by Mary Hogan
“Hello?”
“Libby?”
It was Nadine.
“What do you want?”
“I’m in love!”
FOUR
Doesn’t that just take the cake?
I know, I sound like an old lady, but doesn’t it? Nadine ruins my locker, spends lunch period in detention with Big Foot Curtis, and ends up with a date to go to the movies with him Friday after school.
“He’s so amazing,” Nadine said to me the next day in the cafeteria, completely forgetting about our little tiff and not even mentioning my angry e-mail.
“Yeah, you told me.”
“He plays acoustic guitar and bass. Can you believe it?”
“No. And I couldn’t believe it when you told me on the phone last night.”
“Mr Horny made us sit in total silence for an entire hour, so we were forced to pass notes.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You cannot believe how well you can get to know someone without saying one single, solitary word.”
“You want Pizza Hut or Taco Bell?” We were holding up the line. Fernando High’s cafeteria was a miniature version of my own home. In fact, it could have been catered by my mom. Every year local fast-food hangouts bid for the privilege of delivering junk food to Chatsworth’s future leaders. In an attempt to teach us democracy, the student body was allowed to vote. Apparently, my pencilled-in request for a salad bar was disregarded entirely.
“Who can eat?” Nadine squealed.
I picked up a chicken taco and diet soda and headed for the cashier. Nadine, twittering non-stop in my ear, made a humming-bird look relaxed.
“Two whole pages, front and back, of stuff. Amazing, real stuff. He’s a poet, you know, not just a musician. I’m going to save those notes to show our kids.”
Oh, brother.
“You know what the best part is?” she asked.
“He’ll fix my locker?” That flew right over her head. Nadine bulldozed on.
“The best part is, if everything works out the way I think it will, the way I hope and pray it will, Curtis will turn out to be the boy who delivers the big one.”
I swung my leg over the cafeteria bench and plopped down. Nadine sat beside me, facing out in case (yeah, you guessed it) Curtis walked by.
“You know,” I said, “one hour of detention can’t really tell you anything about a person.” I was tempted to confess I’d spent over a year silently studying Zack Nash and barely knew him at all. But Nadine’s mind was on her possibly very real love life, not my imaginary one.
“Sometimes one hour is all you need,” she said softly, petting the back of my head in a superior know-it-all way that really frosted me.
“And sometimes it isn’t,” I shot back, yanking my head away.
Nadine just sighed. “You’ll see, Libby Madrigal. Before the year’s out, way before, Curtis and I will have a serious kiss. You’ll see. I know in my heart it’s going to happen. In my heart.”
I believed her, which was the worst part. It’s not that we were in competition or anything. It’s just that I wanted my serious kiss to be first. Or at least at the same time as hers. This way, I was just learning to walk, and she was about to win an Olympic gold medal in track and field. How had this happened? My best friend, my very best friend, had zoomed so far ahead of me she was a tiny speck on my horizon.
“Hey.”
“Hey!” Nadine leaped to her feet.
Curtis and his friend Ray – or Roy – or some other onesyllable “R” – walked up to our table. Curtis asked me, “How’s your locker?”
“Still concave,” I said. Then, in response to Ray/Roy’s dumbfounded look, I added, “As dented as it was yesterday.”
Nadine said, “We heard that whole bank of lockers is going to be replaced.”
We did?
“Curtis and I overheard Horny’s secretary talking to the handyman over the phone yesterday.”
Oh. That “we.” Nadine and I weren’t even a “we” any more. I wanted everyone to leave so I could swallow my taco in one bite.
“At least Libby got her books out of there this morning,” Nadine reported. Her voice wasn’t usually so singsongy. I wanted to barf. “Horny had the handyman open it with a crowbar. They gave Libby and her locker mate a brand-new locker.”
“On the far end of campus,” I mumbled.
“Cool,” Ray/Roy said. Then he wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
Curtis turned to Nadine. “A bunch of us are heading out to the Boulevard for a bite. Wanna come?”
“Yes! I mean, yeah, that would be great. I’m starving.”
I just looked at her. Nostrils flared. The way she looked at me the day before when Mr Horny hauled her off to the best detention of her life.
“Can Libby come, too?” she asked. Nice try, I thought.
“Yeah. Whatever.” Curtis began to look impatient.
“You guys go ahead,” I said, flipping my hair casually. “I’m tutoring Zack Nash and I have to find him anyway.
Nothing. Zippo. Not one word of recognition. Not, “Zack Nash? That cute guy?” Not, “Wow. I didn’t know you knew Zack Nash.” Nada. Zilch arooney. Nadine shrugged, spun on her heel, said, “Okay,” and then left. Just like that. I watched her disappear across the school’s front lawn. With Ray/Roy and Curtis, the boy she was going to seriously kiss.
Doesn’t that just take the cake?
FIVE
Dad was trying to pop the neighbour’s dog with an air-gun when I got home from school. He lay flat on his belly up against the chain-link fence in our dirt backyard, his face ruddy and his sweaty arms covered in earth.
“Mangy mutt!” I heard him scream.
My father’s battle with Winnie, the white Maltese next door, was psychotic. He went nuts every time the dog barked, and the dog barked every time her owners weren’t home. Obviously her owners weren’t home right now. Apparently my dad was home, in the middle of a workday, which wasn’t a comforting sign.
“Hold still, you wimpy floor mop!”
“Here we go again,” Rif said, joining me at the sliding glass door. “Canine versus asinine.”
Winnie is as neurotic as dogs can get. Not that I blame her with a gun-toting maniac next door. I swear my dad loves to hear the sound of our neighbour’s car backing down the driveway. He gets very still, waiting. Then, the moment Winnie makes a peep, he’s flying across the room to the closet where his old air-gun and extra box of pellets are stashed – off-limits to us, of course. A few weeks ago, Dad woke us all up in the middle of the night because the sliver of paper he balanced between the air-gun and its shelf had fluttered to the floor.
“Who took it?” he spat at us in a rage. “Was it you? You? You?”
Dad wasn’t drunk. He was hungover, which was way worse.
“Nobody touched your air-gun, Lot,” Mom said wearily, holding her robe closed at the neck. “The kids know better than that.”
“I know better,” Dad yelled. “I always put that gun on a tiny piece of paper so I’ll know if someone used it. And that paper was on the floor.”
“Maybe it blew down when we were in the closet getting something else,” Mom suggested.
“And maybe Christmas will be in July this year,” Dad snapped back at her.
Dirk tried to warm his bare feet on the back of his pyjama legs. Rif stood stone-faced. I simply yawned and waited for Dad’s steam to run out. I knew he didn’t think I’d taken his stupid air-gun. I hated guns. It was me who tried to stop Dad from shooting Winnie until Dad threatened to plant a pellet in my behind.
“Let’s go to bed, Lot,” Mom said.
“Not until I get a confession. Who took it? You? You? You?”
After each accusatory “you,” my brothers and I shook our heads. For once I actually looked innocent, being too tired to blush or sweat. Finally Mom said, “That’s enough, Lot. The kids have school tomorrow.”
Dad cleared his throat, seemed to abruptly see the ridiculousne
ss of his midnight interrogation. He’s like that, my dad. His sanity occasionally catches up with his insanity and takes him by surprise. It’s as if he suddenly remembers the way he used to be, before beer muddled his brain. At those moments, I can almost pretend things are the way they once were.
“Here she is,” Dad would sing on Saturday mornings when I came to the breakfast table in my pyjamas, “Miss Chats-a-worth!”
To be honest, glimpses of my old dad just upset me. When I’m sure he’s lost for good, he shows up and gets me missing him again. I don’t want to miss my father when he’s right in front of me. Too many other things stress me out.
“All right,” he said that night. “Go to bed. But we all know an air-gun is not a toy, right?”
“Right.”
“It’s a dangerous weapon.”
“Dangerous weapon,” we repeated in exhausted unison.
“That piece of paper must have blown down,” he mumbled as we padded off to bed. Dirk said, “Goodnight” at the door of the bedroom he shared with Rif, then fell face first into bed.
Rif excitedly whispered to me, “Now I know about the paper. Next time I can just put it back!”
So, that day after school, Rif and I stood in the family room watching the man who created us aim his precious air-gun at a ten-pound ball of barking white fluff. The muzzle of the rifle poked through the fence. Winnie was hoarse from barking. Juan Dog, peering through the glass door with us, swallowed dry dog spit in terror.
“Who’s top dog now!” Dad bellowed maniacally. Then we heard a pop and a loud ping! Dad never hit Winnie, which added to his frustration, but he often pinged the neighbour’s swing set, completely confounding the family who lived there. We’d see Mr Halpern examining his pockmarked slide while scratching his head. Lucky for Winnie, Dad was a bad shot. Unlucky for us, he was a huge embarrassment (not to mention a horrible role model). How do you admire a parent who not only wages war with a little dog but always loses, too?
The worst was the time Winnie was in heat and Dad had shoved Juan Dog under a gap in the fence. “That’ll mess with their heads,” he’d snarled.
But Juan had just stood there, hunched up, shivering. Winnie’s barking scared him. His ears drooped like two wet Kleenexes. He looked pathetically back at my dad, tried to shimmy backward under the fence into the safety of his own yard.
“What, are you, gay?” Dad had growled at him, blocking his re-entry with the butt of his air-gun. It wasn’t until my mom walked outside and shrieked, “Have you finally lost every last one of your brain cells?” that Dad abandoned his attempt at genetic sabotage.
With so much going on outside, I didn’t notice what had happened inside. In fact, it wasn’t until Mr Halpern’s car drove up and Dad scurried back into the house, that I noticed our living room couch was gone. That’s also when I noticed my dad was still in his slippers.
“What happened to the sofa?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Dad answered, then he peered out the window to watch Mr Halpern examine his swing set. “Loser,” he said, smirking.
Rif reached into his hair and left the room.
“Dad, the couch that used to be in the living room is gone. Did you know that?”
“Of course I know,” he scoffed. Then he asked, “What time does your mother usually get home?”
“In a couple of hours,” I said.
“Good,” said Dad, then he slapped his slippers over to the fridge, opened it, and pulled a six-pack out of the space where vegetables are supposed to be. I sighed. He said, “Not you, too, Libby. Not today.”
I sighed again and went to my room.
My ears buzzed as I walked down the hall, past the gaping space in the living room, past Juan Dog who was cowering beneath an easy chair.
“Bethy is me thy.” Dirk threw a used wadded-up Kleenex at me as I passed his open bedroom door.
“Dirk is a jerk,” I replied, slamming my own door.
Inside, I lay down on my bed and stared up at the ceiling. It felt like I had a dictionary sitting on my chest. The Oxford English, unabridged. I took a deep breath, tried to relax, but my whole life felt like too-tight jeans. My own home was suffocating me.
How had I been born into this circus? How could I escape?
Reaching my hand up to my face, I felt the bump on the ridge of my nose, ran my fingertip across my straight teeth, traced my cheekbones. Picking up the ends of my long straight hair, I checked for split ends. Finally, I came to the conclusion I always came to eventually: I’d been adopted. No matter how many times my parents denied it, I just couldn’t believe that the people I lived with were connected to me via blood and DNA.
The screaming woke me up. At first I didn’t know where I was, but the smell of pepperoni pizza jolted my memory. It was dinnertime at the Madrigal house. Mom had just come home with our dinner on the passenger seat.
“. just made the decision . without consulting . ”
She was yelling at Dad.
“. count on your support. Just once . . .”
Dad was yelling at her. They were both yelling right outside my bedroom door.
“Support?” Mom shouted. “Any other woman would have dumped you years ago!”
Dad shouted back, “I don’t see anyone blocking the door!” To emphasise his point, Dad slammed his fist against my door.
Here we go again.
Heart pounding, my first reaction was to throw open my bedroom door, leap between my parents, and scream at the top of my lungs until they stopped screaming at each other. I’d done that before, exploded in front of them. Face purple, pulling out my hair, I’d shrieked, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
Amazingly, they had shut up. They’d stopped insulting each other long enough to tell me to go to my room. Which I did. Through my closed bedroom door, I heard them stomp down the hall.
“See what you’ve done to your daughter?” Mom had barked, not far enough away for me not to hear.
“Me? What about you? You’re her mother!”
“And you are her drunken father.”
After that, I learned to leave them alone. They had enough to fight about without fighting about me.
Like now, for instance.
“Bash up the whole house while you’re at it!” my mother was screeching.
Dad sounded as though he were doing exactly that. So, I leaped up from my bed and wedged the back of my desk chair under the doorknob the way I’d seen them do on TV. No way was my raging lunatic of a father barging in to create an instant window in one of my walls.
Slapping on my headphones, I turned my CD player up high, tried to calm my thudding heart. Suddenly I remembered reading a magazine article about meditation. It said you could tune out the world by sitting still and breathing. Weren’t you supposed to hum, too?
“This was my house and I’ll bash it if I want to!” Dad’s fist hit the wall again.
Was?
Cross-legged on my bed, eyes closed, I hummed. I tried not to hear the plaster chunks falling to the floor or Juan Dog’s hysterical bark.
Humm. Hummm.
“Happy now?” Mom growled. “Maybe you broke your hand this time!”
Yip! Yip!
Hummm.
The phone rang, disrupting my quest for inner peace. I quickly untangled my legs, yanked off my headphones, and lunged for the extension in my room before either parent could get annoyed with the sound of the ring and yank the cord from the wall.
“Hello?”
“Libby?”
Blam! Dad hit the wall again.
Dirk shot out of his bedroom yelling, “Stop it! Stop it!”
Yip! Yip! Yip!
“Who is this?” I could barely hear the voice on the phone. All I wanted was to get rid of whomever it was so I could pull Dirk into my room and we could hum together.
“Dirk, get back to your room!” Then to my father, Mom sneered, “You think you’re Mr Tough Gu—!”
Bam! She screamed as Dad’s fist hit the wall again.<
br />
“It’s Zack. Zack Nash.”
Yip! Yip!
“Lay a hand on me and you’re dead. I swear it!” Mom shrieked.
“Zack?” My heart leaped into my ears.
Bam! “Are you threatening me? Do you dare threa—”
Yip!
“Hi, Zack! Hi!” Panic instantly fried my brain. I couldn’t think of a single intelligent thing to say. Instead, I giggled hysterically into the phone. “How are you?”
I took the cordless as far into my closet as it would go without losing reception. I curled up and tried to hold the phone in the soundproofing of my armpit.
“Big bad man in his bedroom slippers!” Mom mocked my father. She was out of control. Was this about the missing couch? What did he mean it was his house? I’d never heard my mother stand up to my dad like this before. It was as thrilling as it was terrifying.
“I’m cool,” Zack said. “I was wondering if—”
Crash! Either my mother or my father (God, I hope it wasn’t Dirk) had picked up something and thrown it. I heard a grunt, a thud, and a huge crash. Juan yelped and darted down the hall.
“What’s going on there?” Zack asked.
“On? What do you mean on? On?” I bit my lip, suddenly realising that I, too, was on the verge of losing control.
“Uncle Randall’s chair?! How dare you!” Mom went ballistic. Apparently, the “thing” that had been thrown was the old chair she’d inherited from her uncle. It was the only thing she had of value, she often said. I thought it was ugly. The tapestry seat was all threadbare and the curvy wooden legs were all scuffed. But Mom called it an “heirloom” and dusted it more than she ever dusted any of our other cruddy furniture. It sounded as though Uncle Randall’s chair had been busted to bits.
“You’ve crossed the line, Lot,” Mom wailed, part crying, part bellowing in a crazy voice I’d never heard before.
“That noise? Are you outside?” Zack asked.
Squeezing further into my closet and my armpit, I desperately tried to sound breezy as I said, “Oh that. Uh, that’s construction. We’re, uh, adding a room. A new kitchen.”
“Oh.” Zack didn’t sound convinced.
“You want to end it? You want to end it right now?” Mom was sobbing now.