“I think Annie made a good point this afternoon. I bet Kevin and Elizabeth and John would be unhappy to know that the only time we ever talk about them are in depressing conversations like this.”
“Annie also said that Mom and Dad are lucky to have us.” Geneva’s washcloth mask drops to reveal her blotchy face as she stands up in the tub. I hold her hand as she wobbles, dripping, onto the bath mat, where I wrap her up like a burrito in a king-size towel. “Which proves Annie doesn’t know everything. I bet sometimes Mom and Dad wish we would go away. They only want to be with each other. We were a bad idea—they’re too old to have our-age kids in the house. They’d be better off being grandparents, seeing us for visits. They’re as old as grandparents, anyway.”
“That’s not fair to Mom and Dad,” I reprove. “They’re better than most Ambrose parents; they come to all our school recitals, they care about our grades and what we eat and if we’re wearing our bike helmets, all that stuff. We’re the lucky ones, really, to have parents like them. Now dry off and give me your towel. I’ll meet you back in your room.”
She dries and scoots, streaking across the hall while I arrange the damp towel over the rack and then rinse the bathtub of bubble residue.
Alone, I think hard about what Geneva has said, but even as I reexamine her words, I want to throw them away. It reminds me of an afternoon, years ago, when we sneaked a box of slides marked ST. G—NEW YEAR out of Dad’s study. The parents were not home, but we ran into my bedroom and locked the door anyway. I remember that we were laughing, that my heart was beating on hummingbirds’ wings. At first the theft seemed so tantalizing.
Geneva would hold up a slide to my bedside table lamp, squint at it, then pass it to me. The images were tiny, but imprinted themselves permanently on my strained and hungry eyes. Mom squished between the boys. The whole family piled up on a hammock. Elizabeth eating a cheeseburger. The box contained over a hundred slides, and we examined each one with scientific intensity. When we were finished, Geneva said disgustedly, “I knew it. The parents used up all the love on them.” Her words had terrified me into never forgetting them, and I realized that in part she was right. The other Shepards were Ick. They overloved. That day, I felt as if my sister and I had been betrayed.
I tried not to dwell on the betrayal or the pictures after that, although from time to time I’ve been back in the study and sneaked out batches of slides, like greedy handfuls of after dinner mints, to savor privately in my room. But I don’t think my sister ever looked at another slide again.
When I meet Geneva back in her room, she has changed into fresh pajamas and is in bed, almost asleep.
“Stay,” she implores, catching my sleeve. “While I say prayers.”
“Okay. Then do you want me to sing?”
“Yuck, no. Will you check my throat for swollen glands?”
I check. Her neck is smooth as usual. Geneva got swollen glands about a year and a half ago, and ever since then she has been anxiously waiting for a recurrence.
“Nope.”
She folds her hands together and tucks them under her cheek, an angelic sleeping position she copied from an Olsen twins movie, and she races twice through the Our Father so fast that the words break up funny—“earth asitisin heaven.”
“Slow down,” I whisper. “You don’t even hear what you’re saying.”
She pays no attention. Her third time through, Geneva loses speed and yawns. She only gets past two lines of the fourth round, but I sit a while longer to make sure she is not dreaming.
four
louis littlebird
LOUIS LITTLEBIRD IS STANDING on line at the coffee vendor parked on the curb of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. It is early and I am tired, although I had been following my daily bet of walking on the left side of even-numbered streets and on the right side of odd-numbered streets in a hopeful exchange for finding him.
This morning my bet finally worked, and I have made Louis appear. His bleach-blond and normal-brown hair is a pattern of stripes as identifying as a flag. Closer, I see that he wears his leather jacket over a sage green sweatshirt stamped with the letters BBHS and that he has on his motorcycle boots.
“I want coffee,” I tell Geneva. I speed my pace and glance at my reflection in the glass double doors of an apartment building. The reflected girl holds her book bag too high on her back, and her chin leads the rest of her body. I stop and realign myself, allowing my hips to take the lead and loosening my grip on my bag, although now its more casually arranged weight seems heavier.
“Coffee before school?” Geneva squeaks. “Annie’s already got you addicted. Hey, you think she might come back this afternoon? She said she was coming. She has to, right? Right?”
I grope for the lunch money in my coat pocket. Louis turns as Geneva’s voice drifts into earshot, and I know he sees us by the way he squints to a place just left of my head, then looks away. He has already bought breakfast: a carton of juice and a doughnut blanketed in coconut choppings. But he won’t go yet, up the street and across a block to Bishop Brown High School, where he is a freshman in the same class as the night crawler. Now that Louis has seen me, I know he won’t go.
Louis slides his backpack off his shoulder, then kneels down beside it to unzip one of the compartments. I watch him with the attention of a scout reporter covering my first story.
I stroll up to the vendor, Geneva in tow.
“One small coffee, one small orange juice,” I order. “And a cruller. To split.” I turn to Geneva. “Okay?”
“But I wanted coffee, too,” she whines.
“I’m older, I’m allowed to have breakfast coffee.”
“Besides, it’ll stunt your growth,” Louis says, standing up and stepping toward us.
“Hi,” says Geneva, looking at Louis and trying to place him. She does not know that I have been on constant Louis watch since the afternoon we met him, nearly two months ago. She does not know that, when I learned that he commutes to his school from Carroll Gardens, in Brooklyn, I calculated he would take the F train—which stops at Fourteenth and Sixth—and head east. She does not know that I altered the course of our own route to school so that we cross on Fourteenth Street, even though our school is one street below and we always have to walk down again. She does not realize that for the past two months we have been leaving home up to twenty minutes early or late for school as part of my ongoing experiment to synchronize our commute with Louis Littlebird’s.
“Hey, I remember now,” Geneva says. “We met you in January at the Sam Flax, when we were buying book cover paper. We helped you find paint for your posters.”
“Uh-huh,” Louis answers. He tears off the end of his straw wrapper and spits it into the wind.
“Litter!” Geneva races after the blowing paper. Louis and I watch her spring down the sidewalk, chasing it.
“Strung like a fiddle,” Louis says. “Your sister’s wired. Same as that day in Sam Flax, saying she would throw up if she couldn’t use the employee bathroom. I remember. She doesn’t need caffeine, that’s for sure.” He looks at me and I tilt my head and sip my coffee, petrified by the knowledge that after the cup leaves my lips, I will have to think of something to say and I have no idea what.
Meanwhile, my brain is snapping hundreds of tiny pictures. Louis’s skin is olive dark, there’s a mole just beside his right eyebrow, he’s traded the black stud for a gold hoop in his left ear, his wrestler’s shoulders are wide and sloped and thick. I would give my whole allowance at this moment to put my hands on those shoulders. Very Ick, Mom would say.
“What time is it?” I ask. Dumb question, obvious, stupid.
“A little past eight.”
“Oh, did those posters come out right? Those ones for your wrestling team?” Better. Louis smiles and swigs his juice.
“Yeah, great. The glow-in-the-dark paint looked so pro. We had a lot of people show up to support the team. I won my weight division, too. You should have come and watched. There was enoug
h room in the stands. You said you’d be there.”
“Um, sorry about that.” Except that I was there, up in the way, way back bleachers. I watched Louis Littlebird wrestle and pin his opponent in the 145-pound category. Afterward, I chickened out and ran home. But what was I supposed to do, run up to him, tousle his hair, and smack his backside, along with the rest of his teammates? “I’ll come to the next one, I promise.”
“Season’s over. We’re in baseball tryouts now.”
Geneva bounds up. “I threw it away in the trash,” she announces. “Come on, Holland, you said if we had time we could stop at Piza Ricemann. Hey, I just thought, it seems stupid for us to walk all the way up here, we’re double-walking a block somewhere, aren’t we? I bet it would be faster—”
“Okay, let’s go then.” I nudge Geneva not so gently.
“Wait.” Louis takes an uncertain step closer to us, then drops back. “You go to Monsignor Ambrose, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re Catholic, or you just go there?”
“Catholic when I feel like it.”
Louis wrinkles his nose. “Is that a joke?”
I shrug, but the air between us suddenly bristles with tension. “Why, are you seriously religious or something?”
“I gave up beating on my kid brother for Lent,” he says. “That’s serious.”
“I gave up candy,” I counter. “My sister did, too. But we’re not, you know, obsessed with it. We don’t go to church camp or anything.”
“I did not give up candy,” Geneva says. “I didn’t give up anything this year. Mom explained it was a personal decision. So I decided there’s still too much stuff I personally am not allowed to do, and God would understand that I can’t afford to sacrifice more.” Louis laughs, and I relax slightly.
“Your name’s like Ireland or something.”
“Holland.”
“Uh-huh. I remember. Some strange-ass name.”
“That is called swearing,” Geneva says.
“An ass is a donkey,” Louis says gravely, raising his hand. “Gotta rock. Take care,” he says.
“Bye.” I turn quickly so that we can leave him before he leaves us.
“Your face is red,” Geneva squawks. “Why is your face so red? Did you really give up candy?”
“Would you be quiet?” I growl. I abandon my slow, hips-first walk as I jostle Geneva down the sidewalk.
“What, do you like him or something? He looks like an acid-house-music kid, like Sophie’s brother. Get your hand off my neck!”
“Come on, we’ll be late.”
“We will not. We left fifteen minutes early today. You like him, I can tell. He looks like a rebel. Mom would never let him come over in that leather jacket and with that partly white hair. She would call him an unprincipled thug. I mean it, stop hurting me! What’s wrong with you today?”
“What’s wrong with you? Calling him a litterbug! Yelling at him for swearing! Being an obnoxious little sister, after all I did last night, giving you a bath and staying with you after your boring blah blah blah nightmare.”
In the silence that follows my skin chills with my own cruelty. How hateful, Mom would say. What an unthinking, poisonous sister. What is wrong with you, Holland? Yet I remain stubborn, yanking Geneva’s hand at the cross lights and, even more hurtfully, refusing to comment on or even to stop at the freshly draped and sequined mannequin display in the window of Piza Ricemann. Geneva needs to know that you are angry, another part of me argues.
Most of my thoughts are not really focused on Geneva at all. I found him, trumpets the loudest, most victorious inside voice. I hunted him down, and today I found out exactly when and exactly how Louis Littlebird gets to school in the morning.
We stop outside the side entrance of Ambrose, at the yellow door where we always part for the day.
“Pick you up at 3:10,” I say. “Sorry I was a grouch earlier.” Geneva does not answer and when I look at her, I see that her face is teary. I defrost and melt in an instant, folding my arms over her shoulders.
“Look, I’m sorry, please don’t cry. I am so—” But Geneva pushes solidly from my grip.
“Go drown yourself,” she hisses. She turns and is lapped up into the wave of sixth graders rushing through the door.
“Aw, come on. I said I’m sorry,” I call after her. I stand, undecided, but then I turn and head toward the eighth grade doors. Let her go.
In homeroom, I add to my list in the back of my notebook under the heading: More Facts About L. L.
24. Swears
25. Possib. house music?
26. Brown eyes (not black, like you thought!) with small goldeny dots around pupils
27. Younger brother
28. Catholic
29. Litters
30. Gold hoop earring
31. Breakfast/vendor @ 8:05–8:10 A.M.!!!
At the sound of the attendance bell I bat my book shut and swipe it into my desk, banging the top down, but it is more difficult for me to put away my thoughts. The Louis I bumped into this morning was a more earnest, less detached guy than the one I met in the Sam Flax. I will have to readjust my daydreams, give him a softer approach when we have imaginary conversations or when he asks me out on pretend dates.
I spread my fingers over the desk’s surface and pretend that I am touching Louis Littlebird’s face. My fingertips are damp against his skin, the hollows beneath his eyes, the raised notch of his throat. The top of my desk feels warm, as if my notebook is heating its surface from the inside like a rising, bubbling dessert.
“Mrs. Garcia, will you please send Holland Shepard to the front desk,” the secretary’s voice burrs through the intercom. Geneva.
“Uh-oh, Holland’s gonna get it.”
“Hollandaise is in trou-ble.”
“Go girl, go girl.”
“Betcha it’s bad baby sis again.”
I stand up and look at Mrs. Garcia, who dismisses me with her hand. I cannot resist grabbing my notebook, dangerous with its unprotected secrets.
Habit sends me strolling past the front desk and the principal’s office and straight to the nurse’s station. Geneva lies coiled on a high iron cot. She has ripped off a corner of the sterile, germ-catching paper strip that covers the pillow and is twisting it in her hands. Her pale legs are blue and goose-bumped in the uncovered space between her knee socks and her kilt. Mrs. Just, the school nurse, smiles at me but she looks irritated.
“Here’s a pickle,” she says. “Can you do anything, or should I give her one of her pills? I sure did not count on this today, no sirree.”
“Geneva, what is it?” I whisper in her ear. “What’s freaking you out now?” I smooth her hair away from her face and try to press one of her hands into mine so that she will stop her paper twisting. “You’re being very dramatic,” I say. “How can I help you without knowing what’s bothering you?”
“When I said for you to drown yourself.”
“Who? Who?” Mrs. Just hoots. “Who’s drowning?” Geneva’s two front teeth clamp to lock over her bottom lip.
“I know you didn’t mean it, silly.” I talk in our secret voice. “People always say things they don’t mean when they’re angry.”
“I closed my eyes and I saw you drowned like in the story of Joseph of Canaan, who got pushed down the well by his mean brothers. I called down the well but there was no answer. You were drowned, and it was all my fault.”
“That’s very horrible.” I sigh. Mrs. Just wrinkles her nose.
“As I recall, Joseph didn’t drown in the well,” she says with a sniff. “To my memory, Juda pulled him out, and he and his brothers sold Joseph to merchants for twenty pieces of silver.”
“I would never sell you to merchants, Holland,” Geneva vows.
“Geneva, get hold of yourself.” I pat her arm. “You’re working yourself up over nothing.”
“I hate this day. I want a new day.” She squeezes herself into a tighter knot and pulls her hair over her fa
ce. All I see is an island of nose. “I want to go home.”
“Home?” Mrs. Just looks at me. “Home? There’s no need for that. I can call one of your parents to see if she can take a calm-down pill from her prescription. I’m telling you if she’s got one of her pills, then she can rest here through the morning and won’t miss afternoon classes.”
“Sure,” I agree.
“This day is wrecked,” Geneva whines. “I’m going home. I want another day.”
Mrs. Just licks a finger for every page she flips of Geneva’s thick medical record. She moves over to her desk, reaching for the telephone.
“Mom will be upset to hear this,” I say. “Dad, too. They’ll give you that talk about leaders of tomorrow.”
“I feel dizzy. I might throw up. You were so mean to me this morning, Holland. It put snakes in my stomach.”
“You shouldn’t give me so much power that I could send you into such a tailspin.” I try not to sound too much like Mom.
“My nightmares are not dumb or little, like you said. They’re real. They’re more real to me than today is.”
“Oh, give me a break.” I look at Geneva’s nose and fight an urge to pinch it. I am impatient with the same old hatful of Geneva’s tricks, but I am angry at myself for thinking that her scenes are anything she can help.
“She’s asking to talk to one of you.” Mrs. Just sets down the receiver and looks crossly from me to Geneva. I reach for the phone.
“Mom?”
“I can’t deal with this right now, Holland. The people from Riverside are here.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“What does she want?”
“To go home, of course.”
“Will you put her on?”
The only words Geneva says after I hand her the phone are that she is going home right now, that she has snakes in her stomach, and that she wants a new day. I am back on the line in less than a minute.
“Could you just walk her back?” Mom sounds defeated. Geneva has that effect. “Today of all days, it’s impossible …”
“And then what?”
“And then I’ll leave here early, as soon as I can get out. I’ll call you at home and let you know when I’m coming. All right?” I make a grumpy sound of agreement. Mom sighs. “Thank you. And you know how I hate for you to miss school, but this is the one day I absolutely cannot—”
Other Shepards Page 4
