Skin

by Adrienne Maria Vrettos

  I don’t blame Karen. I would have left too, if I could have.

  2

  I have goose bumps from the air conditioning. Dad’s managed to make it feel like winter in the car, instead of the first day of our summer vacation. Mom keeps staring at the console and then fluttering her hand up, like she’s going to change it.

  “It’s fine, Diane.”

  Even with the air on there is a sheen of sweat on Dad’s forehead. Mom is sitting with her arms folded in her lap, moving them occasionally to rub her upper arms. I can see she has goose bumps too. She shakes her head and looks out the window.

  It started this morning, with Mom walking through the house a second time to make sure everything was closed up and turned off and unplugged. Dad and Karen and I were already waiting by the car, loading in our magazines and music and the car-game books that we’d found in the attic. With the car loaded I stood on the back bumper, balancing my weight on first one foot and then the other. Karen leaned against the hood with Dad.

  “What’s she doing?” Dad looks at his watch and then scowls toward the hills. The highway’s on the other side. I can see him calculate how many more cars are going to be on the road for every second Mom makes us wait.

  “Probably calling Aunt Janice again,” Karen mumbles. Dad doesn’t answer. He’s still mad. Aunt Janice, Uncle Dan, and my cousin Bobby were supposed to have shared the lake house with us this summer, but Uncle Dan had to get an emergency hernia operation so now they can’t come. Mom cried when she found out. I could hear her whispering on her bedroom phone, saying, “I need you there, Jannie.” Dad’s just mad because it was too late to get a smaller lake house, so now we have to “pay for way more house than we need.” Cousin Bobby and I were supposed to have shared a room. For the past few months I’d been trying to imagine what it’d be like, but I could never get a clear picture in my head. Whenever Bobby visits, I have the urge to wrap myself around his leg like I did when I was a little kid. Back then I did it because it was fun to sit on his foot while he dragged me around the house, but now it’d be to get him to stand still, to stay longer, to stay forever. I still pretend we’re brothers, and that next time he comes he’ll stay for good. He’ll go to my school and be my best friend, and everyone will see how cool he is and then they’ll know, if he’s friends with me, then I’m not the loser they think I am. When we found out that none of them were coming, Karen snorted and said, “Sucks for you, Donnie,” and then in the same breath, “Can Amanda come up then? We have room now.”

  “I don’t know what Mom’s doing,” Karen answers.

  I lose my balance and step heavily onto the driveway.

  “Donnie, go get Mom.”

  “You go get her!” I step back up onto the bumper, back up onto the narrow rod of metal that I have to cross to reach the little kid that’s trapped in the burning school. I’ll have to walk across, like a tightrope walker. This is for the tightrope championship. If I can walk across this line, over the pit of snarling tigers, I will be declared the best tightrope walker ever.

  “Honey? You about ready?” Dad calls, still leaning against the car, trusting his voice will make it through the open front door. Mom finally comes out with a jolly face and tired eyes.

  “Just checking everything!”

  Mom opens up the passenger-side door and then looks over the roof of the car at Dad, who’s giving one last yank on the cord holding our possessions to the roof rack.

  “Did you unplug the TV?” Mom’s biggest fear is that one of our appliances will burst into flames while we’re on vacation.

  Dad doesn’t answer. He just stares at her, blank faced and blinking.

  “I’m just going to go double-check,” Mom says, already rushing back toward the house.

  I’m about to take my last step, the step that will make me tightrope champion, but decide it will be more exciting to fall into the pit of tigers and have to fight them off with my kung fu skills. I jump onto the driveway and kick my leg up high, almost as high as the roof of the car. Karen watches and rolls her eyes, so I kick again, this time close to her face. I forget how quick she is when she wants to be and she grabs my foot mid-kick and holds it up, laughing her head off while I hop around and shout, “You think you have me, evil sister? Just wait till I demolish you with my signature black falcon flying kick!”

  But I can’t really kick, so I pull a hair out of her arm instead, which on the good side makes her drop my foot, but on the bad side, she’s put me in a headlock before I can finish telling her that I just got her with my unbeatable yanking-hair torture. I’m really happy Dad’s too busy glowering at the house to yell at us to stop. But after a second he makes us get in the car, and once we get in, he turns the key in the ignition. I look at Karen, wondering if we’re just going to go on vacation without Mom, leaving her to check and recheck that she unplugged the iron and the toaster and the microwave. Karen shrugs and puts on her headphones, which means Don’t talk to me, I’m busy looking moody.

  “Dad, can we go fishing up there?” I lean forward so my body is wedged between the two front seats.

  “If we ever get there, yes we can go fishing,” he answers.

  I ignore his tone.

  “Cool,” I say. “We can catch dinner.”

  Dad smirks and nods his head. I have an urge to ask, “Hey, Dad, why do you have to be such an asshole all the time?” I actually get as far as “Hey, Dad,” but Mom gets in the car before I have the chance to see if I have the guts to say the whole thing.

  Dad’s hands are tight on the steering wheel and he won’t look at Mom. He just twists around so he can back the car out of the driveway.

  “Ready?” Mom asks as she turns in her seat to grin at us. We smile at her, both of us. But it’s the look you give someone you feel sorry for, a smile that barely makes your mouth move and doesn’t affect the rest of your face. Mom turns around and leans forward to adjust the temperature. Dad glares at her, and turns the knob back to where it was. She looks at him, and then pulls her book from her bag and starts reading. That’s how it got so damn cold in the car.

  After an hour Karen pulls off her headphones and says, “Dad, Donnie’s turning blue.”

  Dad glances at me in the rearview mirror. I’m not turning blue, but he turns down the air anyway and looks at Mom. He winks at her and she wrinkles her nose at him.

  Karen rolls her eyes and takes out a deck of cards. We all understand what just happened. They made up. Now we can stop ignoring each other.

  “Donnie, let’s have a good summer,” Karen says, loud.

  “Yeah,” I say. Just as loud.

  Mom and Dad ignore us.

  “So . . . when’s Amanda coming up?” I try to say it like I don’t really care, like I’m just making conversation to pass the time. “Next week. After soccer camp.”

  “Hmm,” I say.

  “Chris and Bean aren’t coming?” Karen asks.

  I answer quickly, “They’re at camp all summer.”

  Karen raises her eyebrows. I ignore her and look at my cards. I know she is trying to solve the same riddle that’s in my head. The riddle is this: What happened between me and my two best friends to make them scrape me out of their lives like dog crap off a sneaker? I think about last summer, trying again to find some sign of what was to come.

  “This is for the championship.”

  I give the ceremonial bow to Chris and Bean, who sit on deck chairs sharing the last crumbs of a bag of chips. Bean is wrapped in three towels and an afghan that Chris’s mom keeps out here for him. Bean’s what they call a “fragile” kid. That’s why he and Chris make the perfect odd-couple combination. Bean’s about the size of a mini Tootsie Roll and Chris is the only kid going into the eighth grade who buys clothes at the Big and Tall store at the mall. They’re best friends with each other, and I’m best friends with the two of them at the same time. Not individually, though, because they already have each other.

  I step onto the diving board, my eye on the sun
as it bleeds red orange into the horizon. I wait till only a sliver of the burning disk can be seen above the hills. I want to hit the water right when the sun on the last day of the best summer I’ve ever had slips behind the round edge of the world. I hold my arms over my head and curl my toes over the edge of the diving board. I bounce once, readying myself mind and body to steal the cannonball championship trophy (aka a giant stick of beef jerky Chris’s dad sent him from Texas) from its proud perch on Chris’s desk.

  I give a silent count, Three, two, . . .

  “ALL EYES ARE ON DONALD LEPLANT!” Chris’s shout almost makes me fall off the board; I windmill my arms till I get my balance.

  “Knock it off!” I shout, laughing, at Chris. Bean tries to stuff one of his towels into Chris’s mouth, yelling to me, “Do it, Donnie! You’ve worked all summer for this! Do it!” and then “Get off me!” as Chris sits on him. I count down again. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Bean squirm free and take off into the backyard. I jump, curling tightly into a ball, tensing my back for the slap of the water. As I go in, I see Chris and Bean look up from where they’re wrestling on the grass. It’s a big splash, I can feel it. I push off against the bottom of the pool and come up to hear Bean clapping and hollering and Chris rolling on the ground, shouting, “I demand a rematch!” I pump a victory fist in the air and go back under, pushing myself down till I hover just above the pool bottom. I don’t want this summer to end. I want to keep coming over here every day. I want to keep eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chips on the deck every day for lunch. I want Chris to keep imitating his mom after she yells at us for splashing water out of the pool. I want the summer to stretch out in front of me forever. I hold my breath till it gushes out of me, and I rise to the surface.

  “I’m glad they’re not coming. Those guys are pricks,” Karen says.

  I’m so deep in the memory I almost say, “No, they’re not,” but I stop myself, because I know she’s right. They turned on me. I wish they’d just sat me down at the beginning of the school year and said, “You’re out,” instead of deciding together to drop me and waiting to see when I’d notice. If they’d done that, sat me down and told me, I would have laughed in their faces. I would have gotten up and walked away and left them sitting there to realize what they’d just done. It’s not like there’s a whole line of kids waiting to be friends with us, clamoring to take my place. We’re the end of the line. We’re the ones that people look at and think, At least I’m not them. Kids get a death grip on their friends when it looks like they might be slipping down to where we are. It’s like a kick in the balls, when people use you as a threat, when you hear someone say, “Stop being such a douche bag or we’ll make you go sit with LePlant and the other freaks.” If someone asked why it was us, why we were the bottom of the barrel, I’d say, “Open your eyes, dumbass.” Nothing about us is right. We’re the wrongest kids you’ve ever seen. Our faces are wrong with zits, we have the wrong hair, the wrong clothes, and I think that we might be ugly. Our families are wrong because none of us are rich, our bodies are wrong because we suck at sports, and there’s something really wrong with all of our personalities, because nobody likes us, not even the teachers. Teachers make fun of us too, and think we don’t notice.

  It’s other things too. It’s the time everyone saw Bean crying on the phone to his mom in the office, or when Chris split his pants from back to front bending over to pick up a dropped chocolate bar, or the month I had to have cotton stuffed in my ears every day because yellow puss was leaking out of them and whenever I was around, everyone was doing these really exaggerated imitations of what they thought deaf kids sound like when they talk. They basically made grunting sounds and found different ways to flip me off using their own brand of sign language, even though I kept saying that I could hear fine. They would yell it back at me, in their fake deaf voices. I finally just ignored them, pretended I was deaf, and when I got better and the cotton came out, they went back to ignoring me. Bean washes his hands before and after every class and turns door handles with an elbow or a foot instead of touching them with his hands. Every once in a while he’ll run screaming down the hallway while someone chases him with a pencil they say they stuck in a full toilet. Chris keeps pitching tents in his sweatpants during gym. And there’s other reasons that I don’t even know how to name, because for the life of me I can’t tell what they are. Something has to be really wrong with us that we can’t see, for us to be where we are in the school cool chain. Because for everything that’s “wrong” with us, there’s some other kid with the exact same affliction who somehow still manages to have a good life.

  For whatever reason, Chris and Bean decided that for all the things wrong with them, whatever was wrong with me was even worse. They started to act like I was bothering them, tagging along like a little brother. I already knew what that felt like. They’d be talking in the hall and I’d walk up to them and Chris would say something like, “Donnie, why do you have to follow us around? Go get us a table for lunch.” So I should have just dumped them, right? Stopped hanging out with them. Found other friends. But there were no other friends. No one moved up from where we were. You stayed there till you dropped out or transferred or graduated and didn’t get invited to any graduation parties. So I’d go save us a stupid table for lunch and maybe they’d come, and maybe they wouldn’t. But they never cut me off altogether. They always left me a little hope that things would be the way they were, to make sure I stayed around. I guess I do know what happened. They just realized that crapping on someone could make them feel better about being crapped on themselves.

  I was spending more and more time out on the front steps while Mom and Dad fought. If Karen was home, she’d take me over to Amanda’s with her, but most times she didn’t even come home after school. She just went straight to Amanda’s. I’d see how long it took her to look out Amanda’s bedroom window and notice me sitting in front of our house. She’d come over, stomp past me up the steps, and practically kick open our front door. She’d never go inside. She’d just lean in and yell something like, “Mom! It’s six thirty and Donnie needs his dinner!”

  I’d mumble, “I’m not a three-year-old, you know.”

  Mom and Dad would shut up for a second, and then Mom would yell back something along the lines of, “Why are you telling me? Am I the only one in this family who knows where the kitchen is? Everyone in this house turns into the village idiot whenever there’s actual work to be done! ’Uh, what do you mean, cook something? A vacuum? What’s that?’” This is directed at Dad.

  Karen waits and listens till she hears Dad mumble something and Mom yells, “You worked all day? Housework is work! Donnie! Come inside. It’s cold out.”

  On her way back down the steps Karen would say, “Tell her I’m eating at Amanda’s.”

  Every time, I’d kind of hope that Karen wouldn’t come over. I wanted her to let me take care of Mom and Dad in my own way. I wish she’d let me sit out there till Mom and Dad finally noticed and had to chip away the ice that’d formed on me while I waited.

  3

  “It’s up ahead, Joseph.”

  Karen and I are both asleep in the backseat, and I wake up thinking we’re at the lake house. We’re not. We’re slowing down on a two-lane road. On the side of the road a line of cars are parked and people are standing around with binoculars looking into a swamp.

  “I used to come here with Dad,” Mom says. She looks at Dad, and I see him deciding between ignoring her and smiling. Next to me I can feel Karen relax when the sides of his mouth finally curl up.

  “The road was just one lane then,” she says. “It wasn’t even paved. We would come here with ham sandwiches and chips in a paper-bag lunch and look at the birds.”

  Mom’s the best when she unclenches.

  Dad lays his hand on Mom’s thigh and says, “Kids, you know what else happened out here?”

  Mom laughs and looks at Dad, leaning her head back against the seat, waiting for Dad to
tell us.

  “I proposed to your mom out here.”

  “No shit!” Karen laughs. “Really?”

  “Yes, Pottymouth, really. I took your dad out here the first weekend he came home with me from college to meet my dad and your Aunt Janice.”

  “I waited till your mom was in the shower, and then I asked her dad’s permission.”

  “What’d he say?” I ask. I know the answer’s obvious, but it’s so rare that Dad tells any sort of story, you kind of have to help him along.

  “Well, first he looked at me and grunted, and then said, ’You hurt her and I’ll pickle your liver.’ Bet you never knew that, did you?” he says to Mom, raising his eyebrows.

  She looks at him a second, biting her lip, and then starts to laugh so hard she’s not making any noise, she’s not even breathing.

  Karen and I look at each other, and Dad looks at Mom. She’s got tears running down her face. Finally she gasps out, “I did know! Janice was hiding on the stairs when Daddy said that! She scared me to death! She ran into the bathroom and tore the shower curtain straight off its rod trying to get it open, and she was trying to whisper but she was laughing and crying so hard she just kept hiccuping. She finally jumped in the shower with me, fully clothed, and sputtered out that you were going to ask me to marry you. So I screamed and laughed and cried, and she cried and laughed, and then we just hugged each other and cried till we were laughing again.”

  Mom’s crying now—laughing, but crying. She wipes her face and beams at Dad. “I hadn’t thought about that in a long time.”

  Dad’s quiet.

  Karen is leaning forward in the seat, her chin on Mom’s shoulder.

  “Mom, why were you crying?”