by D. G. Driver
“That’s different,” he said, throwing sliced onions into a hissing pan of butter. “Look, I didn’t get a degree and can do things some college grads can’t, but they still get paid more. They get more validity. Don’t you want that?”
“Of course I want that,” I said. “I’m still going to college, Dad. But not to do what you and Mom do, that’s all.”
His eyes got teary from the onions. I could feel the spicy waves stinging my eyes too. He didn’t say anything, though. Instead he threw the rest of the vegetables into the frying pan. I listened to them hiss in the olive oil as I waited for him to continue the conversation. I watched him cook until the vegetables softened and the green smell permeated the room. As his sole interest focused on browning onions and peppers, it was clear that he didn’t plan on speaking to me anymore for the evening.
I headed upstairs to my bedroom and shut the door behind me. Under my bed I kept a box stocked with snack cakes and candy bars. I ate two Ding Dongs and figured they would be more filling than my dad’s meatless fajitas anyway. My parents would freak out if they knew I ate this junk. They never put a fraction of processed food in their mouths, nor meat, nor sugar unless it came from fruit.
I grabbed my phone and called Haley.
“Hey, turn your TV a little to the right,” I said. I sat on my bed and looked out my window. Now I could see the screen across the fifteen feet that divided our houses and through her bedroom window to the far wall where the TV rested on her dresser. Some kind of reality show like Dumbest Criminals was on. The picture was tiny, but it was better than nothing. “What’s happening?”
Even though we could both see each other and could talk from the windows without phones like we did when we were kids, we preferred to sit on our beds not looking at each other and use the phones as if we were miles apart. It was way more comfortable.
Haley groaned. “It’s pretty boring tonight.” Then she laughed really hard. “Well, that was funny!”
“What happened? I couldn’t see it.”
“I can’t explain it, really,” she said. “Your parents should let you get a TV for your room.”
“Haley, you know they won’t.”
“I know,” she grunted. “Do you know that they haven’t even spoken to my mom since they found out she leaves the TV on all the time so our dog won’t get afraid when everyone’s gone or asleep?”
“It wastes electricity.”
“Yeah? Well, they should see our clawed up kitchen door after the last time the dog freaked out when he was left by himself.”
“Your dog is weird.”
“Your parents are weird,” she said. Then she added a quick “no offense” as if that made it okay.
I bit my lip. It’s kind of one thing to insult my own parents; it always got on my nerves to hear someone else do it. I tried to play it off like it was no big deal. “They’re just hippies at heart. They’re harmless, really.” I popped half the Ding Dong in my mouth.
“I saw you guys at the Washington U booth tonight. You change your mind?”
“No,” I said, choking on the cake. “I just took the brochure to make him happy, but he’s pissed now because I told him I don’t want to go there and be a clone of my mom. He doesn’t get that being a lawyer doesn’t interest me.”
“You can’t help that.”
“They make me feel so guilty, though,” I told her.
“Don’t,” she said back. I watched her pick up the remote and turn the TV off. “It’s your life, not theirs. And it’s not like you want to do something crazy like drop out of school or spend the rest of your life working at the mall. You still want to do great work.”
“I do. I want to do something that’s my own, you know? Find my own cause to get behind, not just ride their coattails.”
“That’s why we’re starting the Recycling Club at school,” she said.
I laughed. “Well, that’s hardly a new cause, but okay.”
Haley came to the window and sat on the sill. I noticed that she had changed out of her school clothes and was wearing her pajamas. Her hair, usually up in a ponytail, was long and wet from a shower. It seemed more brown than blond that way, and I liked it better. Well, except for the frown she had going on under it.
“So I have to tell you this,” she said. I leaned against my wall and thought how it might be easier to open our windows and talk directly at each other. She was kind of whispering, though, like she was telling a secret, and I guess I wouldn’t be able to hear her without the phone. “I read what Regina posted on her wall. She said if anyone else in school wants to come up with a Recycling Club, she’d make sure it passed through the Student Council review, but she was not going to pass yours because you’d probably be running through the school snatching soda cans out of people’s hands and tearing the pep rally posters off the walls while screaming about how much paper was being wasted.”
It took me a second to process what she was saying. “Wait! You’re ‘friends’ with Regina?”
Haley waved her hand like that wasn’t important. “She ‘friends’ everyone because she wants to have the biggest number to show how popular she is. She never actually responds to anyone else’s stuff.”
“I can’t believe you bother to read what she writes,” I said. “She’s an idiot.”
“She’s President of the Student Council, and without her support tomorrow we have no club. I don’t think we’re going to get it. She hates you.” Then her voice weakened as she looked away from me, “Us.”
I wished I didn’t recognize the hitch in her voice. Poor Haley. I remember when she was ten and new in town. Cute, blonde, and bubbly. The kind of girl who could feel comfortable in any crowd and should have been popular. She should have had lots of friends. But she had the bad luck to stand up in class on her first day of school and introduce herself as my new next-door neighbor. Cursed forever by that mistake, she had no choice to be my best friend because if she didn’t hang with me she wouldn’t have anyone to hang with at all.
“I’m sorry, Haley,” I said.
“When we do this presentation tomorrow, can you just try to convince them that you’re not like your parents? That you’re not going to do anything weird or obnoxious? We just want to put out some recycling bins and help people know what can and can’t be recycled. We’re not going to go rioting across campus and hijacking people’s backpacks looking for recyclables.”
My throat knotted up. Did Haley really see my parents like that? After all these years, did she really worry that I would behave like that? I embarrassed her. “Tell you what. I’ll let you take the lead on this. You do most of the talking.”
Haley smiled and nodded enthusiastically. “That sounds great! Oh! And remember to wear your brown and green. We’ll be Earth Sisters!”
“Got it.”
“The Student Council might think we’re dorks, but that doesn’t matter.”
“No, it does not,” I agreed. “They’re popular, mean, hateful, and selfish, but they’re not entirely stupid. We—you—can convince them to let us have our club.”
Haley wished me luck with my dad before hanging up and closing her blinds. I half wanted to go on the computer and see if Regina Williams would ‘friend’ me, but then I decided it wasn’t worth it.
Dad never did call me to dinner or to “talk things out.” Instead, he did one of his famous stand-offs, where he wouldn’t speak to me until I apologized and gave in to his wishes. I didn’t, though. I didn’t feel like letting him win this time. I was mad too and could be just as stubborn if I wanted to be. I planned to wake up the following morning and leave for school without so much as a nod to the man.
Mom’s frantic call in the middle of the night changed everything.
Chapter Two
No good calls ever came at two o’clock in the morning. Only ones that wipe out any hope of having a normal day. On this particular morning, it wiped out hope of anything ever being “normal” again.
The piercing scream of the phone yanked
me out of my dream. One moment I was swimming with dolphins in the warm, blue waters of Waikiki. The next, I found myself on my stomach, arms above my head, sheets and pillows everywhere except covering me and keeping me warm.
I bolted upright and faced the clock on my bedside table. My movement was so quick, I wasn’t even fully aware my eyes were open until I registered the digital numbers clicking into place. 2:03.
By the time my hand touched the receiver the phone had stopped ringing. My sleepy brain wanted to believe it hadn’t actually rung at all, but the soft murmur of Dad’s voice coming from his bedroom across the hall assured me that it had. He answered so fast, like he expected the call. When Mom was out of town, I think he slept with his hand wrapped around the phone in case it was her.
Getting calls like this wasn’t that unusual. My dad’s business was a nonprofit organization called EE Alerts, a website and call center for environmental emergencies that was basically a one-man operation run out of our house. What was the call about this time? Hurt animal? Fallen tree? Probably not. Even though we get those kinds of calls a lot, and I mean A LOT, those calls could usually wait until morning. Only big calls came this early. Forest fires. People chaining themselves to trees. That kind of thing.
Or it could be Mom calling from Alaska. She was okay when she called last night, but maybe the cold up there caused her to get sick, like “go to the hospital” sick. Anchorage in September has got to make the weather here in Olympia seem like summer. I pulled a blanket over my knees to warm up.
Or maybe...
Oh, the way my mind can go to the absolute worst thing at two in the morning. I hated myself for thinking it. This was my mom we were talking about, not a character from a primetime TV drama.
Melodramatic or not, though, I couldn’t help thinking just then about how she told me that people from the organization she had been lobbying against had been harassing her. Maybe they did something to her. Something horrible that warranted a call hours before the sun came up. Maybe she was in real danger.
I couldn’t wait the five minutes until Dad told me who called and what about, so I slipped my fingers around the receiver and used my other hand to cover the mouthpiece so no one could hear my breathing.
At the sound of my mom’s anxious voice, I felt instantly nauseous.
“Peter! Are you awake? Are you hearing me?”
I wanted to scream into the phone, “Mom, are you okay?”
Luckily my dad asked for me.
“Calm down, Honey, what’s the matter?”
Good advice, I thought. Calm down. Just listen.
“Affron’s rolling,” my mom sputtered. “Their ship was sighted off the Canadian shore three and a half hours ago! If they stay close to the shore, they’ll be passing you any time now.”
“I thought they were going to wait,” Dad said.
My mom had no patience for this. “I thought so too, Peter, but apparently they didn’t.”
I carefully hung up the phone. Oh, that was all. Not that this threat from Affron Oil was a little thing, by any means. But Mom wasn’t hurt. That was what really mattered.
Especially after the fight we had on the phone before I went to bed. I didn’t want those stinging words to be the last one we ever shared with each other. How could I live with that?
Okay. No point in dwelling on it. My mom wasn’t under immediate threat, so I would have time to apologize and maybe try to fix things with her later. Unfortunately, the news Mom relayed made going back to sleep an impossibility. She had called before dawn on purpose to let us know we had to get up and over to the nearest beach ASAP. And our Northwest American beaches weren’t nice and warm like the one I’d been dreaming about. Odds were, too, that it would be raining.
I shut my eyes and listened for the familiar tap-tapping on my bedroom window. It rained so much here in Washington that I was used to tuning it out, and I had to really work to hear it. Just a drizzle, it sounded like. Enough to make the roads slick. The sand at the beach would be easier to walk on because it would be firmer. But it would be extra sticky and hard to get off our shoes and clothes, even without the oil that most likely would be splattered everywhere.
While rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I rolled out of bed. Like a firefighter to the beat of a pulsing siren, I jumped into my jeans, sweatshirt and rubber boots. I yanked my hair back into a ponytail and covered up the loose strands with a cap. It didn’t matter what I looked like. No one who mattered would see me. Besides, what else could I do with my hair? It was long, straight, and black. No one has ever had straighter hair than me. I laugh at girls who use straightening irons on their hair. Honestly. Why would anyone erase her curls?
I headed down the hall as Dad hung up the phone. My father’s groan let me know how serious the situation could be down at the beach. I knew Dad needed a couple minutes to get ready, so I went ahead and ducked into the bathroom to splash some cold water over my sandy eyes and brush my teeth.
I beat my dad downstairs to the study and began filling the duffel bags with equipment. We’d need to take pictures and video, so I packed the cameras and some lighting equipment. My dad had drummed the routine into my head. How many times had he told me, “Anything we get on tape will be enormously valuable to our cause. Years worth of damning press releases and propaganda brochures could come from this mission.” So far, we had never gotten any pictures over the years that were impressive enough to do anything worthwhile for the many environmental causes we fought for except fill fundraising pamphlets.
I worked quickly and efficiently. Lighting equipment in the blue bag. Camcorder in the green bag, with extra DV cassettes for it and some 35mm rolls in the side pocket. The film camera I hung around my neck, and my cell phone was in a case attached to my belt. It took grainy pictures, but I liked to have it just in case. My dad would be taking the pictures, but I could carry the cameras for now.
Above my head, Dad stomped around his bedroom, probably looking for his boots. He wouldn’t find them.
“They’re in the garage, Dad. You left them there on Friday!”
The stomping ceased.
I dragged the bags out to the front door and was just dipping into the kitchen to grab some snack foods when my dad came down the stairs. I looked up and smiled. He did not smile back. In fact, by the way he sneered at me, it was clear that my attempt at a friendly greeting had insulted him.
“I’ve got everything ready,” I said. “I’m pretty sure, I do. I double-checked. So, let’s get moving.” He didn’t move or say anything. I noticed his shoeless feet. “Did you hear me about the boots?”
My dad just stood there. He didn’t note the equipment ready to be carried out to the truck. He didn’t seem to care that I knew where he left his boots. Instead, he stared at me coldly. “Where do you think you’re going?”
After seventeen years of being forced to go to protest after protest, rescue mission after rescue mission, and so on, my dad asked where I was going? Was he insane?
Stumped by my dad’s sudden lack of brain cells, I stood there in the doorway gawking right back at him. I couldn’t find a way to answer his ridiculous question without being equally obnoxious. Impulses running through me urged me to shout, “You don’t want me to help? Fine! I’ll go back to bed!” But I knew better. Saying something like that would only make things worse.
Finally, I summoned up these words: “The phone rang, and I assumed there was a problem you needed help with since I heard you getting up.”
He nodded. “It was your Mom. One of those leaky oil ships is headed this way. I’m going to see if it’s causing any damage.” His eyes drifted to the bags and then back to my face. “Go back to bed, June. I don’t need you to help. I’ll call Randy.”
“I’m already dressed,” I said. “I’ve got everything packed.”
“I’m not going to make you do something you don’t want to do,” he said. “If you don’t want to be a part of the work your mother and I take pride in, then that’s your c
hoice. Go back to bed.”
Really? He was still hanging on to the fight from last night? Here we were at 2:25 in the morning with the possibility of a huge environmental emergency taking place off our coastline, and he was going to get all pouty because his feelings were hurt?
I wanted to scream some sense into him. Just because I wanted to major in a different area of study than my mother? Just because I wanted to go to a college in another place from the one my father’s people had lived in for thousands of years? Just because I wanted to try something new, he didn’t have to jump to the conclusion I wanted no part of his life.
But I didn’t. I stayed as cool as I could. Someone had to, because Dad was clearly not interested in being sensible.
“I’m going with you,” I said as evenly as possible through gritted teeth. I came up with a reason that he wouldn’t be able to argue against. This tact was always important when dealing with my parents—they were activists, after all. Arguing was their life. “I want to go whether you want me to or not. This kind of operation goes right along with a Marine Biology major. If there’s an oil spill, there will be hurt sea life. My volunteer work with them will help toward my college applications.”
“I’m sure you’ve got enough volunteer work credits to get you into college without applications or even having to pay tuition,” he said sarcastically, finally moving off the stairs and through the mudroom leading to the garage door. “You could wallpaper the house in recommendations from professionals.”
Okay, that was rude. I followed my dad even as my face stung from that verbal slap. “That’s true,” I told him, working a little harder at maintaining my tone, “but since you and Mom only deal with environmental issues that affect the state of Washington, a lot of those recommendations won’t do me any good in Southern California where I want to apply for school.”
Dad shut the door in my face.
I leaned against the washing machine and waited. He had to come back in to get the rest of his stuff. A beat later, boots on his feet, he stomped back through the doorway and whisked past me. I continued explaining myself.
