“Oh, well. Then that’s what I’ll do.” She made an arghhhh sound and started to gnaw on a cuticle, which was so gross I had to roll my eyes.
“Ginny. Stop. You’re being ridiculous. You’ve never failed a French assignment in your life, and even if you don’t go to college, you’re not going to die alone because you’ll at least have me and Mom.”
She was being ridiculous. Even for someone as high-strung as Ginny, this was unprecedentedly annoying behavior, and I found myself equal parts exasperated and mystified.
Ginny stopped gnawing and opened one eye.
“And the dogs,” she added.
“And the dogs.” From the floor, Doug thumped his tail against the floorboards in solidarity. “And Charlotte,” I added, because it seemed rude to leave out her best friend.
“Yeah.”
“How’s the University of Pennsylvania?” I asked. “Do they even care if you know French?”
Instead of answering, Ginny curled up into a ball, which made the bumps of her spine stick out between her petal-pink bra straps. For a minute I thought she was going to cry, but then I heard her making fake snoring noises.
“Gin—”
“Asleep. Don’t bug me.”
“You’re not asleep!”
Eyes still closed, she stuck out her tongue, and then smacked me right in the stomach, which hurt.
“Ow!” I rolled away.
“Can’t . . . help . . . myself,” Ginny mumbled. “Too . . . asleep.”
“You are not asleep,” I said. “You’re just being crazy.”
That made Ginny wake up. And hit me.
“Ow!” I rubbed my elbow.
“I’m not crazy.” Ginny pushed her sweaty hair out of her eyes. Now she looked like she was going to cry. “I’m not.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. You’re not. You’re fine.”
Except of course she was not fine. My sister had never been fine a day in her life, and now she was setting herself up for four more years’ rigorous study in a field that I knew she did not actually care about. She had burned up countless hours perseverating over what would happen if she didn’t get in to the University of Pennsylvania, but I wondered if she’d given more than a few minutes’ consideration to what would happen if she did.
Ginny squeezed her eyes shut again and rolled onto her back. “‘Demain, dès l’aube, a l’heure où blanchit la campagne, je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m’attends.’”
Outside, the Volvo door slammed, which made the dogs jump to life and start barking, which made Ginny say her French poem even louder, which made me kick her, which made her leap to her feet.
“‘J’irai par la fôret!’” Ginny yelled back. “‘J’irai par la montagne! Je ne puis something something de toi plus longtemps!’”
There was a moment of silence, or a moment where the only sound was poodles barking, which was the closest our house ever got to silence, and then the trit-trit-trit sound of dog toenails on the stairs. It was Gizmo, with a paper towel tucked into his collar, which I untucked gently.
Sandwiches here, it read. Come on downstairs.
“Gin,” I said, interrupting her babbling. “Dinner.”
“What?”
“Gizmo-gram.” I waved the paper towel. In a house as big as 5142 Haven Lane, shouting does not usually travel far enough to get anyone’s attention; therefore, we devised the Gizmo-gram system of sending each other notes on paper towels tucked into the dog’s collar. It works almost all the time, unless Gizmo decides he’d rather take a nap.
We went downstairs to the kitchen, where Ginny promptly plunked an elbow on each of my shoulders.
“Who ordered ham-and-cheese?” Mom held aloft a foil-wrapped tube of sandwich.
“Me.” I swung out from under Ginny’s grasp and took my sandwich, and also took the roast beef and Swiss that was Ginny’s and put them both onto the plates with the dandelion designs. Ginny, however, ignored the sandwich when I offered it to her.
“Hi,” she said, waving at the screen door. I turned to see Almost-Doctor Andrews holding a big cardboard box.
“Oh,” Mom said, her hands streaked with mayonnaise. “Plum, would you—”
But I was already at the door.
“Thanks, Plum,” Almost-Doctor Andrews said. He set the package on the countertop and took a seat at the counter. “How’s school going? Back with all your friends?”
“It’s fine,” I said. There was not that much to say about school and even less to say about friends. I did not really have friends, except for the Weird Sweatshirt Kids who spent lunch period in the school bookstore playing games that involved notebooks and dice and tolerated my presence. Jeremy Beard, a fellow sophomore the size of a Yorkshire terrier and ardent evangelist for Dungeons and Dragons, had made strong overtures toward me joining a quote-unquote campaign with them, but I simply did not have any interest in Dungeons and Dragons, nor in Jeremy, who—and please never tell him I said this—smelled like an everything bagel, and not in a good way.
Also, the Gregory School is one of those places where being squarely average brings dishonor on your family name. Especially when your family name is Blatchley and all the teachers say, “Oh, I had your sister two years ago! She was brilliant,” and you accidentally forget to turn in your problem set because, to be honest, math is boring. I was taking honors English—hence the Jane Eyre—but since the Gregory School is also one of those places where an indignant phone call from a parent is just as good as a high academic record, I did not count my class placement as an actual coup.
“It is not fine.” Ginny threw herself across the counter, arms splayed. “I am going to die.”
“Ginny,” Mom said, yanking a paper towel from the flamingo-shaped holder.
“I am never going to make it,” Ginny said into the fake Formica. “I am going to be rejected from everywhere and end up alone. I’m going to be the college equivalent of a spinster.”
Almost-Doctor Andrews was politely unfazed. I hoped his rent was cheap enough to offset the insanity of his landlord’s daughter.
“Did the electricity in the carriage house go out again?” I asked. Mom looked alarmed.
Almost-Doctor Andrews shook his head. “Not yet,” he said, and knocked on the wood of his stool. “I just came by because UPS dropped this off at my door by mistake.”
“Ooh,” Ginny said, and jumped up from the counter, her incipient failure forgotten. “What is it?”
“Opening someone else’s mail is a felony,” I said, scooping up Kit Marlowe, who had been threading himself through my ankles.
Almost-Doctor Andrews frowned. “I don’t think— Well, I didn’t open it, anyway.” He studied the label. “It’s from Halcyon-Haupt Publishing.”
Ginny yanked a giant knife from the wooden block, stabbed into the packing tape, and ripped apart the top leaves of the box. Inside were three neat stacks of rectangular hardcovers with the familiar fuzzy faces and our mother’s name in block letters, a bunch of brown paper for padding, and a note.
Mom dived forward for the envelope, attempting to hold it out of sight while swallowing a gigantic bite of her hoagie, but Ginny pounced.
“Let me see!”
A brief struggle ensued, with Ginny scrambling for the letter, Gizmo nipping and yapping, and me trying not to drop any sandwich innards onto the ground.
“Virginia,” Mom said sternly—or as sternly as she could through a mouthful of salami and hot peppers—“give that back.”
But Ginny was already scanning down what seemed to be a tri-folded piece of very official stationery. Her face was very, very pale.
“‘Dear Iris Blatchley,’” she read. “‘Per our letter of September 1, we have enclosed as a courtesy a collection of FIVE LITTLE FIELD MICE titles from our warehouse. As a reminder, these editions of FIVE LITTLE FIELD MICE will be out of print effective October 1. The final royalty statement will arrive by December 31, and no further royalty payments will be issued beyond that date. Per yo
ur contract, the rights to the artwork shall be retained in perpetuity by Halcyon-Haupt. Any questions may be directed to our rights department’ at blah blah blah. Sincerely, blah blah blah.”
“Cripes,” I said.
“Oh,” said Almost-Doctor Andrews.
Ginny threw the letter down. “What does this mean? What letter of September 1?”
Mom stared down at her sandwich.
“Mother!”
“Okay!” Mom snapped up. “They’re redoing the books. For the twenty-fifth anniversary. They’re taking all these out of print and getting a new illustrator.”
“So they’re not going to sell yours at all anymore?” I asked.
Mom shook her head.
“Were you going to tell us about this?” Ginny cried. “Does this mean we’re broke?”
“I don’t have to tell you about this, Ginny,” Mom snapped. “This is none of your concern.”
“I knew it!” Ginny said. “I knew it. Your credit card not working, and the cigarettes, and . . .”
She trailed off, her knuckles white as she clutched the letter. She looked from the countertop, to her untouched sandwich, to the pile of French homework she’d thrown on the counter. And then she burst into tears.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Mom said. She put an arm around Ginny’s shoulders, which just made Ginny wail louder. Almost-Doctor Andrews quietly fished the letter out of her fingertips and tucked it back into the envelope. I slipped a piece of ham to Gizmo, who had been whining.
“We’re broke,” Ginny sobbed. “We’re b-broke and I’m going to fail my French test and I’m never going to get into school and—”
“Ginny,” Mom said. “We’re not broke.”
“Not yet,” I said quietly.
Mom glared at me. “Okay. You want to know what broke is? Try your grandmother putting four kids through college. I wasted thousands of dollars of her money on art school, okay? I’ve been broker than either of you two will ever be. And for what? A stack of”—she gestured at the box—“remaindered kids’ books about goddamn mice.”
Ginny had started to breathe very hard and very fast.
“Here.” I handed her the bag the sandwiches had come in. Ginny disentangled herself from Mom and put it to her mouth but coughed before she could really breathe into it.
“Blech,” she said. “It tastes like hot peppers in there.” She sniffed, and crumpled the bag into a ball.
Mom rubbed her temples. “Why don’t you just . . . take a bath or something? I don’t know. I can’t engage with this right now.”
Baths are a Blatchley panacea, although I think we get it from the Mortimer side. Mom told us she used to give us baths to stop us from crying, because apparently it was the only thing that worked besides a hefty dose of children’s Benadryl, and I have to believe her.
Ginny, for some reason, looked at me. I gave a small shrug.
“You might as well?”
She nodded, and left, sniffing. Mom sank onto a stool, and Gizmo burped, and I yanked open one of the little bags of chips but realized I wasn’t hungry, not even a little bit.
“I apologize for Ginny’s histrionics,” Mom said to Almost-Doctor Andrews. “She’s just very wound up about school.” She put her face in her hands—which, like mine, were covered in rings. Somewhere in there, still, was her engagement ring, and just seeing it gleam under her knuckle made me both hopeful and sad. “She isn’t usually like this. Right, Plum?”
“Not really. Well, like this, but not quite this much.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Mom said through her hands, and looked up. “I mean, Ginny’s always had a flair for the dramatic. But now she’s so much more . . . what’s the word? Extra.”
I groaned. “Mom. Don’t say that.”
“I’m sorry,” Almost-Doctor Andrews said. “I didn’t realize. About, er, any of it.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”
“It’s my fault,” Mom said. “I’m such an idiot. I should’ve known the money from that book wasn’t going to last. It’s a book, for Christ’s sake. But did I decide to go out and learn something, or get a practical job, or take that offer on the house so we could live somewhere we could actually afford? No. Because I’m an idiot.”
“You were going to sell the house?” I said.
She ignored me.
Almost-Doctor Andrews nodded at the screen door. “Why don’t I bring over some wine?”
Mom looked up. “You don’t have to—”
But he was already gone. Mom rubbed her forehead, fished a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, tapped one out, and told me not to tell Ginny.
You see, our house was not simply any house. 5142 Haven Lane was a magnificent heap, possessing the following deficiencies and/or shortcomings: weak forced-air heating that came up through cast-iron grates, a capricious plumbing system that could not handle more than three toilet flushes an hour or showers over ten minutes long, walls that were too thick to let a cell phone signal through but that would crumble when confronted with even a moderate amount of blunt force. The only place you could get cell phone service was standing next to the kitchen window. There were no light switches on any walls in any of the rooms, so that entering a room after sunset meant tripping around in the dark until you could locate the pull chain for a lamp. It’s so old that when we moved in, the city stuffed our mailbox with pamphlets about how dangerous lead paint is and how you should not let your children eat it because it will stunt their intellect. Our parents had thought that was hilarious, until a chunk of ceiling fell from behind the fan and into my oatmeal one morning. Then they read the pamphlets.
Sometimes I wonder if my problem was simply breathing in too much lead-paint dust. But Ginny had breathed it, too, probably more of it, and her intellect was decidedly unstunted.
And all the idiosyncrasies were worth it. Mom got her high ceilings, and our father built the furniture: the dining room table that curved perfectly with the bay window, the bookshelves in the library, the bookshelves in the living room, the bookshelves in Ginny’s tower, the bookshelves in my servants’ quarters room, the coffee table. And he got his office, so well outfitted and well preserved that we’d never disturb it again.
Needless to say, 5142 Haven Lane was perfect. And if we sold it, I knew I would die.
Lips zipped about the cigarette, I took the rest of my tiny bag of chips, dumped it around Ginny’s sandwich on the dandelion plate, and headed for the third-floor bathroom. The third-floor bathroom is the cramped-est of them all, possibly because Ginny never cleans it. Instead of wallpaper, our parents had pasted up old-fashioned biological prints of sea urchins and starfish and kelp, which, instead of making the space feel more open, made it feel like the inside of a very tiny specimen cabinet. Also, the bathtub is so small it’s practically circular.
I knocked, and waited until I heard a muffled come in, and then I came in.
“Hi,” I said. “I brought your sandwich.”
“Thanks,” burbled Ginny.
She was wedged in the tiny tub, her head underwater and her hair floating around her face like a mermaid’s. Ginny did not seem to care if I saw her naked, even though the same was definitely not true of me. The air smelled like the lavender bath soaps we’d gotten in our Christmas baskets from Aunt Linda. Aunt Linda sells baskets on Facebook, so she doesn’t limit giving out baskets of stuff to just Easter. We get Christmas baskets, birthday baskets, Valentine’s baskets, Fourth of July baskets, you name it. Mom says they must pay her in baskets.
I stood there a moment, not sure if I could leave.
“We’re going to lose the house,” she said. “Like, almost guaranteed.”
“What?”
“The royalty payments.” Ginny dragged a hand through the water. “You know that Mom doesn’t make any money. That was what was keeping us afloat.”
“You know, you could try not worrying about everything all the time,” I said. “It might help.”
Instead of answering, Ginny reached up with her foot and turned on more hot water. I set the sandwich on top of the pedestal sink and was starting to leave when Ginny spoke up again.
“We can’t live anywhere else,” she said. “We can’t leave all this stuff.”
She didn’t have to say which stuff. The furniture was as built-in as we were. Outside of this place, we looked funny and misshapen, but inside, we were perfect. We didn’t fit anywhere else.
“We’re not going to sell the house,” I said. “We’ll just . . . have to make some extra money.”
“How?”
“Well, maybe Mom can take on some extra classes next semester. And I can . . .”
I didn’t know what I could do. I had no skills, except writing, which obviously did not count, and no professional ambitions beyond governessing, if that was still a thing.
“Well, I’ll do something,” I said.
“What will I do?”
I gave her a look that said, You and I both know you could do literally anything and do not be absurd.
She floated, thinking, for almost a full minute. “Maybe we could be like those sisters who do all the lip syncs. Surely they have some kind of sponsorship deal.”
“I think they’re German,” I said. “And twins.”
“Hmph.” Ginny burbled. “Well, I could do it.”
“You’d be perfect.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You just would.”
“Do you think I’m a show-off?”
“What?” I said. “Why?”
Ginny shrugged, sloshily. “Iunno.”
I didn’t answer for a minute. I didn’t even know how to answer.
“Of course not,” I said at last. “Who said that?”
Ginny popped a blob of bubbles in her fist.
“‘Triste,’” she muttered into the bath, “‘et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.’”
“You’re crazy,” I informed her. This time, it didn’t even make her angry. She just closed her eyes.
“I am relaxing,” she said. “Hand me that sandwich.”
I did. Ginny set the plate on the lip of the tub and took a bite of her sandwich. I made a face.
Ordinary Girls Page 4
