The Unlikelies

by Carrie Firestone

I touched my cup to his.

  “And to that auspicious moment when the Hamptons Hoodlum got booted from the homegrown heroes luncheon,” he said.

  “I actually met that girl,” I said. “She’s having a hard time, so let’s not call her that anymore.”

  “Hey, you know how at the homegrown heroes luncheon, when people were saying where they wish they were and I was being all mysterious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is where I wanted to be. With you,” Gordie said, leaning in to kiss me.

  “Are you serious?”

  “And can I tell you something even more embarrassing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I have spent the past three years playing the most ridiculous game.” He paused and looked at me. “So, I always try to sit strategically in class so I can just make out the top of your pants, where, if I’m lucky, your shirt will ride up a little and I’ll get a glimpse of your underwear.”

  I slapped his arm. “Oh my God. You little perv.”

  “I’m totally a little perv.”

  “How often did you see my underwear?”

  “Not often enough.”

  “I need longer shirts.”

  “No. No, you don’t. Your underwear is the reason I’m probably going to be valedictorian. No joke. Sometimes I’d be like, Screw it. I’m not going to school today. I’m going to stay home and play my harmonica. But then I’d think, Wait, what if today’s the day I get to see Sadie Sullivan’s underwear and I’m home? Can’t take that chance.”

  I covered my face with my hands. “Mortifying. And creepy.”

  He looked at me with an I’m thinking about your underwear right now expression.

  “Did you have a favorite pair?” I raised my eyebrows.

  “The purple ones.”

  “You’re kind of turning me on right now.” I moved my lips close to his.

  The fluttering.

  “You kind of turn me on all the time,” he said.

  His shirt found its way to the front seat and the electric candles scattered all over the place and Gordie’s hand found my black underwear—the ones I never, ever wore to school—and his mouth found my mouth and it was all incredible.

  We pulled the blankets up and I snuggled against him. I told him all about Shay, that I had finally had a good talk with her and things were much better. He told me he was glad because nobody on this planet is perfect and Shay was probably suffering post-inseparable-senior depressive disorder.

  We didn’t talk about the Unlikelies or what happened in New York or what I was going to do with my promise to Mr. Upton. We didn’t want to sully our perfect night with things that were too intense for almost-seniors to deal with.

  “So what’s going to happen when school starts?” I said, eating another heaping forkful of cobbler.

  “Like, as in with you and me?”

  “Yes. As in with you and me. Do you intend to be the couple who holds hands in the hallway or the couple who sneaks around in the bushes?”

  Gordie kissed my blueberry-stained lips. “Whichever gives me more access to you and your purple underwear.”

  “Okay, good. Because Hannah S. already seems to know about us.”

  “I don’t care who knows about us, Sadie.” He slid his hand up my shirt and gently held the back of my head as he moved toward me and kissed me long and hard until he finally stopped and said, “Sexy Sadie.”

  “Okay, that’s weird,” I said.

  He laughed. “That’s a Beatles song.”

  We lay in the dark with a new bout of rain hitting the car roof. Gordie held me in his arms and the world felt good and safe and hopeful again.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE PRESS COVERAGE of the Unlikelies had shifted to everybody trying to guess who we were. One news network decided the Unlikelies had originated in Manhattan and was probably somebody with connections to the East End of Long Island. Thank you, Meghan Rose Sharp.

  Our offshoot, Ebenezer, was all over the news.

  “Since when have you been interested in news?” Mom called from the kitchen, where she sipped tea and read a fall flower magazine.

  “Shh.” I turned up the volume. The news guy with the hair plugs and overly white teeth was interviewing two women in their early twenties wearing Alice-style print skirts and tank tops.

  “Are you the Unlikelies?” I held my breath, afraid they would claim our baby.

  “No. Not at all,” the glossy-haired girl with glasses said, looking directly at the camera. “The Unlikelies inspired us to create Ebenezer, you know, as in Scrooge, because Scrooge was misguided and then rehabilitated after he had an epiphany.”

  “So what exactly is Ebenezer’s mission?”

  “We are encouraging young people who might be drawn to fundamentalist and fringe groups to join us.” Glossy-Haired Girl stared into the camera again. “There are better ways to make your mark. As the Unlikelies say, ‘You’re one of us now.’”

  The news guy stuck the mic in the other girl’s face. “Do you know who the Unlikelies are?”

  “No. But we’re all Unlikelies now, right?”

  The guy continued interviewing them until a commercial break.

  Damn, they were good, Jean texted.

  Who’s our spokesperson? Gordie texted.

  You, Jean texted.

  Nah. I nominate Sadie.

  You’re biased cause you’re banging her.

  I’m right here, I wrote.

  Val wrote, Is this really happening?

  All because of a couple of candy necklaces for assholes.

  Alice? Is that you? Val wrote.

  Gordie wrote, She’s back!!!!!!

  I went to Alice’s that afternoon. I had something to show her. I hoped it would make her feel better. When I got there, Alice was lying on her front lawn with a blue-gray puppy curled up on her stomach.

  “Who’s this little guy?” I whispered. The puppy stirred when Alice got up, but she stayed asleep.

  “This, Sadie, is the best consolation prize my parents could ever give me.”

  “She’s yours?”

  “She’s mine.” Alice held the puppy up to her cheek. “It took my best friend being shipped off for heroin addiction to finally get a puppy, but she’s all mine.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I don’t have one yet. That’s a very important decision.” Alice took a picture of me holding the puppy and texted it to everyone.

  We went up to Alice’s room. “I have something to show you.” I took a folded copy of a newspaper article out of my back pocket and handed it to Alice. I sat next to her on the bed, and we read Hector’s obituary together silently.

  Charles Adam Sands, 19, died of a heroin overdose Saturday in a Queens bathroom. He was the son of Mary (Lewis) and Arthur Sands and brother to Lily, Maeve, and Sydney, his three “baby bunnies,” as Charles called them. Charles loved baseball, chocolate-chip pancakes, Christmas, and visiting his grandparents in Arizona. He also loved to sit with his cat, Paisley, on his chest while he watched fairy movies with his sisters. Charles got sick the first time he tried heroin at a party, when he was fifteen. His family adored him and spent every moment of every day trying to help him get away from heroin. But heroin won.

  Alice threw the obituary on the floor. “Why are you showing me this? Are you trying to make me feel worse?”

  “No. Alice, look at the date. Hector died on July seventh,” I said gently. “All that time you were looking for him, he was already gone. He died before you even started poking the poppet.”

  Alice sat back on the bed and held the puppy. She didn’t say anything, but I could tell by the way her forehead relaxed a little that she felt better. We put the puppy in her crate and listened to her cry for Alice the whole way up to the attic. The altar was pretty much the same as it had been the last time I was there, but the room was slightly cooler.

  “How do you want to do it?” I said, gathering scraps of fabric from the floor.

  “L
et’s do it the way we did the lizard’s suitcase.”

  “That sounds good.”

  We pushed all the dolls and candles and books and scraps into a big black garbage bag, and Alice went back to her puppy while I went straight to the supermarket, chucked the whole voodoo collection into the dumpster, and drove away.

  By the time I got home, half the damn world had changed their Facebook profile photos to our masked Union soldiers or one of the spin-offs, including Gordie’s mom, baby Ella’s mom, and the insufferable Meghan Rose Sharp.

  Jean: We should be getting royalties for this.

  Gordie: It was only a matter of time before this entire thing became convoluted. It’s like Einstein and the nuclear bomb.

  Nobody knew what he was talking about.

  TWENTY-NINE

  WHAT WAS SUPPOSED to be movie night with Dad turned out to be movie night with Dad, Mom, both grandmas, Mr. Ng, and Willie Ng. They purposely chose a movie that didn’t have sex scenes, because of Willie’s “issues.” They neglected to consider my issues and chose a movie with multiple brutal, bloody assault scenes.

  A few times, I caught myself finger snapping. That was when I decided to focus on the popcorn and chocolate-covered raisins. Grandma Sullivan seemed a little too into the movie. She swatted my hand every time I tried to check my phone. By movie’s end, the good guys finally took down the dirty cop, although I felt like the Unlikelies could have taken him down in thirty minutes.

  After the movie, we walked to the pizza place, except for Willie, who claimed he had someplace to be.

  Mr. Ng wanted to treat.

  “Put your money away,” Dad said.

  “Put your money away, Woody. I’ve joined the Unlikelies,” Mr. Ng announced.

  “Isn’t that something?” Dad said. “That an underground movement of Good Samaritans is going viral because of the Internet? Although my buddy in Syosset was complaining the precinct phones are ringing off the hook. Renegade tipsters turning in drug dealers, sex traffickers, secret polluters, dog-fighting rings.”

  “It’s probably a scam,” Grandma Sullivan mumbled.

  “What’d she say?” Grandma Hosseini asked Mom.

  “She thinks that the Unlikelies is a scam.”

  Grandma Hosseini gave Grandma Sullivan a thumbs-up. “That’s what I thought, too,” she said in Farsi.

  You know you’ve made it big when Grandma Hosseini and Grandma Sullivan accuse the Unlikelies of being a scam, I texted everyone.

  “She’s texting her boyfriend, Gordie,” Grandma Sullivan said with a mouthful of pizza.

  “Gordie’s gay, Ma,” Dad said.

  “He’s not gay.” Grandma Hosseini spoke perfect English when she felt like it.

  I cleared my throat. “Soooo. I have an announcement.”

  They all stopped midchew.

  “I kind of discovered Gordie isn’t gay. It was all a mix-up. And then I discovered we like each other.” They stared at me.

  “Told you,” Grandma Sullivan said.

  “Wait a minute. I let you do overnights with this punk and he’s not gay?” Dad’s face went purple. “I can’t believe that little shit pulled this.”

  “He didn’t pull anything. He’s a perfect gentleman, okay? He’s a really good guy and you don’t even have to threaten to cut off his penis and serve it on a cone with sprinkles.”

  Mr. Ng choked on his soda. “You said that, Woody?”

  “That was supposed to be a man-to-man talk between Seth and me. Kids today are pricks.”

  Mom took a sip of water. “Stop cursing, Woody.” She looked at me with an I’m really skeptical about everything expression and then surprised us with “He’s going to be valedictorian. We’ll take him.”

  “No more overnights,” Dad said sternly.

  We finished eating in virtual silence, except for the giant belch that erupted from Mr. Ng.

  That night, I had an epiphany about the promise I made to Mr. Upton.

  We hadn’t all been together since Jean ditched us on the New York street corner. After work and nonsense and drama and family commitments and no fewer than seven thousand texts, the five of us were finally meeting.

  But this meeting was all business.

  We gathered on Jean’s girlfriend’s dock in sweatshirts and jeans on the first cool night of the summer.

  Alice took the purple collar off the unnamed puppy and dipped her tiny paw into the water.

  “I feel like Sissy has given you an out, like you can really do whatever you want with the diamonds,” Alice said.

  “Canaries,” Val said.

  “Okay, we’re sitting on a dock. Nobody can hear us. I think we can safely call them diamonds.” Alice threw a half-eaten rice cracker in the water.

  I opened my Woody’s Ice Cream tote bag and took out four small packages wrapped in brown paper and tied with yellow ribbons.

  They tried to cut me off with jokes and speculation, but I held up my hand.

  “Let me just get through this,” I said, lining up the packages on the dock in front of me. “This was my promise to Mr. Upton. And it’s my decision. So here’s what I’ve decided: Most of the diamonds will go into a safe-deposit box until exactly four years from now, when I will summon you all back to share what you’ve learned about life and money. Hopefully, we’ll all have more wisdom after college and I will take it all into consideration and have my answer about what to do with them. That being said, the one rule is that if any one of us is in danger of not finishing college because of money, we dip into the diamonds, no questions asked.”

  “That’s awesome, Sadie,” Alice said.

  “Except that’s probably not going to be you or Gordie,” Jean said, flicking Alice on the arm.

  “Oh, please, Gordie could get disowned any minute now,” Alice said.

  “That’s it,” I said. “Pretty simple. Oh, and these are your end-of-the-summer care packages.” I handed each of them a wrapped box. “You can open them.”

  Each box contained the same three items: a candy necklace to remember how it started, a tiny plastic lizard to remember why it started, and a miniature stuffed Raggedy Andy, a tribute to our creepy doll friend.

  “Where did you find this, Sullivan?” Jean said, holding up his Andy doll.

  “Online. They were very reasonable,” I said.

  Alice leaned over to hug me. We fell over, and soon we were a pile of Unlikelies with one adorable nameless puppy.

  We knew that diamonds, as changeless and prized as they were, had limits. They couldn’t ever really begin to redeem the lizard’s evil deeds, any more than they could bring Hector back to his family, or guarantee that Izzy would never crave heroin again. They couldn’t make Javi nicer or take away Frances’s cancer or make baby Ella’s parents love her the way she deserved to be loved.

  The truth was, we didn’t need college to know that there would always be lizards. There would always be diamonds. And there would always be people willing to start unlikely revolutions.

  When Gordie dropped me off, he walked me up to the porch, where my parents were sitting under blankets listening to Springsteen.

  “Springsteen again, huh? Good choice,” Gordie said.

  “He’s the Boss,” Dad said.

  “Yes, he is.”

  “So I’m guessing we’ll be seeing a lot of you?” Dad said.

  “I hope so.” Gordie smiled.

  “Good.” Dad stood up and gave Gordie one of his firm thumbless handshakes.

  Before bed, I texted Jean and Val and Gordie and Alice. As soon as you’re home, go someplace private, take scissors, snip Andy’s crotch, and stick your finger up in there.

  Excuse me? Val wrote.

  Just do it.

  I pictured Mr. Upton’s ghost laughing with me as my friends dug into the seams of their miniature Andy dolls and extracted two yellow diamonds each and a tiny rolled scroll.

  Each scroll simply said Do something noble.

  Val’s Andy doll had a second scroll and a
second pair of diamonds. That scroll said For Javi’s medicine.

  But Javi’s an asshole, Val texted.

  Then it will be our last asshole care package.

  They all graciously accepted the canaries. That night, I didn’t wake up once.

  Daniela must have told the farm stand guys it was my last day of work because they showed up with candy and flowers and a handmade card that said Gracias, Limonada!

  I hugged them and got teary-eyed.

  “I can’t believe you’re abandoning me,” Daniela whined. She worked the farm stand until it closed after Thanksgiving. I wanted to say, You abandoned me for Candy Crush months ago, but there was no point.

  “Thank you for being so good to me that day. What would I have done if you weren’t there to catch me when I went down?”

  She laughed. “It was my pleasure. God, that seems like so long ago.”

  “Doesn’t it? Give the kiddo kisses for me. I’ll visit,” I said.

  “I’ll save the good pumpkins for you.”

  I walked out to the spot where the incident happened.

  When I thought of him, I thought of the same sound bites: the screaming and cursing, calling me an A-rab, slamming down the basket, the liquor breath. I wondered if maybe, in some deep place where a flake of love floated inside him, he had wanted to take Ella away to the mythical Hamptons where rich people sip liquid gemstones on marshmallow yachts, but somewhere along the way, the demons got him and extinguished the instinct to give his baby a better life than he had.

  Whatever his intent, he was a lizard now. I realized I could help Ella by keeping him away from her. I needed to write that letter.

  I sat at the coffee shop with my laptop, my Guide to Northeast Colleges, a caffeine buzz, and a good frame of mind. I opened a blank page and wrote my letter, the letter that would be presented to the judge, the letter that would possibly help determine his sentencing. I wrote about the incident and how terrifying it was and how it left me with blood in my urine and spleen pain and broken ribs and a bruised forehead and a scar on my face. The scar was still there. The headaches were still there sometimes. I had bad dreams. I had night terrors. I got nervous when a car pulled into the parking lot too fast. I got nervous when I smelled liquor on someone’s breath. I got nervous when I saw a baby crying. (I left out the part about stalking Ella’s entire family on Facebook. That just made me look pathetic.) The incident left me a little broken. It also left me humiliated. People made fun of me, judged me, made me feel bad about myself. I was afraid that if he got out of jail, he’d come after me. I was even more afraid of what he’d do to his baby girl.