by Rose David
“Layla, enough!” said Mr. Lopez.
I smirked. “I was just saying...”
“What you were ‘just’ doing was interrupting my class to air your personal problems,” he said. “Are you done now, or would you rather go to the office and see if someone there wants to talk about it?”
Fascist, I thought.
My jaw set, I shook my head and stared out the window. For the rest of the class, I thought I could feel Nat peering at me from the corner of her eye, or maybe it was just the rest of the class ogling me, waiting for me to go off again.
I wondered if I could pay for homeschool with my babysitting money.
#
I had a job after school, nothing big. I didn’t know people even needed babysitters for thirteen-year-olds. Still, I didn’t mind getting paid for watching TV and occasionally checking my ward’s room to find her calling someone a skank via Facebook.
It was just after six-thirty when I stepped inside my house.
Immediately, my nose filled with the intoxicating scent of Wong’s peanut chicken. My empty stomach grumbling, I wandered to the kitchen. A family-sized to-go case sat on the table, filled to the brim.
“Come to mama,” I said.
But before I could pry away the clear plastic lid and dive face-first into the fatty goodness, I noticed a stark white envelope lying next to it. My gut lurched. It was a letter from the Summer Arts Institute.
The envelope felt thick, which could have been good. If it was a rejection, wouldn’t that only take one sheet of paper? Hell, a Post-It Note would have worked.
Even so, I hesitated to tear open the envelope, my thumb lingering just inside the lip. Natalie and I had promised to open our envelopes together, and the thought of finding out the news without her left a bad taste in my mouth.
“Try ripping it like a Band-Aid,” Dad said behind me.
I turned, sighing. “Wouldn’t that make it hurt more?”
“Probably. I guess that wasn’t the best metaphor.” He came toward me. “You want me to open it for you, kid?”
I bit my lip. Hearing the rejection in my father’s voice would probably feel a million times less crappy than reading it myself, but I shook my head. “It’s cool. I should do it myself.”
He nodded, watching as I slowly ripped through the top of the envelope.
The suspense made my heart hurt, but I couldn’t force myself to go faster. Every moment that I drew out meant another second that I wasn’t crushed by disappointment. After what felt like an hour, I finally tore open the envelope.
There weren’t any pamphlets inside, just a few sheets of thick, folded paper. “Dad, how long are rejection letters? You know, generally?” I asked.
“Hard to say.”
“Oh. Great.” I gave him a miserable smile, then unfolded the letter. The text hit me like a punch in the face.
I got in.
“Whoa,” was all I could say.
Dad’s eyes narrowed. “’Whoa’-bad or ‘whoa’-good?”
“I’m not sure,” I said dreamily. Just in case, I scanned the first lines of the letter again. They were still friendly and congratulatory and every other thing you hope a letter will be. I handed it to Dad, thinking maybe he might see something I didn’t.
A second later, he had me in a bear hug and was yelling for my mother. She came downstairs in a hurry, and we had one of those big, family hugs.
For a minute, I was too busy soaking up my parents’ I-Told-You-So’s (not to mention pumping oxygen back into my brain) to wonder why Mom and Dad were so happy about this. Did it mean I had permission to go?
We all sat at the table and spooned big portions of chicken onto our plates. As I digged in, I looked between my parents, wondering.
“The chicken was your mother’s idea,” Dad said.
“Well, the letter came this afternoon. We knew it was going to be either celebration or commiseration, so I thought, ‘Chicken, anybody?’” She smiled. “We both assumed it would be celebration, by the way.”
“I told you so, Layla,” Dad said for the third time. “Those bastards would have been crazy not to let you in.”
Mom didn’t even care that Dad had cursed at the dinner table (a habit as enduring as my love of talking with a full mouth), which meant she was in a really, really good mood.
“So, does that mean I get to go?” I asked. Funny how a little happy news could make you braver.
My parents exchanged a look that seemed to last about three years, give or take a month. Then Mom nodded. “It’s a yes.”
I felt a cheer rise in my throat, but Dad stopped it when he added, “A provisional yes. We know you want to go, but we need to make sure certain safeguards are in place.”
I groaned through a mouthful of chicken. Here he came: Lawyer Dad coming into argue for Regular Dad. “Okay,” I said, “let’s talk.”
“First, you don’t tell anyone about your special condition,” Mom said.
“Who am I supposed to tell: Natalie?”
“I know you two aren’t talking as much as you usually do,” said Mom, “but the rules still apply.”
“Okay, fine. I won’t tell anyone.” I stuffed a forkful of chicken into my mouth to conceal a smirk. What did they think I was going to do, meet up with some hot Chicago guy and spill my guts? No thanks. I was done with cute guys for a while. All they ever did was kiss you five times and then totally screw up your life.
“And you need to put your ring somewhere safe. No carrying it with you,” said Dad.
A protest jumped to my throat, but I stopped myself. I hadn’t carried my ring for a few weeks now, but I hadn’t missed it. Maybe I could handle being away from it for another month.
I frowned, thoughtful. Sure, I was fine now, but what would happen after Sean gave my ring back to me?
And what about things with Natalie? Sure, I wanted to learn stuff and take cool pictures, but it was bound to be pretty awkward seeing Nat at the dorms and stuff.
Not any more awkward than sitting next to her in class, I realized. Anyway, I had been wanting to try street photography for a while now...
After a minute, I said, “Okay, but only if the safe deposit box is near my dorm. I want to be able to visit my ring if I need to.”
Mom and Dad shared a look of disbelief, as if they had expected me to argue.
“All right,” said Dad.
“Okay,” said Mom.
And that was how I finally got permission to go to arts camp.
I smiled and speared another piece of chicken, swirling it in the sugary peanut sauce that had pooled on my plate.
I almost couldn’t believe it: I was going to arts camp this summer like I had hoped to do for months. And, judging from what had happened earlier today, Natalie didn’t think I was total pond scum. Maybe we’d make up, after all.
Things are finally getting good again, I thought.
That, of course, was when I felt that familiar, electric tingle zap over my skin. As my eyes dipped closed and my head got swimmy, it was all I could do not to face-plant into my chicken.
Compared to what I knew would happen next, death by Chinese food didn’t sound so bad.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When I came to, all I could think about was how much I hated Sean Fabry. At first, I didn’t even notice that my ring was hooked around my thumb, zapped back to me by some magical courier service.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to consider just which shade of pink that Nematode Sean would be, because my parents seriously went ballistic. I really thought Mom’s head would explode.
There were questions... Lots of them. So many that my head spun and wouldn’t stop spinning.
I told Mom and Dad everything about Sean’s wishes, including the fake date for Wish Number Two. I watched silently while Mom and Dad had a half-hour long debate about whether or not I should scramble Sean’s brain into forgetting the entire thing. Dad was happy to risk sending Sean to the loony bin, but Mom didn’t care f
or the idea of erasing almost a month’s worth of information from Sean’s memory. Something about potentially taking away motor skills.
So no wiping Sean’s brain, they decided. I wanted to tell them that it didn’t really matter--he had already forgotten me on his own.
Two hours later, as I trudged up to my room, my tired brain was still happy to consider all the possibilities for my revenge.
Why wasn’t there some kind of cosmic tribunal for people who did totally crappy things? Sean should have gotten a million years in a pane of glass, floating through the empty reaches of the universe like that Zod guy in the Superman movies. I would even make sure he wore the dorky outfit.
“We had a deal,” I muttered as I climbed upstairs.
I slammed my bedroom door louder than I should have, and winced. Mom and Dad hated that. Still, they had pretty much grounded me for life. What was one more minor offense?
Growling, I flopped down on the bed. From the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of the sparkly shopping bag from Diana’s makeup counter. The bath gel and makeup were still unopened inside, a total waste of sixty bucks that I could have used to buy a homeschooling program.
I should have known that Sean would throw me under the bus. He couldn’t even wait an extra day--one damn day!--to suck on Diana’s face like an ice cream cone. What if I had still been babysitting? What if I had been out in public somewhere, or dodging traffic on my bike?
Obviously, he hadn’t cared about the consequences or about me.
From inside my backpack, my cell phone chirped an incoming call. I should have ignored it, but I crawled over and checked, in case it might be Natalie. When I saw who was calling, it was like biting into a candy bar and finding a cockroach inside.
And that cockroach was named Sean Fabry.
He didn’t even wait for me to say hello. The second I smashed my thumb into the green button and accepted the call, Sean’s voice grated my ear. “Layla?” he shouted. “Is this Layla?!”
What, was he drunk or something? It figured.
“Who the hell do you think this is: Jesus? Leave me alone!” I yelled, then snapped shut the phone. That didn’t feel dramatic enough, so I threw it onto the floor, where the phone gave a weak plonk as it hit the thick carpet. Ugh, where was an old-fashioned, corded phone when you needed one? Those were perfect for slamming.
I crumpled onto my bed again, defeated by modern technology. By now, any lingering happy-full feelings from the peanut chicken had disappeared.
My room shifted into soft focus, and I felt my eyes grow moist. I was just gearing up for a full-on crying jag when someone knocked on the door. I sat up, wiping my face. “Come in.”
Mom flinched a little when she saw that I had been crying, but she didn’t give me her usual coos of sympathy.
“I guess you’re not here to tell me there’s dessert in the kitchen,” I said.
Mom’s frown made it clear that my (totally lame) attempts at humor weren’t going to fly. “We’re going to put your ring in the safe deposit box tomorrow afternoon. Your father’s meeting with clients all morning and I’m booked up until lunch, so I need your ring for safekeeping.”
“Mom, I’m not going to lose my ring in between now and--”
Her voice was frosty. “I don’t want to hear it, Layla.”
I didn’t have the strength to argue. Instead, I pulled the ring out of my pocket and handed it over.
“Stay in the house until then,” she said.
No arguments from me, Warden.
Outwardly, I only nodded and stared at my lap. As Mom left, I listened to her footsteps fade down the stairs. She was probably headed to the locked drawer in the home office.
I imagined my ring sitting among the passports and old documents, untouched and tucked away. My chest ached, but whether it was for my ring or because of everything else, I wasn’t sure.
#
The next day, I didn’t realize that Mom and Dad had let me stay home from school until I woke up around noon, my eyes puffy and my nose still red. Maybe they had tried to wake me up this morning. I honestly couldn’t remember. I preferred to believe they had taken pity on me and let me stay inside my room-cocoon.
I would have been glad to stay in bed for the rest of the day, but my bladder had other plans. Once I staggered out of the bathroom, I decided that I might as well do something to quiet the hungry rumbles in my belly.
Trudging downstairs, I tried not to wonder what Sean and Diana were doing now. Were they at lunch, kissing some more? Did he even remember what had happened with him and me? And, more importantly, why did that matter to me at all?
I found some leftover peanut chicken in the refrigerator. After heating it up in the microwave, I took the whole carton into the home office, figuring it might be nice to be near my ring again. My time with it was kind of limited.
When I walked into the study, I expected relief to rush over me, but nothing really changed. I still felt grumpy and hungry and totally uninterested in leaving the house ever again.
Sure, I knew that my ring was here with me. I could feel it lying in the desk drawer, almost like it was waiting for me, but this didn’t make me as happy as I thought it would.
Fifteen minutes later, I shuffled out of the office with my now-empty Wong’s carton, wondering how else to kill time. On the way to the living room, I caught a glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror and frowned at my tangled hair. If Natalie had thought I looked bad yesterday, she would have mistaken me for Bigfoot today.
“At least I’ll always have my looks,” I said, trudging away.
Whoever Sophia Loren was, I hoped she was doing better than me (not that that would be so difficult right now). Even if I did have some kind of resemblance to her, it was most likely buried under a night of crying and grumbling to myself. Diana had probably just been trying to earn some extra commission last weekend.
It made perfect sense that she would be just as big a jerk as her ex-boyfriend-now-current-boyfriend was. Those two deserve each other, I thought, slumping onto the sofa.
But the words didn’t sit well with me, even when I tried to drown them out with a billion-dollar action movie. I didn’t really think Diana was a jerk, not after talking to her face-to-face. Before last weekend, I couldn’t remember a time when we had spoken, just her and me, but I had already assumed I knew everything about her.
I had to admit, I had been kind of a jerk lately. And by kind of, I meant, colossally and to epic proportions.
I had been a jerk for losing my ring, a jerk for lying about it, and a jerk for spilling Natalie’s secret to Sean just to prove some kind of stupid point. I could admit all that--but I wasn’t a jerk for kissing Sean.
Oh, no. I had just been under some kind of lip-induced stupidity. At least I had snapped out of it in time. If I had still been in that dumb kiss-daze when Sean had asked to have Diana back, he would have hurt my feelings a million times more.
Not that my feelings had been hurt last Saturday. Of course they hadn’t. It was just annoying how rude he had been, that was all.
I shook my head and focused on the busty, gun-toting redhead cavorting on the screen, who seemed happy to do complicated gymnastics even in a low-cut tank top. As she wasted yet another bad guy, I sighed. Agent What’s-Her-Face was making the best of a bad situation--maybe I should do the same.
With my ring locked up, I would have to go back to school like normal, but maybe I could convince Mom and Dad to let me study at home. Teaching myself couldn’t be that hard. Half the time in class, I daydreamed about being somewhere else, but I still made pretty good grades. If Mom and Dad said yes, then I could stay here all day, eating bad food and watching even worse movies (after homework, of course).
“Sounds great,” I said, though the words came out with a sarcastic twinge.
Ugh. I couldn’t even manage not to annoy myself.
#
A few hours passed, then Mom and Dad came home. They didn’t bat an eye at me sitting on
the couch in the middle of the day, like a bum.
Mom asked, “Have you eaten lunch?” And when I nodded, she sent me upstairs to get dressed.
We were going to the bank.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Mom and Dad didn’t even let me carry my ring on the drive over, like I was going to lose it in the seat cushions or something.
The bank appeared in front of us sooner than I expected. It felt like only a minute had passed since I slid into the backseat, but there it was, looming in front of me. We parked, and my parents stepped out of the car while I stayed hunched in the backseat.
“Not going,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.
I didn’t care how immature I looked. And I didn’t care that a cute, young guy leaving the bank was trying pretty hard not to stare at the two frowning parents and their bratty, teenage daughter. The sooner Mom and Dad shoved my ring into a box, the faster I could get home. The promise of more solitude was enough to keep me from begging to have my ring back.
Outside, Mom and Dad gave one another a long look. Mom shook her head and said something that I couldn’t hear through cracked window. Dad shrugged and shook his head.
For a second, Mom locked eyes with me. She said something else--I couldn’t tell what, and before I could ask her to speak louder, she had already stepped inside the bank.
Dad watched her go, craning his neck to catch her as she stepped through the revolving glass doors and disappeared into the depths of the lobby. He settled back into the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead.
For a minute, the car was way too quiet, but then he said, “It’s really difficult for her to do this, Layla.”
I went rigid. “Difficult for her? I’m the one who--”
“Just wait a minute. She knows it bothers you, all right? I’ve wanted to put your ring in the bank for years, but your mother always said no.”
“She... What?” That didn’t make sense.
From the rearview mirror, I caught Dad’s deepening frown. “You think either of us wants to see you in pain?”
“No, but...” I shook my head, too confused to say anything else.