Dirty Little Secrets

by C. J. Omololu

  “Shouldn’t you be in bed or something?” I asked.

  “It’s not even six o’clock,” he said. “Mom lets me stay up until nine during vacations. She’s having that weird guy from work over for dinner, so I had to get out of there.” TJ’s mom had been divorced for a couple of years and seemed to go out with a new boyfriend every week. TJ didn’t seem to like it, but she kept the babysitting jobs coming, so it wasn’t a problem as far as I was concerned.

  I looked around. It was crazy to let TJ in. Nobody had been in here in years, and I was just going to let him climb through the window? I thought about how quiet and a little creepy it was without him here but what a huge risk I’d be taking.

  “If I do let you in, you have to promise me that you’ll stay in this room.”

  “I promise,” he said, not even asking why. I could hear his feet kicking and scraping at the wood siding on the house. He stopped and looked up at me. “A little help?”

  I reached down and grabbed the belt loops on the back of his pants and swung him into the room. He reached over to close the window, but I stopped him. “No, leave it open.”

  “It’s freezing out there. Why do you want it open?”

  “I, uh . . .” I tried to think of a good reason why I needed the window open in the middle of winter. “The garbage disposal backed up and I’m trying to get the smell out.”

  “My mom just uses air freshener,” he said, taking a good look around the room. “Wow, you guys have a lot of stuff. This is totally cool.”

  “Ya think?” I said. “Well, I’m trying to get rid of stuff we don’t need. Which is pretty much all of it.”

  “I’ll take it.” TJ started poking his finger in some of the cardboard boxes that were stacked against the wall.

  I grabbed his hand and looked him in the eye. “What I want you to do is help me grab all of the green plastic bins in this room and the living room over there and we’re going to stack them up against the wall. Under no circumstances are you to go in any other room. You will be banned forever if you do.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because I said so.”

  “Okay, but why?”

  “I don’t want you to get hurt,” I said, knowing it was a lame answer.

  TJ shrugged and bundled his jacket tighter. “Can you turn the heat on?” he asked. “It’s just as freezing in here as it is outside.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “we’re trying to save energy, so I can’t do that right now.”

  “You’re going to wake up dead then,” he said. “ ’Cause you’re going to freeze to death.”

  If he only knew.

  He poked at one of the green plastic bins. “So what is all this stuff, anyway?”

  “I don’t really know,” I said. “It’s mostly my mom’s.”

  He looked at the growing wall of green bins and piles of belongings in both the dining room and living room. “Well, she must be rich, because I’ve never seen anyone with so much stuff before.”

  Rich. That was hilarious. “I don’t know about rich,” I said. “She just never gets rid of anything.” I started moving boxes off some bins that were stacked along one window.

  “Not anything?”

  “Nope. Not anything.” I stacked the boxes on top of some others in the middle of the room and started dragging one of the bins toward our growing stack.

  “How about books that you guys have already read?”

  I pointed to the overflowing bookcase in the front hallway. If I read one book every day for two years, I’d never get through them all. “Nope.”

  “How about a snotty-nose tissue that someone who has the worst cold in the world has blown their nose in until it was dripping with boogers?”

  I stopped to think for a minute. “Well, she might throw that away,” I said. “But if someone was working on an art project that could incorporate a snotty, boogery nose tissue, then she would keep it in a bag somewhere until she could give it to them.”

  “Ewww!” TJ said. Then he started laughing. “That is so gross. What about a whole sculpture made with snotty-nose rags, belly button lint, and earwax?” He started laughing so hard that he bent over double and had to sit down on one of the bins.

  As I watched him laugh, I started smiling too. Somewhere in this mess I just might find a bag full of snotty tissue, belly button lint, and earwax. I wouldn’t put it past her. It was weird telling all this to TJ. None of us ever talked about it outside of the house, but for some reason he felt safe. Even if he said anything to his mom, she wouldn’t believe him. Nobody would believe that the stories he was telling about our garbage pit were true. No one would choose to live like this.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. I clapped my hands. “Come help me drag this bin over to those. This one is heavy, so be careful.”

  He grabbed the front handle and I grabbed the back, and together we picked the bin up just a few inches off the floor and crabwalked it over to the others. “What’s in here?” TJ asked, and before I could stop him, he pulled the lid off. “Oh, cool!”

  I peeked over the edge and was relieved to see it was just a pile of old books she must have had a greater plan for.

  TJ picked one up and looked at the spine. “What are they? They all look the same.”

  I grabbed one and recognized it right away because we had another set buried in a bookcase in the living room. “They’re encyclopedias.”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “You know, books people used to use if they needed to find out about something. Kind of like Google, only in real life.” I showed him the side of the book I was holding. “See, this one has everything that starts with V. I used to read these when I was little, like they were regular books.”

  He picked up another volume and flipped through it. “Can I keep them?” He shuffled through the books in the box and pulled out two. “I’ll take T and J.” He stuck his hand back in and pulled out another one. “And L too. L for Lucy.”

  “Okay, but that’s it,” I said. “We’ll ask your mom about the rest later.”

  As I lifted a small mountain of shoeboxes and started to step on them so they would fit into the bag better, I spotted the heavy brass corners and battered black leather of the trunk that I hadn’t seen for years. Grandma had died before I was born, and Mom kept Grandma’s special stuff in this trunk. If Mom and I were alone at night, she would sometimes let me sit with her and look at the yellowing bonnets and tiny lace shoes Grandma had saved from when Mom was a baby. I’d always wanted to put the clothes on my dolls, but Mom said they were too old to play with. The trunk opened with a loud creak that got TJ’s attention across the room.

  “What is it?” He came and knelt down by the trunk.

  “Some of my grandma’s stuff,” I said. The bonnets and booties were still carefully folded on top.

  “Are you going to keep it?”

  I nodded. “I think I should.”

  Stacked in the corner was a set of gold-rimmed plates with pink flowers on them. Mom always said we would use these plates sometime when the occasion was special enough. As far as I knew, there had never been an occasion special enough. I took one finger and ran it through the thick coat of dust that had formed on the small top plate. In three short moves I made two eyes and a frowning mouth. Poor, lonely plates. Once this stuff was cleaned up, maybe I’d keep the plates. Except that when I was in charge, we’d use them every day.

  TJ stuck his head in the trunk. “It smells like old people in here,” he said. He reached in and pulled out something from the bottom. “Was your grandma in the Olympics or something?”

  I squinted at what he had in his hand. “Not that I know of.”

  “Well, here’s a gold medal from somewhere.” He handed me a heavy medal that hung on a faded red, white, and blue ribbon.

  I turned it over. On the back was engraved: First Place, Central Conservatory Piano Competition. I shrugged. “I never met my grandma. She must have been a good piano player.”

&
nbsp; TJ was digging in the trunk again, and I was afraid he was going to wreck something. I wanted to put the whole thing aside until I had time to go through it piece by piece. Mom never talked very much about growing up—her stories never started with “When I was a kid” like a lot of other parents.

  “Let’s leave this alone,” I said. “I’ll go through it later.” I reached for the baby clothes to put them back in the top of the trunk.

  “What’s a ‘prodigy’?” TJ asked.

  I looked over his shoulder at the yellowed newspaper he was reading. “It’s a little kid who is really smart or really good at something.”

  “Well, this little kid is really good at the piano,” he said, pointing to a photo of a small girl seated on a piano bench, her shiny patent leather shoes dangling above the floor. “Is that your grandma?”

  “Let me see.” I took the paper and looked more closely. The caption under the photo read: “Local piano prodigy little Joanna Coles can barely reach the keys, but she performed like a professional at the Central Conservatory of Music Piano Competition, where she beat out all comers to win first prize.”

  “Huh. It’s my mom.” I looked at the date on the paper. “She would have been about nine years old.”

  TJ hoisted a big black leather book onto his lap. The pages creaked and the plastic sleeves stuck together as he opened it. “Looks like she won a lot of stuff.”

  We quietly flipped through the pages that showed Mom’s progress from a cute little girl whose feet didn’t touch the floor to a beautiful teenager seated elegantly in front of a white baby grand piano in a sleeveless ball gown. Her neck was long, and she gazed straight into the camera, as though daring anyone to doubt her talent.

  The newspaper clippings showed win after win at local and even national piano competitions—photos of Mom accepting medals and trophies of all sizes. The book was only half full, and the clippings stopped abruptly in 1970. The rest of the shiny, black pages were blank. Mom would have been about seventeen.

  TJ shut the book. “Did she quit?”

  I felt like I had been looking at pictures of someone I’d never met. Why hadn’t she ever shown me any of this before? Why did she stop playing? She never let me dig in the trunk, and now I knew why. I realized with a jolt that I’d never get these answers. “I don’t know,” I finally said to TJ.

  “You should ask her.” He stood up and looked around the room.

  I put the book on top of the baby clothes and carefully shut the trunk. “Yeah, I should.” There were so many things I’d never know the answers to now. “Enough of this. You go finish up over by that wall, and I’ll take care of these things.” I needed something to distract me. Something that would take my mind off the photos and the clippings and the trophies that had never made it into this part of Mom’s life. I wondered what had happened to that girl who looked like she could win anything, to turn her into someone who wouldn’t even answer the front door.

  chapter 12

  6:00 p.m.

  “Oh yuck!”

  “What?” I prayed there weren’t any maggots, because I wasn’t sure how I would explain those away. High school science experiment? Suburban 4-H?

  “This box is all soggy and gross,” TJ said. He had the flaps open and was picking out mildewed bits of paper that disintegrated and fell heavily back into the box as he held them up.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Just shove everything into this garbage bag.”

  “Hey, Lucy, this looks good,” he said. “Can I keep it?”

  I looked over to see him holding up a plastic bag containing Teddy B., the brown gingham teddy bear I’d made by hand in third grade. I walked over to take a better look at the box.

  “Did your mom make it?” TJ asked.

  “No,” I said. “I did. It was a Girl Scout project—I even got my sewing badge for doing it. My mom used to make quilts a long time ago—she was a really good sewer, and she showed me what to do.”

  I squeezed the bear’s tummy and looked at the small brown stitches that ran the length of his side, thinking about the nights Mom and I had sat with our heads bent over the effort of making the stitches that held him together as tiny and uniform as possible.

  “Here,” Mom had said softly, taking the floppy, unstuffed bear from my lap. “Just put the needle in a little ways, like this.” I could feel the warmth of her body straight from the shower, and her wet hair tickled my chin as she bent over our work. We sat in a cleared space on the living room couch, piles of newspapers and scraps of quilting fabric surrounding the small, folding TV tray that held our supplies. “You want to try?”

  She handed the brown fabric back to me, the needle sticking up at an angle. “Just put your finger behind the fabric where you want the stitch to go,” Mom said, watching my fingers as I worked. Beside her tight, tiny stitches, mine looked like something that would have held Frankenstein’s monster together. “That’s good. Just try to get them a little bit closer together.”

  I tried to concentrate even harder, wanting my stitches to match hers so she’d be proud of me. “You mean like th—? Ow!” I cried, the sharp end of the needle making a searing stab at my finger.

  “Oh, let me see,” Mom said, pulling my finger into her lap. She dabbed at it with the edge of her shirt. “I think you’ll live.” Mom smiled at me. “Congratulations. You are now an official member of the top secret quilting society.”

  I dabbed at the mark in the middle of my finger. “What’s that?” I was mad that I’d done something so stupid and wrecked what we were doing.

  “Hold on a minute,” Mom said, and jumped up to rummage in the big tote bag she kept next to the recliner. “I know it’s in here somewhere.” She pawed through material and thread, and dug way down to the bottom. “Aha! I knew I’d seen it,” she said, and held out something small and round.

  I took it and held it up to the dim light. It was like a tiny metal hat with dents all over the top and a pretty painted blue picture of windmills all around the base. “What is it?”

  “Lucy Tompkins! Are you telling me that you don’t know a thimble when you see one?”

  I shrugged, trying to keep her in a good mood. I held it back out to her. “It’s pretty.”

  Mom laughed. “It is pretty,” she said, and took it back to look it over more carefully. “It was my mother’s, and she gave it to me when she taught me to sew. You put it on your finger like this.” She popped it on the end of her pointer finger. “And then the needles won’t stick you.”

  I gave her a small smile. “Cool.”

  She held up my injured finger and set the little thimble on the end. “Now it’s yours,” she said.

  It took a little while to get used to wearing it, but I didn’t poke myself again.

  I hadn’t thought of that thimble in years. Somewhere, in some box or bag or green bin, was an antique thimble that I’d probably never see again.

  TJ held out his hand for the bear. “So, do I get to keep him?”

  I held Teddy B. a little tighter. He was physical proof that things hadn’t always been this bad. “You know what, T? Let’s find something else for you to keep. I think I’m going to hang on to this for a while.”

  “Fine,” he said, and started grabbing things out of the box again.

  I tucked Teddy B. into the front of my jacket and bent down to see what else was in the box. On one side my name was written in black marker that flowed with my mother’s handwriting.

  Taking a handful of soggy papers out of the box, I could see they were a mix of kindergarten drawings, report cards, and those meaningless paper certificates you get for completing a reading program or passing Tadpole swim lessons at the Y. Mom must have put everything in here to save for when I got older. And now everything was destroyed. She had fifty plastic bins in this house full of pristine crap—why couldn’t she actually put something meaningful in them? Like a special silver and blue thimble? Or my childhood?

  I was scraping the pieces of cardboard off the so
ggy rug when I heard a yelp and a crash, as a large stack of books and papers toppled to the floor. “TJ! Are you okay?” I jumped up and ran over to him.

  He was sitting on the floor surrounded by an avalanche of books. “I’m okay,” he said, but I could tell by the wetness around the edges of his eyes it hurt more than he let on. “I’m sorry.” He frantically tried to pick up some of the books. “I didn’t mean it, really. It was just an accident . . . I turned around and my shoulder hit the stack and—”

  I remembered saying those exact words so many times to Mom as she screamed at me to be careful. In her world, there was no such thing as an accident, just people who didn’t pay enough attention. I bent down and grabbed TJ’s face in my hands. “It’s not your fault, okay?” That’s what I always wanted someone to say to me. “Come on, let me feel where the books got you,” I said. Even though it had just happened, I could feel the start of a big bump on his head behind his right ear. “No blood,” I said. “But I think your mom should take a look.” I stood up and held my hand out for him.

  “No,” he whined. “I don’t want to go. We’re not done yet.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “But if I send you home broken, your mom’s going to be really mad at me. If I find anything cool, I’ll put it in a pile for you.”

  TJ touched one finger to the growing lump on his head. “You won’t even know what’s cool,” he grumbled. “You’ll probably throw out good stuff that I want to keep.”

  “I know what you like, don’t worry about it. You need ice on that, so let’s go. I’ll walk you home.”

  We picked our way back through the dining room and into the front hallway. “Hold on, I need my books,” he said, and picked them up off the floor. “Don’t forget to save the other ones.”

  “They’re yours,” I said. We opened the door and stepped out into the biting air. It was unusually cold, for which I was undeniably grateful. We hurried across the street to TJ’s house, his Christmas tree still sparkling in the window.