by Beth Vrabel
I’ll admit, I’m not the neatest eater. Apparently other people think it’s “gross” to hold up each piece of food in front of your face, flip it around a couple times in your fingers, and then nibble it before putting the whole bite in your mouth. But seriously. If they had popped what they thought was steak in their mouth and it ended up being a glob of fat, or found that a spoonful of tapioca pudding was actually cottage cheese, they’d be a little more hesitant with their food, too.
Even so, Mom and Dad were always on me to eat neater. To sit up straight. To take human instead of squirrel bites. James used to get on my case about it, too. But lately he seemed to be in all-out annoy-the-crap-out-of-Mom mode. And he wasn’t nice to me, either. He still hadn’t apologized for abandoning me at the library.
It was odd. All this be-mean-to-Mom-and-Alice business started when we moved, and it’s not like Mom or I had anything to do with that. It was all Dad. And James was nice to Dad, even though Dad spent all dinner talking on his cell phone, hand over the receiver when he took bites.
I’m not sure why being a paper mill plant manager makes Dad’s phone ring so much. I guess it’s because the Mill never closes. Seriously, mill workers are there all the time, round the clock. That’s why there’s a diner—the Williams Diner—right next door, ready to serve breakfast or a milkshake or both around the clock. Dad’s a sucker for the milkshakes. Whenever I get into his car, he unloads an armful of Styrofoam milkshake containers into the trash to make room for us.
He must’ve just had one before coming home because he definitely didn’t seem hungry. All he did was push a few refried beans and sprigs of shredded lettuce around his plate while he talked on his phone.
To make matters worse, we were still using disposable plates and utensils because the moving company had lost our real plates and silverware. Mom kept promising to buy new plates and utensils but hadn’t yet. But she did buy us sporks. Lucky us. Have you ever tried to spear a piece of plum with a plastic spork? I don’t recommend it.
Tooter seemed to be the only one really excited about the spork situation. He patrolled under the table like a snorting, farting cop, schlepping up whatever fell to the floor on the way to our mouths.
I nibbled on the corner of my taco, holding it horizontally so the guacamole didn’t slip out. But it did. It missed the plastic plate and landed with a soft plop on the floor, which Tooter quickly lapped up. And suddenly I was very, very sad.
That guacamole.
My eyes watered. Another drop of guac slid from the taco onto my plate.
I really wanted that guacamole. I wanted it back in the taco. It belonged in the taco. Not on the stupid plastic plate. A stupid plastic plate that didn’t even belong in this stupid house in stupid South Carolina. That guacamole belonged in a taco, tucked in securely with a real fork, resting on a real plate, in our real house where we would have real conversations, not hunched-over caveman grunts from James, snippy comments from Mom, and secondhand chatter from Dad.
That guacamole.
The slippery, lumpy green-wasted goodness represented every single thing that was wrong right now. Tooter whimpered at my feet.
Tears spilled over. Then they rushed out. And soon I was going to make that ugly can’t-keep-it-in cat-howl noise. I swear, I didn’t think about it. I didn’t plan it. But somehow my entire flimsy stupid plastic plate flew across the table like a Frisbee, sending bits of taco everywhere.
Tooter flew right after it. I don’t think he had ever run so fast.
There was total silence from my family. Grunts and slurping sounds came from Tooter. James had some refried beans smeared across his cheek—maybe from my flying taco. Maybe from eating like a caveman. Mom was midbite, spork held inches from her face. Dad’s mouth hung open, phone still pressed against his ear.
I stared back at them for a moment, but I was so sad, so angry, so . . . I don’t know . . . that they all looked like blurs in front of me. So I got up and ran. And, of course, I knocked my hip on the edge of the table, sending shredded lettuce into the air. I reached my room and slammed the door before the lettuce could even hit the floor.
When my bedroom door creaked open a few minutes later, I was sure it’d be Mom. But then I heard arguing from the kitchen.
“Maybe if you hung up your phone and tuned in a little bit to what’s going on here, we’d know something was wrong before our kitchen turned into a taco salad!” Mom shouted.
“Do you have any idea how stressed out I am? And then I get to come home to a miserable house and pick lettuce out of the heating vent!” Dad screamed back. And just then his phone started ringing.
A pan slammed into the sink. James slowly closed my bedroom door.
“You okay?” he asked.
I flopped over on my bed to face him, not even bothering to wipe away the angry tears wetting my cheek. “Why are you acting so mad at Mom?” I snarled.
“Why’d you freak out on the taco?”
“The guac spilled.”
James nodded, like I had reacted in a completely understandable way to slippery guacamole. He sat on the edge of my bed. His shaggy hair hung over his eyes.
“Seriously.” I propped myself up on an elbow. “Why are you so mean to her lately?”
Even though James and I looked different in terms of skin and hair color, we’ve got the same face. So I sort of recognized his expression when he sat down. He was just as lost as me.
“It’s her job to stop him, you know?” James’s voice was soft, but edgy.
I shook my head. “Nope. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Think about it, Alice.” He leaned back. “It’s her job to rein Dad in when he has dumb ideas. And moving here? It was an incredibly dumb idea.”
“Like when he wanted to sell our house and buy alpacas that one time?”
“Exactly.” James’s lips quivered like he was trying not to smile. I got that. Sometimes I try to hold on to my anger, too. Dad’s usually really good at making someone laugh when they really want to be angry. I gave it a shot.
“Think of all the comfy sweaters we could have had.”
James huffed out of his nose, probably the closest thing to a laugh I had heard from him in weeks. “Well, if she’s not going to show him that this was a mistake, I will.”
Chapter Four
I couldn’t sleep that night. Mostly because of what James had said, but also because I was starving. That guacamole.
I snuck into the kitchen after everyone had gone to sleep, climbed up on the countertop, and squinted at the green lights on the microwave. It felt like midnight, but it was only ten. Had everyone else gone to bed already? Dad used to stay up until midnight and James until who knew when. I guess they were all exhausted from cleaning up my tacoplosion.
I grabbed a yogurt from the fridge and picked up my magnifier along with the book I had checked out from the library that afternoon. I was trying to catch up with Kerica’s book tally, but had so far only finished Winn-Dixie. I tried to read but just couldn’t stop thinking about what James had said. How was he going to convince Mom and Dad to move back to Seattle?
As I thought about it some more, going back would be so awesome! I knew a different family had moved into our house, but maybe they hated it there as much as we hated it here. Maybe we could swap houses. If James really had a plan and made it work, then I could be hanging out with Eliza by next week. We could spend the day decorating her chalkboard-painted wall. I had helped her and her mom paint a whole wall of her room in the thick black paint last summer. Since then, we decorated it all the time, adding flowers and leaves or continuing our never-ending game of tic-tac-toe. She was going to be so excited when I told her the news! I bet she missed me even more than I missed her. After all, at least I had met Kerica. Eliza was stuck with the same people, the same faces, and I know none of them could replace me.
I put down my library bag and picked up the iPad, plugging in my oversized monitor. In Seattle, it was only 7:00 p.m. I tapped the gre
en app and Eliza picked up on the third Facetime ring.
“Kerica sounds pretty boring.”
That’s the thing about Eliza, she never holds back how she feels.
“She’s nice! You’d like her a lot.”
Eliza scrunched up her face, like she seriously doubted it. “Whatever . . .”
“Whatever,” I mumbled back, not sure why I was even bothering to defend Kerica. It’s not like we were best friends or anything. “How’s Kenny?” I finally said, changing the subject.
Kenny was the love of Eliza’s life. Three years older than us, he had lived next door to Eliza forever and had yet to acknowledge her existence. Here’s something you should know about Eliza: she’s the yin to my yang, the jelly to my peanut butter, the chocolate to my milk. We’re exact opposites, but somehow that works for us. Eliza has curly brown hair cut boy short, wears silvery eye shadow and pink glossy lipstick, never worries about what to say, and makes up her mind in seconds. Years ago, she decided Kenny was the boy she would marry and getting him to realize the inevitability of that became the crux of our fourth-grade year. Me? I think boys are gross. But as Eliza’s best friend, I’ve got to be supportive.
“Kenny?” Eliza made a face that looked like the name itself was like a burst of morning breath. “He’s so lame.”
“What?” I gasped. “A week ago you were naming your future babies!” Eli and Iza. Seriously. Luckily, I figured I had a few decades to talk Eliza out of those names.
Eliza shrugged. She seemed suddenly very interested in flaking off a bit of her bright blue nail polish. “So, these twins moved into your old house.”
“Oh.” I knew that a family had moved in to our old house, which was a block from Eliza’s. But it felt weird hearing about the new people living there. Someone in my bedroom, hanging stupid posters on my grape-colored walls, probably. “What are they like?”
“They’re actually really, really cool.” Eliza bounced, making the screen suddenly reflect the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling. Eliza’s a bouncer; whenever she’s really into whatever she’s talking about, she literally can’t sit still. “Sam—she’s a girl—is a dancer. But not ballerina dancer. Hip-hop. She’s shown me some moves, and, man, that girl can dance! And Morgan—he’s a boy—he’s . . .” Her face flushed.
“He’s the new Kenny?”
“Alice!” Eliza flopped back on her bed. “He’s amazing. He’s tall, he listens to cool music, and he’s got perfect teeth. I think he’s the one.”
I caught myself before my eyes fully rolled. That’s a bad habit of mine. It took me a long time to figure out that other people could actually see me roll my eyes at them even if I was across the room. So I stopped mid-roll and pretended I had noticed something on my ceiling. Not that Eliza had even been paying attention. She was still prattling on about Sam this, Morgan that.
“Which one’s in my room?” I interrupted her in the middle of telling me how Sam was taking her to a dance class later that week.
“Morgan.” Eliza grinned. “You won’t believe it. He painted the walls black!”
I bit my lip, hard, trying to dislodge my stupid tears. The water stayed still in my eyes. “Huh,” I swallowed, willing my voice to stay steady. “Like your wall, with the chalkboard paint?”
“No, shiny black.” Then Eliza was the one to roll her eyes. “Chalkboard paint is so childish, you know. Morgan’s giving me his leftover paint to cover it up. It looks incredible,” Eliza gushed. “He even painted all the trim around the doors and windows black. Can you believe it? Their parents are so cool to let them paint their rooms like that.”
“The trim, too?” I echoed. The trim where Dad had added a notch every year on my birthday to show how much I had grown? He had even scribbled what my special birthday dinner was beside the notch (Age 4: “Spaghetti and angel food cake decorated with gummy worms and Spider-Man”; Age 8: “Mushroom pizza with chocolate lava cupcakes”). Now it was all gone.
From another room, I heard Eliza’s mom yell, “Eliza! Sam’s here!”
“Oh, gotta go! Bye, Alice!” The screen went black.
I don’t know when I finally fell asleep that night, but it had to be close to dawn. Dad once described how the Mill churned pieces of chopped up wood, called pulp, in huge vats, cooking them so all the pieces mushed and stuck together, ready to be flattened and dried out into paper.
My mind was one of those huge vats, taking everything I wanted and everything I dreaded and churning them until they were molded together.
I wanted to go home to Seattle, but it wouldn’t be the same if we did. Morgan painted my room black! And even if his family did want to trade with ours (what a childish, stupid idea!), Eliza wouldn’t want him to leave. Not now that he was the new Kenny. We’d have to find a new neighborhood in Seattle, and how would that be any different than here? I mean, aside from the horrible stench of Stinkville being replaced with Seattle’s salty air. But I’d still have to be Blind Alice instead of just Alice. And maybe Mom would be happier in Seattle again, but what about Dad? Would we see even less of him while he tried to find a new job? And maybe he’d be the sad one then. I thought of Tooter on Kerica’s lap, Mrs. Morris holding a book just for me on the library table, the hand chair waiting for me in the library.
When I finally woke up, the sun was slanting through my bedroom blinds.
James was pouring syrup over a stack of microwavable pancakes when I stumbled into the kitchen. He always drenches them with sticky syrup before nuking them so all the liquid is absorbed.
“I don’t think we should move back,” I told him.
James’s hand stilled over the pancakes, the syrup still rushing out of the bottle. “You’re joking, right?”
“No.” I sat down on one of the stools. James closed the syrup lid and shoved the pancakes in the microwave, slamming the door shut so hard I thought the plastic would crack.
“What is wrong with you? You hate it here!” he said.
“New people moved into our house. They painted my room black! We’d have to go somewhere new anyway.”
“Someplace new in Seattle is better than any place here,” he snapped.
“I don’t know,” I said, realizing I sounded like Dad. “Maybe we just need to adjust.”
“You’re not seriously buying Dad’s crap, are you? Come on, Alice! You especially have got to know we’re never going to adjust to South Carolina.”
“What do you mean, me especially?”
The microwave beeped and James grabbed his plate, slamming the door shut again. He didn’t answer me, just shoved forkfuls of pancake into his mouth like he was trying to force himself quiet.
“What do you mean?” I shouted this time.
“Are you really going to make me say it?” he answered finally, in a quiet pancake-less voice.
“Say what?”
“What do you think it’s going to be like when school starts, Alice? Do you think you’re going to fit in here? Really? I mean, come on, you’ve got to see . . .”
He let his words fall like bricks around me, echoing louder than any slammed microwave door.
“You don’t think I can do it,” I whispered. “You don’t think I’ll be able to fit in here. Or anywhere, really. Is that it?”
James’s plastic spork cracked in half in his fist. He glared at me. “Do you?” He threw it and the plastic plate in the trashcan. “You know what? Fine. You be happy here. You’re just going to have to do it on your own. Have you noticed? Mom’s checked out. Well, guess what? So have I. Find your own way to the library today.” And with that, James stomped out the front door.
“What’s going on in here?” Mom entered the kitchen just as James rushed out the door. She was dressed. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but I noticed it had been combed. “Alice?” she asked. “What’s going on?”
“You’ve adjusted,” I whispered.
“What?”
I rushed into her arms instead of answering her. She squeezed me back
, but just for a second. In that moment, I noticed that her fingernails were chewed back to the skin. She smelled like deodorant, but sort of stale, too. Not entirely like Mom. She sort of patted my back and then moved to make coffee.
“What should we do today?” she asked.
“Um, I’ve been going to the library. We could do that.”
“All right. Let’s go to the library.” Mom’s smile was stuck on her face, not quite making it to her eyes.
“We don’t have to,” I said. “We could just stay home.”
Mom shook her head. “Nope. I’ve been meaning to get to the library, anyway. I want to do a little research.”
The farther we walked away from the house, the more I saw Mom wasn’t actually that well-adjusted after all. We used to go for these types of walks along the waterline in Seattle. Her hand would be loose in mine, our arms swinging, and she used to describe everything—birds flying by with red wings, clouds that looked like elephants, flowers blooming on apartment balconies. She’d tell me about them in such detail that I could see them, really see them, even though I couldn’t, really. Most of the time, I’d squeeze my eyes shut so I could see everything clearer in my mind. But if there was something tiny, like a bug or a caterpillar, we’d stop and study it, Mom holding it on her long, thin fingertips and standing still so I could make out each detail.
Yet on the way to the library today, her hand held mine tight as a belt. Her shoulders were stiff and her eyes were kept staring straight ahead. She didn’t point anything out to me like she used to. Just step, step, step.
And now we were there and she still hadn’t told me what she was wanting to research at the library. She followed me into the children’s section where Kerica was waiting for me in our hand chairs.
