Yesterday Gina said she couldn’t stand looking at my shitty (fifteen Hail Marys, but for Gina) sneakers anymore, and she took me to the store and told me to pick out whatever I wanted under twenty dollars. There were other choices, but the Chuck Taylors were my favorite. They’re white and they go with everything, even dresses, although no one else seems to agree with me. Bridget said they were ugly boy sneakers from five decades ago, but seeing as how most of my clothes are boy clothes from one decade ago, I think they make sense. I smile at my new white shoes all the way to church even though Fay tells me I look like a retard when I smile for no reason.
St. Agatha’s is right in the center of our town. It’s not a big church or anything, but it does have some stained-glass windows and a crucifix hanging above the altar that kind of freaks me out because Christ looks wicked skinny. All his ribs are showing and his face is hollowed out like he’s about a thousand. Half the town comes to church every Sunday, but my town is really small, so it’s not as crowded as you’d think.
Mass on Sunday is what my parents live for. My mom thumps away on the organ and my dad’s an usher. The rest of us sit in the pews and try not to make too much noise.
That’s harder than you’d think. Nothing Fay or Bridget does is ever funny outside of church, but once we sit down in those pews and the incense gets burning and Mom is thundering away on that organ, everything becomes hilarious. Even just a look will start me giggling. And Bridget is the worst. She’s got a rubber face. Somehow she can make herself look like other people. I don’t know how she does it, but all she needs to do is point to someone sitting in the pews and the next second she looks just like that person.
You try not to laugh when all of a sudden Bridget looks like an eighty-year-old woman wearing a dumb hat. But my elder sisters don’t care who started it. If they catch Nora and me laughing, they pinch us or twist our fingers. The worst part is that if the monkey bites and thumb crackers don’t work, we laugh even harder, because once a giggle fit gets going, trying to stop it only makes it worse, and if even one peep comes out of us at the wrong time, our mom will hear it all the way up in the choral balcony.
Mom’s got superhero hearing. She can hear our cat Geronimo walking across a carpet.
It’s not that I want to be disrespectful, it’s just that lately it all seems … well, kind of silly. The music and the smoke and the farty old priest blabbing on about the love of Christ and then he goes ahead and says we’re all sinners and sinners go to hell, and then I got thinking that if I loved someone I’d never send them to hell, and a couple of months ago I realized I just don’t see the point of coming to church in the first place. If I’m already going to hell—because if you’re Catholic, you believe everyone was born a sinner—what does it matter what I do?
The more they try to explain Original Sin to me—and believe me, they’ve sat me down and tried to explain it a lot—the less I get it. Blaming a baby for something someone ate a million years ago is just about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, and I told them so.
That’s when I got kicked out of Sunday school. I had to say I-don’t-know-how-many rosaries, and my dad looked really sad. They let me back in after my mom went and had a talk with them, but even still my dad looks at me like he’s worried I’m going to pop or something. I try to keep my mouth shut for his sake, but he’s right. I can feel the questions building up in me, and one of these days a question they don’t like is going to come flying out.
I make it through church with only one bruise on my thigh, from Gina. Monkey bite. Yeah, Gina pinches me too, sometimes, but I’m not afraid of her the way I am of Fay. With Gina you always know that she’s doing it for your own good. She was just trying to get me to stop laughing when Bridget pointed out a woman picking a wedgie as she got up to get communion. Gina actually saved me from getting in worse trouble with Mom, and Gina always looks like she hates doing it, which is good. When Fay pinches you, you can tell she likes it. That’s the scary part. She likes it, and you know if other people weren’t around, she wouldn’t stop.
Sometimes I think about what I might have to do someday if she doesn’t stop hurting Nora or me. Well, at least I can leave church knowing one thing. Thinking the way I’m thinking means I’m definitely going to hell, so I don’t have to worry about how many times I’ve taken the Lord’s name in vain this week, because that horse has already left the barn.
Even when church is over it’s not really over, at least not for my family. There’s always some kind of coffee-and-doughnut thing in the basement or out on the lawn. The basement is for when it’s raining. I hate going down there. It always smells like cigarettes from the alcoholics who go there to smoke on Saturday nights instead of getting drunk. Today is a nice day, so luckily, we’re out on the lawn. The Bianchis attack the doughnuts. We don’t get sweets at home. We only get sweets from the priests.
I get held up by my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Brown, so I don’t get to the doughnut table in time. I really like Mrs. Brown. She says that she knows I’m going to accomplish Great Things. She talks in capital letters when she says it, too. I like that. I like that I know her well enough to know her punctuation. She was always big on punctuation.
When I get to the demolished doughnut table, I see Fay standing close by with three doughnuts in her hands. One of them is a Boston cream. Fay always gets the most doughnuts because she shoves everyone else out of the way and takes them. My empty stomach rumbles. Everything goes hazy for a second, and my ears start ringing. Oh boy. I’d better not faint.
“Fay?” I ask. “You gonna eat all those doughnuts by yourself?”
She licks her lips, still working on a cinnamon cruller. She takes another bite and chews. Her lips and tongue go everywhere. She’s got a real long tongue, and she chews with her mouth open.
“Whaz one worth to ya?” she says. Her lips let loose a big, wet hunk of cruller. She doesn’t even care that it lands on her dress.
I think about it because I’m hungry. Mom and Dad don’t let us eat before Mass, because the Body of Christ should only be received on an empty stomach. I woke up at six and it’s eleven now. That Boston cream looks darn good. But if I say yes, it’s like the favor that never runs out.
The thing with Fay is, if you owe her for one little thing, she thinks you owe her forever. Two weeks ago I asked her to help me take out the garbage because it was too heavy for me to lift, and after that she kept saying that I owe her for everything. She did it, like, a thousand times. She said, “Annie, give me the stamps Grandpa sent you because you owe me.” And, “Annie, make my bed. You owe me.”
The bed making I didn’t mind so much. I spit on her pillow while I did it, so it’s not like a favor at all. But the stamps are different. I like collecting stamps almost as much as I like collecting stickers. I have a book for each and I’ve just about filled both up. The stamps I do because my grandpa, my mom’s dad, does them. When I get to see him, which isn’t too often, we look through our collections together. He’s got stamps from World War I, and I’m the only one of his grandkids who likes to collect stamps, so it’s something we do together, which is nice.
I prefer to collect stickers, really. They’ve got unicorns and teddy bears on them and I think they’re way prettier, but I don’t mention that to Grandpa because he’s a stamp man. And now I don’t know what I’m going to tell him when he asks about the stamps Fay took. I guess I’ll have to say I didn’t get them.
I hate lying to Grandpa because I only see him every now and again on account of the fact that he lives miles and miles away, and because he’s the only grandparent I’ve ever known. My older sisters all knew Grandma, Grandpa’s wife, and they tell me I got lucky she died before I was born. Miri says Grandma was even worse than Mom. You never knew when she was going to go off, and sometimes she would even go off on Mom. But I don’t like to think about that.
Anyway, owing Fay favors didn’t stop until yesterday when I told her no. I didn’t want to give her the friendship bra
celet that Kristin Gates gave to me. I just wouldn’t do it. So she beat the stuffing out of me. Luckily, Nora got Aurora, and Aurora lost her mind when she saw that Fay was after me. Aurora looks delicate, but when she gets really angry she’s scary. She’s like Mom in that way.
One good thing about being the baby is that none of the bigger kids will let anyone hit me, not even a little bit. See, I’m like Switzerland. Everybody likes me, and they all know I’m too little to defend myself. Wish I could say the same for Nora, because Aurora just lets Fay whale on her.
Fay takes the last bite of her cruller. My vision blurs. They really ought to let us eat something before Mass. Fay licks her lizard lips. She’s just waiting for me to crack.
“Annie?”
I turn around and see Jordan Dolan standing behind me with two doughnuts on a plate. One is a Boston cream. He jerks his head to the side, and in Jordan Dolan speak, that means follow me. So I follow him.
We sit down at a picnic table and Jordan takes a second paper plate off the bottom of his and carefully shifts the Boston cream onto it. I’m not surprised he brought two plates, or that he knows my favorite doughnut. I’m not even surprised he remembered to bring napkins.
The thing about Jordan is that everything he does is thought out way in advance. He’s the exact opposite of me. I always wing it, but he says he likes that about me because I’m spontaneous and that’s where some of the best ideas for our projects come from. Like when we built the volcano and I said we should put glitter in the goo and a tied-up Barbie doll at the top, like she was a human sacrifice. It looked awesome.
He gestures to Fay with his chin. “That’s one of your sisters, isn’t it?” he asks, breaking his doughnut in half. He likes plain old-fashioned ones. No glaze or anything.
“Yeah,” I say, slinking down a little as Fay glares at us. I don’t like the way she’s looking at Jordan. It’s like she’s thinking of something mean.
Jordan looks back at Fay, and he doesn’t look away. I’ve seen Jordan do this before with some of the boys from school, like Wilson Williams and Richie O’Brian, usually when they get after Jimmy because of his ears or Sarah Bernstein because she’s Jewish. Jordan could make a pile of pillows uncomfortable just by staring at them long enough. Fay gives me a snotty look and then goes away. I realize I’ve been holding my breath and let it go.
“Thanks,” I say, picking up my doughnut.
Jordan doesn’t say anything, but that’s okay because I don’t need him to. I know he means you’re welcome, even if we never say anything about this again. I enjoy my doughnut in peace and quiet for a while.
“Is it a sailboat?” I ask. I know he knows what I mean, because sometimes it takes days to have a conversation with Jordan Dolan, but we always pick right up where we left off and neither of us ever gets confused about it.
“Uh-huh,” he says, rolling the spongy middle of his doughnut between his finger and thumb. “And it has an outboard motor. But I didn’t build that. My dad did.”
I nod. I don’t know what an outboard is, but I get the gist of it.
“Nice Chucks,” Jordan says.
I frown, and he points down at my shoes. Of course Jordan would know a cool name for them. Jordan knows all about cool stuff because he’s rich. “Thanks. My sister bought them for me,” I say, pulling my bright white feet out from under the table. “Not Fay, the mean one. Virginia, Gina. She bought them for me with her babysitting money yesterday. She’s the bigger one.”
He frowns and scans the crowd. I can practically see the wheels in his head turning. I like to watch Jordan think. He looks so serious it makes me want to crack a joke. Making Jordan laugh feels like laughing in church, except I don’t get in trouble for it.
“The goth?” he asks, spotting her. I don’t know what that is, but he’s looking in Gina’s direction, so I nod.
“Did you finish your homework yet?” I ask. He nods. Of course he finished. I haven’t even started mine yet.
“Did you find your destiny yet?” he asks in return.
Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Now I feel bad because of Carl Sagan. He’s counting on me.
“Not yet,” I say with a shrug. “But it shouldn’t be too hard. I mean, I’ve got sisters and a brother who are really good at a lot of stuff, so I should be really good at something, too.”
“You’re good at talking to people,” Jordan says.
I scrunch up my face. “I like talking to people, but that isn’t a destiny. That’s, like, what you do at lunch,” I say with a laugh.
Jordan just looks at me. Usually, I know what his looks mean, but this time I can’t figure it out. It’s weird not to know what Jordan’s thinking, seeing as how I’ve been able to figure him out since the first week of first grade.
We were on the playground and Rob Winchell kept cutting the line for tetherball. Jordan just took hold of the ball and kept it, not letting anyone play until Rob agreed to go stand at the end. When the teachers tried to find out what was wrong, Jordan wouldn’t say anything.
But see, Jordan was upset, and that’s why he wasn’t talking. Kind of like Nora, but different. She freezes up when you put too much pressure on her, but it’s not that Jordan freezes up, he just refuses to talk when he can tell no one will understand him. He clams up.
So, anyway, I totally saw that the teachers needed to go away, so I told them that Jordan was handling it and we’d play in a second as soon as Rob Winchell stopped being such a ding-dong. And Jordan and I have been friends ever since, because I could tell that he hates anything that’s unfair, like someone cutting the line, but he also likes to handle things himself without going and blabbing to the teachers.
“Annie, it’s time to go,” Nora says. She hovers over me, so I can tell I’m already late. I don’t know how I managed to get late, because I feel like I just sat down with Jordan, but Nora hovering means I’m doing something wrong. Nora’s a champion hoverer.
“Bye,” I say, smiling at Jordan. “Thanks for the doughnut.”
For a second it looks like Jordan wants to say something else, but then he just nods. I follow Nora to the car, worried. I feel like I didn’t give him enough time to say what he needed to say, and now I’ll never know.
“Was that your boyfriend?” Bridget teases as soon as she slides open the back door of the van. She and Fay are holding the door open, but they’re blocking it, too.
“What did you give him for that doughnut?” Fay asks. Half of her upper lip is pulled up so I can see her fangy teeth.
Does she think I paid him? Jordan’s not like that. He’d never charge me for a free doughnut. Fay definitely would, though.
“I didn’t give him anything,” I say, shrugging. “He’s my lab partner.”
Fay and Bridget look at each other and go, “OOOH,” with their voices sliding all up and down.
“Just ignore them,” Nora whispers in my ear.
“Fay and Bridget. Stop acting like idiots and get out of the way,” Evangeline snaps. She’s behind the wheel and JP is in the front seat.
They move so we can climb in, but not until Fay gives us the stink-eye. Great. Now she’s going to get back at us for making Evie yell at her.
JP is looking out his window. “Is that him?” he asks, pointing at Jordan. He’s walking across the parking lot with his hands in his pockets.
“Yeah,” I say. We all watch him get into a shiny black BMW.
Evie and JP look at each other. Their eyebrows are practically on top of their heads.
“He’s really cute,” Evangeline says, like she’s shocked.
I don’t know what to say. Jordan is Jordan. I never thought about how he looked before. I mean, sure, I’ve thought about how he looks because I look at him all day, every day, seeing as how we’re in every single class together. He’s got brown hair that gets these big curls in it when he hasn’t had a haircut in a while. He’s got hazel eyes that are almost gold, and really long eyelashes like a girl. He used to get teased for them at the begin
ning of first grade, but that didn’t last long. All of a sudden the bullies stopped teasing him and started avoiding him. I never found out why, though. I asked, and he clammed up. But that’s Jordan for you.
“What do his parents do?” JP asks.
“Huh?” I ask. I forgot what we were talking about.
“Your lab partner. What do his parents do?”
“His mom’s a lawyer. I have no idea what his dad does. Jordan told me he buys and sells companies. What do you call that?” I ask.
JP cranes his neck to look back at me. “Wealth,” he says quietly.
“What’s his house like?” Bridget asks, excited.
I shrug. “We always do our projects together in the ACT room at school,” I tell them. “All the tools and supplies are there for us to use, and we don’t even have to pay for them.”
JP stares at me for a while. His lips are pressed together so I know he’s upset about something. “Be careful,” he tells me.
I laugh. “You don’t have to tell me. Jordan already burned me once with the glue gun on accident last year when we were making a housing for the circuit board for his electricity project.” I twist my left arm around so JP can see the pink scar just above my elbow. “See right there? It really hurt.”
JP smiles suddenly, reaches back, and ruffles my hair. “I’ll bet it did, Shrimpy.”
“I think we’ve got a few more years,” Evangeline says to JP. She sounds relieved.
I look between the two of them. “A few more years of what?” I ask, but no one answers. Evangeline just shakes her head when she turns the key in the ignition.
We have to wait behind Jordan’s dad’s BMW to get out of the parking lot. Everyone is really quiet while we drive home. I know what they’re thinking, because I’m thinking it. They’re thinking Jordan’s dad’s BMW probably has a radio that works and air-conditioning and, like, seats in the back and stuff.
Snow Lane Page 5
