Things I Should Have Known

by Claire Lazebnik

  “Whiter?” I repeat. Maybe I did go too heavy on the bleach.

  “Well, I see it, even if you girls don’t,” Mom says with a shrug.

  Ivy’s been sitting cross-legged on her bed, but now she slides to her feet and crosses the room to examine herself in the closet mirror. “I think I look more like Diana than like Chloe.”

  “Like who?” Mom says.

  “Diana. From my class. I look like her now.”

  “No, you don’t,” I say.

  Ivy crosses her arms over her chest. “You don’t know her that well. I do.”

  “I’ve seen her, and her nose is completely different from yours. And her eyes are a different color, right? Plus your face is rounder, and—”

  “No, no!” Ivy shouts, putting her hands over her ears like she doesn’t want to hear any more.

  “Stop it, Chloe,” Mom says. “You’re upsetting her.”

  “Because she’s wrong,” Ivy says.

  “Fine.” I throw up my hands. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care, except . . . truth.”

  Ron appears in the doorway. “What’s going on here?”

  “The girls were having the silliest argument,” Mom says, suddenly all cheerful about it. “Not even worth discussing.”

  He slings his arm over her shoulders and surveys us with phony paternal pride. “Your daughters may be noisy, but they sure are pretty! Some male hearts are going to be broken this week.”

  “They do look beautiful, don’t they?” Mom says.

  “They come by it honestly.” He plants a revolting kiss on her lips.

  Ivy says, “Can you please get out of our room?”

  I doubt she was commenting on the kiss—​she probably just wants to go to bed—​but I’ve never loved her more.

  Seventeen

  “I DON’T GET IT,” David says.

  It’s Saturday, and we’re sitting in the back of the movie theater waiting for the trailers to start. Ethan and Ivy are two rows ahead of us. He wanted to sit far away from us. She wanted to sit right next to me. This was the compromise.

  “What don’t you get?” I ask, tilting the popcorn bag toward David so he can help himself. We got one for us to share and one for them to share. Ethan paid for theirs, and I paid for ours.

  “You and Ivy both did something to your hair, right? It looks different.”

  “We just highlighted it a little bit.”

  David wipes his fingers on a napkin. “Why?”

  “Why not? It’s fun to change things up.”

  “And it has nothing to do with the general belief that blondes are more attractive than brunettes?”

  “I don’t care what other people think. I just do it for fun.”

  “Okay, putting aside that that’s just a lie, what about Ivy?”

  “It wasn’t a lie!”

  “You care about what other people think. Everyone does. Why did Ivy do it? Was it her idea?”

  “Stuff like that doesn’t occur to her.”

  “Right,” David says, digging into the bag. “So it was your idea.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  He tosses popcorn into his mouth. “Hey, if you want to impose your own advertising-driven ideas about beauty on your sister, that’s your right.”

  “Thank you. Your permission means the world to me. And I think she looks pretty cute.”

  “Your sister always looks cute. She didn’t need blonder hair for that.” His tone changes as he lowers his voice. “Ethan has a major crush on her, you know. He talks about her all the time. I hope she feels the same way.”

  It’s confusing—​one second he’s caustically berating me for being superficial, and the next he’s soberly confiding in me.

  “Do you think she likes him?” he asks.

  “She was definitely excited about going to a movie tonight. But I can’t tell whether it’s because she likes him or just the idea of going out.”

  He takes a drag on his soda straw before saying, “It must be rough for her to have a sister like you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He flaps his hand impatiently. “You have crazy good social skills—​the whole world wants to hang out with you. It wouldn’t be easy to be your sibling even if she weren’t on the spectrum. But she is. So it’s worse than not easy. It’s got to be painful.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s probably rough on Ethan being your brother.”

  “I’m not nearly as social as you.”

  “Oh, I know,” I say airily. “I just meant because you can be such an enormous pain in the ass.”

  He looks at me, a little stunned, I think, and I brace myself for his return volley. I figure he’ll shoot to kill. But he surprises me. “Yeah, you’re right,” he says. “And the sad thing is, as big a jerk as I am, I’m Ethan’s best relative.”

  “I was just joking!” I’d been pleased by my insult but then he had to go and be nice about it and ruin my fun.

  “No, you weren’t. And that’s fine. I know I can be a—”

  The lights dim, and he stops before he can tell me what he can be. I have some guesses though.

  We meet up with the other two in the lobby after the movie.

  “What’d you think?” I ask.

  Ethan says, “It was really good!” just as Ivy says, “I didn’t like it.”

  “Why didn’t you like it?” he asks her, a little anxiously.

  “It was stupid.” She moves away from him, closer to me.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Ethan says, appealing to David, who says diplomatically, “It was a little stupid, but I liked it anyway.”

  Ivy and I go to the bathroom together and join the long line of women who drank too much soda during the movie.

  I glance at her. Her lips are moving, and I can tell she’s whispering to herself, even though I can’t hear her with the hand dryers blasting away. “Everything okay?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Something happen?”

  “Ethan put his hand on me.”

  My voice gets tight. “What do you mean, ‘on you’? What part of you?”

  She gestures with her right hand at her left shoulder. “Here.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. He was just trying to put his arm around you. As long as he wasn’t trying to cop a feel . . .”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know . . . like, trying to grab your boob.”

  The middle-aged woman in front of me turns around at that. I gaze at her blandly, and she quickly swivels back.

  “That would be bad?” Ivy says. “If he tried to do that?”

  “Only if you don’t want him to. It’s fine if you want him to.”

  The woman ahead twists again, pretending to look past us—​but she’s clearly spying on us.

  “He didn’t do that,” Ivy says. “I wouldn’t have liked it if he had, but he didn’t.”

  “But he did try to put his arm over your shoulder?”

  “Yeah. I pushed it away.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” She sounds confused and maybe even a little upset, but I can’t tell whether it’s because of what happened or because I’m trying to get her to tell me how she feels about what happened.

  “The first time a guy tries to put his arm around you is always strange,” I say.

  The woman ahead of us goes into a stall with one last curious backwards glance.

  “Do you like it when James puts his arm around you?” Ivy asks.

  “Of course. You know that.”

  “Did you like it the first time?”

  “I think I made the first move, actually. You should probably ask James how he felt about it.”

  “That would be weird.” She hesitates. “I don’t want to be alone with Ethan again tonight.”

  “Okay. We’ll all get something to eat together and then we’ll go home.”

  She nods and then a stall frees up, a
nd I push her toward it.

  As soon as we rejoin the boys in the lobby, Ethan says to Ivy, “It’s okay if you didn’t like the movie. You don’t have to like it because I did.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “We had a little talk about tolerating other people’s opinions,” David says to me as we walk ahead, leaving the other two to follow together.

  “I figured. We had a talk too.”

  “What about?”

  I move closer and lower my voice. “That it’s okay for a guy to put his arm around you at a movie, but not for him to cop a feel.”

  “Wait—” He grabs my arm. “Did he—?”

  I shake my head. “Just a nice friendly shoulder squeeze.”

  He releases me. “Oh, good. I mean, unless she’s told you she wants him to make a move—”

  “Definitely not. She’s not ready yet. Do you think he is?”

  He snorts. “He’s a guy.”

  “Does he talk to you about it?”

  “Not really. But I’ve seen his Google history. He looks up a lot of stuff.”

  “You mean like porn?”

  “He mostly just Googles body parts—​the fun ones. But he must stumble on porn now and then. I mean, it’s the Internet—​you can’t not end up looking at porn.”

  “Ivy is definitely not looking at porn.”

  “Well, she’s a girl.”

  “That’s sexist. Girls can like porn too.”

  “Yeah?” he says with interest. “Do you?”

  I laugh. “Actually, no. I think it’s gross.”

  “Have you ever heard a girl say she liked it?”

  “No, but I don’t go around asking people.”

  “Well,” he says, “from my sample size of one, I’m going to say my theory that girls don’t like porn is confirmed.”

  At the food court, Ivy and the guys get meals at Panda Express, but I don’t feel like Chinese food, so I wander around, considering my choices, before settling on a tuna roll and a Diet Coke from the Japanese place.

  It takes me a minute to find the others, who are no longer at Panda, but once I turn a corner, I spot their table instantly—​they’re hard to miss, mostly because Ethan is standing up and shouting and flailing his arms.

  “It hurts!” he’s shouting. “It hurts!” He sticks his tongue out and rubs at it with first one hand and then the other—​he looks like he’s slapping at his own mouth.

  David grabs at his hands. “Hey, hey, hey. Don’t do that. Eat some rice—​that’ll help.”

  “Why did they give that to me?” Ethan cries. “It hurts!”

  “They’re just for flavor—​you’re not supposed to eat them.”

  “Why do they put them in there, then?” He wrenches his hands out of his brother’s grasp and swipes at his mouth again.

  David sees me standing there. “Chili pepper,” he says wearily.

  “Oh.” Now I understand. “He’s right about eating rice,” I tell Ethan. “It stops the burning.”

  “The rice is hot too!”

  “It’s a different kind of hot. Blow on it first, and it will help, I promise.”

  Ivy’s sitting at the table, watching Ethan with impassive curiosity as she steadily chews and swallows her own food. There are bits of rice on her shirt and in her hair, which I got her to wear brushed and down tonight, instead of in a ponytail, and there’s also some kind of brownish sauce on her chin and at the corners of her mouth.

  Ethan wails some more. An elderly couple is walking by, and the man maneuvers around his wife so he can put himself between her and our group.

  He’s being gallant.

  It hurts, especially because he’s probably just some sweet old guy who loves his wife and wants to protect her from bad things.

  But Ivy and Ethan aren’t bad things.

  David pushes Ethan into a chair and stands over him. “Seriously, dude, eat some rice.” He plunges a fork into the mound on Ethan’s plate.

  Ethan glares at him but opens his mouth, and David shoves the rice in. Ethan chews and swallows. “It still hurts.”

  “You shouldn’t have eaten the chili pepper,” Ivy says. “Everyone knows they’re hot.”

  “I didn’t mean to!” Ethan roars at her, spraying chewed-up rice across the table. “It got in my mouth on accident!”

  “Chilis can be sneaky,” I say.

  “Tricky little beasts,” David agrees. “You can’t trust a chili.”

  “Bell peppers, though—​they’re trustworthy.”

  “The really evil ones are those little shishito bastards,” David says. “Some of them are hot, and some aren’t. You can’t tell until you bite into one. How is that fair?”

  “It’s not,” I say. “It’s not fair at all.”

  “And don’t get me started on pepperoncini. I mean, first of all that name . . .”

  “My tongue is better now,” Ethan says. “Because of the rice.” He takes the fork from David and starts rapidly shoveling more rice into his mouth. “I’m not going to eat any more orange chicken,” he says through the mess in his mouth. “Just the rice. There’s no chili pepper in rice.”

  “Good idea,” David says, and we sit down to our food.

  I’m drizzling a packet of soy sauce over my sushi when I hear someone say, “Hey!” and look up as Jana Rodriguez descends on us. “What are you guys doing here?”

  “We just saw a movie,” I say.

  Her eyes flick eagerly back and forth between me and David. “You two?”

  “All of us,” I say quickly. “My sister and David’s brother are friends.”

  “Yes, don’t mistake their friendship for ours,” David says jovially.

  Jana turns to Ivy. “So you’re Chloe’s sister? Oh, my God, you totally look like her! I can’t believe I’ve never met you! I’m Jana.”

  “Hi,” Ivy says. Her eyes slide away from Jana’s friendly gaze. I notice there’s now also a smear of sauce on her forehead. How did that even get there?

  “And you’re David’s brother?” Jana says to Ethan, who’s still hunched over his plate, forking rice into his mouth like his life depends on it. “What’s he like at home? Does he say really smart, scary things there too?”

  Ethan says, “I don’t know,” through a mouthful of rice.

  Jana stares at him for a moment then abruptly turns to me. “It’s so weird bumping into you, Chloe—​I was just thinking about you on the way here, about how I needed to ask you for notes from Monday’s history class. And here you are!”

  “Don’t say it’s an amazing coincidence,” David says. “Just don’t.”

  “What’s wrong with saying that? It is! I mean, what are the odds?”

  “On any given day, you probably think of dozens of different people at various times. But the only time anyone ever remembers thinking about someone is when they run into that person. It’s not coincidence—​it’s selective memory.”

  “Whatever,” she says, rolling her eyes. “You do you, David.”

  “I always do,” he says calmly.

  “I’ll send you my notes when I get home,” I tell her.

  “Thanks.” There’s an awkward pause. She glances sideways at Ivy and Ethan. Neither of them looks at her. They both just keep eating. “I’d better go meet my friends,” she says. “It was cool running into you guys—​even if it wasn’t a coincidence.”

  “It wasn’t,” says David.

  We’re all quiet for a moment after she leaves, and then David says, “Smart and scary? That’s my reputation?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Except for the smart part.”

  “Shut up,” he says, and if it had been anyone else in the world, I would have sworn he said it affectionately.

  On our way out, we pass the old couple sitting at a table. They watch us furtively as we pass, and the old man protectively hitches his chair a little closer to his wife.

  Eighteen

  “WHY IS EVERYONE so judgmental?
” I ask David a little while later. We’re walking through the mall on our way back to our cars. Ethan and Ivy are lagging behind us—​she’s slow, and he stays close by her side. “I mean, the second Ivy or Ethan does something the slightest bit not normal, people act like they’re going to start serial killing everyone in sight. Where’s the compassion?”

  “Okay,” David says. “I’ve thought about this a lot, actually. Want to hear my theory?”

  “I do.”

  “You know what the uncanny valley is?”

  “It sounds familiar, but no, not really.”

  “It’s a nerd term. You know how computer animation is getting really good? Like they can do individual strands of hair and fur and stuff like that? So there’s just this one problem with it: if the animation’s too good, it starts to freak people out. Which is why most animated characters still have eyes that are too big and floaty hair and stuff like that—​the goal isn’t to make the most realistic animation you can, but the most appealing.”

  “Why is it called the uncanny valley?”

  “Because if you graph their reactions, people like more and more realistic animation up to this one point and when you reach that point”—​he makes a dipping motion with his right hand—​“they suddenly find it creepy. It’s usually something about the eyes—​the eyes always look just a little bit dead when everything else looks totally real.”

  “Got it,” I say. “So why are we talking about this?”

  “It’s just something I’ve thought about.” He lowers his voice a little more as we turn a corner. “You know, if we were pushing our siblings in wheelchairs, people would be nice to them and to us. They’d be like, Oh, the poor disabled people and their wonderful siblings! Let’s hold doors for them! But Ivy and Ethan . . . they basically look like everyone else, with just these tiny differences in how they behave and move. And that bugs people. They don’t know what to do with that. It’s like people have a place in their brain for normal, and they have a place in their brain for something obviously wrong, but they can’t deal with something just a little bit different. And that makes them uncomfortable. And when people are uncomfortable, they act like jerks.”

  I’m silent for a moment.

  “What do you think of my theory?” he asks.