I’m transferring the wash into the dryer when I hear Misty’s tread on the stairs. Even though she makes every effort to be a bratty sister and daughter—I sometimes think it’s a role she’s learned from watching too much TV—her footsteps are cheerily distinctive, containing a bounce that is nothing like my parents’ tired footsteps. I glance up to see her slouching in the doorway of the laundry room. She looks bored or something.
“What’s going on?” I say.
“Wanna shoot pool?” she offers, not really answering my question.
“Sure, just let me finish this,” I say. I finish loading the dryer, hookload by hookload, use my hook to set the dial at seventy minutes, use my hook to depress the button.
I go through the door of the laundry room, then pass through my dad’s home office at the base of the stairs—thankfully, he’s not there—and into the rec room, where Misty is waiting for me, balls racked, cue stick already chalked.
I was a much better pool player than Misty before the accident and, having put much effort into recovering my game, I am once again.
I sometimes think that whoever invented hooks for hands, that person must have been someone who loved pool. How else could he have designed a device that performs so perfectly at the game?
“Do you want to break, or shall I?” I ask, taking a twenty-one-ounce stick out of the wall rack and chalking it until the tip is coated in that perfect sky blue, blowing the excess dust off the tip. It sparkles briefly in my field of vision, hanging in the air before drifting down to the brick red linoleum floor.
“Me,” Misty says, bending over to line up the cue ball in her favorite spot: just an inch in from the right bank, so far forward that it’s flirting with a violation of being over the break line.
I’ve tried to tell her before that this is an insane position to break from, that you can’t get enough power from it, that it’s too easy to scratch the shot, but she never listens. Misty can be stubborn that way.
I know what she’s thinking when she breaks, know why she opted to break herself rather than letting me take it: she knows that this way at least she has a chance to sink a few shots before I take over the game. She knows I’ve become such a bionic pool player that if I break, there’s a fair chance I’ll run the whole table.
Who wants to lose without ever even being in the game?
Misty does pretty well. She doesn’t scratch on the break, managing to sink two balls: a solid and a stripe. It’s her choice, and she goes for solids, training her stick on the maroon seven. She sinks it no problem, but then she blows an easy tap shot on the blue two, groaning as she cedes the table to me.
I study the remaining twelve balls, plotting how I can sink all six of the striped balls left plus the eight.
People think to be a good pool player all you need do is put a ball in the pocket, like hitting a ball over the fence in baseball or a tiny ball into a tiny cup in golf. But there’s so much more to it than that. In order to be really good, you need to be able to see the shot after the shot you’re taking right now; to be great, you have to see how to strategize in order to clean the whole table. Pool is a game of concentration and angles, yes, but it’s also a game of looking to the leave: If I do this, where does it leave me? If I take this shot, what angle do I need to come at it from not only to make my shot but also to set myself up for where I want to be for my next shot? Oh, and by the way, if I sink all my balls, what’s the point of my accomplishment if I manage to stitch myself on the eight?
To avoid that last problem, I’ve lately taken to working the games I shoot backwards in my brain, meaning I think first about how I want to come at the eight in the end, before working backwards in my mind, step by step through each ball and angle it’s going to take me to get there until I arrive at the first ball that needs to be conquered.
But I don’t do any of that higher-level playing right now as I face off against Misty. I sense there’s something she wants to discuss with me but that she won’t get the chance if I run the table on her. So I go for the long orange thirteen striper—picking a table-length shot, so she won’t get suspicious—but instead of sinking it smoothly and with authority like I can, I tap it just enough off center to cause it to bounce off the pointed corner of the bank.
“Darn,” I say, shaking my head as though amazed at my own ineptitude. If I still had fingers, I would snap them here to emphasize my dismay at my own lack of finesse. As it is, I have to settle for shuffling my feet and staring at my cue as though it’s somehow offended me.
“I chalked this thing, didn’t I?” I say.
Misty rolls her eyes at me. “Of course you did. Aren’t you the one who’s always telling me ‘chalk is cheap’ and that I have to remember to chalk my own cue between each shot?”
“That does sound like me,” I say, and for once, even though it’s so rare for me, I can’t help but grin.
Misty studies the table, doesn’t grin back.
“So, how’s the new school working out for you?” I ask Misty as she takes her turn. I figure, she’s a kid, she’s always been a far more social kid than I am, so what else could be on her mind?
“There’s this boy in my class,” she says, “Bobby Parker.”
“There’s always a Bobby Parker,” I say.
She looks at me, puzzled by my wit.
I sigh. “What did this particular Bobby Parker do?” I ask.
“He somehow learned about you,” she says. “He told me he thinks you’re crazy.”
“And what did you say in response?” I ask, sure of the answer. Surely she will have agreed with this Bobby Parker: Misty’s brother is a nutcase, a whackaloon. Good citizens would be well advised to hide all the women and chickens.
“I told him if he didn’t shut up about it,” she says, “I’d sic you on him and then he’d see how crazy you really were.” She looks at me like she’s worried I’ll yell at her. “Was that okay?”
I try not to let the huge smile I’m feeling on the inside show on my face. “I’m not sure that threatening your fellow classmates with me visiting upon them grievous bodily harm is the best way to convince them that I’m not the craziest person in town,” I say sternly. But then I just can’t help it: the smile breaks across my face. “But yes,” I add, “what you told Bobby Parker was perfectly all right. Just don’t make a habit of it.”
She heaves a sigh of relief, and I think how I can’t believe this: my little sister has stood up for me.
“It must be hard on you,” I say, sobering, “having everyone in school think your brother is crazy, maybe even acting as though you must be just like him. I’m sorry.”
She shrugs. “It’s not really that bad.” Then she laughs. “I mean, at least they’re not all Bobby Parkers.”
We share a chuckle moment now that she has at last grasped my earlier joke.
“Really, aside from Bobby Parker,” she says, “I’ve made a ton of friends.” Now it’s her turn to sober. “Anyway,” she says, “it must be even harder on you.”
“Not really.” I shrug, not wanting her pity. “So tell me about this ton of friends.” Ton of friends—it’s a foreign country to me.
I listen as Misty excitedly tells me about girls with names like Kiki, Tiki, and Biki.
“Biki?” I say. “Did someone actually name their kid Biki? What is wrong with some of these parents?”
I mock that which I don’t understand while wondering at the world Misty and Aurora live in, an astonishing world in which a person can make a ton of new friends instantly without even appearing to try, an unimaginable world in which a person actually expects to make a ton of friends and can even do so by following that insane advice to “Just be yourself.”
“How about you?” she asks. I can tell right away that she knows exactly where my mockery comes from, see the pity in her eyes. “Have you made any friends in your new school?” She poses the question cautiously, as though she expects the answer to be obviously negative.
“One,” I say
. “Maybe.”
Misty raises her eyebrows at me, a look of shock and an invitation to tell her more.
I think of Aurora. I think about the evidence I see before my very eyes every day in the cafeteria: Celia liking Jessup, Jessup liking Aurora, Aurora liking . . . who? I think how, even though I was a jerk to her that first time she tried to talk to me in the cafeteria, and even though I’m still often a jerk to her, it hasn’t stopped her from saying hey to me every time she sees me in the halls—who knew that having someone else simply say hey to a person could feel like such a big deal, could become the high point of a person’s every day? My being a jerk hasn’t stopped her from smiling at me each time she says hey, sometimes even going further to ask how I’m doing whenever we’re in the same place for more than a second. She is the only person in the school, including teachers, who is constantly nice to me.
I am not used to other people being kind.
And, since I am still frequently a jerk to her, responding to her overtures with terse one-word answers, I wonder why she bothers. And yet I can’t help the way I act around her. I was terse with her that first day in the cafeteria because I didn’t want her pitying me, because I had no idea how to handle someone being nice to me for a change—it had been so long—and now I don’t know how to stop. I’m like a prickly pear, and yet Aurora can’t seem to stop herself either, can’t seem to stop being nice to me.
“Maybe,” I say again to Misty. “Maybe.”
I see another look of pity cross her face. In Misty’s social world, where more is always by definition better, it must seem pathetic: the idea of a person having only one “maybe” friend.
We finish out the game.
I let her win.
And afterward, for good measure, I let her beat me again.
Aurora
It’s become habit for my dad and me to go to Angelo’s Pizza for Sunday night dinner.
The idea was all mine.
I told my dad that he slaves over a hot stove six days a week, and that he deserves a day of rest. I told him I had no intention of learning to cook in order to provide him with that day of rest. I told him I’d even pay for these Sunday night dinners using my allowance money.
My dad has given me a weekly allowance for as far back as I can remember. The amount is always equal to that of my age. I get to keep eighty percent of it, while ten percent goes to savings and ten percent goes to charity. This means I now get fifteen dollars a week from which I get to keep twelve. Since I don’t spend a lot, it tends to pile up. For this money, I don’t have to do a thing except “be a member of this family,” as my dad puts it. He says that all family members are shareholders in the wealth.
There is a good reason why, where we used to live, my friends thought my dad was the greatest dad who ever lived.
Oh, and if I do want extra money for something special? My dad says I can always do chores to earn that. But I almost never want anything and I do chores anyway, telling my dad that “shareholder” shouldn’t have to mean “lazy and useless.”
My dad resisted my offer to spring for pizza—“I think I can afford to feed my own daughter, princess”—but I insisted.
And so we go early each Sunday night to Angelo’s, where, amid the heavenly aromas of rolled dough, fresh tomatoes, and melted string cheese, we discuss books and life.
As we wait for our pizza, I sip at my Coke. My dad won’t let me drink diet soda. He says he can’t stop me from rotting my teeth with regular soda the way other kids do, but he refuses to let me put chemicals in my body that he finds suspect. My dad also has written up his unpublished theory that diet products make people fat. Show me a fat person, it opens, and I’ll show you a fridge stocked with diet soda.
I don’t really see that regular soda is any better for a person than diet soda—and I suppose my dad isn’t saying it’s any good either, only that he finds it to be the better of two evils—but if it makes him moderately happier to see me consume 150 calories more per can, I’m game.
“So,” my dad asks, “how’s school going so far?”
You would think, with us being in the same school every day, we’d talk about it all the time at home. But my dad believes in giving me space and I believe in giving him space too, so after the first few days, we stopped asking each other all the time.
“It’s good,” I say truthfully. “You know, it’s funny. I was sure I’d have trouble fitting in. I was so used to my friends in my old school. But everyone here has really been so welcoming.”
“I’m glad,” my dad says. “Anyone in particular?”
“Well,” I say, “there’s Deanie and Celia. Deanie can be a little wishy-washy about some stuff”—I wrinkle my nose at the thought of some of her wishy-washiness—“but she is really friendly. And Celia?” I think about this one a little longer. “She’s mostly very nice to me. But sometimes, I wonder if she just does it because Jessup Tristan does. I think she likes him.”
“Ah, Mr. Tristan,” my dad says.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
But he doesn’t answer. Instead he says, “What do you think of Mr. Tristan?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Sometimes, I think he acts too nice to me, like it’s false somehow, but I don’t know.”
I think about what Jessup said to me the day after I ran into him outside the library, when he said he thought the new librarian was odd before realizing the librarian was my dad. The next day he apologized again, but it was a weird kind of apology.
“I’m sorry,” he said with a laugh. “I just always thought it was strange for anyone to want to be a librarian, but particularly for a guy to want to be one. Know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t,” I told him evenly.
But then he told a joke about something else—Jessup can actually be quite funny when he’s not making fun of someone—and I forgot all about it for a while.
“I know what you mean,” my dad says now. “One day I realized one of the students had done something to the computers so that a site could be viewed that the school doesn’t, um, allow.” My dad’s cheeks color slightly, so I know he must be talking about porn. Parents get worked up about both sex and violence, but I have noticed they never blush when talking about violence. “I could have sworn,” my dad goes on, “that Mr. Tristan was the only one who used that computer that day, but when I checked the sign-in log, it was another kid’s signature. That student I was sure hadn’t used the library at all that day, but when I asked him to write out his signature for me, it was a match. Naturally, I couldn’t turn in a phantom, so I just reprogrammed the settings on the computer and I had to let the matter drop.”
“Weird,” I say. “Kind of creepy too.”
Our pizza comes, but it’s too hot to eat right away. It’s the veggie special, my dad’s doing. He says this will counteract the harm done by the sugar in my soda. So he doesn’t feel bad, I pretend I’m excited about the prospect of eating eggplant and olives rather than pepperoni and double cheese.
I know my dad tries too hard at, really, everything. But I also know nothing is easy on him anymore, feeling like he has to be both dad and mom. Nothing has been easy on him for a very long time.
My dad bites into a slice too soon, burning the roof of his mouth.
“You know,” he says, after downing half my Coke to soothe the sizzle on his tongue, “Mr. Tristan reminds me of the Mr. Bubble boy.”
“The who?”
“He was a kid who used to come into your Grandpa Aaron’s store every day.”
Grandpa Aaron owned his own pharmacy for most of my dad’s childhood, until all the CVSes and stuff took over. My dad sometimes tells stories about helping Grandpa Aaron restock the candy, ring the register—back, he always reminds me, before registers told you how much change to give, when human beings could still add and subtract in their very own heads—and sometimes even count out pills for prescriptions when no one was looking.
I at last take a bite of my own first slice. Tru
th time: I actually do like the way the mushrooms, onions, and peppers interact with the stringy hot cheese. The eggplant does make whatever it touches a little watery, but the olives always remind me of my mom. Mom loved her olives.
“So what did this Mr. Bubble boy do?” I ask, not taking the time to totally swallow first.
“Like I say,” my dad says, “this boy used to come in every day. And every day he’d shout out a big, friendly ‘Hi, Mr. Belle!’ to your grandfather.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I want to know.
“Nothing, in and of itself,” my dad says. “But when I was growing up, there was this wonderful product on the market called Mr. Bubble. I don’t know if they even still make it anymore. They probably do, only now I’ll bet they make it in a liquid form and put it in a plastic bottle.”
I wait while my dad has a nostalgia moment.
Sometimes I wonder what I will feel nostalgic for when I’m his age. Some days I feel as though I’m already nostalgic for so much, every memory I have filed under either Before Mom Got Sick or After.
“Anyway, the Mr. Bubble I grew up with,” my dad continues, “was in powder form and came in this humongous pink and white box.”
I swear, when my dad tells these stories about his childhood, sometimes he seems like he’s still a kid. If he knew about the word ginormous, he’d probably use it to describe that Mr. Bubble box. Still, his sudden excitement is contagious and I feel myself get eager, hopeful for a good story coming my way.
“It was a bubble bath,” my dad answers my silent question. “Mr. Bubble made the biggest bubbles. They gave the best bath.”
“Um, sounds really wonderful.” I can’t believe he’s stopped the flow to do a commercial spot. “But what does any of this have to do with the Mr. Bubble boy?”
“I’m getting to that, I’m getting to that.” He waves his pizza slice at me as though he’s mad at my interruption, even though I know he’s not. He does look a bit surprised, though, when his pizza waving causes all the toppings and cheese to slide right off his slice. At last he shrugs it off. “So there was this kid, coming in to say hi to my dad every day. ‘Hi, Mr. Belle!’ Truth? Sometimes I was jealous of him, because my dad was always telling me what a great little boy he was, such good manners. Hey, I always shook hands when I met new people, I was always polite to the customers. But then one day my dad catches this kid stealing a giant box of Mr. Bubble. And, after just the mildest questioning on my dad’s part—he swore there were no thumbscrews involved—the kid spills that he’s been stealing a box of Mr. Bubble every day and selling it on the bubble black market at school.”
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