My Life in the Fish Tank

by Barbara Dee

  I look up from my laptop. Kailani, Maisie, and I are having a group chat, but I can talk to them whenever. Hanging out with my big brother is special. And I can’t think of the last time we went somewhere together, just the two of us.

  “Okay,” I say, gathering my long brown hair into a ponytail to get it off my sweaty neck. “What kind of celebration?”

  Gabriel’s hazel eyes are sparkling. “You decide. We’re celebrating you.”

  “Really? Can we do Here’s the Scoop?” It’s the new ice cream shop, two towns over.

  “Yeah, I was hoping you’d say that,” he replies, grinning.

  He drives us in Mom’s car, blasting teen-boy music out the open windows. People on the sidewalk glare at us, but I don’t care. I like that we’re making noise. Once I even wave at a lady pushing a jogger stroller.

  At Here’s the Scoop, Gabriel orders a Monster Cone: three scoops of Rocky Road, plus whipped cream and hot fudge, plus sprinkles, in a giant waffle cone. I order a single scoop of cookie dough ice cream in a cup.

  He can’t believe it. “That’s all? That’s what we drove here for?”

  Gabriel’s voice is too loud. Louder than I’ve ever heard it in public. A mom at a table with twin toddlers looks up at us.

  “It’s my favorite flavor,” I remind him.

  “Then you should take a bath in it! Dump it over your head!”

  I pretend to laugh. “What?”

  He takes a giant mouthful of ice cream. “Come on, Zinny, at least order a Monster Cone. One little scoop doesn’t celebrate anything!”

  “He’s right,” says the scooper, a pretty purple-haired girl with dimples when she giggles. And when Gabriel grins back at her, I realize they’re flirting with each other. Girls have always liked Gabriel; once when we were at the town pool, two older girls told me, “Your big brother is sooo cuuute.” And I didn’t know how to answer, so I swam away.

  Suddenly I feel like I’m five years old.

  “Okay, sure,” I say, placing the cup of ice cream back on the counter. “Can you please make me a Monster Cone instead? With everything except whipped cream.”

  “Great choice,” Gabriel says, slapping my back just a little bit too hard.

  The scooper girl digs into the cookie dough ice cream again. But now I’m feeling on display, like I have something to prove. “Wait,” I add. “Can we do cookie dough on the bottom, then raspberry chip, and chocolate brownie on top? And then hot fudge over everything? No sprinkles.”

  “Nice,” says Scooper Girl, as if I’ve passed some kind of test.

  Right at that moment, three kids Gabriel knows from school—a boy named Jack and two girls—walk in, and he shouts a hello, running over to hug them as if he hasn’t talked to them in months. I’ve never seen him greet anyone like this, not even family. Scooper Girl is watching, and so is the mom with the twins. Then Gabriel announces he’s treating all three school friends to Monster Cones, just like his. In fact, he insists on it. Also, he’s getting another one for himself.

  “Wait, what?” I speak quietly to my brother, because I don’t want to embarrass him in front of the others. “Do you have enough money on you?”

  “Oh, definitely, of course I do,” he replies in the new too-loud voice he’s been using since we got here. “Zinny, I have an idea. Why don’t you wait for me outside?”

  “Outside? But it’s broiling. Why can’t I stay in here?”

  “Come on, I won’t see these guys all summer, and they’re my best friends. Well, some of my best friends! And we’re all going to different colleges, so this is our last chance to hang, and you’ll just feel awkward if you sit here listening. Don’t worry, it’ll be like five minutes, I swear.”

  I try to catch his eye, but now he’s smiling at Scooper Girl. “It better not be longer than that,” I mutter. “Just five minutes, okay?”

  “Six at the most. I promise! Hey, you’d better eat your Monster Cone before it melts!”

  * * *

  So while Gabriel is inside in the air-conditioning with some of his best friends plus Scooper Girl, I’m outside, standing under a skinny tree that doesn’t protect me from the sunshine. It’s my first Monster Cone, and I want to make it last—but I can’t see the cookie dough scoop anymore, probably because it’s settled into the cone’s bottom. Then the raspberry starts dripping down the sides, and as I try to keep up with the drips, the chocolate brownie scoop on top tilts at a weird angle.

  Finally I give up trying to save it, and just eat the whole thing.

  And wait for my brother, my hands and face sticky from sweat and ice cream. Why did Gabriel ask me to come, I wonder, if he doesn’t want me with him? He’s never treated me this way before, and I’m really annoyed.

  Ten minutes pass. Fifteen.

  At last Gabriel swings open the door, carrying what looks like a milkshake.

  “Thanks for waiting,” he says, grinning.

  “Mmf,” I say, letting him see my annoyance. “How can you possibly be drinking a shake after all that ice cream?”

  “Thirsty,” he answers. Practically shouts it at me.

  We get into Mom’s car and Gabriel turns on the AC full blast. Also the radio, even louder than before. BAMbambambamBAMbambam.

  Then my brother flashes me a smile as bright as a Christmas tree. It makes me forgive him right away, although I don’t tell him so.

  “Hey, Monkeygirl,” he shouts over the music, “you know what would make me incredibly happy right now? To go for a long, long drive. Me and you.”

  It’s a relief that he wants to be with me now, just the two of us. I smile back. “Sure. Where should we go?”

  “Nowhere. Everywhere. I just feel like moving. Don’t you ever get that way, like you want to burst out of your skin?”

  “I guess.”

  He opens the windows, even though the AC is on. We pull out of the parking spot with a vroom. “Yeah, and a lot of times when I’m driving, I get the best ideas. Like today, right this minute, you know what I’m thinking about? Tesla.”

  “You mean the electric car?”

  “No, no, the inventor Nikola Tesla, who the car was named after. Don’t you know about him, Zinny? The guy was a total genius—he figured out alternating current, which means he basically invented electric motors, and also fluorescent lights and lasers and remote controls. Oh, and he invented the first hydroelectric power plant in Niagara Falls—isn’t that amazing? Anyway, so what I’ve been wondering is, what did Tesla think before he figured out alternating current? Like, was he just sitting at his breakfast table eating a bagel and drinking a latte when all of a sudden he had this incredible brainstorm? Or was it he thought A, and then B, and if so C, which means D—you know, a logical order, one after the other, like dominoes? But if you saw the dominoes individually, you wouldn’t think anything was special about them?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, wondering why my brother is speaking so fast, although probably it’s from all the sugar. And I’ve never heard him talk about Tesla before. “I guess you could look it up. There must be a biography—”

  “Oh, but biographies are useless, Zinny! They’re all this kind of ‘Then he went to school, and then he got married, and then he moved to this house’ sort of crap, which doesn’t tell you anything really important. I’m way more interested—no, I’m fascinated—with his mind, not his boring everyday life! Like what I wonder about, Zinny, and not just when I’m driving, is how did his mind work, how did he logically go from one idea to the next, you know what I’m saying? And what was he thinking about before he was thinking of reinventing the universe? Because that’s the stuff that if you could understand, who knows where it would lead you. Like it’s an untapped source of energy, do you get what I’m saying?”

  We turn off the street and screech onto the parkway. I stare out the window as trees zip by, one big blur of summer green.

  Now I can feel my heart thudding and my palms sweating. This whole situation—my brother driving too fast, talk
ing too loud about stuff I can’t follow—is making me nervous. What’s going on with him, anyway?

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Gabriel answers, laughing, as his foot hits the gas. “That’s the whole point of what I’m trying to explain to you: just turning the wheels on a beautiful summer day! Oh, and the same thing for Thomas Edison—”

  “What same thing?”

  “You know, how did his mind work before he invented the light bulb? And when he did invent the light bulb, did a light bulb go off in his head? Haha, it couldn’t have, right? Because he hadn’t invented it yet! So maybe it was a sundial or a torch or what do you call that thing, oh right, a candelabra—”

  “I want to go home,” I blurt.

  “Now?” He turns to look at me, a second too long. His eyes are wide, shocked.

  “Watch the road!” I yell.

  “I am, Zinny! I’m totally watching the road! You don’t have to tell me to do that, okay? We just passed the sign that said Lakeland—”

  “Gabriel, you’re going too fast! And this isn’t fun. Let’s just go home now. Please!”

  He doesn’t answer. Or slow down.

  My fingernails dig into the seat. “GABRIEL!”

  The car swerves to take an exit.

  “Fine, Zinny!” my brother snaps. “If that’s what you want to do, that’s what we’ll do. Although I thought you weren’t a boring baby who only wanted to sit in her room and chat with her friends all day long, even though it’s summer. But I guess I was wrong about you!”

  This stings. But by now I’m just closing my eyes, trying to tune him out, not hear the blaring music or feel the wind whipping my hair out of the ponytail.

  For the rest of the ride, Gabriel doesn’t say a word. The silence between us feels like an electrified fence.

  When we get home a few minutes later, he doesn’t seem angry with me anymore, just tired. He turns off the car ignition and gives a small sheepish grin.

  “Sorry I said all that before,” he says. “You’re not a baby.”

  I shrug. “It’s okay.”

  “Well, but I feel bad that I called you that. You’re not mad at me, Zinny?”

  “I was, but not anymore. Are you mad at me?”

  “Nah.” He does the full Gabriel smile. “Hey, so can I ask you a big favor? About these.” He dangles the car keys.

  “Wait.” I’m staring at him, trying (again) to understand what he’s telling me. “You took Mom’s car keys? Without permission?”

  “Kind of. She was out running. And her keys just were sitting there on the kitchen counter, and I had to get out of the house—”

  “Oh, Gabriel.” He’s gotten in trouble for this before. Mom is fine with him driving her car, but she has a thing about communication, especially from him. “If you want the car keys, just ask,” she says all the time.

  And I can’t help thinking: It would have been bad enough if we’d gone to Here’s the Scoop and come straight back home. But the way he kept going on that road, driving until I made him stop, only made it more likely Mom would find out. And be furious.

  Why would he risk that? None of it made any sense—the driving, the talking. Even all the ice cream.

  “So are you gonna tell Mom on me?” Gabriel is asking, not looking at me.

  “No,” I say. He called me a baby; even though he took it back, I definitely don’t want to be called a tattletale, too. “I’m not going to tell. But Gabriel—”

  “Thanks, Monkeygirl,” he says, and then he slams the car door behind him.

  Un-time

  After that phone call on Monday, time got weird for us.

  It was almost like everything froze. Like the rest of the world was still liquid, flowing, but inside our house everything had turned to ice. Nothing changed or moved. We were in another dimension from everybody else, where minutes and hours went by, but they didn’t count somehow. Anyway, none of us added any notes to the Rescue Dog of the Month kitchen calendar. And when November ended (a brownish mutt named Bonkers), nobody turned the page to December (a one-eared shepherd mix named Pablo).

  Mom and Dad kept driving back and forth, to and from the hospital, even on Thanksgiving. At some point during those drives, Mom quit her teaching job. She just told us she was “taking some time away,” but not how long that would be. And when she was home, early in the morning and late at night, she was constantly researching on her computer, or arguing with insurance companies on her phone. So I started to think that this was her new job: arranging doctor stuff for Gabriel.

  Who Scarlett, Aiden, and I hadn’t seen since the accident.

  And who we hadn’t heard anything about.

  Still.

  “Not yet,” Mom and Dad kept telling us whenever we asked about visiting. “Soon.”

  But when would that be, exactly? “Soon” wasn’t real time. It was Abnormal Standard Time, like “some time away.” And I began to wonder if it would ever happen.

  * * *

  Scarlett, Aiden, and I didn’t go to school the day after Gabriel’s accident, mostly because (despite all the neighbors bringing over casseroles and pies and pointlessly “checking in”) nobody was forcing us—and then it was the four-and-a-half-day Thanksgiving weekend. So basically for that entire week the three of us just slept late, ate Cheerios at noon, played video games, got dressed, ate chocolate chip cookies, played more video games, took naps.

  Maisie and Kailani texted a few times to ask if I wanted company. But the truth was I didn’t; I just wanted to be with Scarlett and Aiden. The odd thing was how we did everything together, like we were afraid to let one another out of our sight. Like we were still standing on the stairs, leaning into one another, afraid we’d go sprawling if any of us made a sudden move.

  Except once, Scarlett sneaked away, locked herself in the bathroom, and cut her hair with a pair of nail scissors. The haircut was really short and raggedy-looking, like how a little girl would wreck her doll. Maybe she thought it looked cool or goth, or it was supposed to be a statement about her feelings, or something, but I thought she just looked awful.

  I mean, I was proud of my thick brown hair. It had taken me two years—since fifth grade—to grow it long enough to make a good ponytail, or sometimes to wear it in braids.

  “Why did you do that to your hair?” I asked.

  “Because it’s my hair,” Scarlett growled at me. “I don’t need you to understand.”

  Good, because I don’t, I answered her in my head.

  Sunday after Thanksgiving, Eight Thirty P.M.

  Mom and Dad called Scarlett, Aiden, and me into the living room. Mom sat on the sofa, petting the cushion next to her for Aiden to sit there. Dad sat where he usually did, in the old gray easy chair. Scarlett perched on the ottoman, and I picked the sofa arm, to Mom’s right.

  “Okay,” Dad said. He cleared his throat. “We wanted to update you guys about Gabriel.”

  “Yeah, about time,” Scarlett muttered.

  Dad flinched. “Scarlett, we haven’t been hiding things to be mean or unfair. We’ve just had a lot to sort out, a bunch of meetings with Gabe’s doctors. Also with a few of his professors and several of his classmates. And we wanted to get a better handle on the sequence of events.”

  Sequence of events.

  “What’s going on with Gabriel?” I asked in a small voice.

  “Right now he’s still recovering from the car accident,” Mom said. “The doctors think he’ll be discharged from the hospital very soon. So that’s good news.”

  There was a pause.

  Why is there a pause?

  My heart was in my throat. “And then he’ll go back to college?” I asked.

  Mom and Dad exchanged a look I hadn’t seen before.

  “No, sweetheart,” Mom said slowly. “We didn’t really understand all this before now, but Gabriel has something else, a type of disorder that caused the accident. And a few other things—”

  “Other thi
ngs? Like what?” Scarlett demanded.

  “Some behavior people noticed on campus,” Dad said. “We don’t need to go into specifics right now. But apparently, with the end of the semester, Gabe’s been under a lot of stress. And not sleeping—”

  “Dad, that’s normal college stuff,” Scarlett protested. She was a high school junior, so she knew about things like this.

  Mom took a deep breath. “No, honey. It’s more serious than that. His roommate told us that before the accident Gabriel was sleeping all the time, not talking to anyone, skipping classes. Then lately he’d stopped sleeping altogether, and was just typing around the clock. And he wouldn’t stop talking and laughing—so loudly the kids next door complained.”

  “Okay, but that doesn’t mean anything,” Scarlett said. “Gabriel’s always been loud and silly! And all the typing—he was probably just meeting deadlines at the end of the semester! You know how he puts everything off until the last minute.”

  “Also,” Dad said, “we hear your brother’s been drinking and driving, way too fast. Which is how he smashed up his roommate’s car.”

  “That’s impossible,” I blurted. “I mean, okay, sometimes he drives too fast, but he knows about drinking—”

  Mom closed her eyes for a second. I could see she didn’t want to talk about the roommate’s car. “We heard Gabriel was acting pretty wild when they brought him to the emergency room, yelling at everyone, making a scene. The doctors think he may have something called bipolar disorder. But it’s completely treatable—”

  “What?” Aiden said. It was as if he’d been playing Nintendo inside his head the whole time, and only now realized we were having a conversation. This conversation. “What’s wrong with Gabriel?”

  “Gabriel has a mental illness, baby,” Mom said.

  “He does not.”

  “Yes, Aiden, he does. It’s like his moods are stronger than other people’s, and he can’t control them. Sometimes he’s very happy or angry for no reason, and sometimes he’s sad and sleepy for no reason. It’s not his fault, sweetheart.” She caught her breath. “But if he goes to a special type of hospital for a while, where he can get medicine and therapy—”