Not That I Care

by Rachel Vail

  She never told anybody the real reason I quit. She told Fiona I got bored of it, and Fiona can think whatever she wants, CJ stood by me. Fiona is such a boring bun-head, CJ and I always say. I had better turn-out than she did. She was jealous of that, and of my friendship with CJ. I could be on my way to prima ballerina, too.

  Gabriela is showing her key chain and explaining how she has two homes, her mother’s and her father’s, and that it’s hard for her—she has trouble keeping track of where her shoes are and knowing who to ask to sign her permission slip, but at least she gets to bring her cat back and forth with her. Everybody squirms, listening to this. It’s too personal. Gabriela is really nice but so clueless.

  twelve

  Fifth grade, when I was turning eleven, was the first time Mom took the camera out and dragged me in front of my cherry tree to pose. I didn’t want to; without Dad there it was just depressing. While she was positioning me, Ned muttered something about no cherries ever growing on my cherry tree and how my father had probably just bought the wrong kind.

  Mom agreed. She said something like “defective” as she was trying to figure out the focus.

  I yelled, “It is not defective!”

  “Right,” Ned said.

  “It’ll have cherries by next year on my birthday,” I insisted, and Mom snapped the picture. I look angry in it.

  “Don’t get all worked up about it,” Mom said. “Can we please? I have to set up for your party.”

  “It will,” I said. “You’ll see.”

  “Fifteen screeching kids on their way,” Mom complained. “I can’t deal with this today.” She hurried inside to hang streamers.

  “It will,” I whispered again. Nobody was listening to me, so I got on my bike and rode for a while.

  When I got back, my guests had already arrived and Mom was furious at me for running away. “Just like your father,” she whispered. She gave me the Silent Treatment, all through my party.

  The next weekend, I stole a bottle of vitamin-rich plant food out of Mr. Hurley’s shed. Every Saturday morning before Ned and Mom woke up, I poured little capfuls around the tree’s roots. I kept the bottle hidden under my bed, because I didn’t want to explain. Mr. Hurley would never notice; he had three bottles of it all lined up in his gardening shed. Whenever I went over to CJ’s, I watched him, how he watered and worried over his plants. I watered my cherry tree and walked around it, all that summer and fall. I even stopped checking my red tulip at the Hurleys, out of loyalty to my tree.

  In the winter, last year, I did nothing, because Mr. Hurley did nothing. Let it lie fallow, he said, when I casually asked how do you help the garden in the winter. Let it lie fallow, he said, let it rest so it can save its energy for the spring. He asked if I was getting interested in gardening. I just shrugged and said not really.

  When the snow melted, he went back to feeding his garden and worrying over it, so I started with the little capful and the watering again, too.

  “Pacing around it isn’t gonna make it grow cherries, you know,” Ned unhelpfully told me.

  “No kidding,” I said, rolling my eyes. He thinks he’s so brilliant.

  By the end of March, there were blossoms all over the branches. Almost every morning before school, I woke up early, made myself some tea, forced myself to sit at the table and drink it, and then went out back before Mom and Ned stopped snoring. I climbed up my tree and checked for cherries.

  Nothing.

  At night I prayed. Come on, Saint Chris, I said, hoping friendliness might influence him. One cherry. How hard can one little cherry be for a saint? I’m not asking for world peace here. A measly cherry, on a cherry tree. It’s not for myself, Chris—it’s for my mother, so she’ll know my father didn’t plant her a defective tree when I was born. She’d be so happy.

  Nothing.

  Mom drank her coffee each morning standing in the kitchen, looking out the window at the tree, and I knew she was thinking, what a stupid defective tree. I watched her.

  A month before my birthday, I told her one morning, “I think this might be the year we get cherries.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t even like cherries that much anyway,” she said.

  “Yes, you do.” I hiked myself up to sit on the counter. “You love cherries.”

  “Morgan, don’t agitate me today, OK?” She spilled out the rest of her coffee. “Get off the counter. I have an exam tonight, and my boss is on my case, and I’m just way too stressed to be patient with your fantasies. OK? Like it or not, you play the hand you’re dealt. This is our life, so we have to get used to it.”

  “I am used to it,” I told her, still up on the counter.

  “Good.” She shoved her feet into her shoes and grabbed her keys off the hook. “So can we stop with wishing for cherries to magically appear?”

  I quit praying for magic and came up with a plan.

  I hoarded my allowance. We won a softball game that week, but I made up an excuse that I couldn’t go to the pizza place after, had to ride right home, because I was grounded for cursing at my mother. A total lie—I just didn’t want to waste the money on a slice of pizza. I needed it.

  The day before my birthday, I limped around school saying I had hurt my ankle, so I’d get out of softball practice. I hobbled away from the gym, then jumped on my bike and rode to the grocery store, all my money in the pocket of my khaki shorts.

  That night, Mom took me and CJ and Ned out to Red Lobster and said we could choose anything we wanted off the menu, including for dessert. CJ said she just wanted the shrimp cocktail. I don’t know if she was trying to save my mother some money or just watching her weight as always. I almost ordered the same, but my mother looked so disappointed I chose a lobster. It was delicious. I got a sundae for dessert, and CJ tasted it. She was practically falling asleep on the table, because she’d had ballet that afternoon.

  After we dropped CJ off, I raced into the house to check the messages and e-mail. Nothing. “I’m sure he’ll call tomorrow,” Mom whispered, trying to hug me.

  “Who?” I asked, pulling away.

  “Why do you always pull away from me?”

  “I’m tired.” I sat on the windowsill in my room with my face pressed against the glass, straining to see my tree, for a little while, then set my alarm for four-thirty A.M., checked the bag under my bed, and got under my covers.

  The next morning I woke up just before the alarm buzzed. I think it must’ve clicked, because my eyes popped open and I slammed down the snooze button just as the buzz was starting. I flipped the switch to off, got out of bed, and pulled up the covers in one motion, and took the grocery bag out from under. I tiptoed to the kitchen, filled the teakettle with water, and climbed onto the counter to get a tea bag out of the box I’d hidden there. When the steam came out of the kettle, I poured it over the bag in my mug and watched the water darken. I dragged the tea bag around inside the mug and hummed “Happy Birthday” to myself.

  “Happy Birthday to Morgan,” I whispered, pouring in the milk and watching the cloudiness curl into itself. Humming the rest, I went out to sit at the table and drink my tea. No presents on the table. Big surprise. Well, I got dinner. And I don’t need anything, I reminded myself. I wear my sandals every day it’s warm enough, and I take good care of my clothes, and it’s not like I played with toys or anything anymore, and I’ve never been the jewelry type. I finished my tea as quickly as I could, threw on some sweats, grabbed the grocery bag, and quietly, silently, opened the back door to step out into the cool.

  The grass was damp under my sandals. I crossed our little yard quickly and left my sandals at the base of the tree, beside the grocery bag. I climbed up into a crook of the trunk, the plastic bag of cherries in my teeth and the roll of Scotch tape in my waistband. I had bought as many cherries as I could afford, almost four and a half pounds, which is a lot when your fingers are cold and the
branches are a little damp so you have to wrap Scotch tape around and around each stem.

  When I finished, it was six-fifteen. I climbed down and stood back, in the cold grass, to see. The branches hung heavy with fruit. One of them really drooped, where I’d overcrowded. It was beautiful. There were maybe a hundred cherries taped up there, but it looked like a thousand to me, with the sun coming up brightening the sky behind the tree. They looked like jewels. I grabbed the bag and my sandals and raced back inside, thinking, This will show her, and also, I hope she likes it. She deserves a nice thing, and she really does love cherries.

  It felt like forever, lying there in my bed with my nightgown back on, waiting for Mom to get up. She hit her snooze three times, until I was ready to go clonk her over the head with the clock. After her alarm rang the fourth time, she grumbled and went into the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush and then the water running in the sink. She must’ve brushed every single tooth four hundred times, it felt like. Finally, she padded to the kitchen. The coffee beans were ground up noisily and water poured into the coffee machine. I buried my head in my pillow to keep from shouting, Look out the window!

  I listened past the percolating of the coffee machine for any sound. Nothing. What was she doing in there? The fridge opened and closed. Look out the window! And then I heard it. A gasp.

  I couldn’t stand it anymore. I jumped up and raced into the kitchen, trying my best to look sleepy. “What?”

  Her face was puffy, there was some mascara smudged under her eyes, her thick stack of curly hair was leaning toward the window. She looked beautiful. Her mouth was open but almost smiling. She didn’t move, just stood there pointing out the window. “The! The!” she said. She shook her head a little and breathed out hard through a spreading smile.

  “What?” I looked out the window, squinted like I couldn’t see all those fat red cherries decorating the branches.

  “I don’t believe it,” she whispered. “Cherries!” She blinked a few times, then grabbed me by the nightgown and dragged me out into the backyard.

  I flopped behind her, trying not to smile.

  “How in the world?” she whispered breathlessly as she pulled me barefoot across the lawn. “I never thought . . . Look at them, there must be a thousand cherries, I just yesterday looked and . . .”

  She reached up to touch a deep red cherry, and pulled. It didn’t come off, so she pulled some more. Pulled and pulled and pulled. “What the . . . ?”

  She yanked so hard the branch arched down to her waist, and when the cherry finally came off in her hand, there were loops of tape around the stem. She brought it up close to her face, then slowly raised her eyes to look at me. “Morgan,” she said.

  I squinted at the cherry. “Hmm. That’s weird,” I said.

  “You taped cherries to the tree?” she asked.

  I looked at my toes in the grass. “It must be magic,” I mumbled.

  “There must be twenty dollars’ worth of cherries taped to this tree.”

  I smiled to myself but didn’t say anything. It was eighteen, really.

  “Oh, Morgan,” she said, sighing.

  “Taste it,” I suggested.

  “How will we ever get all these cherries off?”

  I shrugged. “I guess the tree isn’t defective, huh? We should call Dad.”

  She threw the cherry onto the grass. “Would you stop it already? He is the one who left, and I am sticking it out here. OK? Will you for once stop apologizing for him?”

  “I didn’t . . .”

  “I am not mad at you,” she said angrily, clutching my shoulders. “Do you understand? I just don’t know why you would do such a stupid thing.”

  As I walked back inside, I heard her asking again, “How am I supposed to get all these cherries down? They’re all going to rot.”

  thirteen

  “Thomas Levit,” Mrs. Shepard calls. I guess I spaced out on the rest of Gabriela Shaw’s presentation, because she’s already sitting down. Tommy’s chair screeches as he pushes it back. CJ’s new boyfriend. So cute, the jerk.

  Oh, no. The red-hots. What am I going to say about them? Because Tommy and CJ both will definitely recognize this box of red-hots in my bag.

  I roll my eyes at CJ, she rolls hers back, and I’m feeling OK for the first time all day. So what if Tommy is going out with CJ? That’s OK, I decide generously. She’s my best friend. So I’ll go out with Jonas; Jonas is sweeter than Tommy, and cute, in his own way, definitely. Jonas has rosy cheeks and long eyelashes, although he has started walking like a chicken. But I could get past that, probably. His twin, Tommy, looks nothing like him. Tommy has dark, straight hair hanging into his dark eyes, and he does this thing with his chin—he sort of points with it at you when he’s including you in a joke. He juts his chin out and looks at you out of the corner of his eyes, then looks away. I don’t know why that made me so crazy last year, but it did, and I went out with him for two weeks until I dumped him for being too horny. Since then we’ve been a little weird around each other.

  But I’ll get Zoe Grandon to ask Jonas if he likes me. CJ and I and the Levits will be a foursome anyway, just switch guys; best friends do that. It’s fun. Zoe is taller than Jonas and Tommy, and last week she said herself she doesn’t like either of them like that, just as friends. Zoe is a very friendly person. I have nothing against her. She’s been president of our grade since there’ve been grade-wide elections. I’ve always voted for her. She smiles easily and laughs at any joke or wisecrack you make, and she genuinely seems to like everybody, which is beyond me. Nobody annoys her. She has stringy blond hair and huge blue eyes that focus only on whoever is talking to her, like she’s got nowhere else she’d rather be.

  CJ would never choose Zoe as a best friend. I don’t know what I was thinking this morning. Zoe’s too, I don’t know, big. Too happy. Too popular. No depth. I can’t believe I was stupid enough to think CJ would dump me for Zoe—Zoe, with her huge grin and stringy hair and no depth. Zoe’s bag is probably empty, I tell myself, and almost laugh out loud, having cheered myself up so thoroughly.

  Then I remember my red-hots dilemma, and that gets me serious again fast. What am I going to say about these red-hots?

  fourteen

  Zoe fixed me up with Tommy Levit last year, in sixth grade. Everybody watched him ask me out, up on the upper playground. When he wandered over before school that morning in the snow, all the sixth-grade girls made squeaky noises and pushed me toward him, because, of course, Zoe had told everybody she was fixing us up. I could feel them all watching us walk toward the chain-link fence, through the already crunched-up snow.

  When we got to the fence, he mumbled, “Will you?”

  “OK,” I said. Then we ran back to our separate groups of friends.

  We didn’t talk to each other the rest of that week or the next, but Valentine’s Day was the following Saturday, and there was a party at Zoe Grandon’s house, which is right behind the Levits’. Pretty much everybody in sixth grade went. We didn’t talk to each other much there, either, but at ten-thirty when we were all shrugging our soggy jackets on in the dining room, getting ready to leave, Tommy shoved a box of red-hots from his jacket pocket into mine. Taped to it was a note that said, “Happy V-Day. Tommy.”

  CJ and I were having a sleepover that night, after the party. We stayed up all night reading and rereading the note. We planned what would happen if Jonas asked her out and the four of us were a foursome all through middle school and high school. We planned to go on the seventh-grade apple-picking trip as two couples, discussing if we should sit with them or with each other on the bus, and maybe kissing them, there. That cracked us up, talking about kissing. We kept falling back on her bed, pretending to faint. Do you think you have to move your face around, she asked, imitating how people do it in the movies. We made kissy noises and then pulled the necklines of our nightgowns up over our chins, em
barrassed, and agreed we were too young to have to worry about it.

  We got out construction paper and markers and wrote, Morgan and Tommy, CJ and Jonas. Morgan Levit and CJ Levit. We decorated the papers with hearts and some glitter. If we marry them someday, we whispered, we’ll finally be real sisters, or at least sisters-in-law. We crossed our fingers and touched our noses as we watched the sun rise.

  By breakfast, CJ and I were exhausted but still giddy. We tore our artwork into tiny bits, then dialed the Levits’ number like twenty times before I finally got my courage together and asked to speak to Tommy. It was nine-thirty on a Sunday morning, and his father sounded pretty groggy.

  Tommy picked up the phone and asked, “Hello?”

  “Hi.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Morgan. Miller. From school.” I rolled my eyes at CJ, who was pretzeled up inside her legs on her bed.

  “Hi,” Tommy said.

  “Hi.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Um . . .” I couldn’t remember. “I just, thanks for the red-hots. They’re delicious.” I hadn’t opened them. I still haven’t.

  “Oh,” he said. “No big deal.”

  “Right,” I agreed. “I didn’t say it was.”

  “We’re gonna build a snow fort,” he said. “Me and Jonas.”

  “Oh, OK,” I said, shaking my head at CJ like, why did you talk me into this? “’Bye, then.”

  “No,” he said quickly. I raised my eyebrows; CJ leaned forward. Tommy finished, “I meant, if you want to come over.”

  “Oh. OK,” I said again.