Mom thinks you’d make a good teacher,” says Evan, “if you put your mind to it.”
“And Dad says you have the right concentration for being a lawyer!” Lainie shouts. “But only a lawyer for public defense, like him. Not the kind who has yachts.”
“Gee, thanks. Tell your parents I’m glad to come in so handy as a subject of debate . . . ” My voice drifts off, because my tone shames me, especially since I’m pretty sure I once read a Bartlett quote about sarcasm being the lowest form of humor. Even though my future is always an extremely interesting topic to me, it feels strange to be noticed by the Priors, and I’m not sure how much I like the sudden spotlight.
A Small Reprimand
From: [email protected]
Ireney-bean,
Carrie my doubles partner is starting to call you my “friend” with quotation marks around it because she thinks I’m making you up. That would be on account of you never e-mailing which consequently results in me never having any news about you.
Maybe I am making you up????
But I will keep writing you because I am that kinda pal. Sooo . . . Walt Waterman and me are still Love-All. That’s a little tennis humor for ya. On a recent excavation of his superfine bod I discovered a tat of a snake on his thigh and another on his shoulder of a broken heart. He got the snake with his best friend Dingo but he won’t tell me about the heart only gets a mystical look in his eye and says it’s complicated. When W.W.’s not being mystical & complicated he’s the funniest guy at camp—in that scary way that makes you glad you’re on his team. Choice Walt lines: “Let me translate that into moron for you” and “I didn’t realize you were fluent in clueless.” But it’s more the way he says it—kinda gotta be here . . . and I kinda wish you were here even if you claim tennis gives you heat rash.
Drop me the news or give me 1 good reason why you won’t. What’d I ever do to chafe?
t.t.f.n.
La Whit
I have zilch to report to Whitney so far, but I know that if I don’t write my best friend very, very soon, I’ll be in deeper trouble than anything my bargaining skills can navigate.
So I hit Reply, take a breath and go for it.
Whatsup Whitty-whitpecker—
Wow do I get the Neglectful Friend Medal or what ??? but so much is Up—the Prior job is paying me big $$$ and I met this girl Starla who is the coolest and we’ve been hanging out. Last nite we met up with these two awesome guys in the Lotsa Tacos parking lot—Matt and Lars—surfers visiting from Malibu Beach!! I got together with Lars after—
My fingers stop. Who am I kidding? Even my most brave and vivid flare of imagination starts to sputter when attempting to picture myself hooking up with some random surfer dude named Lars in a fast food parking lot.
I send my cursor chomping backward and try again.
Whitly—
Sounds like you are having an amazing summer. Lucky you to get to go tennis camp, and here I can’t even afford a tennis racquet! So much for justice in this world. Some of us get bonfires and sing-alongs, others are resigned to the grim fate of the downtrodden, underpaid for overtime and nothing to—
Nope. I delete that one, too. I stare at the blank message Reply space, hypnotized by my inability to spin my summer into anything that sounds remotely fun, and feeling a touch sorry for myself that I have so little news to work with at all, until the sound of the front door unlocking snaps me from my trance. It’s Mom, with our Chinese takeout dinner.
Which makes it easier to decide that I’ll tackle the Whitney write-back issue on a full stomach of egg rolls and shrimp fried rice.
A Bad Angel
THE NEXT DAY, it’s Evan’s turn to go work at the Plugged Nickel. “I do the inventory, since I’m gifted at math,” he tells me, his chest puffed out like a superhero. Though he has absolutely improved from last summer, there’s still a good chunk of dork left in ole Evan.
But Judith doesn’t seem to mind or notice. She reaches out and rumples his hair. “Say, Irene, you should ask your mom to hire Ev. She’s always talking about the chaos in her stockroom.”
I don’t answer. I’m still on guard about the Priors deciding that I’d be an unwelcome addition to the world of small-business owners. Now it seems to be Mom’s turn under the Prior spyglass.
When Lainie and I ride out to Larkin’s, I make her work hard to keep up. Judith’s comment has annoyed me.
“Jeez McCheese, I’m happy you don’t ride Evan’s bike every day!” puffs Lainie as we lock them at the stand. “ ’Cause you sure are a fast bike rider! I bet you could win that big ride they put on television.”
“The Tour de France.”
“Yeah, I bet you’d clobber.”
“I’ll go slower on the ride home.” It’s not fair to take my petty grudges out on Lainie. I open a juice pouch and give it to her to rehydrate.
Starla stands leaning against her chair, her chin uplifted, hands resting lightly on her hips, watching the water like a supremely bored sea captain. I’m coming to realize that there’s something slightly unnatural about how Starla expresses and arranges herself, as if she knows about all the attention people are beaming onto her—even when she isn’t doing a thing. Being too eye-catching must be slightly exhausting that way.
Lainie trots right over. I follow. I haven’t seen Starla since last week’s junk-food theft. I was half imagining that she’d have been caught by now. Also arrested, and put on probation, and held up by local Larkin’s gossipmongers as an example of Teenage Delinquency.
“Where were you the other day?” asks Lainie. “Me and my brother came here with our parents and you weren’t around.”
Starla smiles down at her. “Even lifeguards get weekends off, cutie-pie.”
“You should come back to our house for lunch. Since Evan’s not around to ruin everything.”
“Uh-huh,” answers Starla.
“We’re the last house on Highland and we’ve got three acres. That’s enough land for a pony but I’m not allowed one.”
“I’ll stop by some other time,” says Starla in a flat voice, her eyes cutting at me in warning that Lainie’s thin charms have worn out.
Lainie, deaf and blind to all social cues, touches the leather strap bracelet on Starla’s wrist. “That’s pretty.”
“Did you get that in Idlewild?” I hadn’t meant to blurt this—but I’d logged on to Starla’s journal yesterday and learned that she and some of her friends—Me + Kelli + Em = FUN!!!—had hit the mall. I’d even checked out the photos: of long, rangy Em drinking a soda and crossing her eyes at an indoor mall café; of wispy blonde Kelli plus Starla imitating the mannequins’ poses in a lingerie storefront, and then one of all three, the camera held out and tipped so you could see up way too much nostril. I’d tried to cipher from the photos if Em and Kelli, as the cute-ish friends of gorgeous Starla, understood what they were up against. Did they huddle together or whisper on the phone about how all the guys loved Starla best? Did they despise Starla for her power? Or were they in constant competition to win her favor? Or maybe I was stone wrong, and Kelli and Em were perfectly at ease about their pal. That’s what their blandly happy smiles seemed to be telling the world—though photos often lied.
Now I quake in horror, having exposed myself to Starla as a lonely blog-haunter and creepster. I am speechless with embarrassment.
Starla snaps her fingers. “Gotcha, Nerd! I knew you�
�d go on my journal.” She looks genuinely delighted. “Did you read my poems, too?”
“I might’ve read a couple . . .” I hate when Starla calls me Nerd, and Lainie’s bat-eared presence makes me doubly uncomfortable. I point. “Hey, Lainie, don’t you know her?”
“Annie Waldron?” Lainie glances over at the freckly girl sitting under a tree, pretending not to notice that her mother is braiding her hair. “She’s in my class.”
“I thought so.” I shove her. “Go say hi.”
“But Annie Waldron is icky.”
“How?”
“She just is.”
“But now she saw you, so you have to go. It’s the polite thing.”
Lainie’s shoulders sag. “Only because you’re making me, not because I want to. And it’s not like you’re so polite, Irene. How many people are you making friends with around here?”
“That’s my business,” I say, squaring her by the shoulders and pushing her off.
As soon as Lainie’s out of the way, Starla flips her Off Duty shingle. She trails me while I pick a spot on the grass and spread out the towels. Lainie’s comment has embedded itself in my brain, and I smile in what I hope is a friendly and outgoing manner. Starla does not smile back. “So, Nerd, just between us,” she says, “tell me what you think of my poems. For real.”
I weight the corners of the towel with rocks. “First, stop calling me Nerd.”
“Just admit it that I’m good at rhymes. My friends all say so.”
Then I have an idea. Obasan, which I finished yesterday, is still in my bag. “Listen to this.” I flip to a place and read. “ ‘The stillness is so much with me that it takes the form of a shadow which grows and surrounds me like air.’ ” I look up. “The girl is talking about missing her mom. There’s more poetry in that sentence than in something like ‘My mom’s not here, she’s gone I fear.’ ”
My Almost Epic Summer Page 6
