by Rachel Vail
He wiped his sticky hands on his pajama pants and grabbed my hand. “Come on,” he whispered.
Our hands stuck together as we dashed around the corner to the stairs. He stopped short on the landing. Our parents were behind a door just above us. I made a face like Go! Go!
He grinned back at me, leaned toward me.
I shook my head and pushed him up the steps.
At his room, he stopped again and turned around, grabbing me by the sleeve of my fleece and pulling me toward him. “This is fun,” he whispered in my ear.
There was a noise from behind our parents’ door. His eyes opened wide and mine did, too. I scurried down the hall. At my bedroom door, I turned around. His head was peeking out from behind his.
“See you at breakfast,” he mouthed.
I rolled my eyes and dove into my bed. My mother’s alarm clock buzzed before I was fully under my covers. I froze, listening, as some whispering and then some giggling wafted down the hall from her room toward my unwilling ears, until I had the sense to cover my head with my pillow.
In the silence and darkness, I didn’t plot out how in holy hell I was going to get through breakfast and the day of school—Spirit Day, I remembered in my fog; have to wear a purple shirt. But I didn’t jump up to make sure my purple shirt was clean, or contemplate what I had gotten myself into and how many ways it could end in complete catastrophe (and how few, well, how zero ways it could end well). Or whether I’d tell Tess what had just happened. Nope. I fell asleep thinking forward twenty hours or so, to when maybe we could meet out on the deck again.
fourteen
I BLAME THE lack of sleep. But when my mother announced at breakfast that she had changed her mind about my sleepover Saturday, I think I was slightly justified in losing it, even if I had been in a normal state of mind.
Though how could I possibly be in a normal state of mind in front of Kevin and his family at breakfast, while having a should-be-private conversation with my mother despite my kiss-swollen lips?
She changed her mind. Saturday wasn’t going to work after all.
“But I already invited people,” I protested. “Tess will be so—I can’t just cancel!”
“People?” Joe asked. “How many people were you planning on?”
“Excuse me?” I said. “I wasn’t talking to—”
“Charlie,” Mom interrupted. “We just think—”
“We?” I may have been yelling by this point. Just what I did not need was to cancel on Tess.
“Charlie,” Mom said in a Calm down NOW voice. “Joe and I discussed it—and …”
“And he said no?”
She opened her eyes wide at me like Let’s discuss this later, not in public, but we were not in public; we were in our own kitchen. And she was letting this guy take over what I was allowed to do or not even after she gave permission.
“That’s not fair, Mom,” I said.
“Charlie, come on now.”
“Why can I suddenly not have friends sleep over?”
“Well, for one thing, what about Kevin? It doesn’t sound fair to …”
“He could invite some of his friends over, too,” I suggested, trying to sound both spontaneous and reasonable. “I don’t mind. That’s fine.”
“Never gonna happen,” Joe said. “Coed sleepover? Ah, no.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Mom said, her hand on Joe’s arm. “My point was, I wasn’t really thinking of this when I said yes, but now I realize it could be uncomfortable, for Kevin, to suddenly have five girls …”
“Five?” Joe asked.
“Doesn’t sound uncomfortable to me,” Kevin piped up. “Sounds like my birthday and Christmas all wrapped up in—”
“Kevin!” Joe said, but I could see he was sucking his smile in, trying not to laugh. Every once in a while, I get a glimpse of Joe’s fun side and it really throws me off.
“Hey, that’s a good idea,” Mom said.
We all turned to her, like, what is a good idea?
“Why don’t you postpone, have the sleepover during spring break? Kevin and Sam will be out west, so you and your friends can have some space, and …”
“I’m going to Dad’s,” I objected.
Mom hesitated.
“I’m not going to Dad’s?”
“He’s taking his wife and ABC to Paris that week.”
“I thought he hated France,” I said, despite completely not wanting to discuss this in front of the Lazarus family.
Mom’s lower jaw tightened twice. She raised her eyebrows while shaking her head and said, “I thought he did, too.” A small, mirthless chuckle escaped her.
“He’s not taking me with them?” I asked in an unfamiliarly small voice. Not that I would want to go on vacation with them, where I’d basically be an unpaid nanny, but still.
“Maybe call your father later to discuss it?” Mom suggested. “And also the job thing? But meanwhile, wouldn’t that be a better idea, postponing your sleepover until then?”
I shook my head, not trusting my voice, not trusting anything.
“Sure! You girls can rent some movies, and I’ll get one of those tubs of popcorn for you, and Joe and I will mostly stay upstairs, and it won’t be so awkward for Kevin, and it will all be good.”
“The end,” Samantha said without lifting her head from the book she was reading. She said it like the narrator at the end of a sweet little tale for children. I had to laugh a tiny bit at that.
“We gotta run,” Kevin said, and thrust my bag at me. “Bye!”
We were out the door before I could even continue arguing or figure out what had happened.
“I can’t believe her,” I grumbled on our dash to the bus, which was pulling toward the corner already. “Or my father. Damn. Screw everybody.”
“Better this way,” Kevin said. “We’ll tell them they can go out for dinner Saturday, then get Sam to sleep early …”
I opened my mouth in disbelief and gave him a little shove.
“I was just thinking we’d watch a movie,” he said. “You’re the one with the dirty mind.”
“So are you,” I said, climbing up the bus steps.
“Yeah,” he said. And for the first time, he didn’t pass me to go sit in the back row with Brad. He plopped down next to me instead.
I didn’t ask him anything about his mom or tell him anything about my father. We didn’t talk at all, in fact. For once I didn’t get all awkward and compulsive about filling in the silences. I closed my eyes and slumped beside him, this hot guy I still didn’t know all that well who had just witnessed private, inside family stuff, stuff nobody had gotten to witness before. Maybe somebody with siblings would feel different, but for me, it’s always been me on my own, with only my mom or my dad for discussions. It was kind of embarrassing—whose father disses her like that? But I’d witnessed some of his secrets, too, I realized. We might tilt our heads down toward our feet during moments of odd family tension, but still there was no way to avoid getting some inside views, simply by living in the same house as each other.
I felt his knee fall against mine as the bus went around a curve. I didn’t open my eyes or move my leg away, and when the torque straightened out, his leg continued pressing warmly against mine. I opened my eyes, an adrenaline surge waking me up fully, better than anything Anya could whip up at Cuppa, for sure. I spent the rest of the ride looking out the window, silent, with my thigh and Kevin’s pressed against each other, so anybody could see if they looked.
As we rounded the corner coming up to school, Kevin held out his hand to me. In his palm was cradled a pear, the last one, ripe, from the fruit bowl. I took it, held it against my chest, and let it slip into my bag before we got off the bus. I didn’t say thank you out loud, but I could tell he heard it anyway.
I passed Tess a note in bio that my mother had lost her mind or at least changed it because of her husband, so my sleepover was canceled. She didn’t write back, but she did wait for me, to walk through the hal
l together.
“Hey, sorry I didn’t tell you I was trying for the job at Cuppa. I …”
She shrugged. “Think you’ll get it?”
“Yeah, I did, actually.”
“You get a discount?”
“Twenty percent off.”
She looped her arm through mine. “That’ll help.”
My face unclenched. I may even have taken a note in class.
At lunch, all the girls gathered around me, commiserating as I told them about my mother’s horrible new flirtiness and mind-changing, and how Kevin’s father was almost always there, in my house, and how I can’t even ever leave the bathroom door open anymore.
“Does Kevin walk around in a towel?” Felicity asked, leaning close, her hand on my arm.
“Yes,” I whispered, and everybody shrieked.
“He is such a slut,” Tess said. “I’m sorry, Charlie, I know you’re stuck with him in your house, which has to be the most horrid, awkward thing, but I just have no use for him anymore.”
“I’d find a use for him in a towel,” Felicity whispered.
As she said the word towel, Kevin appeared in front of us like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and we all shrieked again.
At least he wasn’t in a towel. His feet in their scuffed sneakers were spread wide apart, his jeans a bit frayed at the back edges. His dusky, gray-blue T-shirt was untucked, and over it he wore an unbuttoned, blue-and-white-striped button-down. His arms hung lankly by his sides, with his crumpled-top lunch bag gripped loosely in his left hand. When I finally let my eyes wander up to his face, I saw, as I expected by then, that peculiarly Kevin-ish look of patient curiosity, his head tilted slightly to the side and forward, his soft, red lips almost curving into a smile but not quite, his right-cheek dimple hinting at indenting. But his eyes were not vague or hinting. They were unwaveringly staring right into mine.
“Hi, Kevin,” I said, striving for normalcy but apparently missing, because all around me, the girls other than Tess were giggling and collapsing onto one another, gasping for air, repeating, Hi, Kevin! Hi, Kevin!
Tess’s eyes were pinched nearly closed, looking back and forth between me and Kevin.
“I got your lunch,” Kevin said.
“You what?”
“Cheese sandwich?”
“Maybe it’s your cheese sandwich,” I mumbled.
“Nope.”
I grabbed my lunch bag, or what I’d thought was mine, and opened it. There was a huge, round mound wrapped in tinfoil instead of my normal flat sandwich.
“Turkey and tomato?” Kevin asked.
“I don’t know. It’s huge.”
“That’s what she said,” Darlene whispered behind me.
Kevin didn’t glance over at her, or at anybody but me. “I like it on a roll. You should try it.”
Darlene and Paige were giggling behind their hands.
“Ignore them, Kevin,” Felicity said, which shut them both up.
I stood up to trade bags.
He leaned toward me and let his fingers brush mine during the lunch bag exchange. “Did you eat the pear yet?”
“About to,” I answered. “Thursday pear.”
“Mmmm.” He walked away, back toward the boys.
When I sat down, trying to look normal, Tess was glaring at me. “What the heck was that?”
“I must have grabbed the wrong—what?”
“Thursday pear?”
“It’s a …” The words family joke strangled in my throat. “It’s a pear. It’s Thursday. What?”
“You guys sound like you’re …”
“What?”
“Married,” Tess said, at the exact moment that Felicity said, “Siblings.”
We all opened our mouths wide at both ideas and how definite both Tess and Felicity had sounded. I tried to make it about Tess and Felicity, their conflicting ideas, but everybody was like, Wow, Charlie, your face is so red. I denied that, even though I could feel the heat fevering up my head.
We all just focused on our lunches for a while. I was concentrating too hard to say anything, working on not making eye contact with Tess, who would see the truth with her X-ray best-friend vision. At the same time, I was using every eye muscle I had on not lifting my gaze to Kevin’s, to see if he had heard what Tess and Felicity had said and if he was still, over across the way where the boys were slouching, looking at me.
fifteen
AFTER SCHOOL I went straight to Cuppa. Anya had said if I didn’t have too much homework, I could stop by, maybe learn how to clean the machines, maybe even make that pot of tea she got too busy to teach me how to make the day before. I wasn’t scheduled to have an actual work day yet; I had a bunch of training to do first, but she told me not to worry, she’d pay me for training, too.
I didn’t tell her I wasn’t worried about that because I actually had no interest in the money at all. It would just sit in a jar on my desk. There was nothing I wanted that money could buy. I was just happy to have someplace to go instead of straight home. On my way into Cuppa, my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. My first thought was Kevin instead of Tess. Before I could wonder what that meant, I saw that it was my mother.
Hi, Charlie!
I have a ?
My mother does not normally text me. She is a history professor at Harvard. Anything post–Civil War tends to strike her as disarmingly modern.
What’s up? I texted back.
Does Kevin like it
Okay, I just stared at that for a few seconds. What the heck? Does Kevin LIKE IT?
I texted back:
????
I stood there and waited for a response. Finally, my phone shook again. My mom had texted:
Sorry. Does Kevin like IT
So I had to text back:
Mom what the heck is that supposed to mean?
Nothing. My phone just faked innocence, lying still as a walnut in my palm.
“You have to press something to make those work,” said a voice beside me.
“Excuse me?” I looked way up into a scraggly but familiar face. It was a guy from school, a senior with heavy-lidded eyes and a hipster’s slouch. Tall and slim, with dirty-blond hair hanging limp down his long neck. Rollerblades on his feet, a messenger bag slung across his torso.
“Oh,” I said. “Hi.” I had met him a few months earlier and seen him around, here and there. I groped my mind-files for his name, so I’d seem less little-girl frightened by his aggressive mellowness and sudden appearance. “Tony, right?” I asked.
“Close enough,” he answered.
“Okay.” Then my phone buzzed again. He looked over my shoulder at it.
Do you if Kevin likes
“My mother has lost her mind,” I said.
“Who’s Kevin?” Toby asked, raking his fingers back through his hair. “Your brother?”
“No, my … jeez. No! He’s not my—never mind. My, he’s my, my friend. Kind of.”
“Boyfriend?”
“No!”
“Your mom is wondering who he likes?”
“No! What?”
“Who does she think Kevin likes?”
“I have no idea. I don’t think she …”
“That’s kind of cute, that your mom wants to know who your friend likes. Weird, but …”
“Weird doesn’t begin to describe my family these days.”
“Yeah, tell me.” He skated forward and opened the door of Cuppa. I walked in. He followed me.
“Can I help you?” I asked him. The last thing I needed right then was a stalker, even one with a rumbly, slow-talking way and Rollerblades.
“No, I’m good,” he said, and skated toward the counter, then around it, back to the storage room. Nobody stopped him; nobody who worked there seemed to be around, just me and this guy, gliding to the storage room to, whatever, steal all the coffee filters.
“Hey!” I yelled in my toughest voice, shoving my once-again-buzzing phone into my pocket. “Hey, you, not-Tony! You can’t go back
there! Hello?”
It was up to me, apparently, to stop him and save Cuppa from disaster. Awesome. I took a deep breath and charged across Cuppa, without a plan other than maybe to deck him.
I got bounced back to the counter when we slammed into each other. He was emerging from the storage room not with arms full of stolen merchandise but instead tying a Cuppa apron around his waist.
“You want a decaf, maybe?” he asked me. The skates were gone, replaced by TOMS. How was he so fast?
“No.” I sucked on my knuckle, which had bumped against the counter.
“Oh, great!” Anya said, coming from the milk station near the bathroom. “You’ve met. Toby, this is Charlie, the new kid.”
“I had a feeling,” Toby said, nodding slowly, his eyes half-closed. “Cool.”
“Can you give Charlie a manual and an orientation?”
Toby turned around and went to the back room. As Penelope emerged from under the counter and began her listless dance among the machines, which hissed and burbled under her care, Anya kept up a happy little chat with the elderly couple waiting for their drinks. I took up space.
Toby came back. He handed me a crisp Cuppa apron and a manual about seventy pages long.
“You gotta memorize that,” he said. “Quizzes every single shift.”
“You are frigging kidding me.”
“Yes,” he said. “Very few quizzes, for real.”
I flipped through. There were pages and pages of precise measurements for every type of beverage; brew times; how many pumps of syrup flavoring go in which size cup; definitions—I was getting sleepy just skimming the headings. Expectations for what baristas and expeditors must do, say, and wear. “No tattoos,” I read aloud.
“No visible tattoos,” Toby corrected.
“Oh?” I looked. He was right. I tried not to wonder if he had any invisible tattoos.
He smiled. “Put it down for now. First rule of Cuppa is …”
“Don’t talk about Cuppa?” I asked.
He smiled. “Yeah. Only other rule is, chill.”
“Chill?”
“It’s not pulling babies from a burning building, you know?”
