by Paul Rudnick
“Sophie!”
“It’s gonna be fine! I know it is! It’s gotta be! Even if we die, I’d rather die in a Sweetcakes explosion!”
I was about to say something but Heller caught my eye and we both knew: When it came to dying, Sophie was in charge.
“Catey,” said Sophie. “When I say go, could you, like, flip all of those red levers over there, the ones marked FULL POWER? So while all the machinery stuff is getting warmed up, Heller, you can get me up onto the conveyor belt.”
I had a choice. I could refuse to go any further and I could put my foot down and force all of us to go back to the hotel, which was exactly what I would have done two days ago. So much had happened and now here I was, about to add another and far more serious criminal act to my growing rap sheet. I was about to do something that I could never explain to my parents or my pastor or to anyone except Heller, who’d already found a crate for Sophie to use as a footstool to get herself up onto the conveyor belt.
“Sophie,” I said, “hasn’t this gone far enough? You’ve seen the factory, and the squiggle thing, we can just head back …”
Sophie turned toward me and I saw her ridiculous, bobbing topknot and her shining eyes. Her shirt had come unbuttoned at the top and I saw something else, just below her neck.
“What’s that bandage?”
Sophie looked down. “It’s covering my port,” she explained. “It’s like, ’cause I’ve had so much chemo, the nurses have trouble finding a vein. So the doctor put this plastic thing in my chest, it’s called a port, so they can just hook me right up.”
“Catey?” said Heller. “Sophie asked you to do something.”
I pulled the levers, praying they wouldn’t work.
* * *
There was a ka-chung sound as the room’s machinery hummed and clicked and whirred, as if an ancient, giant robot was waking up and looking around for his morning cup of ancient, giant robot coffee.
“I love it!” said Sophie. “It’s going! It’s on!”
“Catey, I need a hand,” said Heller, and I ran over to the conveyor belt, which wasn’t moving yet. Heller and I each took one side of Sophie and we hoisted her up onto the wide, well-used canvas belt and Sophie lay flat on her back.
“Are you okay?” Heller asked Sophie, who said, “I think so. The lights are in my eyes but I’m going to concentrate on just thinking like a Sweetcake. Catey, I saw a button over there, where the sign says EMBELLISHMENT BELT. That’s the official name for the squiggle, I read about it online, it’s called the Embellishment, isn’t that the best? If you push that button, maybe the belt will start moving.”
I found the button and my index finger hovered over it.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Sophie?” said Heller.
“In a second,” said Sophie. “I gotta do this just right, like I always dreamed. I wanna slide right under the cone and get squiggled, and then after that, Catey, you probably should turn the power switch off.”
“Okay, but why?”
“I’m not totally sure about this, but, like, I don’t want the cone to stab me to death.”
“WHAT?”
“It’ll be fine, Catey!” said Heller. “Just do it!”
“One … two … ,” said Sophie. “Three! Do it! Start the belt!”
I pushed the button and for a few seconds nothing happened and I was incredibly relieved. “I’m sorry!” I called out. “Maybe it’s broken or there’s a safety catch or something! Sophie, we’ll help you climb down!”
There was a grinding noise and a high-pitched buzzing and the belt started moving. I could see Sophie, on her back, getting closer and closer to the looming, menacing silver nozzle. There was another split-second pause and then Sophie’s head began to slide under the cone. Frosting began to zoom out of the nozzle, first forming a perfect, looping squiggle along the center of Sophie’s forehead and then onto her nose, and then the nozzle was right over Sophie’s mouth, which she’d opened as wide as possible, and the squiggle zoomed inside.
I was mesmerized and then Heller yelled, “Catey! Shut it down!” My head jerked up and I lunged for the ALL POWER EMERGENCY OFF lever. I slammed it down and held my breath and all of the machinery in the room shuddered, made a loud belching noise and ground to a halt.
“Is she okay?” I asked as I ran back over to the conveyor belt.
“Sophie?” said Heller as we grabbed Sophie’s feet and tried to ease her body out from underneath the nozzle without scratching her face. Finally her head was free and Sophie pulled herself up on her elbows, still on the belt. In only that short amount of time the squiggle had hardened, so that Sophie’s face looked like a Sweetcake made out of a human head. A head that was smiling from ear to ear.
“BOOM!” Sophie said. “SWEETCAKES BOOM FOREVER!!!”
“That was pretty cool,” said Heller.
“That was fantastic,” I said.
“You guys,” asked Sophie. “Do you wanna get squiggled?”
“Catey?”
“Heller?”
I remembered this sort of moment. Heller would grin and I’d get nervous and then we’d be off, climbing a tree or sneaking into a PG-13 movie or stealing one of my brothers’ baseball caps and filling it with shaving cream.
“What if,” said Heller, “we took off all our clothes? What if we got naked squiggled?”
“HELLER!!!!”
Once we’d turned off the lights and left the factory, without any further squiggling, Heller took a selfie with the watchman and called his wife and daughter and told them he was now an official Angel Warrior, and she invited the whole family to the premiere on Monday night. We jumped into the van and took off before the watchman could notice that Heller still didn’t have a purse.
“You guys, thank you thank you thank you like infinity, that was so epic,” said Sophie, who was sitting in the backseat and picking squiggles off her forehead. “Should I eat these extra squiggles or, like, save them forever?” she asked as she was already eating them.
“We got you squiggled,” said Heller. “Sophie, you said that there were three things you need to do. What’s next?”
“I think we’ve already done quite enough inappropriate and illegal activities for one day,” I said. “We need to get back to the hotel so Wyatt doesn’t get into more trouble than he’s already in.”
“I sent him a photo of Sophie with the squiggle on her face,” said Heller. “He loved it. I grabbed him a bunch of defective LuckyPucks.”
“I need to get a tattoo,” said Sophie.
“Ink?” asked Heller. “Your first?”
“NO,” I said firmly, and I knew that this time everyone was going to listen to me. “Just NO. NO WAY. ABSOLUTELY N-O. No one is getting tattooed. Tattoos are repulsive. God does not want us to disfigure our bodies, which are his sacred gifts to us, with graven images of skulls and dragons and Chinese lettering. A person is not a take-out menu. The only people who get tattoos are bikers and serial killers and strippers.”
“Excuse me,” said Heller. “But I have, like, eight tattoos.”
“EXACTLY,” I said.
“I know just what I want,” said Sophie. “A pair of angel wings around my wrist, like a bracelet.”
“That is so awesome,” said Heller. “Maybe I’ll get one too.”
“EXCUSE ME,” I said. “Why isn’t anyone paying attention? This is a terrible idea. Sophie, you’ve just had all of those medical treatments, so it’s not even safe.”
“Yes it is,” said Sophie. “I asked my doctor and he said, especially if it was small, a tattoo would be totally fine.”
“What do your parents think?” I asked. “Wouldn’t you need their consent?”
“They think it’s just, like, some silly dopey notion,” said Sophie. “They keep waiting for me to forget all about it. Every time I talk about it they don’t even hear me.”
“My mom went with me to get my first tattoo,” said Heller. “It was her idea. She wanted us to get ma
tching Aztec sunbursts but I told her no, she could get a sunburst, but I wanted a devil having sex with Hello Kitty. Which is corny but come on. I was eight.”
As Heller was about to tug her pants down to show Sophie this tattoo on her hip bone I told Sophie, “Please ignore Heller. She’s a very bad influence. When we were little Heller tried to pierce my ears—while I was asleep.”
“When she woke up,” Heller said, “I was going to tell Catey that the ear-piercing fairy had done it. But Catey’s a real light sleeper and she bit me.”
“That’s so cool,” said Sophie. “I wish I had a friend like that.”
“Like which one of us?” I asked.
“Both,” said Sophie. “It’s like you balance each other out. Heller is awesome and amazing and out there, and Catey’s …”
“What?” I said.
“Awesome and amazing and insane,” said Heller, laughing.
“I am not insane!”
“In a good way!”
I tried to decide if there was a good way to be insane but then I started laughing too.
“Sophie,” said Heller, “when Catey and I were little I’d always try to push her to try new things and she’d usually start screaming. But if I could make her laugh I knew we were on the right track.”
“But why do you want a tattoo?” I asked Sophie, changing the subject to less personal territory. “You’re only thirteen and a tattoo is permanent. It’s forever. Why do you want to do that to your body?”
“Okay okay okay. Here’s the thing, right? It’s like, I’ve been doing so much other stuff to my body,” said Sophie. “I know that the chemo and the biopsies and the transfusions, it’s all supposed to make me better and save my life and, like, hooray for that and blahdiddy blahddidy blah. That’s what I tell myself, every time I go back into the hospital. Only all I keep thinking is: Hey, everybody, like for once, why can’t I do something to my body that won’t make me barf? You’re totally right, a tattoo is forever, which for me might not be all that long. ’Cause I could live to be a hundred or I could get hit by a truck in five minutes and splattered all over the highway—BLART!”
“Sophie!” I said.
“Whatever happens,” said Sophie, “you know what? It’s, like, my body. It’s my life. That’s why I want a tattoo.”
I still knew that Sophie getting a tattoo was a seriously bad idea, but it was hard to argue with her logic or with the determined look on her face. I knew she was serious because she hadn’t said “BOOM!”
“The problem,” said Heller, “is that I got all of my ink done on the West Coast, so I don’t know any of the artists out here, and we want to use somebody really good. Wait a minute—I know who we can ask, because he lives here and he’s got some amazing tats—Billy Connors.”
“Billy has tattoos?” I said. During the yoga class I’d noticed something on Billy’s chest peeking out from under the strap of his tank top, but I’d hoped it was a birthmark. My parents have always been very strict with us about tattoos, even when Castor, who’s eighteen, asked about getting a musical note on the side of his neck. “You’re of age,” my dad had told him, “so I can’t stop you. But I can start calling you B-Flat.” So far Castor hasn’t gotten his tattoo, but thinking about whatever Billy had on his chest was upsetting because it made me start thinking about seeing Billy with his shirt off, which made me think about either going to the beach with Billy or marrying him, because those were the only appropriate ways I could ever see him shirtless.
“I’m calling him,” said Heller, pulling over to the side of the road. “Billy has this picture of two penguins and a zebra having an orgy, across his entire back …”
“WHAT?”
“I’m kidding,” said Heller, dialing Billy. “Sophie, isn’t it fun to make Catey scream like that? Like a teakettle in heat? It’s my favorite thing in the world. Billy? It’s Hel. You have to meet us on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 55th Street in twenty minutes. Wear a hat and a hoodie and don’t tell anyone where you’re going … No, you’re not allowed to ask any questions … Yes, Catey’s going to be there, and she says that she wants to have your two-headed baby and name both of the heads Heller, and that she wants to get started right now, in the backseat …”
“HELLER!”
By the time we’d driven into Manhattan, Heller had explained why we needed to kidnap Billy: “It’s for his own protection, so he’s not implicated in any of this and so he doesn’t call Wyatt or Sophie’s parents or anyone else who might try and stop us.”
I looked out my window and there was Billy on the corner, wearing a baseball cap, a hoodie and sunglasses, all of which only made him look even cuter, like a nice, handsome, helpful boy pretending to be a tough guy or a gangster. I’d noticed that this was how all boys over the age of twelve, including my brothers, wanted to look.
“Get in,” Heller told Billy as Sophie opened the door to the backseat.
“Hey, Catey,” said Billy, touching my shoulder—why do I remember this? Why, even though I was wearing my blouse and my blazer, did it feel like he was touching my bare skin?
“Hey, Sophie,” said Billy, and I knew that I’d become pure Godless evil because I was trying to decide if Billy was being nicer to Sophie then he was to me. I was jealous of a thirteen-year-old girl with cancer and a topknot.
“First, give me your phone,” Heller told Billy.
“Why?”
“Just give it to me or I’ll tell Catey you have gonorrhea.”
“I do not have gonorrhea!” said Billy, handing Heller his phone. “Catey, don’t ever believe anything Heller says!”
“I never do,” I assured Billy, although I was also thinking about Googling gonorrhea on my phone, to make sure it was curable.
“Who did your ink?” Heller demanded.
“My ink?” Billy asked.
“I’m getting a tattoo, isn’t that amazeballs?” said Sophie. “So are Heller and Catey!”
“SOPHIE!”
“It’s such a perfect idea,” said Heller. “I can get Lynnea chopping off Ava Lily Larrimore’s head, and Catey can get the Darkling Creeper wearing kneesocks.”
I debated opening the car door and jumping out onto the highway. Billy touched my shoulder so I decided to wait.
“I go to this amazing woman in Dumbo,” said Billy. “She’s the best, she takes her time and everything looks really crisp. She mixes her own colors. See?”
Billy lifted up his shirt and in the rearview mirror I could see an intricate design of interlocking circles and winding ropes along the side of his body.
“Catey?” asked Heller. “Are you okay? Why are you whimpering?”
“I am not whimpering,” I insisted as I stared at Billy’s tattoo and also at Billy’s very defined abdominal muscles, which were something my brothers liked to talk about; they’re always doing what Castor calls “ab checks” after they’ve had sit-up contests. Calico had once told me that Castor uses a magic marker to give himself even more defined abs and when I was doing the laundry there were marker stains on Castor’s T-shirts. From what I could see, Billy’s abs didn’t need any help.
“It’s a Celtic symbol for trust and global unity,” said Billy.
“That is so cool,” said Sophie. “I should get that one too.”
“NO!” I said. “Even one tattoo is too many!”
“I’ve also got this awesome lizard, right here,” said Billy, tugging down the collar of his T-shirt to reveal an extremely realistic lizard crawling across his collarbone. “You know what? I’ve never named my lizard before, but I’m gonna call her Catey.”
I was now unable to move or talk because I thought that Billy naming his lizard tattoo after me was both the most disgusting and the most poetic thing that any human being had ever done for another human being in the history of the world.
“Catey can get a crocodile or a turtle tattoo and name it Billy,” said Sophie as Heller held up her phone and told Billy, “Give me your tattoo person’s number. Yo
u’re coming with us.”
Dumbo, it turned out, stood for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, and by the time we’d found a parking space near Billy’s tattoo lady, I was drumming my fingers on the dashboard. I was trying to act like it was just nervous energy, so no one would notice. I’d started by drumming exactly three times, but I had to reach thirty sets of three or a car was going to hit Billy. My phone buzzed. I answered it but no one was calling.
“It’s an email,” said Heller. “Don’t you know you can get emails on your phone?” She turned to Sophie and Billy: “In Catey’s village, they don’t allow electronics. Or buttons, zippers or deodorant. That’s why it’s such a small village. Go on ahead, we’ll be right in.”
As Billy and Sophie got out of the van, Heller showed me how to read the email. It was from my mom: “More great news! You’ve also been accepted at the Torlington School of the Arts in North Carolina, with a full scholarship in Choral Arrangement and Performance Studies! We are so proud of you!”
What? WHAT? My mind had been a million miles away from stressing out over where or if I might be going to college next year. Everything snapped back into place and I started drumming my fingers even faster, because now I had a choice. When I’d only gotten into Parsippany Tech I didn’t have to worry about where I’d be living or what I would study. My future had been decided and I could accept that. But now—Torlington? And music? And best of all and worst of all—performing?
“Catey?” asked Heller. “Are you okay?”
“I’m … I’m …”
More than anything else I hate to stand up in front of an audience all by myself. When I’m singing with my family I feel surrounded and supported, but if I have to perform even a brief solo in the middle of a group number, I start to shake until one of my brothers or sisters holds my hand.
“Catey? What’s going on?”
“Noth … noth …”
My parents had encouraged me to apply to Torlington because if I majored in Choral Arrangement and Performance Studies I’d be required to prepare solo pieces. My mom had insisted that this would increase my self-confidence. She’d said, “Caitlin, you have a beautiful singing voice but sometimes you sabotage yourself. You’re too young to start shutting yourself down.”
