“Whatcha workin’ on up here?” Dad says, though a monkey would have known by the pencil in my hand, the bag on my lap, and the golden spool of thread on the desk, which is to say nothing of the activity wheel hanging on the door at the bottom of the attic steps, which exists for the sole purpose of avoiding conversations like this one. Before I started, I turned it to “embroidering” and then hurried back upstairs. It’s possible my activity wheel is too subtle for my family, because it never seems to keep them away.
“I’m just training for the krav maga demonstration,” I say. I even smile.
“What?” Dad’s a very swift cookie at times.
“Did you need something?” I ask, to maybe help him through the thick undergrowth of my bewitching conversational style.
“Oh,” Dad says, standing straight up from his doorjamb-lean. “Just wanted to let you know we’re heading out.”
“Where?”
This is a running gag in my house, which is putting it in a nice way, since it often ends in blowout fights, with Mom, Dad, and Hen at the bottom of the main steps and shouting up at me, and me at the top of the attic steps, shrieking down at them to mind their own business. Businesses. Whatever.
The gag starts like this:
“We told you, Lana,” Dad would say. “Why, your mom and I have been talking about it all morning/for days/all summer/since Christmas.”
“Refresh my memory,” I’d say without thought, or, often enough, even looking up from my embroidery/drawing/map/miniature/book.
At this point, Dad would remind me about the beach day/camping trip/picnic/hang gliding that everyone in the family was about to pile into the family SUV for, the activity that I had allegedly agreed to do as well—which makes perfect sense, if you’ve been paying attention at all, because I’m frequently so amped for outdoor activities like sewing, reading, and creating role-playing games. Oh wait. Those aren’t outdoor activities, are they?
Anyway, that’s when the fighting starts. I insist no one ever told me about any such activity, and that I certainly didn’t agree to join in, and then: J’en ai ras le bol! Soon I’m slamming doors, and the family is once again just the three of them as they set off without me.
On this particular morning, as it has been for months now, the activity is a Thunder game—that’s a local professional soccer team with which my parents, for some reason I’ve never been able to discern, are utterly obsessed. Remember Hen’s stuffed sea monster? That’s official merchandise. The team’s mascot is the Loch Ness monster, Nessie, because they play at the National Sports Center, or NSC. If you say it fast, it almost makes sense.
From downstairs, Mom—in her bellowing falsetto—insists this will be our last opportunity for the whole family to get to a game until next summer. “The weather won’t be so inviting for long!” I wish you could hear her say that. In a previous life she was an opera singer who could never get a part. I’d put money on it. But more to the point: how inviting is a rainy day? I swear, I sometimes think the rest of the Alleghenys actually enjoy torturing themselves in this manner, and that the rain pittering on them the whole time adds to the appeal.
Of course, all I can reply is, “Good! I don’t want any more opportunities.” And I don’t. No shady, drunken weirdos with painted faces, smoke bombs, Dad screaming at the ref. It’s miserable. Dad sighs and stomps back downstairs.
He mumbles something to Mom and Hen, probably already dressed and waiting at the bottom of the main stairs. That’s when Hen comes tearing up the main steps, a last resort. They’re not giving up this time. I hear her tennies squeaking on the steps the whole way up, and I go to my open doorway to see her little blond head appear at the bottom of the attic steps. My sister is valiant, and I respect and love her for it, but it’s still pretty annoying.
“Lana.” She stares at me.
“I’m not coming,” I say.
More staring.
“I’m not coming, Henny,” I say. “I don’t like soccer. I don’t like going to games. I don’t like cheering and shouting and I don’t like Fry and his tiny trumpet.”
“Mom and Dad do,” she says. “I do.”
“Then have fun.”
“It’s more fun with all of us,” Hen says. And I’m this close. “I’ll protect you from the tiny trumpet. And I’ll share my nachos.”
I sigh, because I’m going, and I lean a little farther through the doorway and shout over Hen’s little towhead, “I have to get dressed.”
I hear delighted murmuring and quickly add, “And brush my teeth! Don’t rush me!”
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CHAPTER 5
LESH TUNGSTEN
It’s dark and humid, but cool. The air smells like springwater and compost. Something brushes against my leg, and I wave it away. It’s a moth—a huge moth, bright green, the color of sunlight filtered through a forest canopy, and I crane my neck looking up, and that’s what it is. The moth flutters higher and higher, closer to the treetops, lush with huge, translucent green leaves. It disappears as it climbs, blended in with greenery. I’m walking now, next to a narrow, quiet stream, as clear as filtered water, bubbling over broad, flat, copper-colored rocks, glittering with silver and gold specks. It makes the water look even cleaner, more delicious. I am going to kneel and take a handful to my mouth when the thing brushes against my leg again, and I go to brush it away, but this time it’s no moth. It’s a cat, a big one, and it’s batting at me with its paw, the claws still withdrawn, and our eyes meet—its like gold coins with black slivers, mine no doubt huge with fear—and in that instant it opens its mouth and lets loose a deep and shattering roar. The world around flashes bloodred, and the ice-capped mountains in the far distance seem to erupt. Above it all, bigger than the world itself, soars a demon shaped like a man, but with gnarly horns and huge leathery wings. He bellows—a visceral, animal roar, like violence and death and horror itself have been twisted into a thunderous boom, and the cat raises its paw again. I grab for my leg, where it is poised to strike.
My phone is vibrating in my pocket. I can’t even open my eyes, but I pull the thing out and slide a thumb across the face. “Hello?” It’s a whisper.
“Dude.” Greg. “You were supposed to call.”
“I feel asleep,” I say. “I think.”
Weird dream, too, I add in my head, but Greg talks on. “So what’s up?” he says. “Wanna do something?”
“What’d you have in mind?” I say, which is my typical response in this conversation, but then add, “I’m grounded.”
“Snap,” Greg says. I hear the world-entrance bong! of his MMO.
“Well, you’re busy, so …”
“Not really,” he says, but even his tone has changed, and I can see him, with the phone cradled between his ear and shoulder, his posture becoming unhealthy, his left hand forming a claw over the keyboard, his right on the mouse. This is called dual wielding. He’s gone.
“Right,” I say, ready to end the call.
“Wait a minute,” he says, and he’s back. Like, super back. He’s focused and psyched about something. I begin to worry. “If you’re stuck inside anyway …”
“Whoa, whoa,” I say, sitting up. “I can see where you’re going with this, and we’ve been down this road, too, too many times.”
“What else are you gonna do?” Greg says, and I respect that he’s remaining calm, and even not immersed in the game at the moment. I can picture him, having taken the phone in his opposite hand—maybe he’s even up from the desk.
I wonder how the pancakes were. “How were the pancakes?”
Greg ignores the question, and it was meant to distract. It failed.
“Look,” Greg says. He’s back at the computer now. I can hear him typing, but it doesn’t sound game-related. He’s tabbed out, then. I groan, get to my feet, and switch on
my own display. My computer isn’t half the machine Greg’s is, but it works. “I’m sending you a link.”
At the same moment, an IM window pops up. “I see it,” I say, and click the link. “What the hell is this?” A download window has appeared.
“Just tell it to save to the desktop, okay?” Greg says.
I sigh and close the window. “I’m. Not. Playing. The Stupid. Game.” Then I click end call. The IM window beeps and flashes, Greg pleading his case. After a few minutes he gives up, and I hit the kitchen because I’m suddenly ravenous. But here’s the problem, and it comes to me as the big glass of orange juice is tipped back at my mouth and a pancake-wrapped breakfast sausage is weighing down my gut. It really is amazing how hungry I can be after a night like that, even if it did take a night’s sleep and a power nap to get there.
But I was saying: here’s the problem. Greg’s right: I am grounded, and for some reason, I’m curious. I can’t explain it—if I could rationalize this, believe me, I would—but with that orange juice at my lips, and the deep yellow of the drink itself shallowing in the upturned glass before my eyes, visions swim through my mind. They’re from the dream, obviously. I’m not that dense. But why the dream? Why did it linger, too?
I place the empty glass in the sink and hurry back to my room. I close the door and lock it and glance at the clock: it’s almost three. Then I click that link again, and this time I tell it where to stick it, by which I mean I tell it to save the file on the desktop. I lean back in my desk chair, with my hands folded behind my head, and I can smell that forest, and I can see, when I close my eyes, a huge translucent moth, fluttering against the bright-green forest canopy.
This is what Greg didn’t tell me: downloading an entire MMO—even the free starter version—takes a very, very long time. By the time the growing green progress bar hits 50 percent, both my parents are home. Mom’s loudly banging around in the kitchen, and Dad’s showering away a day’s worth of sweat and sawdust. In a few minutes I’ll have to face the music, but at the moment, Greg is blowing up chat.
Me: <
Him: <
Me: <
Him: <>
Me: <>
Him: <
Me: <
I hide everything on the screen but the desktop and unlock my door, then retreat to the safety of my bed.
“Hi,” I say when she steps inside and leans on the jamb, arms crossed, face cross.
She stares.
“I’m sorry?” I say.
The white noise coming through the floor suddenly goes quiet, and the shower curtain rattles loudly on its metal hooks and rod.
“He’ll be up in a minute, so I’m giving you a chance for this to be slightly better than the worst day of your life,” Mom says. “Tell me everything, and we’ll see.”
I sit up on the bed and plant my hands on its edge. “I just said I’m sorry.”
“I’m not looking for sorry,” she says, and she moves to my desk and sits in my chair, turns it toward my bed. “I’m looking for the narrative.”
“The narrative,” I say, and I close my eyes and run my hands through my hair. I haven’t showered. “The narrative is me and Greg went—”
“Greg and I,” Mom says.
“—to Vic’s last night and I had two tiny drinks. Two.”
“Tiny drinks,” Mom says, and I nod, and she sighs. She looks at the clock next to my bed. It’s almost seven. “Did you eat dinner?”
I shake my head. “Hardly left my room. I think I had breakfast.”
Mom stands when Dad shows up in the doorway. “Well?” he says.
I glance at Mom, who is no help. “I’m sorry,” I say, not meeting his eyes.
“You’re goddamn right you’re sorry,” he says. “And you’re going to be sorrier, because you’re done with staying out at all, and you’re sure as hell done with going to concerts at bars. Anywhere there’s liquor. You’re done.”
“Oh, come on,” I say.
“Come on?” he snaps. “I spoke to Elizabeth Deel myself this morning. She said she heard you stumble in. She heard you puke in their bathroom.”
I puked?
“And this morning you were hungover—” He swivels his tensed neck to Mom. “How much did he drink? Did he say how much he drank?”
Mom sighs again and rubs her face. “He said two—”
“Ha!” Dad says. “He had at least four, am I right?”
I look at the ceiling.
“All right, I’m done,” Dad says in his thin, aggravated, out-of-patience voice. “Grounded. Forever. School. Home. That’s it.”
“What?” And I’m on my feet, and he’s heading for the door.
“You heard me,” he says. “Dinnertime.”
I stand in the doorway and call after him as he heads down the narrow steep stairs. “This is completely unfair. It’s one time. One time! And you cannot tell me you didn’t drink when you were out seeing Metallica or whoever.”
Dad stops at the bottom and looks up the stairs at me. Mom is behind me now with a hand on my back. It’s meant to soothe, but also to warn: I should stop arguing now.
“What I did has nothing to do with this, first of all,” Dad says, and his voice is straining like a wildcat in a canvas bag. “But since you bring it up, yes. I did. I also never went to college, and barely finished high school, and I work sixty hours a week building garages for men who did. Wanna follow that path?”
The discussion has taken an unfair turn. Even I can see that. So I clam up and stare at the ceiling. He decides he’s won and walks off, repeating over his shoulder, “Dinnertime.”
“Come on,” Mom says. “I got extra fries. And I’ll talk to him.”
“Thanks,” I say, and we head downstairs. The spread on the dining room table is straight from the deli counter at Target. An extra hour on the clock and a juicy employee discount trump hurrying home to cook.
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CHAPTER 6
SVETLANA ALLEGHENY
It’s raining. Il pleut comme vache qui pisse. We all knew it was raining, but we climbed into Dad’s giant house of a truck-car and took the longish drive up I-35 to picturesque Blaine, Minnesota. In the back, we put pounds of bratwurst, a bag of rolls, and the folding canopy.
So now, here we are: Mom and Dad in their violently fluttering blue-and-yellow ponchos, gathered near the communal grill with the other hardcore fans, their various meated foods scorching away, stinking up the parking lot; Henrietta, under the canopy with me, a thick and ragged novel in her dirty little hands, pages flipping not from the wind, but from her preternatural reading speed; and me, my own blue-and-yellow poncho up over my head, my knees against my chest, and my arms around my knees, and muttering to myself, “This is not my life. This is not my life.”
A slap in the back and I spin, my eyes burning with rage as my blue-and-yellow hood flips back.
“Hey, blondie.” It’s Fry Dannon, the single other “fanatic” of high school age (specifically and unfortunately Central High School), the son my parents’ good friends, and the only person stupid enough to approach me and offer conversation. He’s got on an official Thunder-merch jersey—it’s got a number on the chest and the sponsor’s name on the shoulder. It’s probably got a name on the back, too. Hopefully I’ll get a look at that— at least it would mean he was walking away. “Excited?”
“What do you think?”
He throws his head back and laughs. Then, from behind his back, he produces the littlest trumpet I’ve ever seen—and I’ve seen plenty, because Fry brings one to ev
ery game. He must have a collection, and his choices get smaller every time.
“My newest,” he says. “It’s a piccolo, obviously, from 1920. Check it out.”
He takes a deep breath, and I hurry to pull my hands out from under my poncho to cover my ears. I barely have myself protected before his blaring and shrill “Charge!” music blasts across the Twin Cities’ northern suburbs. Thunder claps and the gaggle of Dark Clouds—that’s what this group of thirty or so fanatics call themselves—cheer.
The thunder—you will recall, that is the name of the team—at the end of Fry’s “Charge!” instigation was pretty amazing. But still. Let’s not encourage the boy.
“You’re the greatest, Fry,” my sister says, her voice as flat as ever, her eyes still on the page, and then the next page. “Now could you please go blow that thing someplace else?”
Fry leans down so his body blocks the little light Hen is reading by. “This is a soccer game,” he says. “Not a reading … um … game.”
She smirks up at him, draws back her foot, kicks his shin. It definitely hurts, but he laughs as he hobbles off.
Henrietta faces me. “That boy is in love with you, Lana.”
I nod at her.
“You should tell him you’re not interested,” she says. “Otherwise he’ll just bug you forever.” Then she goes back to reading.
And I huddle up into a ball again under my poncho, wallowing in the misery of a rainy day, a soccer game, beer-drunk parents, grilling meats, and love-life advice from an eight-year-old.
“This is not my life. This is not my life. This is not my life.”
With my eyes closed, under the poncho, and the sound of heavy rain drumming the top of the canopy, I let my mind wander back down I-35, right into Saint Paul, along Lexington Avenue, over and around three-story Victorians, and little Mission bungalows, into our house, up to the low-ceiling third story, under the dormer on the south wall, where my drawing desk is, and my notebook sits open. As my spirit approaches it, the pages flip like the leaves of a witch’s most magical tome, and the blue and black and red and green inks of my four-color pen—my tool of creation—leap and leak from the pages, filling the attic with first grass, then thicker growth, then six-inch-tall pixies, then a spotted wildcat, skulking between the thick trunks of wise old trees, then a centaur, stopping at the stream running toward the stairs, and he leans over to take a drink of the moonlight-colored water.
Guy in Real Life Page 3