Frowning down at the tiny screen, I take a breath and do something I’ve never done before. I post a message.
JustC: Spring break, hour one: visiting the new Dad/Chris, who is now Dad/Christine.
To my surprise, I get almost instant replies.
Styx: been there. done that.
C4Buzz: First time. Drama!
Viking: Happy first visit. Don’t forget he’s still the same person.
A kick at the door rattles me into snapping my phone closed before I can reply. Ysabel glares at me from the hallway, and I silently follow her upstairs, wrapped in my own thoughts.
Happy? Viking means well, but seriously—I’m not seeing cause for celebration. And is Dad really the same person? Isn’t the point of this whole thing to say that he’s not?
It’s awkward in the car. Dad makes small talk while Ysabel glowers at me, still pissed at having had all of Dad’s attention this afternoon. It’s a relief to park the car and join the trickle of foot traffic out onto the sidewalk past the Road Closed signs to the street lined with stalls for the farmer’s market.
The smell of popcorn hits me, and my stomach growls.
There are far more people than I expect: kids in face paint running around screaming, a DJ playing tunes for an impromptu dance party on the sidewalk, and booths for political candidates. The crowd noise is a dizzying assault, but I ignore my urge to run away and dive in, putting my head down and pushing, getting further from Dad and closer to the madness. Near the center of the action, I smell hot sugar, and my mouth waters. Ysabel appears beside me, and we exchange a look. Street-fair food. Funnel cake. Dinner. Suddenly there seems to be something worthwhile to the day. I pick up the pace and join a line a little way ahead of us. I don’t care what they’re selling. It smells like sugar and grease, and I know I want some.
Dad hesitates in the midst of the crowd, obviously torn between staying with me and keeping up with Ysabel, who has drifted toward a fast-moving line for some kind of pastries. In minutes, she’s digging in her pocket for cash and threading her way purposefully across the road to meet me.
Impatient minutes later I meet her halfway, clutching a grease-spotted plate of crispy-hot funnel cake, covered with drifts of powdered sugar. Ys is juggling a paper container of something cinnamon-sprinkled and deep-fried. Dad, meanwhile, is approaching with a bottle of water and an expression that’s half amused and half squeamish. I ignore him and take another bite of my cake.
“Whatcha got?” I mumble around a mouthful of sweetness.
Ysabel sucks in air to soothe her scalded tongue. “Gravenstein apple fritter,” she says, and chews rapidly, her mouth open to sip in cooling air. “Apples, sliced, battered, and deep-fried.” Ysabel dances in place and puts her hand over her mouth. “Hot!”
“Good?”
She nods emphatically, bouncing on her toes, and I roll my eyes. I envy my sister; like Mom, it seems she can section off her brain and be totally happy in a moment of food bliss, no matter what else is going on. Unfortunately, I’m too aware of my father hovering in the background to enjoy my funnel cake, which is a waste of really good fried dough.
“I don’t know how you two can eat like that,” Dad says, shuddering as Ysabel snitches a bite of my funnel cake, and I eat the last of her apple fritter. My father digs out his wallet and flips it open. “I’ll make a contribution to the cause, but I hope you eat something that resembles real food instead of that sugar and grease.”
“Don’t need money.” Even though I could use the twenty he’s holding, I resist taking it from between his fingers, feeling my stomach clench at the idea of accepting anything of his.
“We don’t need real food, either,” Ysabel adds, licking her fingers as she shrugs and Dad puts his wallet away. “We need nachos, and peach rings, and lemonade.”
“I don’t see nachos,” I say, scanning the row of booths. “There’s chili dogs, though.”
“No.” Ysabel frowns. “They’ve gotta have nachos. You can’t have a street fair without orange liquid cheese squirted on tortilla chips. It’s just not possible.”
“You make it sound disgusting,” I tell her. “And the peach rings? Are foul.”
“Nobody asked you to eat them.”
“Look, why don’t we split up?” Dad begins, moving so he can see both of us at once. “I’ll go pick up some produce, and if I see nachos, I’ll text one of you. That way—” He breaks off with a grin, waving at someone. I turn to see a tall blond woman making her way through the crowd toward us. I begin to back away.
She’s very tall.
“I’ll find the nachos,” I announce, feeling dread tighten around my throat.
She’s too tall. I know women can be tall, but she’s as tall as Dad. Is she a transperson? I’m not ready for this.
“Wait, Justin. Let me introduce—”
“Justin!” Ysabel hisses, her expression indignant, but panic is driving me.
“Be right back,” I promise, and dive into the crowd.
Over my shoulder I see the woman shaking Ysabel’s hand, probably giving her that “Your dad has told me so much about you” line. As I escape, Dad’s eyes meet mine.
I know that look. It’s Dad’s “I’m disappointed in you” face. Yeah, well, too bad. In the last six months, there’s been a lot of disappointment to go around in the Nicholas family. Unfortunately for my father, I’m immune to that face now.
Mostly.
I wander through the crowd for endless minutes, not really seeing anything. I feel like a stupid little kid, running from a strange woman. What was I so afraid of? And it wasn’t cool to ditch Ysabel like that; she’s already pissed at me for leaving her with Dad before.
This is Dad’s fault. I already told him: I don’t need to meet anyone. Why can’t he just listen to me, one time?
I only stumble across the nachos by accident, and then I have to wait in a line that stretches back about fifteen people or so. Just as I take my place at the end, my phone buzzes in my pocket, and I dig it out, expecting a message from Ysabel. Instead, it’s from Dad, and a moment later, my phone starts singing whatever stupid pop song Ysabel programmed in the last time she stole my phone. Nervously, I answer and blurt the first thing I can think of to defend myself.
“I found the nachos.”
A pause. “All right. You in line?”
“Yeah. About ten people in front of me.”
“Okay. So, head back this way as soon as you can. We’ll eat near the gazebo. Think you can find it?”
“Yeah.” I pause a beat, listening to the babble of voices and music on his end of the line. My fingers itch to hang up, but I know my father. He’s waiting, like he always does when I owe him an apology. I try to wait him out, feeling my stomach tensing up in the silence.
“Look, about your friend, I told you I—” I begin defensively.
“Justin, do you know I love you?” he interrupts.
“What?” I look around as if others can hear our conversation. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Do you know I love you?” my father persists. “Do you?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say hastily, not wanting him to say it again. “I know.”
“Good,” Dad says. “Make sure you get enough nachos for all of us.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say into the silence, then I frown. “Dad?”
No reply. I put the phone away with the strange feeling that I’ve somehow been tricked, and Dad’s scored points off of me … but what’s the game?
Sunday Night, 11:46 p.m.
Ysabel
The Myers-Briggs personality tests we took in Future and Family class say that I’m ENFJ: extroverted, intuitive, feeling, and judging. Based on that list, I’m supposed to be a leader, totally goal-oriented, decisive, and good at reading people. Justin’s test was, of course, the total opposite. He’s all about rules and order, figuring out what makes things tick, and making everything work.
We might have shared space before birth, b
ut we’re nothing alike.
Even the way we deal with stress is way different. It’s 11:42 p.m., and Justin is sprawled bonelessly on the floor next to my bed, dead to the world. I’m sitting under the window at a table filled with a mess of glass rods, my torchwork case propped open at my feet, trying—badly—to make beads. There’s no fan, but with the windows thrown open and the torch going, it’s not that hot. This table is cramped, though, and the light isn’t right. My mandrel was too cool, and the glass didn’t stick for my first bead. The second one I took off the heat too soon. The one I’m working on now is … average. I was all excited about making some twisty rods for jewelry, spirals of colored glass around a core of clear. I was going to try and use them for some earrings I saw, but I can’t even get started right.
I watch the glass slump into a bead shape at the end of my mandrel and carefully use the graphite paddle and my mashers to flatten it into a square. Quickly I turn a green rod in the flame, pulling a drop of what will be brass-colored glass from its molten tip and turning it onto the flat, square bead.
The colors are all wrong. The glass looks like a crooked, half-sucked lollipop. I pull it out of the fire in disgust.
Justin flops over and lets out a snore. I glance at him and sigh. As easy as it would be to push away the events of the last eight hours, sleep isn’t happening for me tonight. And Justin is grinding his teeth.
After bailing on me when Dad introduced me to his friend—which I still don’t get; she was just someone from work or something—Justin tried to make it up to me all evening. He brought me nachos with extra jalapeños. He tried to buy me a bracelet from a little craft stall, but it was completely overpriced and the beads were crap—there was no way I would let him pay what the guy was charging. And, just after we got home and we called Mom, he dragged his mattress into my room and brought out a deck of cards. He interrupted my plans to work, but whatever, it was nice to hang out for a change, and I beat him twice playing War.
Justin turns over again, and for a moment, there’s silence.
Not that he’s been doing some kind of bizarre mime thing, but tonight’s been the most Justin’s talked to me in weeks. We used to talk all the time. I’d be making beads at night, and Justin would come to my room with his laptop and surf weird news sites so he could read me the headlines. (Police arrest woman buying drugs with Monopoly money!) We’d discuss all the gossip from school, who was getting together or breaking up, and just … hang.
Even with all the attention he got for being the freshman anchor on the debate team, Justin still managed to be just … normal. Until his last debate team event.
Despite the fact that one or the other of them always shows up, somehow, neither Mom nor Dad made it to his final meet. And it was the worst timing ever. He’d had a hugely important semifinal, and he just … choked.
Justin’s girlfriend, Callista, was sitting with a bunch of her friends for the semifinals in the row right in front of me, and she told me she thought Justin was sick. At first, he just sort of swayed, grabbed onto the podium—and then he walked off the stage. By the time I realized he wasn’t just in the bathroom puking, he’d left campus, which is against school policy. Later, Mom and Dad cleared it up and told the school he was sick, but they weren’t positive about that. Since I told them he threw up and he did go straight home and to bed, they bought his story.
They have no clue what happened.
I do.
I came home and found him destroying everything in my parents’ bathroom, his eyes all bloodshot. He’d knocked Dad’s colognes off of his vanity, broken his old-fashioned shaving mug and brush we gave him for Father’s Day one year, shoved his wool suit in the toilet, and smeared Mom’s makeup all over the sink. He’d written LIAR on the mirror over and over again in this really bright shade of lipstick, and when I came in, he was trying to break the mirror above the sink, just wham! wham! wham! Punching with his fists.
When he saw me standing in the doorway with my mouth open, he tried to say something and starting crying, making these horrible retching noises.
“What?” I’d practically screamed. “What’s the matter?”
For the longest time, all Justin could say was “Dad.”
By the time my parents got home, their bathroom was scrubbed, Dad’s suit was folded up in a plastic bag, ready for the dry cleaner’s, the mug was mended with epoxy, Justin was tucked in bed with lots of water and orange juice, and we had our stories straight. Dad might have noticed that the floor was wet and there was a big crack in his bottle of Amour Pour Homme, but he never said anything. He probably figured he’d bumped it too hard on the sink.
I didn’t believe my brother when he told me, but this is what he said: Dad was at Justin’s debate. Only, he wasn’t really Dad—he was wearing a wig, and a white suit, and high-heeled shoes.
Justin met Christine before any of us.
I turn off my torch and put the still-hot glass on the graphite pads for safekeeping. As I yank off my glasses, my brother turns over and inhales. I turn off the lamp, wait a moment, then cross to his makeshift bed and look down at him. A few seconds later, Justin breathes out with a little whistling noise and starts grinding his teeth again.
I tug on his pillow.
We had a weirdly good time tonight. Even though Justin bailed on me—the punk—Dad and I met a guy who raises bees, and Dad bought some honey, then he picked out some vegetables, and we bought olive bread and some cheese to take home, and then Justin came back with three big things of nachos, lemonade, and cinnamon churros. We went to the benches at the gazebo on the corner and had a little junk food picnic.
I expected … something else. Some kind of confrontation. Some kind of evidence Dad was going to spring on us that let us know that everything had changed. Even Justin kept looking at Dad out of the corner of his eye, and when we got home, he was just kind of waiting, tense. And nothing happened. We called Mom and talked. Dad puttered around in the kitchen and put the food away, then he sat on the couch with the paper and the news on like he always does. At about ten, he said he’d see us tomorrow at breakfast, and then he went to bed.
And that was all.
I sigh as my brother starts grinding his teeth again. It’s been a long day, my beads suck, I’m in a weird, generic town house in the middle of nowhere, and I want to try and sleep.
“Justin,” I say, poking him on the shoulder.
He’s awake immediately, coming up on his elbows, alert. “Ys? You okay?”
“Where’s your teeth thingy?”
“What? Oh.” Justin wipes the back of his hand across his mouth and sits up, grimacing. “Sorry.”
“It’s no big deal, but Dr. West says you’re screwing up your jaw sleeping without it.”
Justin sighs. “Yeah, yeah. I know.” He scratches his long, skinny arms, then rolls to his feet and stumbles to the door. A few moments later, he’s back, the red plastic case in his hand. He plops down on his makeshift bed and looks up at me, his eyes barely visible in the dimness.
“You okay?”
I shrug. “I guess. It’s kind of quieter here than I’m used to. It didn’t make sense to pack my stereo when we’re only here for a few days.”
“Stereo.” Justin shakes his head. “Would it kill you to try something smaller? You’re the last person in America without at least an MP3 player.”
“I can’t sleep with anything in my ears.”
“If you’re asleep, you don’t feel it.”
“Whatever, Justin.”
My brother snickers. “Wow, that’s a great comeback, Ysabel. ‘Whatever.’ You should join a debate team, you know that?”
“Shut up.” I lean over the edge of the bed and whack him with my pillow, and he yanks it out of my hands. After a brief struggle, in which we basically beat each other until Justin wimps out and begs for mercy, I lie back, wheezing but victorious.
At least in my version of the fight.
When he’s caught his breath, Justin breaks the
silence. “Ys?”
“Yeah?”
“Seriously, though, you’re okay, right?”
I nod, then realize he can’t see me in the dark. “Yeah.” I chew my lower lip, rolling the bedspread between my fingers. “I just …?”
“Hm?”
“Just thinking about Mom at the airport.”
Justin leans against the bed, his head a darker blob against the burgundy spread. “Yeah. She was …” Justin sighs. “This is all so messed up.”
“I know. I think our being here is part of something they’re doing, though. That’s why she was so upset.”
“What do you mean?”
I hesitate. “I don’t know for sure. I mean, I just heard some things.”
Justin slides his arm across the bed until he touches my leg, and then he flicks me hard with his middle finger.
“Ow! Cut it out.”
“Well, stop stalling.”
“Okay, fine,” I blurt, rubbing the sore spot. “I think they’re selling the house.”
There’s a tense little silence, then Justin says, “What makes you think that?”
I roll onto my stomach and lean on my elbows. “Last week, I heard Mom saying something to Grandmama about not waiting, and then, I mean, you saw how upset she was at the airport. I think Dad wants us to live here part-time with him.”
“I’ve been erasing phone messages from Realtors.” Justin’s voice is dull.
“What?” I gasp, feeling chilled. “They’re calling already?”
“That’s why Mom was crying, I guess.” Justin sighs. “Maybe she doesn’t want to, but everybody’s got to do what Dad wants now.”
“Justin, that’s ridiculous. Mom has a business; she’s not going to pack it up just because Dad says so. And if they’re selling the house, it’s probably so Mom can get an apartment or something. If they’re sharing custody, we’ll have half our stuff here.”
Happy Families Page 5
