Not That I Care

by Rachel Vail

  Roxanne was very sympathetic. She told me she’d mentioned my name to TF, as she called the tooth fairy, and that TF had told her some people are just slow and that’s fine. I felt grossly babyish. Roxanne looked so much more grown up, even at six, with all those spaces in her mouth and that wild mess of hair she refused to brush. She outweighed me by half.

  Roxanne invented complicated imaginative games with endless rules I could never remember, because there were always new ones. Our favorite game was Time Machine, which we played under my cherry tree. Roxanne was the pilot of our time shuttle (called a maznoropa), so she got to say where we’d go—Colonial America, a prehistoric cave, Jupiter. Whatever the time period, she played my slave, and she told me exactly what I had to do. Then she’d make daring escapes or else die tragically. It was all a little scary to me, but there were no other kids my age around, and Ned was already too cool to let me play with him in the daytime.

  Roxanne decided she should be called Rock, because of her name, and I should be called Tree, because of my cherry tree, which I had told her I owned. The tree evened things out in my mind: She got to make all the rules, but I owned something huge, living, and unmovable.

  Roxanne swore we were part Native American, a fact provable because who else would have names like Rock and Tree? She also decided we were half cousins. I wasn’t sure how we could prove that, but I didn’t press. She said if the tree ever grew some cherries I could change my name to Cherry. I was psyched; Cherry seemed like a really beautiful name. Each time before we played Time Machine we’d check all the branches really carefully, and Roxanne would sympathetically announce, “No, your name is still Tree.” Then I’d crouch down in my passenger spot and wait to see what time period the maznoropa would bring us to.

  three

  “Roxanne Luse,” Mrs. Shepard says.

  I look behind me to the right toward Roxanne. Her face is hidden in her hands, under her big tangle of black hair. Her green pants have writing all over them, and her T-shirt is on backward so the pocket is over her shoulder blade. She’s not answering. Come on, Rock, I think, though I never call her that anymore. I know she would have interesting stuff in her bag; weird, even.

  “Roxanne Luse,” Mrs. Shepard says again.

  “Unprepared,” Roxanne mumbles into her hands.

  “Unprepared?” Mrs. Shepard asks, like the word tastes sour in her mouth.

  Roxanne lifts her head and stares at Mrs. Shepard.

  “Unprepared?” Mrs. Shepard asks again.

  “Yeah,” Roxanne says and shrugs.

  “That’s unacceptable,” says Mrs. Shepard.

  Roxanne uncaps a Sharpie marker and starts to write on her pants.

  “Gather your things,” Mrs. Shepard says, looking at her watch. “Go to the office.”

  Roxanne fills in the shape she’s drawn, recaps the Sharpie, and throws it into her big book bag. She pulls the book bag up onto her lap and sweeps the notebook, pens, and crumpled paper off her desk, into the bag, then smooshes it down with the heel of her hand. Then she sighs and stands up, hoisting the big bag onto her shoulder. Down the aisle she trudges and out the door.

  Mrs. Shepard closes it quietly but firmly behind her and looks suspiciously at the rest of us. “Is anyone else here unprepared?”

  Nobody moves or even breathes. She waits. The clock ticks. I consider raising my hand for one demented second, picture myself gathering my things and running down the hall to meet Rock and maybe be best friends with her again, no matter how weird and unpopular she is; at least it would get me out of having to stand up there in front, soon, and present this Sack full of myself.

  I don’t, of course. I sit very still.

  “Let’s continue,” Mrs. Shepard says.

  four

  In the winter of second grade I started taking ballet after school on Tuesdays. It was sort of boring, but I liked having a chance to do something apart from Roxanne and her complicated games. She’d wait for me in her green Snorkel and boots under my cherry tree on Tuesdays, but sometimes I’d tell her I had to go inside and practice ballet, so she should go home. The ballet teacher told my mother after class one day that she should really encourage my ballet training because I was blessed with perfect turn-out. I ran to the backyard to show Roxanne, who said she had a headache and couldn’t stay. At dinner Mom told Dad and Ned.

  “Perfect turn-out?” asked Dad. “I’m ever so proud.”

  They all laughed, which humiliated me. I ran to my room and slammed the door. I could hear them laughing straight through it. Our house is very small. Dad came in, still smiling. He looks like a movie star, everybody always says, and he’s originally from Ireland, so he’s got that whole accent thing going. Plus he’s six foot three, with high cheekbones, dark brown wavy hair, and little lines coming off his eyes that make him look like he’s hearing something funny. He sat beside me on the floor and said, “Gotta learn to take a joke, Maggie.” He calls me Maggie. His voice is sort of hoarse, always, like he’s been cheering too much.

  “I can take a joke,” I assured him.

  He winked at me. “That’s my girl.” I used to love when he said that. He whispered, “We have enough sensitive types in this house, hey?” and raised his eyebrows toward the living room where Ned and Mom were still eating.

  “Right,” I whispered back.

  “Well, then,” he said, pointing at my feet. “Let’s have a look.”

  I stood up to show him my turn-out. My feet just naturally face opposite walls.

  “And that’s good for ballet dancing, is it?”

  I shrugged and made a face like, isn’t that the funniest? But it is good for ballet, and all the other girls had gathered around me to look at my feet at the end of dance class that afternoon. I waited for his opinion on my blessed feet.

  “Just looks like a duck to me,” he said and smiled at me, though I saw a little questioning look in his eyes.

  I forced my face into an imitation of a smile. “Quack,” I said.

  He swooped me up in his arms and said, “Come eat your supper, Duckie.” I could tell he was proud I didn’t have such easily bruised feelings as Mom. If he’d told her she looked like a duck, there’d be broken dishes and tears, for sure.

  A few weeks before my eighth birthday, a tooth wiggled. I worked on it endlessly and showed Roxanne its progress every morning on our way to school. It hung by a thread for about a week. Roxanne offered to yank it out, but I felt a little queasy about that.

  Ned and I were watching a video on my parents’ bed one afternoon when they’d gone out to finish their fight. Mom was angry at Dad about something, he was being selfish again like always, she was being oversensitive, stuff was starting to be thrown, and they’d decided to take it outside.

  Ned’s eyes were narrow as they left, like they always got when Mom and Dad started fighting. He can’t handle tension. I followed him into Mom and Dad’s room where he turned on a movie with lots of punching.

  I jumped on Ned to tackle him, get him to play with me, and my tooth fell out. We found it on his shirt.

  He was in sixth grade and very cool at that point. I was jumping around like I’d just won a trip to Disney World. “Finally! My tooth! Yes!”

  Without looking away from the guys beating each other up on the TV, Ned asked, “So what? You don’t believe in the tooth fairy, do you?”

  I stopped jumping and looked down at the tooth between my finger and thumb. I remember not wanting to answer. Even in second grade I had this idea I shouldn’t make a fool of myself.

  “The tooth fairy is just Mom and Dad, you know,” he said.

  “It is not.”

  “Trust me,” he said and turned up the volume.

  “Roxanne is friends with her.”

  “Roxanne is a liar,” he said. “It’s Mom.”

  That really bugged me. “It IS NOT! It’s
the tooth-freaking-fairy!” Ned and all his buddies used to put freaking in the middle of where it didn’t belong all the time back then, and it sounded really tough and grown up to me.

  I guess it didn’t sound so tough to Ned, because he fell off the bed, laughing. “The tooth-freaking-fairy! I love it!”

  “You shut up!” I yelled. I stood there stomping my feet, searching for any power to hold over him other than the obvious little-sister weapon. I had nothing, so out it came: “Shut up or I’m telling!”

  “Tell,” Ned answered.

  “I will.” I touched my tongue to the soft metallic-tasting space where the tooth used to be. Ned clicked off the TV. “Or don’t tell. Don’t tell them you lost your tooth at all. Just put it under your pillow and see if the tooth fairy really does show up.”

  “She will.” I inspected the tooth. It looked weird and not very toothlike, with the roots showing there between my fingers. “Roxanne knows her.”

  “Right. Tell you what. If the tooth fairy does come,” Ned said, “I’ll match what she gives you.”

  “Fine,” I said, close to tears, because the truth was, I had my doubts. Why would a fairy be willing to pay for such an ugly thing? And what was she planning to do with it, after? Roxanne had said something about jewelry, but it didn’t make much sense. You could just use beads and not spend every night sneaking into kids’ bedrooms.

  “Let me see it,” my brother asked. He held out his hand. I placed the small, slightly bloody tooth softly inside.

  “Psych!” he yelled and closed his fingers around the tooth. He lifted his fist above his head. I jumped, but Ned was already close to six feet. He ran around to the other side of my parents’ bed.

  I chased him, screaming, “Give it back! It’s mine!”

  “Not anymore!”

  He ran out of their room. I followed him. He ran through the kitchen to the basement door, which he slammed shut behind him. I grabbed a metal spatula off the counter, flung the door open, and screamed, “Get up here!”

  I was afraid of the basement, and my brother knew it. There was no light switch at the top of the stairs. You had to go down into the darkness and hold your arm up, wandering around without seeing, hoping the string hanging somewhere in the middle would brush your hand. My parents were always saying they should get a switch put in, but they never did.

  No answer from Ned.

  “Get up here!” I screeched. “Now!” I stomped as hard as I could on the top step, but the only effect was pain wavering up through my leg. I was holding the spatula up in the air like a weapon, although I had no idea if he could see me. I felt fierce; I wanted to kill him. It was my tooth, my first shot at getting something under my pillow from the tooth fairy. He was stealing from me. “Now!” I repeated with as much authority as I could muster.

  When there was no response, I flung the spatula down into the darkness and slammed the door shut.

  I heard a whimper, or thought I did, but I was scared he was just teasing me. I touched the doorknob, trying to decide what to do, whether or not to open it. I let go, then grabbed it again, and felt it turn in my palm.

  The door opened. When I saw my brother, I fell back into the stove. There was blood pouring down into his eyes and he was crying, my big, tough hulk of a brother. I could see his forehead pulling apart from itself and shut my eyes tight against seeing his brains.

  “Call 911!” he screamed, wiping blood out of his eyes.

  Instead I opened the back door and ran away.

  I was too scared to run far, so I just ran to my cherry tree and sat on the far side of it. My father found me out there later while Ned and Mom were at the hospital getting Ned’s head sewn up.

  “I thought you ran away,” Dad said, his back against the bark, like mine.

  “I did,” I told him.

  “Oh, Maggie,” he said, laughing.

  “What?”

  “You’re just like your old man, you know that?” He took me inside and gave me ice cream.

  After everyone was asleep that night, I went down to the basement in my nightgown. I took about an hour getting down the dark steps, gripping the banister tight, telling myself if there are no fairies, then certainly there are no monsters, nothing to be scared of in the dark. No such thing, I said to myself before each step. No such thing. When there were no more stairs, I felt relieved, until I realized there was also no more banister to hold. I was adrift in the middle of the darkness, and in my imagination there were now pools of my brother’s blood on the floor waiting to drown me in revenge for what I’d done. Only the fact that I wanted that first lost tooth so bad kept me going, hand raised, feet shuffling. I gasped when the string tickled my palm.

  I closed my eyes and pulled the string, then got down on my knees on the cold concrete floor to search for my tooth. I found it pretty quickly and ran up the stairs. I was wasting a lot of money, leaving the light on, but at that point I was like, too bad; no way was I making the trip up in the dark. I ran to my room, placed the tooth under my pillow, and lay there in the bed with a pounding heart waiting for the tooth fairy. When I woke up, of course, the tooth was still there under my pillow. I hadn’t really believed in her so much anyway.

  Only babies believe in magic and fairies and stuff, I told myself, and put my tooth into a little white box because nobody would want it. Even my own body had no use for it anymore. When Mom noticed it was missing a few days later, she asked, “Why didn’t you put it under your pillow, Morgan? For the tooth fairy!”

  “Come on, Mom,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m too old for stuff like that.”

  “You’re seven.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t even know what I did with it.”

  She looked really disappointed, walking away from me with slumped shoulders into the kitchen.

  The next weekend, when Dad’s friends came over to watch soccer on TV, he’d told them all how I’d split my brother’s head open and run away. “Way to handle pressure, Maggie!” he said. “Yeah, when the going gets tough, run away and hide—that’s my girl!”

  My mother frowned and said, “Eddie.”

  “Don’t be such a party pooper,” he told her. Then he scooped me up into his lap to watch the game with him and his buddies.

  five

  I put the tooth in my Sack to show that part of me, the part that knows there’s no such thing as magic. I was born a realist, not all sentimental like CJ, with her pink room and a flowered scrunchie on her bun. It’s amazing she and I stayed friends as long as we did, come to think of it. We’re so different.

  She knows about what I did to Ned, though, so if I get up there and pull out this spatula, I know she’ll cover her mouth and open her eyes wide like she did when I told her about it. She wanted to hear every detail, even the blood part. It made me feel tough, telling her about it; not ashamed, like I was some violent jerk, but tough and strong, the way Roxanne had seemed to me. When CJ and I played together, I got to make up the rules.

  Well, that’s over with, I guess, and who cares, because it’s not like we play anymore. We’re a little beyond that, or at least I am. If I get called and take out this spatula, she might think I’m gross. She might have changed her mind about me. I could say I’m into cooking or something, I guess.

  CJ hasn’t budged. It’s beyond me how somebody can sit that straight and that still. Doesn’t her behind start to itch, so bony on the hard chair?

  Mrs. Shepard makes a clicking noise with her tongue, or maybe it’s the pointy toe of her shoe tapping on the cold tile floor. I don’t know. I don’t want to look at her and give her an idea to call on me. I need time to come up with a bunch of lies about what my things symbolize.

  “Louis Hochstetter,” Mrs. Shepard calls.

  Thank you. The boy can talk, which gives me a few seconds to think. Lou stands up abruptly behind me, jolting his chair into Zoe Grandon’s
desk. I would normally turn around and smile at Zoe about Lou’s clumsiness, but not today. Zoe is my enemy, now.

  Instead I take the opportunity to jiggle stuff around in my bag. The spatula CJ would recognize, and the ballet slipper, oh, dread, I can’t let her see that. This can’t be happening. The branch she might get or not, I don’t know. I can’t make a fool of myself in front of her and everybody; what am I going to say? I should’ve walked out with Roxanne. Oh, please, somebody help me.

  My hand touches the cold, smooth medal. She won’t recognize this. I never told her about this; she doesn’t even know it exists. I clasp it in my hand, under my desk, as Lou Hochstetter scuffs by. Saint Christopher, protect us.

  six

  The day my father announced he was leaving was the Saturday after Fourth of July, three-and-a-little years ago. It had been sort of a rough year because Ned was being totally impossible, fighting at school and getting suspended, cursing at my mother, and threatening everybody who looked at him funny. Mom dragged him from one psychiatrist to another and read a hundred books on how to cope with him. She tried everything from putting us all on a macrobiotic diet to praising Ned every time he took a breath: I appreciate that you didn’t use very many curses in that sentence, Ned!

  Dad and I played catch in the backyard a lot that year. We didn’t like to be in the middle of all that tension. He also started being a daily communicant, going to Mass every morning at seven. I heard Mom proudly telling a friend of hers on the phone that my father was able to handle things so well, able to turn to God and be a calming presence for the family.