Dad laughed, and then we drove in silence for a few blocks.
“So, how did this morning go?” I asked finally as we were pulling into the parking lot. Dad turned the car off, and touched his lip gently.
“Not great,” he said. He unbuckled his seat belt and leaned back against the seat for a second.
“What happened when the nurse got there?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It was the weirdest thing,” he said. “When she got there, Mom seemed fine, so we thought maybe it was just an isolated incident, but then I went over to say goodbye and she lashed out at me again.” We both opened our doors and got out. “Same with Pig,” he said as we started a cold walk across the parking lot. “She doesn’t like the dog getting anywhere near her. But she was just fine with Olivia helping her.” The parking lot was nearly empty, and we walked up the ramp to the glass doors. Dad pulled one open and held it for me. The inside of the restaurant was dark and quiet, and the hostess led us over to a booth by the window.
Dad and I sat down, and he pulled a menu over to him, opened it without reading anything, and then looked back up at me. “Kid, so the reason I wanted to take you to lunch…,” he said, and paused.
“Was so you could buy me a lot of mozzarella sticks?” I asked, trying to delay what I knew in the pit of my stomach he was going to say next.
“Well, that too,” he said. “But Olivia and I were talking this morning, and I think Mom has to go back to the facility, at least for a while. It just seems like something changed, and she’s just too unpredictable right now. I don’t want you to get hurt, and I don’t want her to get hurt.”
The waitress appeared at our table, and hovered for a sec. Dad flipped the menu closed and ordered the crispy shrimp platter.
“I’ll have a double order of mozzarella sticks,” I said, and she nodded.
“That it?” she asked.
“And a large iced coffee,” I added.
“Uh, we don’t have iced coffee,” she said. “We have hot coffee?”
I nodded. “That’s fine,” I said. “And can I get a cup of ice?”
“Okaaay, sure,” she said, and walked away. I turned back to Dad, who was fiddling with a corner of his place mat.
“You don’t think we can just hire someone else to help?” I asked, even though I felt like I knew the answer. “In addition to Olivia?”
“That’s the thing,” he said, “and I know this sounds weird, and”—he paused, and gave an ironic smile—“and particularly awful, but I don’t think it’s about just anyone. She was totally fine with Olivia. I think it’s only me, and you, and Pig. It’s like something happened between last night and this morning, and she’s mad at us or has some sort of emotion toward us that she can’t express in any other way.”
“It’s so fast,” I said. “I mean, she has one bad day, and we send her back?”
Dad sighed. “I know, Esme, I know,” he said. “But I’m trying to think preemptively here. If she stays with us, and something really bad happens, then…” He trailed off, and I nodded. He didn’t need to finish, because I knew what he was thinking—something really bad was any one of several things that could take Mom away for good.
The waitress was back, and she set a very small cup of coffee and a very large glass of ice down in front of me. “Thanks,” I said, and proceeded to pour one into the other. The ice melted almost instantly, but I unwrapped my straw anyway and took a long slurp. Not exactly coffee, but definitely coffee water. “I’m sorry,” I said to Dad.
“It’s not your fault, Esme,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “And everyone keeps telling me that, but I can still feel sorry about stuff that’s out of my control. Like, this sucks. I can describe it a million different ways, but it all comes back to that: it just sucks.”
The waitress appeared out of nowhere and set Dad’s shrimp platter down in front of him, and my double order of mozzarella sticks. Dad and I both stared at my plate.
“Wow,” he said finally. “That is a lot of fried cheese.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “At least something’s going right today.”
I picked one up, dipped it into the sauce, and took a big bite. It was scalding hot, and almost against my own will, I spit it back out, and then took a gulp of my coffee water to try to soothe my soon-to-blister tongue. For some reason, the too-hot cheese tipped me over the edge, and I could feel the tears start to come again. “It’s just…it’s not fair,” I said, my mouth full of ice. “It’s not fair to me, but I’m a Sitter. But you…you’ve got a wife who’s so cursed, you can’t even go near her, and you’ve got a daughter who’ll probably never do anything normal ever again.”
Dad smiled, then reached over and took a mozzarella stick off my plate. He broke it in half, blew on it, and then popped one half into my mouth. “Esme, I hate to break it to you, but you’ve never been normal, not even before you knew you were a Sitter. Remember first grade?”
I chewed and swallowed. “What happened in first grade?” I asked.
“Well, you wore a life jacket and a ‘Happy New Year’ crown to school every day for at least two months,” he said.
“Fashion, Dad. You wouldn’t understand.” I smiled and looked down at my plate. “I guess I’m just feeling sorry for myself right now,” I said. “Even if I do have all this cheese.”
“That’s okay,” Dad said, taking a bite of his shrimp. “Cheese or no cheese, that’s allowed.”
“Like, sometimes I just find myself wishing I didn’t know that Mom was cursed,” I said. “Because knowing that there’s a way out, and that I just don’t know what it is, only makes things more difficult.”
Dad nodded and chewed. “Esme,” he said, “you want to know the scariest day of my life?”
“Sure,” I said.
“The day you were born,” he said. “I loved you so much that it terrified me. I took one look at you and knew I would do anything I could to protect you, and I knew that I had no idea how. I still feel like that, and knowing what you do as a Sitter scares the crap out of me. Do I sometimes wish I didn’t know you were out there chasing demons? On a superficial level, maybe. But deep down, I’m glad I know, because that means I get to know the real you. I get to see you be your true self and live the life that was meant for you. Sometimes people choose to live a lie, or believe one, because that’s easier. But I’m not like that, and neither are you. We can handle the truth.” He gave a little laugh, then made his face serious. “We can handle the truth!” he said, his voice all weird.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Sorry, my Jack Nicholson impression. A Few Good Men? Tom Cruise?”
I shook my head. “No idea,” I said.
“Never mind,” he said. “Anyway, what I’ve learned in my decades on this planet is that as life gets bigger, the hurts hit harder. The only way to not get hurt is to not care, and that’s not how we do things, you and me. That’s not how your mom does things either.”
“Thanks,” I said, smiling at him. “You give one heck of a motivational speech, Dad.”
“Thanks,” he said. “It all depends on having a good audience.”
“I don’t really wish I didn’t know,” I went on. “It’s just…a lot sometimes.”
“Of course it is,” Dad said. “Protecting the innocent is no small task, but you’re up for it. And I don’t want you to think that Mom’s never going to be able to live with us again. This is just a rough patch. We’ll get through it.”
“Our whole life has kinda been a rough patch,” I said, smiling at Dad.
“That’s not true!” he said. “Remember when the Chiefs won the Super Bowl a couple of years ago?”
“That’s that big tennis tournament that’s held in England every year?” I asked.
“Har-de-har-har,” he said. “And also, need I remind you
that our dog came back last night? That’s pretty darn lucky, if you ask me.”
I smiled, thinking about Pig. “I don’t think Pig is a dog,” I said, and Dad cocked an eyebrow at me.
“You mean she’s an intergalactic being sent here to teach us about love?” he asked.
I smiled. “Yeah, something like that.” Sometimes Dad really did get it.
Dad and I each made dents in our lunch, and then the waitress was back, looking down at my plate. “You want me to get you a box for that?” she asked. “I can see if we have one big enough.” I nodded, and she swooped the plate away, and then reappeared a few moments later and dropped my doggy bag onto the table with a thud before handing Dad the check. He slipped a couple of bills onto the table, I hefted my leftovers, and then we got up and made our way to the door.
“So,” he said as we were walking back into the parking lot, “this bird. You guys just friends?”
“Dad,” I groaned. “Not today, okay?”
Dad dropped me back at school, and Cassandra was waiting for me at my locker. She stepped aside so that I could open it, and then I saw her nostrils crinkle. “What smells like mozzarella sticks?” she asked.
I lifted my lunch leftovers into view. “That would be this bag of mozzarella sticks,” I said.
“I’ll give you three bucks for it,” she said.
I handed it over to her. “I’m feeling generous today,” I said. “You can have it for free.” She grinned, and dug in, eating a stick in two bites.
“So, Janis told me about this morning,” she said after she swallowed.
“Yeah,” I said as I shut my locker. “It sucked.”
“What are you guys going to do?” she asked.
I started walking to class, and she followed, making fast work of the mozz.
“My dad is moving her back into the facility this afternoon,” I said. “I guess it seems like she’s okay with other people, just not us?” At those words, I could feel my eyes get hot again, so I quickly tried to think about candy and baby kangaroos, because I didn’t want to cry at school.
“You should talk to Ruby,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “I was planning on doing that.” Ruby’s grandmother had been somewhat of a scholar on curses, and Ruby had picked up a lot from her.
“She and Mallory’s flight gets in at four,” she said. “And Amirah and Ji-A get in before that. You’re coming with me and Janis to pick them up, right?”
I thought about it for a second. That was what I’d always planned on, but now I wasn’t so sure. I knew I should go check on Mom, or go home to be with Dad, since I thought he’d probably taken the whole day off work.
“You should come,” Cassandra said, pulling me out of my thoughts. “You can go check on your mom tomorrow. Esme, this weekend is going to be really fun. You need to have some fun.” She chewed and swallowed another bite. “We need to have some fun.”
“You’re right,” I said, realizing she was right as I said it. “I’ll come.”
Cassandra looked into the bag and scowled. It was apparently empty, which meant that she had eaten approximately eleven mozzarella sticks in the time that it had taken to walk to my government class. She crumpled the bag, and tossed it, arcing it into the trash can across the hall.
“Hey,” I said, “maybe Mallory should stay with me this weekend? That way you and Ruby can just hang out.”
A smile flashed across Cassandra’s face, and it lingered in her eyes. “Yeah,” she said, “that’d be great.”
“So, I’ll meet you at the van after school?” I asked.
Cassandra flashed me a thumbs-up as she walked away, headed toward the door that was in the opposite direction from any of her classes. I went into class thinking that maybe Dad was right and I wasn’t so unlucky after all. I did have pretty great friends.
* * *
—
I made it through government without getting into an argument with Mr. Sutton about his thinly veiled libertarian beliefs. One would think that the fact that he and I were on opposite ends of the political spectrum would work against me, but I actually think I was one of Mr. Sutton’s favorite students, owing to the fact that I was awake most of the time and could correctly identify the vice president. Or, for that matter, the president. I will never forget the look on Mr. Sutton’s face when Liz O’Reilly gave a presentation on the forty-fourth president of the United States with a picture of Jordan Peele glued to her poster board.
My last class of the day was pottery, another class in which I was a standout student, considering that we were now more than a month into the semester and I had yet to make a bong and try to pass it off as a bud vase. In that class, I was working on Janis’s birthday present—which was a legit bud vase, in the shape of Grace Jones’s head—and I had to say, it was coming along nicely. I was especially pleased with my vase’s cheekbones.
When the final bell rang, I scrubbed the clay from under my nails and hurried out to the parking lot. Janis and Cassandra were already waiting by the van, and when Janis saw me, she gave me a big hug. “How are you doing?” she asked when she finally pulled away.
“Good, I think,” I said, and I heaved the van’s sliding door open and started to climb in. “It is what it is, and I’m happy to have this distraction.” Janis shut the door after me, since the inside had no door handle, and then she climbed into the passenger seat. Cassandra got into the driver’s seat and turned the key, causing all three of us to hold our breaths for a second, as an ill-timed backfire could send the entire parking lot ducking for cover. Fortunately, the van just gave a few sputters before we were on our way.
The Spring River airport was, as was to be expected, small, with just one terminal and only, it seemed, direct flights to places that you could easily drive to. We were halfway there when Janis’s phone dinged. “Ji-A and Amirah got in early,” she told us, “so I guess they’re getting something to eat.” She turned around in her seat and gave me a frightened look. I met her gaze with a grimace. There was only one restaurant at the airport, and that restaurant was Panda Sub. The last, and only other, time she’d been in Spring River, Amirah had bemoaned the lack of uni, so I couldn’t imagine what she was going to order at a place that served General Tso’s chicken on an Asiago bagel.
“Should we warn them?” I asked Janis.
“I think it’s too late,” she said as her phone dinged again. “Ji-A just sent me a picture of her teriyaki iced tea.”
When Cassandra pulled up outside the airport and stopped at the arrivals door, I noticed the security guard eyeing the van warily, no doubt half-worried that we were there to bomb the place. But then Janis jumped out and pulled open the sliding door, and happy screams filled the air as Amirah and Ji-A came bursting through the revolving door, rolling suitcases clattering on the ground behind them.
Amirah and Ji-A were both dressed in travel-uniform sweat suits. But, of course, as soon as they got close, I could tell that these weren’t just any sweat suits. Ji-A’s hoodie and joggers were oversized to the point of almost swallowing her up, and they were matching monochrome, in a color that I could only describe as a beautifully depressed rose. “Oh my God,” I gushed, gesturing to her look, “I love that.”
“Thanks!” she squealed as she threw her arms around me in a hug. “It’s all organic and dyed from flowers. I can send you the pre-order code for their next drop!”
“Yeah, awesome,” I said, knowing that her hoodie alone probably cost as much as Dad’s car. On her feet were bright green Balenciaga sneakers, the color of a tree frog, and she had a black Carhartt bucket hat on her head. Lots of people in Spring River wore Carhartt, but none of them looked anything like Ji-A. She had finished this look with an ever-practical black denim Off-White cross-body bag with a bright yellow logo strap, and a brushed aluminum suitcase that looked like something James Bond would use to sma
sh someone in the face and knock them out the side of an airplane.
Whereas Ji-A had gone for a swimming-in-sweats look, Amirah’s sweat suit was sleek, fitted, and all black. She had on a cropped Palm Angels hoodie with a cutout at the neck, slim-fit Dsquared2 joggers, and black Balenciaga speed sneakers. Her suitcase, like Ji-A’s, looked like it was built to survive an explosion, and her bag was an architectural black backpack from the Row. I saw a woman trying to sneakily take Amirah’s picture, no doubt convinced that she was in the presence of a celebrity. Amirah didn’t notice, though, as she and Janis were engaged in a mutual hug-and-squeal fest as they complimented each other’s outfits, and when they finally broke it off, Amirah turned toward me and I got a good glimpse of the front of her baseball cap. It wasn’t Rick Owens, or Gucci, or Burberry, or any of the other brands I would expect from Amirah.
It was from Panda Sub.
Amirah was a hugger, and she gripped me hard, picked me up off the ground, and spun me around. “I am so glad we’re here!” she said as she set me down. “New York has been a total borefest lately, and if I had to go to one more fashion week party, I was gonna barf into my bucket bag.”
I stifled a laugh, as the mere thought of fashion week parties made me sweaty with jealousy. “Sounds awful,” I said. “Hey, is that an employee hat?” Amirah turned from side to side, grinning with pride as she modeled it.
“Yeah,” Ji-A said. “She paid some dude named Larry fifty bucks for it.”
Fifty was probably more than Larry made in a shift.
“Why didn’t you guys tell me about Panda Sub when we were here last?” Amirah asked, looking at me, Janis, and Cassandra accusingly.
“I’m sorry,” Cassandra said. “We woulda warned you, but—” Amirah wasn’t listening, and cut Cass off.
“OMG, it is amazing!” she said. “I mean, if you ask anyone who knows me, they will tell you that my favorite foods are Chinese and Italian.” She looked at Ji-A. “Right, Ji-A?”
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