Out of Order

by Betty Hicks

  They’re still yelling.

  Snowman’s barking.

  So loud I can’t read.

  So. I’ll keep writing.

  What’s left to say?

  Lily. I feel rotten for her. She took care of that sunflower like it was her own kid.

  But, at least it made Dad forget everything that’s wrong with me. For now.

  Journal Entry #174

  “The mention of bad-tempered and unstable people reminds me that during the whole of this day my behavior has been above reproach.”—Dostoevsky, White Nights

  Lily

  For one whole day, I do nothing. I say nothing. I feel so hollow. So cheated.

  Get a grip, I tell myself.

  I hear Parker pleading, Lily, it’s just a flower.

  He’s right.

  I’m numb over losing a stupid flower. I can’t imagine what Eric and V must have felt like when their brother died. Parker said Eric told him that Ben was scary sick for a whole year.

  At least he wasn’t killed. Hacked down in broad daylight by his own sister.

  I know she did it. I mean, come on—she actually left the murder weapon at the scene of the crime.

  When I watered my sunflower, there was no rake. When I went back an hour later, V’s rake was right there. Practically touching my plant—what was left of it.

  I’m not numb anymore, though.

  I’m mad.

  I spot Frank’s spray bottle full of Roundup, the one he uses to kill weeds deader than a stomped-on ant. Roundup doesn’t just wipe out weeds. It kills all plants.

  Why did V kill mine?

  Because her dad likes me?

  What kind of a reason is that? Doesn’t my mom like her? Well, I’m sure she would if she had time.

  But do you see me chopping up her new clothes?

  No.

  I pick up the Roundup.

  I stare at V’s tomato project—the one that’s going to bring her a pile of money. For what? More lip gloss? A new Victoria’s Secret thong?

  I squirt it harmlessly at the gravel path. Cicadas scurry in ten directions. Does Roundup kill bugs, too?

  It’s an awesome day. Blue sky, gentle breeze, fluffy white clouds. Not too hot. It makes me angry that I’m wasting all this time being angry.

  I aim the Roundup at V’s tomato plants. Should I zap them?

  Of course not. I’m not mean like her.

  I place the spray bottle back on the ground where I found it.

  Will we ever get along?

  I remember the day, a month after Mom and Frank got married—the day I thought V and I would be best friends.

  Mom had left the house to call on one of her computer customers. She does custom work and tutoring in other people’s homes—installing new software, fixing glitches, teaching slick cyber tricks. All the stuff that old people over forty with home computers need. Only they have to find someone like her who speaks non-tech language, slow and simple.

  Frank, Eric, V, Parker. All gone. I had the house totally to myself.

  I outgrew dolls a long time ago. But sometimes, if I’m home sick and no one is watching, I get out my Barbies. I don’t know why. It’s just fun.

  I never ever did the Barbie-loves-Ken stuff, or blushing-bride-Barbie, or just-got-her-nails-done Barbie.

  Gag.

  No. My Barbies are damsels in distress. Locked in tall chest-of-drawer towers, waiting to be rescued by Parker’s G.I. Joes.

  Or I make them be Kung-Fu Barbies, flipping through the air and kicking Darth Vader’s storm troopers into cyberspace.

  But when Mom married Frank, it seemed too risky, so I packed them all up and hid them in the attic.

  One day, I sneaked back up and pulled them all out. Everything. Even the Barbie Jammin’ in Jamaica Buggy and the entire Cali Girl Beach Pool Playset. Half my room was morphed into a pink-and-purple wonderland. Plastic stuff everywhere. Parker’s bed was the evil kingdom of Garlic Breath, and his Incredible Hulk had trapped Barbie in a black cave under the pillow where she was suffocating because of bad air.

  “Barbie?” said V in a voice of total astonishment. “You’re playing with Barbie?”

  I whirled around to see V standing in my doorway, eyes wide, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

  “No,” I said, feeling the heat rise up around the collar of my shirt and explode onto my face.

  Of course I was playing with Barbie. Any fool could see that I was playing with Barbie. There was no made-up explanation on earth that would make a sliver of sense. So I just said no.

  Let her deal with the absurdity of it all. No was my final answer.

  She stood there looking snobby for about a minute, then she scanned the hall for witnesses. Next she picked up one of Parker’s X-wing fighter jets and flew it in to rescue blue-in-the-face Barbie, who was gasping her last.

  She plopped down beside me on the floor, scooped up three skimpy doll outfits and folded them into a piece of Barbie’s matching airport luggage. She tossed the whole thing, along with Barbie’s boom box, into the back of a Corvette.

  “Here,” she said, thrusting Barbie’s Princess Horse Marzipan and Luke Skywalker at me. “Saddle them up and meet me in Venezuela before sunset.”

  It took me a minute to process the shock. Then I fell backward onto the floor, laughing so hard I thought I would cry.

  We played goofball Barbie for an hour. Nutty stuff. Wild and crazy. I loved my new sister.

  Two days later, Cassie and I were watching TV in the den when V strolled through with her new friend, Jessica. Jessica is the type of person who goes to the pool every day of her life, but has never gotten wet.

  Cassie thinks she’s interesting.

  I think she’s more boring than a spit-out wad of chewing gum, but I say, “Hi, Jessica,” just to be friendly.

  “That’s Lily,” says V, her chin up in the air. “She still plays with dolls.”

  It’s almost a year later, but thinking about it, even now, makes my heart cramp up as if a huge hand had just squeezed it like a lemon. The same feeling I get when I look at my broken sunflower stalk. The one that’s turning brown from the top down.

  I pick up the bottle of Roundup and squirt a dozen of V’s tomato plants before I can stop myself.

  But I do stop. I can’t make myself destroy her entire project, even if she deserves it.

  It doesn’t matter, though. The breeze carries all the poison to all fifty plants.

  I didn’t know it would do that.

  Parker

  I didn’t know it would do that, thought Parker, staring miserably at the scuffed-up basketball in his grimy hands.

  Who knew it would bounce so high? Or hit so hard?

  He dropped the ball and watched it roll to the end of the driveway. Then he ran as fast as he could toward it, kicking it so hard it stung his toes like a hornet.

  “Stupid ball!” he shouted after it as it soared across the street, bounced against the curb, then spun all the way to the storm drain in front of the Flannigans’ house.

  Good, he thought.

  He hoped it got sucked down a pipe and into the Atlantic Ocean.

  Parker swiped angrily at a tear with his dirty fingers, streaking his face with mud.

  “Stupid, stupid ball,” he repeated. “You made me break Lily’s flower.”

  V

  After school, Mary Beth dropped me off at the end of our driveway so I could roll our empty trashcan back to the garage. At least she thinks I can do something.

  I can’t wait until Eric gets his license. Then he can drive us all home from school. The ride home today was beyond boring.

  Parker, who’s usually louder than the cicadas, was mute as a brick. Lily sat in the front seat and moved her head in different directions every time her mom asked her a question.

  “Are you all right?”

  Nod.

  “Anything wrong?”

  Shake.

  “You’re so quiet.”

  Shrug.
>
  “Is this about your flower?”

  Violent shake.

  To her credit, Mary Beth had whispered the last question—so she wouldn’t make me, the sunflower slayer, uncomfortable. But I heard her anyway.

  All of them think I murdered Lily’s precious plant, but I didn’t.

  Eric read his fat book all the way home. Why doesn’t that make him carsick?

  Personally, I was thrilled to get to escape the car eight seconds early, even if it was to retrieve a garbage can. Mary Beth probably thought I’d love that job since it meant I could squash innocent bugs on the way down the driveway—killer that I am.

  I felt terrible for Lily. She loved that plant. But I couldn’t figure out how to tell her without it sounding like a confession. I’m sorry, implies sorry because I killed it.

  How did it die?

  I searched and searched for clues, but there weren’t any signs of disease or bugs or weed killers. It just looked broken, as if someone had clubbed it with a baseball bat. Or my rake.

  I waited until I heard the back door slam, meaning everyone had filed into the house like zombies. I pictured Eric, still reading his book. How did he walk and read at the same time?

  Vroom! Mary Beth had not gone in the house. She’d reversed the car and was backing out of the driveway—zipping off to somewhere.

  I waved, trying to stop her and ask if I could do anything to start dinner. She waved back and kept going. Clueless does not begin to describe this woman.

  I opened the door to Dad’s tool room, searching for my rake. Was it still in the garden? Yuck. How many cicadas would I have to step on to get to my tomato plants?

  I pictured how green and beautiful they were—ready to sell. I wondered if Parker would let me borrow his wagon to take them door-to-door. Or should I go to each house with only five or six placed neatly in a box?

  And what should I say first?

  Would you like to buy some tomato plants?

  Or, I’m raising money to buy soccer balls for children in Iraq?

  No. The first thing I should make perfectly clear, before they pinched up their faces thinking about digging in the dirt and sweating, was I’ll plant them.

  Then I could explain that the soil in our neighborhood tended to have the perfect pH—slightly acid—for tomatoes. I’d offer to sprinkle some cottonseed meal in for free, and then describe how I would bury a few of the lower shoots so that they would root too, giving the plant extra ways to suck up water in case of drought.

  All the neighbors would think I was a total plant genius. Last, I’d mention the soccer balls. A generous genius, they’d think, and happily buy three plants, maybe four.

  I edged around the corner of the house and into the garden, tiptoeing around the bugs.

  When I looked up, I saw drooping weeds where my plants should be.

  My plants were gone.

  No. I looked again. Not gone. The ugly weeds were my tomatoes.

  I couldn’t believe what my eyes were telling me.

  Fifty plants. All limp. Sick. Brown. Dying.

  No. I inched closer. Not dying.

  Dead.

  Lily

  I’m sitting in my room, wishing I were dead, when V explodes through the door like a bomb.

  “You disgusting, vicious little creep!” she screams. “You killed my plants!”

  Her face is as red as her tomatoes would have been.

  “I hate you!” she keeps yelling. “I didn’t kill your stupid plant!”

  I’ve known all day that this was coming. But I still don’t have a clue what to say.

  I only meant to kill a few?

  I’m only a partly disgusting, vicious little creep?

  I wonder how she knew I did it, but I’m not surprised. V is a super-sleuth genius when it comes to plants. Maybe I left fingerprints on the Roundup, or Lily-breath on the shriveled up leaves.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, knowing it’s not good enough.

  “Sorry?!” she shrieks. She takes a giant step toward me and I shrink. What if she decides to hit me?

  “You’ll be sorry,” she shouts. She turns and storms out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  Parker’s Shrek poster slides to one side. The big green ogre, with that goofy air of goodness he has plastered all over him, is looking at me sort of lopsided.

  You, I say to him, are only ugly on the outside. I am ugly everywhere.

  No.

  Wait.

  I didn’t mean to kill them all.

  Besides, look what she did!

  Aren’t we even?

  ERIC

  Journal Entry #174

  “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”—first sentence of The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway

  I’m sick of Russia. All those wars and hoarfrost made me tired and cold. Suddenly everything about it reminded me of home. Dostoevsky writing about why people act the wacko way they do—Tolstoy writing about wars and family problems. So I asked Mr. Jackman what I could read that wasn’t about families or fighting—something tough, man against nature. How about Moby Dick?

  Eric, he says, you amaze me. But give it a rest, man. Moby Dick is a thousand pages. Treat yourself to something short.

  The Old Man and the Sea, he says.

  I like long books—getting lost in them for weeks.

  The Hemingway book is so short it feels like Cliff’s Notes. But it’s cool. The language is lean and hard.

  There’s a boy in it who wants to help this old guy catch fish, but his dad won’t let him, because the old man is a loser. He hasn’t caught a fish in 84 days.

  “I am a boy and I must obey him,” says the kid, but he still wants to do something nice for the old man, so he buys him a drink, and the wrinkled, leathery old fisherman calls him a man.

  I know I should help out with our family crisis. Lily and V hate each other. Dad and Mary Beth are big-time stressed about it. Even Mud Boy is acting psycho.

  Dostoevsky would figure them all out in a heartbeat.

  I’d rather read.

  Lily

  V and I are both grounded. Stuck at home. Together.

  It’s so unfair. Not the part about being grounded—we both deserve that. But being alone with her in this house feels like I’m a lamb locked up with a lion. Well, maybe not a lamb. More like a rat. Either way, I hide quietly in the corners of our big cage and hope she doesn’t smell me.

  I can hear her banging around in the kitchen. And vacuuming the den. Is she bored, or just so mean that she’s trying to keep me out of the best rooms?

  What I should do is my history homework—that and dream up a science topic. School will be out in a month, and Mrs. Finley wants a science project!

  Talk about mean.

  She thinks we need something serious to keep us from quitting too early.

  It doesn’t matter though, because I can’t concentrate on anything except the bad vibes in this house. I swear, I can actually feel them. On my skin. Like a pulse.

  So I lay low, think about how my diseased science grade is about to get sicker, and work a lot of word puzzles.

  I’m sprawled across my bed staring at “almbe” and trying to unscramble it. Usually the five-letter words are a cinch. It’s the six-letter words that cramp my brain. But I can’t think about anything but Mom and Frank, who slipped into my room a while ago, like ghosts, easing onto Parker’s squeaky bed.

  “Lily,” said Mom, holding Frank’s hand for support. “You and V need to apologize to each other.”

  Frank sat straight up, looking super confident, as if that would fix everything.

  “I already did,” I said. “First thing. I told her I was sorry. But she was madder than anything—ever. Not that I blame her. So, I tried again later. When she was calmer.”

  “What did she say then?” asked Mom.

  Frank leaned forward, hopeful.

  I eyed him ca
refully. Should I repeat the exact words his daughter said? No way. My second apology had made her even madder than the first one. The stuff she’d said would get me grounded for life.

  “She told me to go pretty far away,” I reworded.

  Frank cringed.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “She swore she never touched my gall-darned sunflower.”

  His shoulders sagged.

  “And?” Mom dug some more.

  “That’s about it,” I lied. Why bother with the part where V claimed she planned to spend her tomato profits on soccer balls for kids in Iraq? I mean, give me a break. Soccer balls? Iraq?

  And I’m going to send my bread crusts to starving children in Africa.

  Frank and Mom left the room looking about a ton heavier than when they glided in.

  I bet they know V didn’t say “gall-darned.” I don’t even say “gall-darned.” But I’ve heard Papa Bud say it a million times, and it seemed a fair enough way to rephrase what she really said.

  Papa Bud has an old-timey way of talking that sometimes says things better than Shakespeare could’ve.

  Right now he would say that I am in a world of hurt.

  He would also tell me to forgive V because the Bible says so.

  I know that, because I go to Sunday school. V and Eric probably don’t know that, because they hardly ever go. Mom says I have to, but V and Eric are old enough to decide for themselves.

  That is so not fair.

  I go back to solving my puzzle.

  V

  I could feel the tension in this house. Actually feel it. When Dad and Mary Beth came into my room for the big talk, I swear, the air around my skin got heavier and vibrated.

  I acted busy, doing algebra homework at my desk. They eased themselves onto the end of my bed as though it might break. Mary Beth gave Dad’s arm a gentle squeeze of support that I wasn’t supposed to see. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d said a prayer. Please God, be with Frank in this moment of crisis, and forgive V her sins. Amen.

  “V,” said Dad. “You and Lily need to apologize to each other.”

  “No way,” I said, not looking up from my equation.