Copyright © 2012 Deborah Kerbel
First ePub edition © 2012 Dancing Cat Books,
an imprint of Cormorant Books Inc.
No part of this publication may be printed, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1.800.893.5777.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Kerbel, Deborah
Under the moon/Deborah Kerbel.
ISBN 978-1-77086-126-8
I. Title.
PS8621.E75U64 2012a jC813'.6 C2012-900276-3
Cover design and image by: Angel Guerra/Archetype
based on a text design by Tannice Goddard, Soul Oasis Networking
Dancing Cat Books
An imprint of Cormorant Books Inc.
390 STEELCASE ROAD EAST, MARKHAM, ONTARIO, CANADA L3R 1G2
www.dancingcatbooks.com • www.cormorantbooks.com
For Kim
With love.
PROLOGUE
June 12th
The school bus chugs up the long, sloping driveway. Excited teenage chatter bounces around me like a Super Ball. I sit by myself in the next-to-last row, head down, hands pushing into my pockets, holding my breath until my lungs start to singe and wishing this rickety old bus would succumb to a sudden death. Harsh, I know, but at least it would spare me the pain of what’s coming. When we finally reach the top, I lift my head slightly and let the burning breath out. The old wooden cabin rolls into sight. There’s no sign of anyone.
Quel relief.
She must still be inside.
I pull a hand out of my pocket and wipe away the film of sweat that’s beading my upper lip. My armpits are feeling sweaty too. I’m melting with nerves. Normally, Aunt Su’s shambly little cabin is my favourite place in the world. But on this sunny June day, I’m wishing I could be anywhere else on the planet. Solitary confinement in a dank, dungeonous, rodent-infested Columbian prison cell would be preferable.
Truly.
The bus wheezes to a stop and kids scramble into the aisles, eager to see the home of Big Bend’s one and only author. Yeah, my Aunt Su holds a bit of a freak-show status around these parts (which I’m sure must thrill her to no end). I guess writers are rare in hayseed towns like ours, kind of like tropical birds over the Nunavut tundra.
Last year, in the hopes of “inspiring a new generation of budding artists,” my teacher, Ms. Harris, asked me to arrange this class visit to Aunt Su’s home. After months of nagging, I finally set it up. Now that the day is here, I’m praying with every cell in my body that artists are the only things my teacher will find budding around the old cabin.
“We’re here, everybody out!” hollers our bus driver, a middle-aged man with a sagging pot-belly and a pair of matching dragon tattoos breathing fire out of each forearm. It’s a warm spring afternoon but that doesn’t stop a cool shiver of nerves from crawling over my skin as I imagine every cringe-worthy moment that might possibly take place in the next hour. Trust me, if you could peek into my brain right now, you wouldn’t blame me for being the last one out of my seat. By the time I gather the nerve to get my legs moving, our driver is already ambling down to the edge of the property for a cigarette. I shuffle my way out of the bus. I’m definitely not in any kind of a hurry to get the visit started. Believe you me. Don’t misunderstand; I love my Aunt Su like whoa. But other people just don’t get her like I do.
Outside, Ms. Harris huddles us together in the driveway like a flock of unruly sheep. “Class, please wait here a moment while I check to make sure Ms. Chase is ready for us.” She walks up the flagstone path toward the cabin. The second she’s gone, every eye in the group turns to yours truly. Questions fly at me like a swarm of hungry black flies.
“This is where your aunt lives?”
“I thought authors were rich.”
“Isn’t she worried the walls are going to fall down?”
“How can she stand living all the way out here on her own?”
“My dad says your aunt is nuts.”
It feels like there’s a small animal chewing its way through my stomach. Merde. Why didn’t I just play sick and stay in bed this morning? I duck my head away from the questions, close my eyes, and pretend to be invisible. A minute later, Ms. Harris is back. “Okay, people, she’s ready for us. We can go in.”
And suddenly, the small animal inside me is spinning around and crunching down on my spleen. I stagger forward through the pain. As my classmates file through the front door of the cabin, I send out a desperate series of silent, last-ditch prayers to the universe.
Please let her have some clothes on … please don’t let her be smoking anything … please don’t let me die of mortification …
Aunt Su is waiting for us in her living room. She’s dressed (thank you, universe!) in a flowing, lavender-coloured muumuu that trails behind her like some kind of elegant ball gown. She’s wearing her best faux feather earrings, and her long grey hair has been pulled up into a high, swingy ponytail. She grins widely and winks as soon as she spots me. Then she lifts her arms over her head and starts waving her hands frantically to beckon the rest of the kids closer. The room is cluttered with all her crazy stuff, so we all just stand in a wobbly circle and listen while she speaks. She talks for a few minutes about writing and passion and emotions. She shows us her overflowing bookcases and tells us about her love of reading. “Remember kids, every writer is a reader first.” It’s her favourite saying; I must have heard it a thousand times over the years. Then she plucks a dog-eared novel off the shelf and reads a passage out loud to us. It’s a really sad passage, and she injects her heart into each word. By the end, she has half of us entranced and the other half in tears. Me, I’m somewhere in between.
Before we can recover, she flips on some Mozart and shoos everybody over to the giant picture window that faces the lake. The sun is shining on the waves, and it sparkles like a field of diamonds as the notes of the symphony fill the room. One by one, we take turns describing to her what we see in the water. After that, she hands out pens and sheets of paper and leads us through a writing exercise. There’s nowhere in the cabin for twenty-one kids to sit and write, so Aunt Su has us stand in a big circle and lean forward so that our backs become desks for the person behind us. We bend our bodies and write through the hilariously ticklish pen scratches across our spines. By the time we’re done, the entire room is belly-laughing, even stone-faced Ms. Harris. With so many warm, happy bodies, the little cabin is quickly transforming into a makeshift sauna, and there isn’t a drop of air conditioning around for kilometres. Aunt Su skips over to her freezer, pulls out a giant box of grape-flavoured Popsicles, and ushers us out onto the lakefront porch for a snack. Ms. Harris suddenly turns stone-faced again.
“Excuse me, Ms. Chase, but are those peanut-free? Our school has a strict policy …”
Aunt Su snorts and passes the Popsicle box around the group. “Policy, schmolicy. It’s just frozen water! You’re in my home now, not school.”
Ms. Harris doesn’t even try to argue with that one.
The group volume lowers while we all suck on the Popsicles and enjoy the cool breeze b
lowing off the lake. Aunt Su flits over to my side, her crinkly smile creasing her face like a beautiful Chinese fan. “How’d I do, my Lily-girl? Hope I didn’t embarrass you too much.”
I give her a big hug and notice how, under the muumuu, her body feels thinner than usual. “You were great,” I say. And I mean it. She puts a hand on my cheek. Her palm is smooth and warm — like sunlight sliding over my skin. Her eyes narrow with worry. “You didn’t sleep last night after our phone call, did you?”
I shake my head. “Too much on my mind.” I don’t tell her the rest of the truth — how worrying about this class visit kept my brain from getting any rest. Seems silly, now that it went so well.
Pirouetting around, she extracts a book from a small cardboard box on the porch floor and hands it to me.
“My newest baby arrived in the mail this morning. Want to see?”
Nodding, I turn the book over in my hands and examine the glossy cover. A beautiful young couple is embracing in a swirling ocean as a dark, ominous sky looms above. The title reads LoveStorm.
“If you ask me, the font they used is all wrong,” she says, pointing at her pen name streaking across the cover in thick, black Times New Roman letters. “Not my personality at all. But I do like the picture they came up with. What do you think?”
“Except for the font, I like it. A lot.” If people were fonts, Aunt Su would definitely be wingdings.
(That’s wingdings, in case you don’t know enough about fonts to tell.) I hand the book back to her with a sigh that says, Just wish I could read it for myself.
I might as well have screamed the words out loud, because Aunt Su can see my thoughts as clearly as if my forehead was made of glass. She smiles sadly and tweaks my chin. “That’s something you have to take up with your mother, Lily-girl.”
My mother. Just the mention of her makes me squirm in my flip-flops.
As I’m bending down to put LoveStorm back in the box, Emma Swartz and her Siamese-twin-BFF Sarah Rein come up to me. “Your aunt’s really cool!” they swoon in unison. “How often do you come here? This cabin seems like such a great place to hang out.” These two girls never talk to me at school. Like, ever. So I’m guessing they must be genuinely impressed by Aunt Su. The little animal has long since stopped chewing on my stomach. Now there’s something else inside me … something warm and light filling my chest like a helium balloon. I think it might just be happiness. Or maybe pride. Or maybe both.
The visit is over. While Ms. Harris stays back to thank Aunt Su, the rest of us follow the narrow path up the side of the cabin to get back to the bus. I’m so chuffed about the way the afternoon went, I must stop thinking clearly. Because next thing I know, I’m leading the group right past Aunt Su’s herb garden. That’s when it happens. Todd Nelson breaks away from the path and kneels down in the garden, turning one of the tiny new spring plants over in his hands. My heart freezes the second I realize what he’s found. Todd’s family is in the gardening business. He happens to know more about plants than any other kid in Big Bend. “Oh my God,” he calls out to us. “She’s growing marijuana!”
Waves of shocked laughter slam into me from all sides, and in a flash of a second, I feel that happy little helium balloon burst apart inside me. My cheeks flare with an angry heat. Don’t laugh at my aunt, I want to yell at them. But I don’t. Instead, I tear away from the group, back to the bus, back to my seat in the next-to-last row, where I bury my face in the green vinyl bench, close my eyes, and pretend to be invisible. Again.
A Short Note from Me
You probably never thought of this before, so I guess it’s kind of my duty to enlighten you to the reality of the situation. Are you ready? It’s sort of depressing — maybe you should be sitting down. Because the sad fact is that while you’re sleeping every night — snoring and pillow drooling and twisting like a giant piece of licorice under the sheets — a huge chunk of life passes you by. Truly. By the time you’re old and shrivelled up, you’ll have slept away 220,000 hours, or about 9,125 days. That’s almost twenty-five years gone in the blink of a dream.
Twenty-five years!
I’ll give you a couple of seconds to process that.
A Short Note from Me (Part 2)
Okay, that’s enough. Now that you’ve had some time to absorb, you’re probably starting to wonder what you’d do with all that extra time you’d have if you didn’t have to sleep. Am I right?
Well, you’ve come to the right place, my friend. I can tell you the answer to that question ’cause I happen to be the only person in the world who’s alive to write about it. Yes, the only person in the world (and if you don’t believe me, just watch for my name in the upcoming edition of Guinness World Records). If you didn’t have to sleep, you’d get to know the dark really well. Trust me on this one. And you’d come up with some creative ways to pass the time to keep yourself from going mental — like writing a novel or re-enacting the Defenestration of Prague. And you’d rack your brains for something amazing to do. And you’d become friends with the moon and pretty much anything and everything else that comes out at night.
At least, that’s what I’m doing.
It all started with a dead body.
My Aunt Su’s, to be specific …
ONE
September 3rd
A pair of scuffed black loafers creak across the wooden floor and slow to a stop in front of me. Sturdy, practical, and straight out of the Librarians “R” Us catalogue. I know without looking up that they belong to one of the bazillion old ladies who’ve descended on my house today — all claiming to be old friends of my Aunt Su’s.
“Are you all right, dear?” a soft, grey voice asks from above. A sudden image of afternoon tea, lace doilies, and raspberry scones fills my head. I nod and keep my eyes on the floor. The voice is nice enough, but I know if I say a word, I’ll start to cry. And once I start, I might never be able to stop again.
Ever.
“We’re all so sorry about your aunt. Such a shock.”
My hands instinctively curl into fists at my sides. If one more person tells me how sorry they are, I’m going to have to start throwing some punches. A fistfight at a funeral reception — Aunt Su would have loved that. Hockey was the only thing she ever watched on her fuzzy old tv, and I happen to know she only enjoyed it for the blood. I glance sideways at the small, pomegranate-shaped jar perched on the mantle. The sight of it sends my stomach plunging into my socks.
After a moment, the loafers give up and retreat back to the herd of sensible shoes that are whispering and shuffling around the dining room table. My shoulders sag with relief as I watch them go. I don’t want to share stories and tears with any of Aunt Su’s childhood friends. I don’t want them telling me how sorry they are and hugging me to their thick, perfumy chests. I don’t want any of these strangers to see how broken I am inside. All I want is for this day to be over so I can have my house back and grieve alone.
A trickle of sweat dribbles a path down my back. With all these extra bodies crowded into our house, the air is unbearably hot and stuffy. I fan myself with my hands as the old ladies’ hushed words blow across my ears like a slow breeze.
“… so sudden … accidental overdose … how much do you think … such a strange little niece …”
I squeeze my eyes shut and will away the sudden rush of tears that’s threatening to burst out and tear me to pieces. When I open them again, there’s another pair of shoes parked in front of me. I know right away these shoes won’t be so easy to get rid of. Black patent leather, sharp three-inch heels, and one pointy toe tapping the floor with obvious impatience.
My mother.
“Lily?”
I keep my eyes on the floor and pretend not to hear. Lily. I still don’t know what possessed my parents to name me after a flower. A girl named Lily should be sweet and delicate with a voice that rings like a bell — dontcha think? Pretty much the opposite of me. I have nothing even remotely delicate going on (unless you count my puny height,
which my mother insists on calling “petite”) and my voice is more of a gong than a bell. I know it’s technically wrong, but I like to think of myself as an oxymoron.
And no, that’s not a brand of zit cream.
“You haven’t eaten a thing today, Lily. You’ll make yourself sick if you’re not careful.”
“I’m not hungry,” I manage to say without imploding.
“Honey, you’re not the only one hurting here, you know. We miss her too.”
No you don’t. Not like I do.
A soggy-looking tuna fish sandwich suddenly appears in front of my face.
“I brought this for you. Eat. It’ll help.”
My eyes flick up to Mom for a second. Her forehead is scrunched up like an accordion and her blue eyes are all dark and squinty. She actually looks worried.
“Eat,” she says again, pushing the sandwich so close it almost squishes my nose.
Brilliant, Mom — like some goopy canned fish and day-old bread will solve all my problems. I know my mother means well, but whatever maternal instincts allowed her to give birth to me have long since gone on a permanent leave of absence. Shoving some smelly fish into my face is the best she can muster up in the way of comfort. I shouldn’t be surprised; when I was little, instead of kissing my cuts and bruises like the other mothers did, my mom used to tell me to toughen up and shake off the pain. Epic mom-fail, right?
But even though she’s clueless and sad, you kinda have to love her for trying. Mom is an accountant, but I honestly believe she missed her true calling by not pursuing a career in the military — she would have made an A1 army officer. Sometimes I call her General MacArthur in my head.
“Eat,” she commands in that certain tone that tells me I’m out of options.
Under the Moon Page 1
