“No worries.” Tate bent down and picked up what remained of the jack-o’-lantern. “I mean, I was the one who left it under the drain spout. And no one gets what it was supposed to be anyway.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It’s the Sixers logo,” Tate said, gesturing as if I (1) knew what that logo looked like, and (2) could discern any intentional design in the rotting orange flesh.
“Mm,” I said.
“Our boys are killing it. We’re gonna be the best team in the NBA this year—next year, tops. Did you see the game against the Wizards?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t watch sports.”
“No?” he said. “Not even to, like, relax?”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “God, no.”
“Oh.” Tate regarded his mashed pumpkin. “So yeah, long story short, I was bored and my mom brought pumpkins home and I couldn’t think of anything else to carve.”
“Of course you couldn’t,” I said, before I could stop myself.
Tate stiffened.
“Hah,” he said, nodding. “Yeah.”
“I have to go,” I said, face absolutely burning.
“Yep,” Tate said. “Bye.”
He threw the pumpkin into the trash, and I clomped down the steps with the dogs, and went out the gate, and hurried myself back to Haven Lane.
Finally, three days later, the plumbing had been mended. Ginny thanked God that she didn’t have to sponge-bathe in an empty tub with a kettle of hot water, and Mom wondered if the plumber had used solid gold pipes to repair the outflow valve because Jesus Christ, how could it cost that much, and Almost-Doctor Andrews remarked that it would be nice not to have to take showers at the campus gym.
I agreed, of course. I didn’t want there to be any cause to leave this house at any time, ever.
Strangely, the one family member who couldn’t seem to tolerate a once-again functional water system was Kit Marlowe. Kit has grown into a cranky cat, but typically a quiet one. Now, he had taken to yowling, which I wouldn’t have even particularly remembered if it hadn’t interrupted a game of Scrabble.
“There.” Ginny nudged her final tile into place. “JOGE.”
“No way,” I said. “Use it in a sentence.”
“Hey, look at that joge.”
We both cracked up. Kit yowled. Then we stared.
“There’s something in the water,” Ginny said ominously. She clacked around in the bag of tiles, stirring them like they were knucklebones with a fortune to tell.
“What, like fluoride?”
“Huh?” She squinted. “No, I mean, like, a miasma or something. It’s making Kit witchy.”
“That doesn’t happen anymore,” I said. “We have filters. I think.”
But Kit was rolling around with an unusually wild gleam in his eye, and that night, when I retired to bed, I found him on the windowsill outside the office, staring out at the moon, like he wanted to leap out and pounce at it.
Something had changed. But then, fixing things does, necessarily, mean changing them, I suppose. You can’t go back to exactly how something was; you are only approximating, and hoping the newly fixed version will do you just as well into the future. And there’s no way to know but to wait and see how things unfold.
When I woke up, Kit was still on the windowsill, still looking outside.
Three
Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
I truly never believed I’d have reason to leave the house again. For one thing, now that the showers worked, and I had my rings back, there was no particular reason for me to go anywhere. Second of all, I didn’t really like being away from 5142 Haven Lane. The school day was more than enough to get me out into the world and socialize me; the rest of the time, as far as I was concerned, I could be entirely homebound.
Or so I thought, until the November night my sister began another tirade.
“I thought you liked the Forsythes!”
Kit Marlowe brisked himself through my legs and out of the kitchen, and I paused in the doorway, silently as I could. I had been upstairs, making a list of possible nonsentimental items we could sell, covertly, on the internet, but had come downstairs to sharpen my pencil in the electric sharpener. In the kitchen, Mom was sitting on the countertop, and my sister sitting on a stool with a predinner bag of popcorn, which she seemed to have stopped eating. Everyone was wearing big sweaters.
“I do, I do,” Mom was saying to Ginny. “They’re fine.”
“What do you mean fine?”
“Ginny!” Mom thumped down the leftover three-ring binder from my fifth-grade days that she’d been using to store her wine-and-cheese plan. “Thanksgiving is a time to be with family. They understand that.”
“Well, they see me as part of their family.” Ginny folded her sweatered arms. “I don’t see what’s so bad about that.”
Mom closed her open mouth with a little click and gave the ceiling a Someone, please intervene look. By accident, I had stopped paying attention to my pencil and had sharpened it down to a stub. I would have to go into the kitchen and retrieve a new one.
“I don’t see what’s so complicated about it,” Ginny was saying. “They invited me, and I said yes.”
“I just want you here, okay?” Mom said. “Is that so much to ask?”
“Why?” Ginny threw up her hands. “So I can eat dry, frozen turkey with literally three people, assuming Almost-Doctor Andrews shows up?”
Mom deflated against the counter. “That was mean,” she said softly.
But Ginny was on a roll. “The Forsythes actually know how to cook. They don’t have to light their stove with a match. They have actual food at their Thanksgiving. They’ll have actual furniture in their house, can you imagine? And you know what? I’m just sick of being here! I’m sick of dealing with this house, and I just want to be somewhere nice for a change. Is that okay with you, madame?”
Mom threw her hands in the air. “What am I supposed to say to that, Ginny? I’m a terrible cook, okay? I get it. I’m not as good a mom as Susan Forsythe.”
“And I’m an adult,” Ginny said. “So if I want to go there, I can.”
I had had enough. “God, Ginny, give it a rest.”
It was ironic, I found, how Ginny acted more like a two-year-old at eighteen than she did as her toddling genius self. I’d say she was doing it on purpose, to be contrarian, but that would have required her to have bothered reading our father’s essay. Maybe the very existence of the essay put the thumb on the scale, so to speak, and was slowly throwing her off her intended course. Not to cast blame, of course. Just that I wouldn’t have been surprised if Geoffrey Chaucer’s son had never bothered to learn the astrolabe.
Ginny let her jaw drop dramatically, and her eyes rolled with frightening elasticity.
“Oh, thanks, Plum. I appreciate you being so mature. Just because you have nowhere else to hang out doesn’t mean the rest of us have to suffer.”
The air in the kitchen felt hot and uncomfortable, and not just because the Franklin stove was spitting out warm wiggly air. Kit, now firmly situated on the kitchen windowsill, gave a plangent yowl at the outdoors.
There is a passage from Jane Eyre that I had underlined (well, Ginny had underlined it first, but I wrote my own underline over it).
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.
I was no bird, and I was no indoor cat unable to unlatch the door and escape. I was a fifteen-year-old girl with little air to herself, no particular orders to stay within those walls, and an independent will.
“I’m going to go out,” I said quietly. Nobody noticed. But, to be fair, no one usually noticed.
And that’s how, five minutes later, I ended up at Tate Kurokawa’s back door.
I wish I knew more about why I ended up there. Subconsciously, it may have seemed like
the least likely place to go, the one secret that Ginny didn’t know I had. I was actually very nervous, and my heart was beating very hard and fast the whole time I walked down the block. I knew that kids at school snuck out to go indulge in illicit activities, but I was never really sure what the term implied—in my mind it always involved a rope of bedsheets like in a cartoon. But I had basically just done the same thing, and it was a little scary, but not particularly difficult. It turns out that if no one really pays attention to you in the first place, you can do almost anything.
“Hey,” said Tate when he answered the door. He was wearing the same Nantucket sweatpants. You’d think that someone like Tate Kurokawa could afford more than one pair of sweatpants, but who knows.
“Hello,” I said. “I came over to watch some sports.”
You would think that this would throw him for some kind of loop, or puzzle him—or at least I thought that, in the moment. But he simply accepted it, or accepted it at an even lower threshold, like there was nothing to even consider.
“Cool,” he said. “Just you?”
“No,” I said. “Stevie’s just running late.”
Tate laughed. “I meant, like, without your dogs.”
“Oh.” I thought about poor Gizmo and Doug, trapped in the blast radius of Ginny’s fury at home. Maybe I should go back for them. But if I went back for them, it would call attention to the fact that I hadn’t had them when I left, and then Mom might start asking questions. Maybe the best thing was just to go back and not do anything or watch anything at Tate’s house.
“I should go,” I said, just as Tate said, “Uh, come on in.”
I did.
“Do you want something to eat, or something?” Tate said. I shook my head.
“You’re not doing anything important?”
Tate gave me a look. “What important thing could I possibly be doing on a Thursday night?”
“Homework?”
“Do I look like the kind of person who does homework before two a.m. the day before it’s due?”
I conceded that he did not.
“Cool,” he said. “Well, the TV room’s this way.”
Instead of the stairs, he led me down the first-floor hallway, which had very high ceilings that made our steps kind of echo.
“You know,” Tate said, echoing a little, “I didn’t think you were actually going to come back.”
“I’m trying to get into sports,” I said. “I’ve heard sports are relaxing, and I like relaxing.”
Tate laughed. “Right, no. I just meant I didn’t think you liked me.”
“Oh,” I said, because what were you supposed to say to that? I didn’t not like Tate, I didn’t think, which is to say that I no longer hated him. Which was strange to admit. But I wasn’t really ready to phrase my attitude toward him in any kind of positive grammatical structure.
Fortunately, we had arrived at what must have been the TV room—must have been because there was not any TV in it that I could discern, only huge floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a big window, and a red couch and armchair that matched.
“Here.” Tate gestured at the couch. “You can sit there.”
I didn’t know if by that he meant that I could have the entire couch to myself, or that the couch was just the place that everyone sat when they were watching the TV that did not seem to be in this room. But I sat.
“Do you even have a TV?” I asked, just as Tate flicked a switch on the wall and two of the bookshelves began to glide away from each other. Behind them was, in fact, a TV.
I felt very dumb.
“Oh,” I said.
Tate laughed a little and picked up a remote from the coffee table. “Mom says it’s ridiculous to have a TV that big, but me and Benji wanted it, so we compromised.”
Remote in hand, Tate zapped the TV on, then paused in front of the couch.
“Um,” he said, and didn’t sit down. “Hm.”
It was totally my fault. Because I had interpreted his You can sit there as you, Plum, will be the only person sitting on the couch, I had settled such that I was sitting on the crack between two of the couch cushions, more or less in the middle, which meant that if Tate were to sit on the couch with me to also enjoy the best viewing angle for the TV, we would be well within each other’s personal space. I had not done this on purpose.
“Oh,” I said. “Um.”
My options were few. If I moved toward the couch arm to open up space, I risked looking like I did not, in fact, want Tate anywhere near me, which seemed unnecessarily rude considering I’d just barged into his house. But if I stayed where I was, then Tate might brush up against me when he sat down, the very thought of which made me want to throw up my own racing heart.
While I was panicking, Tate sat in the armchair.
“Your boys aren’t playing tonight.”
“My who?”
“Your boys. The Sixers.” He held the remote aloft and flicked through TV channels so quickly I could barely see which was which. “But we can watch an old game. What do you want?”
“Whichever,” I said. “A good one.”
Also, by sitting in the armchair, he was actually closer to me than he would have been on the couch. There was more furniture separating us, but in terms of direct physical distance, we were barely half an arm’s length apart. If I sat with my back on the couch arm, the end of my braid would touch his elbow. Probably.
“Picky, picky,” he said, and clicked on one with the remote. Then he got up and went back to the light switch and turned down the lights so that it was pleasantly dark in the room. Probably as dark as people make it in their living rooms when they have snuck out to do things. Which Tate surely did, as we all knew based on his rumored escapades.
He sat back down in the armchair, I sat very still on the couch, the theme song, or whatever they’re called for sports, blasted out, and just like that, I was watching TV with Tate Kurokawa.
I couldn’t really follow the game, because I didn’t even technically know the rules of basketball. But the thing that I did not appreciate about watching television with another person who is not your older sister is that you’re not really watching the program at all. Your observational energies are occupied elsewhere. You’re thinking about this other person, and how he’s sitting, and what his breathing sounds like, and how maybe you should’ve made more space on the couch in the first place, and if he is thinking any of these things about how you’re sitting and breathing. Then you try not to sit or breathe weird.
“You’re awfully quiet, Peach.”
“Huh?”
Even in the sort-of dark I could see Tate’s eyes when he looked at me from the chair, like Kit Marlowe’s when he stalks into your room when you’re sleeping. Instinctively, I sat up straighter, because somehow in the fiftysomething minutes of basketball that we had watched I had started to sink backward into the couch. My braid had been very, very close to his elbow.
“Just like . . . I don’t know, usually when people watch games they say stuff,” Tate said. “Like yelling at the players, or whatever.”
“That’s stupid,” I said. “Why would anyone do that?”
“I dunno.” Tate shrugged. “Because they think it helps?”
I gave him a look that said, We are miles away from the arena, and this game has already passed.
Tate laughed. “Peach, have some self-confidence. You could make Embiid sink that three-pointer.”
His grin surprised me so much that I stuck out my tongue—a conditioned response from being teased my entire life—and I was instantaneously mortified. What kind of person did that? What kind of person did that to Tate?
But he laughed, and we went back to watching TV, and I forgot to think about my breathing for the rest of the game.
“Do you want to watch another one?” Tate asked, when it was over.
I had to admit that watching basketball with Tate was a lot better than having to listen to Ginny whine and yell. But I also could not necessarily admi
t that out loud.
“Do you?” I asked.
Instead of answering, Tate gave the end of my braid a little flick.
It didn’t hurt, but I jolted as if it had. Tate looked like maybe he was going to apologize, even though there was no reason to, and I knew that he had been joking, and actually it was kind of nice to joke with him.
So I said, “Ow.” And I smiled. And Tate smiled back and was definitely about to say something when there was a groaning door sound and the whooshing of outside air and the clicking of someone’s high heels.
“Tate?”
Now Tate was the one to sit up very, very straight.
“Uh,” he said. “Uh, um.”
“What?” I said, not particularly intelligently.
“Uh, it’s my mom,” Tate said. “I didn’t know she was— Shit.”
He went for the remote, but dropped it, and I went to pick it up, but then we both bent down at the same time and clonked our heads together, and our fingertips very gently grazed.
But Tate yanked his hand away.
“I’m not supposed to have girls over alone,” he said quickly.
“Oh,” I said.
It had never even occurred to me that someone like Tate Kurokawa would have rules about something like that. I had just assumed that the LSBs had the kind of neglectful parents who looked the other way when their sons wanted to get up to opposite-sex-related hijinks.
And maybe, also, it had never occurred to me that I was a girl. I mean, I was fairly secure in my gender identity, I just didn’t know that, in terms of sneaking out and potential rule breaking, I counted. Not in that way. Not to Tate.
“You should probably go,” Tate said hurriedly. “Um, just, I mean, go to the kitchen, and we’ll . . .”
He leaped to the door and waved me out into the hall, and I leaped up from the couch and made a beeline down the hall after Tate.
When we got to the kitchen, a short, dark-haired woman was setting a box of groceries on the island. Round Earth Food Cooperative, in the interest of saving the planet by inconveniencing everyone, does not provide bags, only recycled boxes.
Ordinary Girls Page 8
