“Whoa! Watch out for Mom’s stuff,” he says, hauling me up by my arm. He ruffles my frizzy hair and gives me a little more space to get by. JP takes up a lot of room because he has a lot of muscles. He does a ton of sports at school and has, like, five letterman jackets, even though he and Gina are both only going to be sophomores when school starts up again.
Sometimes people call them Irish twins, but I don’t get it because most of the Irish people I know aren’t twins. Anyway, JP is like the exact opposite of Gina, so maybe that’s what they mean? Irish twins are like reverse twins or something?
JP is super popular in school and good at pretty much everything. You can’t get into his bedroom without tripping over a trophy for sports or academics. Not that I’m allowed in his bedroom, but still. I like that he’s always so nice to me and he always seems to listen when I’m telling him how I’m upset about something. Maybe that’s why other people like him so much, too. JP does a lot of listening, from what I can tell from all the girls who are always hanging around him.
And Gina—well, Gina’s not popular. She never gets any phone calls, and she spends a lot of time listening to this band called the Cure. For some reason that makes her a big weirdo.
Now that JP’s out of the bathroom, Virginia, Fay, and Bridget dart in. Aw, crap (five Hail Marys). I missed my one chance. Bridget slams the door in my and Nora’s faces.
“But I really have to go,” Nora says, shifting from foot to foot.
We hear the snap of a cassette tape as it’s turned on. Music blares from behind the door. Led Zeppelin. “Whole Lotta Love.”
“Please,” Nora begs.
“You gotta sing the next line of the song,” Fay yells back. The cassette is paused. I hear Bridget snickering.
“Yeah,” Bridget says, because everything she says is something that Fay said first. “Sing the next verse of the song we were just playing and you can come in and pee.”
“So childish,” Gina says. “Just let her in.”
“No!” Fay snaps back. “I want her to sing.” When Fay gets an idea in her head, she’ll die before she lets it go.
Nora’s so full of pee her brown eyes are turning yellow, but I keep my mouth shut because if I say anything right now, Fay and Bridget will just get worse.
Nora doesn’t have a choice. She clears her throat and tries to sing. “Way, way down inside—” She breaks off.
“And then?” Fay was laughing, but now she stops and she sounds totally serious. “There’s more.”
“It’s just a bunch of yelling and noises,” Nora says. She’s crying now and I feel my throat choke up with her. It’s like when the doctor hits your knee and your leg just shoots out. If Nora cries, I cry. “Come on, Fay, I can’t hold it any longer!” she begs.
“Let her in,” Virginia orders.
“No,” Fay says. I can practically see the sneer on her lizard lips through the door. “Make me, Vagina.”
Uh-oh.
Nora and I jump back as someone gets slammed into a wall on the other side of the door. There’s a lot of snarling and slapping and their voices are really high and screechy. There’s a thump as a body hits the floor.
It’s even money, to tell you the truth. Gina’s the biggest, but it’s not like Fay is tiny like Nora and me. Fay has a thick back and really broad shoulders, like a boy. And she plays field hockey. She’s like the captain or something, because she always finds a way to win.
Well, I know how she wins. She cheats. Fay cheats at everything, especially cards. Whenever we play, Fay always makes Nora give her the best cards, and if Nora doesn’t, she hits her. Fay hits hard.
Bridget is having a conniption fit in there, she’s laughing so hard. I hear them slam up against the door, and Nora and I jump back when we hear a splintering sound. Everything goes real quiet.
“Kids?” my mom calls.
I hear swearing on the other side of the door.
“What’s going on up there?” my mom yells up the stairs. She comes to the bottom of the stairs, where she can see Nora and me standing outside the bathroom door. “What did you do?” she asks us. Just like my mom to show up only if there’s something broken.
“Nothing,” I say. “It was them in there.”
My mom eyes Nora and sighs. “Go change your pants. Don’t put those down the chute or the whole wash will smell like pee. Put them in the sink in my bathroom.”
I look down and see Nora’s wet herself. She’s gone all pale and woozy like she does sometimes, and she’s not moving even though I’m tugging on her.
“Come on,” I say, grabbing her arm. I try to pull her into Mom and Dad’s bedroom. “Quick, before Fay—” But she doesn’t move fast enough.
“Before Fay what?” Fay asks as she pulls the bathroom door open.
“Nothing,” I mumble, pushing Nora in front of me and trying to block the wet mark on the back of her pants.
Gina brushes past us and goes down the stairs and out the front door without even getting any breakfast. I glance back and see that the piece of plywood on the inside bottom part of the door has been all smooshed in.
See, our doors aren’t like other people’s doors. They’re hollow inside, and they don’t stand up to much. You could probably punch a hole right through with your forehead if you were standing too close when you sneezed.
“You two should be more careful,” Fay says behind me. “I’m going to have to tell Mom what you did to the door.”
“Hey,” I say. “We didn’t do that.” Duh. Of course Fay knows we didn’t do it. Don’t know why I said that, except it was the first thing that popped into my head.
“Sure you did,” Fay says. She crosses her arms. “Didn’t they, Bridget?”
“I saw the whole thing,” Bridget says, nodding and snickering.
I open my mouth to argue, and Fay leans forward and flicks me right on the Adam’s apple. I can’t think of anything to say after she does that. She and Bridget walk past us.
“Come on,” I tell Nora, dragging her into the empty bathroom behind me. “I guess you’ll have to wash off in the tub, too.”
Her lips are all pressed together, and she’s crying without making a sound. I’ve gotten good at that, too, but Nora’s the champ. You’d never know she was crying if you didn’t see the tears. Her shoulders don’t even shake or anything.
“I hate her,” she whispers after we’ve got her pants off and she’s soaking in the tub.
Catholics aren’t supposed to hate anybody except the devil. It’s called Wrath, and it’s one of the Seven Mortal Sins. I just nod because I don’t want to say it and go to hell, but I’m thinking it. I’m also thinking it’s so unfair that I’m not allowed to hate Fay when she really deserves it. God must have been an only child.
Chapter Two
Did I mention I grew up on a farm?
Well, technically, I don’t live on the farm (that’d be awesome). My uncle Antonio and his wife, Constance, live on the farm. My uncle is older than my dad and he inherited most of it, and then we needed money (nobody would tell me for what) and my dad had to sell his part back to my uncle. All that happened before I was born, and now we just work the farm for extra money for our family. My aunt and uncle don’t even have any kids. Why do they get all this space while the eleven of us are crammed into a tiny house on Snow Lane?
Being born first gives you lots of good stuff. Being born last, like my dad and me, means that everybody is your boss.
It’s so hot on the farm in the summer, and there’s no way to get out of the sun when you’re working. Dad tells me to wear a hat, and I do, but it just feels hotter under it with no breeze, so I always end up taking it off.
And then I faint about half an hour later.
See, my dad’s Italian, but my mom’s Irish. Full redheaded Irish. All of my sisters got my dad’s dark hair, and most of them got the kind of skin that gets pretty and golden in the sun, but not me. I just faint, burn, and then freckle.
So here it is. I’m skinny
and shrimpy, with pouffy dishwater-blond hair (that’s what Bridget calls it), and when I smile I look like a grand piano. People keep telling me I’ll grow into my big teeth someday, but I don’t know about that. I’ve got giant teeth. I have to concentrate to keep my lips shut. Fay tells me it makes me look dumber than I am to always have my mouth hanging open, but I can’t be thinking about that all day or I’d never get anything done.
Having as many physical disadvantages as I do doesn’t make me exempt from work, though. And today is a farm day, even though I’ll be sore from falling out of bed this morning.
I go downstairs to the hall closet, where everybody’s winter coats hang. At the bottom is the boot pile. The thing about the boot pile is that it’s magic. Some days there’s a pair that fits and then bang, the next day there’s nothing. Sometimes you find just one stinking boot, and that’s the worst because you can spend forever in the hall closet looking for something, but if it isn’t your day, it isn’t your day. And today’s not my day.
“Annie, hurry up!” my mom shouts.
“I’m coming!” I holler back. I’ll have to wear my sneakers, but I’ve already worn a hole in them and Mom says she won’t buy me another pair yet because it’s almost school shopping time. Not that I ever get anything new for school anyways.
I pull on my crummy sneakers and wiggle my big toe, looking at the hole. I’ll have dirt and rocks in my shoe in under a minute, I bet. I run to the garage. Gina is up front with Mom. Fay, Bridget, and Nora are already in the back of the van. JP is probably at his Youth Fellowship meeting with the monks, and Evangeline and Aurora are on the T to Boston to rehearse with the symphony and the ballet. I climb into the back.
“Did you tinkle?” Mom asks. I climb out of the van and run back upstairs to tinkle.
When I come back down, my sisters are all looking at me like I’m something they stepped in. It’s a long drive, and nobody likes being in the van for one second longer than they have to because the van is the van.
There are some cars, like the blue Chevy Nova, which used to belong to my aunt Mary Perpetua (she gave it to Miri when Miri went to MIT), that are difficult and smelly like the van is, but you still like to ride in them because they have something about them that’s easy to love. The van is the most unlovable car ever made. It has no seats in the back (there are only two seats up front, one for the driver and one for the person lucky enough to ride up there, which is never me). There is no padding of any kind in the back of the van, and no straps to hang on to when the driver takes a sharp turn. And the air vents don’t have filters, so it always smells stinky, like car exhaust. Going to the farm in the back of the van is like spending an hour in a dryer with a bag of rocks and a fart.
“You put your shirt on backwards,” Bridget says.
“Darn,” I reply, looking down and realizing she’s right.
The thing about being dyslexic is that you think things are all lined up and doing exactly what they should, but there’s a difference between looking at something and how it’s going to look on you. I know that, but I can’t see it. My mom used to lay my clothes down on the floor for me just like I was supposed to wear them. I’d lie on top of them and then wiggle in. Easy peasy. But she stopped laying out my clothes a few months back because I’m supposed to be old enough now. I don’t know what old enough has to do with it. Unless she means that I’ll grow out of being dyslexic someday. I hope so.
I pull my arms inside my T-shirt, spin it around, and stick my arms out through the holes again.
“It’s still inside out,” Bridget tells me.
I go to pull my shirt off over my head to flip it and Fay yells at me.
“No, don’t take your clothes off! People can see in the windows,” she says, pulling my shirt back down over my head. “God, why can’t you learn how to dress yourself? I’m sick of doing it for you.”
“She isn’t even wearing a bra,” Bridget says, like I’m some kind of freak. But I don’t need a bra yet. There’s nothing there to put in one.
I can’t think of a time Fay has ever dressed me, but it doesn’t matter. Everyone’s so frustrated with me I start to feel anxious again. I look for something to count but there are no other cars yet, so no other license plates.
As my mom steps on it to merge onto the freeway, we tumble across the bumpy iron floor of the van.
Nora catches me and shows me which way is up as my mom cuts the wheel to change lanes. I brace myself against the wall and smile at her for saving me some bruises. I see Fay and Bridget shaking their heads at me.
“Retard,” Fay whispers. She looks away like she can’t stand to see me anymore.
I look out the window and watch the dark green leaves of the summer trees flick by, but it’s only so I don’t start counting. Nora doesn’t mind when I do it, but Fay, Bridget, and Gina hate it because they say it makes them look weird by relation and I’m already in enough hot water with everyone for not peeing before I came down and I don’t want to get a slap. I keep my eyes glued to the leaves, trying to ignore the license plate numbers and the mile marker numbers and the exit numbers.
I try to tell myself not to start adding, and not to start putting the sums together into multiples of three and then take the threes and put them in sets of threes, and count the sets. But I can’t help it. I see numbers coming together and branching out all the time when they fly by me like they do on the Mass Pike. It makes me feel calm. Crap (five Hail Marys), I need a two to fix that seven so I have a nine to round out my eighteenth set. I hold the four on the back of the Volvo in a “remainder set” while I search for a two or a five or an eight—
“Your lips are moving,” Nora whispers in my ear. She slides in front of me and hands me a comb. “Braid my hair,” she tells me.
I sigh and gratefully start sectioning her hair into threes. Now I can count for a reason. I’ll do three rows of French braids. Nora’s hair is slippery-soft and she’s got a ton of it, so I’ll have to pull it tight. I’ll be at it forever, which is a good thing.
I don’t mind Shrimpy. I don’t mind Pukatrid. But I hate to be called Crazy. It’s how they look at me when they say it that bothers me. Like they’re worried about me. Or maybe they’re scared. Miri told me once that I was wicked smart like her, and that’s why people are afraid of me when I do stuff with numbers they don’t understand. I loved that she said that. I loved it most that she said we were alike. But I don’t really get what she means when she says I’m smart like her. Miri’s got to be way smarter than me, because Fay and Bridget always say I’m an idiot.
You’d think since I like counting so much I’d be great at math, but I’m not. It’s the shape of the numbers that I like to think about. How they fit together. It’s making a rule, like, I’m going to add the numbers on a license plate as it flashes past. If the numbers add up to a multiple of, say, three, five, or seven, then that’s the rule today. I look at another license plate as it flashes by and add the numbers on it. If they don’t add up to a multiple of five, I have to keep adding new sets of license plate sums until I get a sum that is divisible by five. Then I start over.
Today it was multiples of three, which also happens to be my favorite. I add up the numbers as they go by, and if I can get the plates from three cars to add up to a number divisible by three (and nine is my favorite, because duh), then it fits the rule for today. And when I get the numbers to fit, I feel better. Like, something you can’t prepare for—a license plate flashing by—adds up just the way you want it to and that means that everything is going to be okay today. Sometimes it means I have to hold dozens of numbers in my head to make the sets work, but that’s easy for me. I can remember long strings of numbers without any trouble at all. I’m good at it. Being good at it makes me feel calm. It’s like I don’t even need to think because I’m thinking so hard. I can’t really explain it, but sometimes it’s a pain because I can’t shut it off. Especially on days when I’m nervous.
I didn’t find the damn (ten Hail Marys) two
I needed. But now I braid it into Nora’s hair. I’ll do three sets of three strands of hair and I’ll only use two rubber bands to tie it off. Shazam. I’ve got my two.
Honestly, I don’t know why my sisters think my counting is so weird. Our mom has about a half-dozen rosary beads hanging from the rearview mirror, and when she’s stuck in traffic, she takes one down and starts counting prayers on it. Mom whispers her Hail Marys and her Glory Be’s from the front seat. Why is me whispering license plate numbers that much different? But everyone in my family is worried about how things look to other people.
When we finally get to the farm, I’m carsick from staring at the back of Nora’s head. I get out of the van and brace my hands on my knees, looking at the ground real hard. I take a deep, cool breath. The best part about the farm is the ocean breezes. We’re not too far from the coast, and every now and again you get a tangy, salty sort of breeze that’s about ten degrees cooler for about five seconds before it goes back to being ninety degrees out again. But for that five seconds, it’s really nice.
What sucks (five Hail Marys) about it is knowing that I’m so close to the ocean but I haven’t been to the beach all summer, and I probably won’t go there once this year because Mom says I’m not allowed to swim anyway on account of the fact that I always seem to aim right for a riptide.
“She’s gonna barf,” Gina warns, holding Bridget back so she’s out of the blast zone.
“No, I’m n—” I say, and then barf comes shooting out of me. Ugh. I wasn’t ready for it, so most of it comes out my nose. Now I’ll smell barf all day. Wait, did I eat something blue?
I hear my sisters groaning. Calling me gross.
“I can’t help it,” I say, still bending over in case there’s more. Yup. There’s more.
Another chunky rainbow splats out of me. This one sounds like I’m shouting for some guy named Hughie, which makes me laugh, which is disgusting because I suck a ton of puke back up my nose and re-swallow it, which makes me barf again. And now I’m trapped in the never-ending barf cycle, where your barf grosses you out so much all you can do is barf more. At this point, I think I might actually barf forever.
Snow Lane Page 2
