by Foxglove Lee
When my door was closed, or at least as close to closed as it would go, I slipped out of bed and picked up Yvette’s outfit. Even her little leather shoes were on the floor, buried under her dress.
“What did you do?” I silently asked Yvette.
She answered without saying a word. “Nothing.”
“Well, you must have done something. How did your clothes end up on my floor?”
“Don’t ask me,” she said. “I’m an inanimate object, remember.”
I dressed quickly and then struggled to get Yvette’s little dress over her big head. There was absolutely no way I could have taken those doll clothes off in my sleep. I nearly broke her arms trying to fit them back into her sleeves. Dolls were not easy to dress and undress. I couldn’t figure out how those clothes had ended up on my floor.
And, of course, I couldn’t explain to my aunt what she’d seen in my room. Not that she asked. We weren’t that kind of family. We didn’t ask each other personal questions.
Breakfast was a hearty spread of bacon, sausage, eggs, tea, and toast. When I ducked out of my bedroom, Uncle Flip hovered over the stove, frying bread in bacon fat. It was special enough to eat any breakfast that wasn’t Pop Tarts, but three proteins and toast fried in fat? That was my favourite sort of decadence.
I sat beside Mikey without saying a word. He was too busy stuffing his face to even notice me.
“Thank your brother,” Aunt Libby said as she dished scrambled eggs onto my orange plastic plate. Her voice wasn’t as chipper as it had been.
“What for?”
“Mikey brought your needlework and your shorts up from the beach,” Uncle Flip said as he turned his bread in the sizzling fat.
“Oh.” Begrudgingly, I said, “Thanks.”
Mikey didn’t look up from his breakfast.
“You missed quite a show,” Uncle Flip went on. He seemed oblivious to the tension between Aunt Libby and me. “Best fireworks display in years.”
“I saw them,” I said. “We watched from the yard.”
Aunt Libby had just sat down at my side, but I saw her raise an eyebrow. “We?”
“I.” There was no way I was going to say ‘Yvette watched with me.’ Hard enough to admit to myself that I thought of Yvette as a real person.
Uncle Flip brought a plate of pan-fried bread to the table. “So, what would everyone like to do today?”
“Swimming!” Mikey shouted through a mouthful of eggs.
I hadn’t even taken a bite of mine yet.
“Becca?” my uncle asked. “What about you?”
I shrugged. “Whatever.”
My aunt glanced at me for just a second, and then concentrated on cutting her sausage into pieces. I was so embarrassed I wanted to cry. Anger burbled in my belly, but instead of letting it out I drowned it in toast and homemade raspberry jam. It wasn’t unusual for me to feel misunderstood, but just because I recognized the emotion didn’t make it any easier to stomach.
Suddenly, I missed my mom. And I wondered where the hell my father was. Why couldn’t I have a normal family like everyone else? Life wasn’t fair.
After breakfast, Mikey and I collected kindling for the fire pit, then played badminton in the front yard. He didn’t say anything about the mud-slinging, but I didn’t expect him to. He was only a kid.
When Aunt Libby and Uncle Flip finished up the breakfast dishes, we put on our bathing suits. All together, we took a long walk around the winding cottage roads, then veered down to the lake. My stomach tumbled with every step, but when there were no kids, no adults, nobody swimming at all, my nerves settled. I swam all the way out to “the patch,” which was an island left of the beach. It had started out as nothing, but now it had mossy groundcover, wildflowers, grasses, and even trees poking up in the middle.
“I wish you would take off your T-shirt to swim,” Aunt Libby said.
Weird. I couldn’t remember her ever commenting on my clothing before. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything, just walked up the sand and grabbed my towel, which was small and threadbare, but bore the name “Rebecca” in red block letters. In the centre, there was a purple unicorn. My late grandmother had given it to me when I was Mikey’s age. She obviously didn’t know me very well.
I sat in the shade and watched Uncle Flip help Mikey build a sandcastle. Usually I’d have joined them, but there was a new irritability building up in me. All that wet sand and water lapping the shore should have been soothing. Instead, it made me angry.
Bolting toward the shoreline, I picked up a big wad of mud, swung it back side-hand, and launched it at my brother’s back.
Mikey fell forward, crushing the castle he and my uncle were building. Even before he howled, I heard my aunt’s voice behind me, howling, “Rebecca! What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?”
“Becca!” Uncle Flip called out, looking utterly perplexed. “Hey, what’s gotten into you?”
Mikey knew. That’s all I cared. I wasn’t going to explain myself to anyone else. All I said was, “At least I didn’t do it in front of the whole beach.”
I knew I wasn’t going to get any sympathy from my family, so I grabbed my shorts and my towel and took off down the cottage road. My stomach rumbled. It was past lunchtime and I’d only picked at my breakfast. This was supposed to be a getaway from everything I had to deal with at home, so why was everything the same? My family was mad at me, I had no friends, and my stomach was eating itself.
My aunt and uncle probably expected me to go back to the cottage like I’d done the night before, but I was feeling too antsy. I also needed something to eat, so I walked down the main road until I reached the store.
Aside from the marina, which served greasy fries and hot dogs, there was only one store in our lakeside community. It was the front room of a mint green cottage. The old couple who ran the place lived in the back. There was an upstairs too—it was a much bigger cottage than ours—but my aunt said the couple had trouble getting up and down the stairs nowadays.
I liked the mint green cottage store, because there was nothing like it in the city. They carried fresh bread and pastries, which were baked by a woman down the way. They also carried jams made by the mother of the skinny girl with pigtails who’d started the mud fight yesterday. All the store’s pickles were made by that girl’s father.
Other stuff, like the penny candies that cost a penny and the ones that cost a nickel, were brought in from town. I usually bought a green thumb, a red foot, hot lips, two gummy worms, and a shoelace. Every time, I ate them in a different order, or I’d eat a bite of one, then a bite of something else. But I wouldn’t be eating candy today. My relatively empty stomach couldn’t handle the sugar. I needed something plain and bready, like a scone or a cheese biscuit.
When I opened the door, the bells above it jingled to alert the owners a customer had entered. They lived and worked in the same place, so they didn’t always stay in the store.
“Shuuuut uuuuup!” somebody moaned from the back room. It didn’t sound like old Mrs. Jones, who ran the store. Even less like her husband. The voice sounded young like mine, and a hundred times more annoying.
I froze, because for a second I thought maybe she was talking to me. But I hadn’t said anything, so maybe she was arguing with somebody back there. When I didn’t hear any other voices, I thought maybe she was on the phone. The cottage’s silence suffocated me quickly, and my breath was slow to return. Maybe whoever was back there had been yelling at the bells on the door. So, in a way, she was yelling at me.
My stomach dropped at the thought of being hated even by people who had never laid eyes on me.
Maybe it would have been smart to leave, but I didn’t want to move in case the floorboards creaked and the mystery girl howled again. For a while, I flipped through the Archie comics that lived on a white wire rack near the entrance. They were all used copies, for sale at four for a dollar, but the kids around the community more often exercised their option to trade.
They brought in an old Archie and switched it for one they hadn’t read yet. That way, every book on the rack circulated to every cottage on the lake. I didn’t spot a single one I hadn’t checked out at some point in my life. That thought made me feel strangely old.
“Hello?” I called out. It’s not that I felt particularly bold—more that I was hungry. Also, it occurred to me that something bad might have happened to Mr. and Mrs. Jones. They’d usually have come out by now. “Anybody home?”
Again, that voice moaned, “Shuuuuuut uuuuup!” The words extended out and ran one into the next.
I crept toward the glass case by the cash register, since that’s where Mrs. Jones kept the baked goods. As I approached, I heard something crashing to the floor in the next room and then a whispered, “Shit!”
“Are you okay?” I called out, even though I didn’t know who “you” was.
Another moan, and then the mystery girl stumbled from the back room. “Whaddya want?”
When she leaned against the doorframe that divided the store from the Jones’s private space, my breath caught in my lungs. The girl in the blue bikini! Even though I’d only seen her from a distance, I knew right away this was the same person. Her blonde hair was a golden mess around her face. My mother would have called it a “rat’s nest” but I thought she looked pretty. She had about the longest legs I’d ever seen, and porcelain white, not carelessly tanned like my own skin.
“Well?” she snapped.
I couldn’t speak. I knew I was staring, and I knew it was rude, but I couldn’t help myself. It was after noon, and she still had on pyjamas: a white eyelet babydoll top with short ruffled undies. I wasn’t used to seeing anyone, even family, in that state of undress. The fabric was so thin I was sure I could have seen her chest right through it, if her long hair hadn’t been in the way.
“If you don’t tell me what you want, I’m going back to bed.”
“You live here?” I asked. It’s not what I wanted to ask, but my brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders. “I mean, where are the Joneses? Are they okay?”
“Town,” she muttered.
“Huh?”
“They went to town!” she shouted, over-enunciating every syllable.
“Oh.” I tried to think of something interesting to say. I wanted to engage her, show her I was smart and funny, even though I was neither of those things. I ended up asking, “Who are you?”
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“Tiffany.”
“Oh.” I’d never met anyone called Tiffany before. “You work here?”
She started to nod, then grimaced and held her hand to her temple. I knew what that meant. “Remind me never to drink ever again.”
“Okay.”
She still hadn’t answered most of my questions. Then again, I was staring at her chest, so I guess I was in no position to call her rude.
“They’re my grandparents,” Tiffany said. “The Joneses, who run the store.”
“Oh.”
“Do you want something, or did you just stop by to make my life a living hell?”
“Sorry.”
Tiffany had both hands on her head now, one on each temple, pressing them together like a vice. When I still didn’t tell her what I wanted, she slouched off the doorframe and said, “Okay, bye then.”
“Oh, wait.” I made a quick decision. “Can I get a tea biscuit?”
“I don’t care,” she said, disappearing into the back room. “Take what you want.”
Even though I couldn’t see her, I asked, “Aren’t you worried people are going to steal things?”
Her disembodied voice said, “Do I look like I care?”
“Guess not.”
If I hadn’t been so hungry, I’d have probably just left. Instead, I snuck around to the wrong side of the Jones’s sales counter and opened the glass case. I left a quarter beside the register—enough for one tea biscuit—but I took two.
Even before I’d left the store, I felt consumed by guilt.
Chapter 5
“Hi, thief.” Yvette had fallen from my shelf to my bed, and when I picked her up, she said, “You stole a tea biscuit.”
“Shut up. No I didn’t.”
“You can’t lie to me,” Yvette said in Aunt Libby’s sing-song voice. She tsked her teeth, shook her head in a mocking sort of disappointment. “Bad girl, stealing from the Joneses. And from Tiffany.”
“She didn’t care,” I said out loud. Sometimes I forgot to talk to Yvette just in my head. “She said it didn’t matter if people stole from the store.”
“Are you five years old? Don’t give me excuses. You know right from wrong.”
“Yeah, I do,” I said, forming the words silently with my lips. “Doesn’t mean I always do what’s right.”
Aunt Libby and Uncle Flip were getting dinner together in the kitchen. I could hear them shuffling pots and pans out of the oven, chopping vegetables, all those sounds of a meal in progress. It was nice not to be the one cooking, though I knew I’d probably leave my room in a couple minutes and offer my help. Mikey ought to lend a hand too, but I could hear him outside my window, repairing our tepee. Every summer we gave it a new carpet of ferns and a new coat of pine boughs.
“Yvette, how did your clothes get on the floor this morning?” I knew it was a stupid question to ask a doll, and in fact asking it made me feel a little scared.
She didn’t offer any explanation, and I was glad. Even so, I lay on my bed, waiting. The sun caught up with me, and I fell into a soft sleep as I listened to my aunt and uncle speaking in hushed tones and Mikey chattering alone outside. Maybe he had imaginary friends, too, though it seemed unlikely since he had so many real ones.
A light breeze wafted through my open window, disrupting Yvette’s curls and shifting the white curtains. They were eyelet and thin, just like Tiffany’s pyjamas.
Once my mind had landed on Tiffany, she was all I could think about. It bothered me that she’d been hung over, that she’d obviously spent last night drinking with those older guys who’d taken her water skiing. I wondered what else she’d done with them, and that thought enraged me. Tiffany wasn’t even nice to me. I shouldn’t think about her like that. Anyway, the last thing I needed in my life was another drinker.
“That’s right,” Yvette said. “And don’t you forget it.”
I felt embarrassed that she could read my thoughts. Sometimes Yvette seemed like a real person, not just a doll on a shelf that I had pretend conversations with. She really seemed to have a mind of her own.
“Are you mad at me?” I asked.
Yvette didn’t answer right away, and that was answer enough. Then she said, “I’m not mad.”
“You seem mad.”
“Nope.”
I wasn’t going to argue with her. At least, I didn’t plan on arguing, but it bothered me that she wasn’t telling the truth.
“You’re mad about Tiffany.”
“What about her? She doesn’t even like you.”
Yvette sure knew how to knife me in the heart when she wanted to.
“But I like her,” I said, actually pronouncing the words, whispering them across the room.
“Why?” The word was vicious, hate-filled. “She’s a dumb blonde beach bunny. And she drinks!”
“Maybe not all the time,” I said, though I really knew nothing about her except that she’d water-skied yesterday, drank too much last night, and snapped at me this afternoon.
Uncle Flip called me to set the table. Two tea biscuits sat like bricks in my stomach, but at least dinner saved me from a conversation I didn’t want to have with Yvette. I wondered if things were getting out of control with her, if I couldn’t shut down the part of my brain that made her talk. She used to be silent and supportive, back when my uncle first gave her to me. I could tell her things about school, about my family, my dad. She’d listen and, if she said anything, it was kind and reassuring.
Yvette called to me as I left my bedroom, but I closed the door to s
hut her out. My aunt and uncle hadn’t talked to me since I got my revenge on my little brother, so I figured I was off the hook. In my family, we didn’t hold grudges with each other the way we did with friends and enemies.
“Your uncle and I would like a word with you while Mikey’s out back.” My aunt was adding canned fruit to a half-set bowl of Jello.
I grabbed four plates out of the cupboard, but I didn’t say anything. I wanted to be invisible.
When Uncle Flip started talking, my brain felt like it was full of bumblebees. I grabbed knives and forks out of the top drawer and set them beside our plates, forks on the left and knives on the right. I couldn’t remember if that was the proper way, but I wasn’t going to interrupt my uncle’s soft-spoken concern to ask.
“Acting out.” That’s about all I heard through the buzzing. He said something about me being angry with my dad and taking it out on people who didn’t deserve it, and that Mikey and I needed to look out for each other just now.
Maybe I heard more than I thought.
Aunt Libby asked if there was anything I needed to talk about, “just us girls.” She told me we could have a special day in town if that’s what I wanted.
Just us girls. Those three words curdled my blood, because I never felt like I had anything in common with other girls. I was in another category—not quite boy, not quite girl. I didn’t have a name for it. The Martina category, maybe.
I stood beside the table, tracing the rose pattern on the handle of my fork with my fingernail. The cottage cutlery wasn’t a full set, but rather a combination of sets. My grandparents had accumulated them over the years. All the forks and knives and spoons were different—some tinny, thin and dull with black age spots, others clunky and weighted but plain. The fork I’d chosen for myself was fine, almost dainty in design, but with a good heft to it. I guess everybody had preferences, even when it came to cutlery.
“Can I bring a friend?” I asked Aunt Libby.
The question came out of nowhere. My aunt was checking on our meal, but she closed the oven door and turned fully to look at me. I knew exactly what she was thinking: You have a friend?
