This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  It was Roo who didn’t want to go. Roo was first-chair flute that year. Roo was quarterback of his peewee football team and president of every activity that had one: student government, class council, band, the No Girls Aloud (Quiet Ones Welcome) Club he’d formed with three friends in fourth grade when they were studying homonyms. Roo had friends, lots of friends, friends he’d known since preschool, friends who just shrugged and then laughed about something else when he told them his baby brother was wearing dresses to kindergarten. Roo did not want to share a room or give up his rope swing or move someplace where there was no sledding because it never snowed. Roo felt that Poppy could wear a skirt or Poppy could wear pants or Poppy could wear chain mail or a tuxedo made from bacon or a cape knit out of Jupiter’s fur, but that didn’t mean he should have to throw out half his stuff and then pack what was left into boxes and then drive two thousand miles to someplace where he had to start all over again in every way that mattered. And Rosie agreed. He was right. He shouldn’t have to do that. It was sad and unfair and very hard that he had to do that. But he did have to do it. That, she explained, was what family meant.

  “I hate family,” said Roo.

  “That too, I’m afraid,” said his mother.

  Her new job paid to ship everything, including the furniture, including the boxes, including the cars and even the dog, so they got to fly to Seattle instead of driving. The road trip would have been romantic, cathartic maybe, to feel each mile drop behind them, to watch the landscape change and change again, to eat hamburgers in sticky diners and make picnics from sad grocery stores and take over motels so beaten they could afford to stay two to a room and everyone could have his own bed. That was, Rosie thought, what a move of this magnitude should feel like, how it should be marked, but in the end, it was already the weekend before school started up again by the time they closed on the pink turret house. On the final descent into Seattle, they flew so low over snowy, craggy Mount Rainier it looked like they could hop a few feet out of the plane onto its lid and just walk down. And that’s what the whole move felt like in the end, in the beginning, epic and age-old and monumental, ice-covered and treacherous and breathtakingly beautiful.

  PART

  II

  One Thing

  School started on a Tuesday, so Poppy was allowed to have a sleepover Sunday night. At quarter to midnight, she and Aggie and Natalie and Kim were sitting in a circle on Poppy’s bedroom floor, hands held, eyes closed, the apple-passionfruit candle Poppy’d got from her Secret Santa (Kim) the year before aflame, attempting to contact Aggie’s grandfather, who had died of a stroke in June. Their moms had carefully and repeatedly impressed upon them that they did not need makeovers for they were beautiful just as they were, but earlier in the evening, the girls had tried out half a million hair and outfit options anyway because you couldn’t leave what you were going to wear or how you’d do your hair to the night before fifth grade actually started. The night before fifth grade actually started you would not have three friends sleeping over because it was a school night, and you couldn’t expect to make decisions like these on your own. Aggie and Natalie both had older sisters who could help them if they were in the mood, which they almost never were. But Kim was an only child, and Poppy had nothing but hordes of brothers, which was actually worse, so they’d spent much of the evening weighing outfit options, doing and doing and redoing hair, painting their nails, and trying out different shades of lip gloss, lip gloss being a whole lot easier to sell than lipstick or—no way at all—mascara or eye shadow, which Poppy knew her mother would never ever agree to. Then they’d watched a movie and eaten their weight in pizza, popcorn, and ice-cream sandwiches. After the movie, Poppy got the bear (Alice) and the sheep (Miss Marple) who always came to bed with her so she could go to sleep, but Aggie said she missed her grandpa, and Kim said let’s hold a séance, and Poppy had that candle so it was pretty much perfect.

  They tried to contact Aggie’s grandpa for a while, and then Poppy went to change into PJs, but when she got back, Aggie was asking the Ouija board if Oscar O’Mally liked someone, and the Ouija board said yes, but when they asked who, it didn’t say. Then Natalie asked if Mattie Underpants liked someone—his name was Underman, which would actually prove worse for him in the years to come, but they’d called him Underpants since his family moved to Seattle like Poppy’s had in first grade—and it pointed to the number seven, which who even knew what that meant. Then Natalie asked if Kim liked someone, and Kim threw a balled-up pair of socks at her, and then they had a sock fight.

  Poppy thought Aggie was the lucky one because she liked Oscar all alone, and who even cared whether he liked her back because that was not the point, whereas Natalie and Kim both liked Mattie, even though neither wanted to say so, and so who he liked back did matter a lot, and whereas Poppy didn’t really like anybody which probably meant she was a baby. It was weird because she’d known Oscar and Mattie since they were all, like, six which was basically forever, and she remembered when they did embarrassing things like when Mattie threw up on the floor in second grade and when Oscar was dressed as a cowboy and slipped on a Milky Way during the Halloween parade and cried and cried all the way back to school, holding his butt in both hands. So she liked them well enough, but she couldn’t really like them like them. A new boy, Chester, had moved in in the middle of last year, but Chester was the name of Orion’s guinea pig so she didn’t like him, and Richard had come at the beginning of third grade, but he smelled like hot dogs, so she didn’t like him either. There was Jake Irving, who used to be really nice, but lately he’d been hanging out with Marnie Alison, and her mean was rubbing off on him.

  Not liking anyone was worse than liking the same boy one of your three best friends liked because at least Natalie and Kim had something to talk about, but when they talked about boys, Poppy had nothing to talk about. And then it got worse because Kim asked the Ouija board when will Poppy grow boobs, and everyone giggled. Poppy blushed even through the blush they’d put on when they were doing makeovers, but Aggie rolled her eyes and said, “You’re so lucky you don’t have any yet. You should hope you never get any. They’re so”—she looked down at her overfull pajama top as if she’d find an appropriate adjective inside—“floppy.”

  “Aren’t they supposed to be floppy?” Natalie wore one of her older sister’s bras sometimes and stuffed it with underpants, which were smoother and softer than socks.

  “I guess,” Aggie said. “But it’s going to be really weird in gym. Everyone will be staring at me.”

  “Yeah, with envy.” Kim giggled and added, “Or lust.” She had a tiny bra that was really more like a strappy undershirt and nothing much to fill it, but it was still more than Poppy had.

  “I’ll probably get my period first too,” said Aggie. “It’s not fair.”

  “Maybe you won’t be first,” said Natalie. “My sister got hers in fifth grade, so maybe I’ll be first.”

  “I hope so,” said Aggie. “It’s going to be so gross and embarrassing.”

  “Maybe they’ll let us out of gym,” said Natalie.

  “At least the shower part,” said Kim.

  “Who will get it first?” Aggie asked the Ouija board, and they waited, genuinely worried, until it pointed to the moon, which Poppy had to admit was kind of appropriate but not really helpful, so they finally blew out the candle and worried in the dark in their own separate sleeping bags.

  Sex ed in fourth grade had had nothing really to do with sex. It was about hair and breasts and blood instead. It was about how your body was going to get gross and need modification—hair needed removal, breasts needed corralling, smells had to be prevented or masked, and then all sorts of things were going to leak out. It was truly horrifying. Right after lunch for that unit of health, the boys went in one classroom and the girls went in another. Then they all came back into their regular room for the rest of the day—math and science—looking alarmed, ashen, and shy of one another. They knew from older kids a
nd older siblings that this year, fifth grade, sex ed would truly be about sex, which horrified them even more, and there was a dance for Valentine’s Day, which just seemed like a cruel confluence. And they also knew from the same older kids and older siblings that this was their last year of shower-free gym, and starting in middle school, they’d have to get actually naked and shower together after PE. And they all wanted to die.

  It was nearly one when they finally went to bed, but they woke up early anyway. Poppy’s dad made them the same pancakes he’d been making them since first grade: vaguely Mickey Mouse–shaped, but not really, with chocolate-chip eyes and nose and banana mouths even though they were too old for Mickey Mouse and chocolate-chip pancakes. They all but split a bottle of syrup between them, so when Orion and Rigel finally wandered down, stinky and spiky haired and sleepy-looking, even though it was practically lunchtime, they had to have their vaguely Mickey Mouse pancakes with excess syrup dribbled off the girls’ plates. Orion, who was wearing a green felt fedora, held his pancake in his right hand and Poppy’s plate in his left, took a bite of Mickey Mouse ear then ran his tongue over the plate like Jupiter, bite, lick, bite, lick until he was done.

  “Eww,” the girls said.

  “You know what they loved about me when I was your age?”

  “Nothing?” Aggie guessed.

  “Table manners.” Orion opened up to show Aggie a mouthful of chewed-up pancake, and Aggie laughed, and Poppy felt like she would die of embarrassment, and Penn wondered where boys learned that, that trick of attracting girls by grossing them out, which only worked for a few years, like flirting training wheels. Maybe boys had it all along, that razor’s-edge balance of disgusting and charming, and for many years they didn’t notice or care, and for a few years girls found it fascinating, and for the rest of the time, men fought to keep it under wraps and only let it out when they were alone.

  Poppy and Aggie and Natalie and Kim had been best friends since first grade when Poppy had been the new kid, and Aggie was her new neighbor, and they’d formed the PANK Club, whose avowed pursuit changed over the years from hopscotch to bird-watching to detective agency but whose name never changed because its members never did. At first, Rosie and Penn had been silly-grateful for these girls, not just for how much they loved Poppy but for how ordinarily. Eventually, though, the girls stopped being miracles and settled into family: Poppy’s friends, who were just there at the table when Rosie came home from work, ready to be asked to stay for dinner, who came out for ice cream with them after school or bowling on a rainy Sunday, Poppy’s friends who came over for movie nights and said, “Hi, Poppy’s Mom,” when they met in the hall at school, Poppy’s friends who disappeared into her room for hours and never sent a tray of clay models crashing into shards or came out to ask for a snack and consumed an entire jar of peanut butter and two loaves of bread as happened regularly with the boys’ friends. And whereas the boys’ friends came and went and even overlapped, Poppy and the PANK Club never wavered. They told each other everything.

  Except for one thing.

  Rival Neighbor Princess

  They never planned to keep Claude a secret. It was an accident. It was an accident plus opportunity plus special circumstances. You can say that about a lot of things—Rigel and Orion said it, for instance, the time they lost their skateboard in the lake when they tried to use Jupiter as a sled dog during an ice storm—but this one was different because this one was huge. This one was different because it lasted (the twins had managed to keep their secret for less than ten minutes) and because it transformed so many lives. Usually secrets that do that are kept through foresight, scheme, and strategy, careful planning and obsessive track-covering. A lot of work. In this case though, secrets were kept by accident and then mostly forgotten. But their power was therefore no less portentous.

  Four years before Poppy’s erev fifth-grade sleepover, moving from Madison to Seattle had been like moving from Madison to the moon. They swapped the tumbled brown middle of the country for the soaring blue edge; muggy, comforting summer days for long, clear, sun-kissed ones; the much-promised rain not yet in evidence. The pink turret house had been built the same year as the farmhouse—1906—but the similarities ended there. Where the farmhouse was wide and white and open, the pink turret house was tall and formal with dark, newly polished floors and dark, newly installed countertops, with granite and burnished metal instead of worn wood and wainscoting. Where the farmhouse had been a car ride away from even the bus stop, the pink turret house was a mere driveway from the sidewalk, short feet from the street. You could see downtown skyscrapers from the front window. The dining room was barely large enough to fit the homeworking table, itself a worn and whitewashed relic of their other home, another life. The floors were perfectly smooth but still, the boys had been frustrated to learn, poor for roller-skating, being constantly interrupted by too many walls. The house had been edited over the years by a century’s worth of owners with what were clearly widely varied visions, financial constraints, and priorities. The result was a bit hodgepodge. Orion’s room was tucked into the second-floor eaves and too short to stand up in except in the middle. Rigel’s was accessible the regular way but also through a trapdoor in the back of the linen closet. The steps to Poppy’s turret led up from the master bedroom. Roo and Ben shared the basement, one sprawling room Ben turned into six by repurposing the moving boxes to make a labyrinth of bedrooms, workrooms, corners, and hideouts. The house was polished and functional, just a little odd on the inside when you looked close enough. “Like me,” Poppy said.

  Madison’s wide, amber flat was replaced with Seattle’s verdant verticality, the green hinting perhaps at the nowhere-in-evidence-yet rain but the latter a complete surprise. The pink turret house was on a hill so steep Penn thought they might need to hire Sherpas. Their main-floor living-room window looked out over their next-door neighbor’s roof. And it was this that was truly the biggest change of all: someone next door. For the first time in their lives, the kids had neighbors.

  Alone on their farm, Rosie and Penn had forgotten all about the way your neighbors’ desire to live next to a mown lawn and weeded parking strip somehow trumped yours to not care and go to yoga instead of gardening on Saturday mornings, the way their kids lay out on towels in the backyard and played bad music loudly so there was nothing you could do to stop it entering your open windows and then your open ears, the way your own horde of children holding a science experiment to determine how loud you had to yell to shatter a wineglass meant you had to worry about more than the wineglass. And the way neighbors knocked on your door within hours of your arrival, never mind your house was a mess, your hair was a mess, your kids were a disastrous mess, and you were not in the mood to be sociable. Never mind it turned out that after all the ruminating and decision making over what to move versus what to buy new, what to keep versus what to give away, what you had but wouldn’t need (sleds) versus what you needed but didn’t have (something to entertain a troupe of children in the winter that wasn’t a sled), what you really required didn’t occur to you until it was too late.

  When she heard the doorbell the first time, Rosie ignored it. The kids had never had a doorbell and spent most of the morning trying this one out until she was completely inured to its chimes. When it rang again an hour later, she was in the turret unpacking Poppy’s room and assumed someone else would get it. No one did. When Rosie finally went downstairs to investigate the third ring, she found she had the house to herself, an occasion rare enough she was irritated to have it interrupted.

  She pulled open the door to a perfectly pleasant-looking couple about her age. “We don’t want any.” Her father’s joke when friends came to visit, though these two were strangers and she wasn’t actually kidding.

  “Oh. Uh,” the female half fumbled, looked at the male half who smiled gamely, first at his wife, then at Rosie, then back again, “we wanted to welcome you to the neighborhood.”

  “Ah.” Rosie squinted at them.
Mystery solved. “Thanks.”

  “We brought cookies.” The male half raised and wiggled a plastic-wrap-covered plate to prove it. “But full disclosure: they do contain peanut butter. Oh, and raisins.” Rosie thought peanut-butter-raisin cookies were an odd combination. Rosie thought it unfair that even moving across the country wasn’t far enough to escape people’s obsession with peanut allergies. Then the man added, “And wine.” She thought he meant in the cookies until he produced a bottle from behind his back like a magic trick, but in the beat it took Rosie to reach for it, he put it back again. “Although if you’re allergic to raisins, you’re probably allergic to wine too, right? Not that it’s raisin wine, of course. Is that even a thing? Raisin wine? Or maybe you don’t drink? We don’t mean to presume. Maybe you aren’t drinkers. Or cookie eaters. Not that we drink that much, but it is nice to have a glass of wine with dinner. If you drink. If it’s good wine. Not that this is really good wine. A colleague brought it over for dinner the other night, and we never quite got there. Not that it’s crappy either. Just, you know, leftover.” Then he was quiet, which was probably for the best. They both looked at Rosie. It was her turn now apparently.