Pack of Dorks

by Beth Vrabel

  “I’m right here,” I chirped, suddenly scared.

  Mom didn’t turn around, and her voice sounded too high-pitched. “Hey, honey. How was school?”

  “I got kissed.” My hands flew to my mouth, trying to cram the words back inside. Dad’s mouth popped open with a little puff. But Mom, she laughed. An actual, real laugh. Her laugh cut off to a sharp gasp and she grabbed her huge basketball belly.

  “Five minutes since the last one,” Dad barked. He jumped to his feet. “We’ve got to go now!”

  “We’ll—huff—talk about—huff-huff—that kiss soon.” Mom put a hand to my cheek. It was cold and wet. “Right now, we’re about to have a baby.”

  “Now?”

  She nodded.

  “Should I pack my bag? Am I spending the night at Grandma’s?”

  “No time!” Dad yelled. He grabbed my shoulder and turned me back to the door. “We’re going! Now!”

  We weren’t having a baby. Mom was having a baby. Dad was watching her have a baby. I was sitting in an odd little waiting room outside the section of the hospital where moms have the babies. Behind me were glass double doors locked tight. I could see nurses and doctors dashing around inside the section where I wasn’t allowed. Dad said I just had to wait here in this stupid little room with stiff, plastic-y couches next to a fat, ugly security guard until Grandma got here to take me home. Grandma had “just one more hand” of poker and then she’d be here.

  Grandma, I should let you know, isn’t like other grandmas. She doesn’t bake cookies; she rips open Oreos and only eats the fluff. Most of the time when I’m at her dark city apartment, she’s on her little metal balcony (which Mom calls a fire escape) smoking long skinny cigarettes. She doesn’t wear little pantsuits and aprons like most grandmas. Nope, my grandma wears long, shapeless, tie-dyed dresses that skim the top of her thick leathery feet. She only wears flip-flops, even in the middle of winter. Her kinky curly hair is about thirty different shades of red, orange, gray, and black. Her eyebrows are thicker than wooly caterpillars and her small green eyes are smudges behind her thick plastic glasses. My grandma doesn’t give me hugs; she reads my palm and tells me not to walk under ladders.

  The only time Grandma ever yelled at me was when I put a loaf of bread away upside down (“Bad luck! Bad luck!”). And I had the best day of my life at Grandma’s when we spent all day throwing mugs, vases, and cups against her brick fireplace so she could make a mosaic later.

  “Did you ever make that mosaic?” I asked an hour later when Grandma rushed into the waiting room.

  “What?” she asked. Her head jerked toward me, like she was surprised I’d be there. I guess my question was a little out of the blue, but why did she look annoyed that I was there? Wasn’t she here to pick me up?

  Grandma puffed up her chest and squinted her smudgy eyes at me and then peered at her cell phone, cupped in her hand. It vibrated and beeped with a text message. She sighed and didn’t look at me again. “Lucy, I’ll be right back.”

  “What do you mean?” I jumped up. “You’re supposed to take me home.”

  Grandma still didn’t look at me. She put a heavy hand on my shoulder and gently pushed me back onto the sticky couch. “Something happened. I need to see your mom. Be back soon.”

  The security guard pushed a little button and the double doors opened. “Can I come?” I yelled after her, but the doors closed behind her. I stuck out my tongue at the security guard, but he didn’t even look up from his crossword puzzle.

  A nurse must’ve given me a blanket, because when I woke up a few hours later I was covered in the thin white cloth. Grandma stood over me, her glasses clasped in her hand and her eyes red. She rubbed them with the heel of her other hand. “Come on,” she said. “Come meet your little sister.”

  “She was born!” I jumped up, the blanket falling to the floor. “She’s here?”

  Grandma nodded, but didn’t smile.

  “Is Mom all right?” My stomach gurgled, but I don’t think it was because no one remembered to give me dinner.

  Grandma nodded but still didn’t smile. “She’s fine. She’s going to be fine.”

  The guard pushed the button and the double doors opened. This time, I got to go through.

  Thousands of questions—does she look like me? how big is she? what’s her name? what color is her hair? does she have hair?—trickled up to my throat, but I didn’t let any of them out. Grandma was moving so slowly, like she was suddenly old, and I found I couldn’t speak. The hall was so bright, so white, and the nurses rushed all over the place even though most of the patient rooms were dark. At the end of the hall, light spilled out from a room. I heard a cry; it reminded me of kittens that squeaked all day long for milk. That’s our sister, I thought. We’re a big sister now!

  And suddenly I was running. First I saw Dad, sitting in a corner, arms folded and eyes shut. Mom sat on a bed, her arms rocking slowly with a wrapped-up white-blanketed lump in her arms.

  “Is that her?” I asked and my hands clapped. There was a monster bottle of instant hand wash on the wall, so I slipped off my diamond ring, put it on top of the bottle, and scrubbed my hands with the smelly sauce. See how mature being a big sister made me? No one even had to tell me to wash my hands.

  “Can I see her?” I asked when no one spoke, even to congratulate me on making a good decision of disinfecting my hands.

  Mom’s bottom lip shook, and she nodded. Way too slowly she lowered the lump on to her legs. She pulled back a corner of the blanket. And there she was! My sister, her face like a squashed-up tomato, her lips quivering just like Mom’s, and her hair messy brown fluff like mine.

  “Hello there,” I whispered. “I’m your big sister.” I kissed the top of her forehead, and it was so much sweeter than kissing Tom. I thought only of how soft her head was, like pressing my lips to a stack of clean tissues, and how she smelled like baby wash. Clean and new.

  “She’s perfect,” I whispered. “My perfect little sister. Can I hold her?”

  Mom let out a weird noise, a crashy sound like stack of books dropping inside of her. Her shoulders shook, and her face crumpled. Dad rushed forward and grabbed the baby lump from her lap, putting it gently into a bassinet.

  “What is it?” I asked, crying, too, even though I didn’t know why. “What did I do?”

  Grandma’s heavy hand was on my shoulder again. “Nothing,” she whispered. “You did everything right. Your mom just needs some time.” Grandma squared her shoulders and spoke loudly over Mom’s sobbing. “I’m taking Lucy home. We’ll see you in the morning.” She gently touched the baby lump and turned back to the door.

  “But wait!” I cried. “I don’t even know her name. What’s her name?”

  Dad looked over at me, Mom’s head stayed buried in his shoulder. “We were thinking Molly.”

  “Molly,” I repeated. I touched her soft head again. “Perfect.”

  Grandma tugged softly on my shoulder, and we left.

  “There’s something wrong with the baby.” Grandma lowered herself onto the chair across from me at the breakfast table the next morning.

  “Molly.” I licked some jam off my finger. Grandma burnt the toast, so I was smearing about an inch of marmalade over the blackened top. My heart thumped a little, but mostly I felt relieved. Finally, she was talking. The whole way home from the hospital, she barely spoke and then turned on the TV as soon as we got back to her apartment. I watched SpongeBob until I fell asleep while she stayed out on the fire escape with her cigarettes and cell phone. “Is that why Mom wouldn’t let me hold her?”

  “No, that wasn’t why.” Grandma put both elbows on the table and leaned in toward me. “I’m not sure if your parents want me to be the one to tell you, but it’s obvious that something’s up and you’re not an idiot . . .” For some reason, Grandma’s face flushed almost purple when she said idiot. Believe me, I’ve heard her say much worse.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Did you notice ho
w her face looks a little different than yours?” asked Grandma, her eyes squarely on mine.

  “She’s just squished looking from being crammed up inside Mom for a couple months.”

  Grandma nodded. “But that’s not all. It looks like Molly was born with something called Down syndrome. Have you heard of it?”

  I nodded, thinking of a girl in the grade ahead of me. She smiled all the time, and her face was round. Her nose was flat against her face. She didn’t talk much and spent recess on the swings. “She’s . . .” I couldn’t think of the word for it. Grandma couldn’t seem to, either.

  “It’s a form of mental retardation. It means it’s going to be harder for Molly to do things, to understand and learn things, than most people. She’s going to have some other . . . issues, too, probably,” Grandma said after a long time of being quiet again. “Like her heart. It was built differently.”

  “Retardation? Like retarded? But she’s okay, right? I mean, she’s going to be okay?”

  Grandma nodded. “She’s okay. She’s fine. She’s just . . .”

  “Different,” I finished.

  Everything was different. Mom and Molly were ready to come home on Monday, and Dad said I had to skip school so we could have a day as a whole “family unit” (which made me think of robots). But, of course, Dad only said I had to skip school when I came out of my bedroom at 8:12 a.m. The bus picks me up at 8:15. He was asleep on the couch, the TV blaring away. I don’t think he moved since we got home late Sunday night. We went to the hospital to pick Mom and Molly up at 9 a.m. It was really hard not to stick my tongue out at the security guard again.

  The hospital was the first time I got to see Molly since Grandma told me about her being different. She had kept me at her apartment until Dad picked me up that night. We went through the McDonald’s drive through and Dad seemed to chew more on his words than his fries.

  “It’s cool, Dad,” I finally told him after he said “Molly . . .” and “the baby . . .” and “your mom and I . . .” about thirteen different times. “Grandma told me all about it. It’s cool.”

  He smiled, but it was a tight, really-working-on-the-pulling-back-of-lips smile. “It’s not cool, but it is what it is.”

  We didn’t talk any more about it and I, for once, couldn’t think of anything to say. But I was sure that once we picked up Mom and Molly from the hospital and we were all home, things would be normal again.

  But I must be an idiot after all, because nothing was normal.

  For starters, Mom wasn’t at all Mom-ish. Like, her eyes were puffier than her stomach, which I thought would’ve been a lot smaller now that the baby was on the outside. (But Dad said that takes time and not to mention it to Mom that I noticed.) She sat on the couch with a blanket wrapped around her and Molly in a bassinet beside her. Every time Molly made a noise, Mom pulled her close and whispered to her or fed her until she stopped whimpering. Then Dad would change her diaper. Then Mom would cry again.

  There is something very, very wrong about seeing a mom cry. They aren’t supposed to do that.

  Plus, the whole thing was very boring. I knew babies stay like big lumps for a few days. But I thought I’d at least get to play a little bit with her. Yet every time I came anywhere close to Molly with a rattle or a stuffed animal, Mom would tell me to back off. “She’s resting,” or “Molly is content right now.” Dad was looking up stuff on the Internet. Every time I went into his office, he closed the laptop and said he needed time “to research.”

  I couldn’t watch TV because Mom and Molly needed to rest. I had left my library book at school and had nothing to read. The phone was disconnected after it rang nonstop for the first few hours we got back from the hospital. I was bored with a capital B.

  A billboard-sized B.

  Finally I just sat in the chair across from the couch and stared at Mom and Molly. After a few minutes of this, Mom seemed to realize that one of her daughters was, in fact, not resting or content. She cleared her throat, pulled her frizzy hair back into an ugly ponytail, and said, “So. Someone kissed you.”

  Somehow I totally forgot about telling her that. I forgot about The Kiss entirely! Friday seemed like a really long time ago. I quickly pulled down my sleeve to cover my left hand, not feeling up to showing that while one kid was just being born, the other had been both kissed and given a diamond. Only my ring wasn’t on my finger. In fact, the only thing on my finger was a thin green band of skin where the ring had been.

  The ring was gone.

  My life was over.

  Chapter Three

  Dad wouldn’t take me back to the hospital for my ring. “No way in the world am I heading back there. Not for anything, especially a plastic ring from a fourth-grade boy.”

  My face burned. “It’s. A. Diamond!”

  “Diamond rings don’t make girls’ fingers turn green.”

  I stomped my foot and growled. Dad laughed, which made me growl even louder. “Are you farting lollipops again?”

  Oh, now I was really mad. Once when I was three years old and in the middle of a huge tantrum, Mom asked me if I was farting lollipops. I was so stunned by the question I had stopped mid-scream. She said the only excuse a person had for an all-out screaming fit was either having a leg fall off or farting a lollipop. Now, whenever she and Dad think I’m acting ridiculous, they ask me if one of those things is happening.

  “Please!” I cried. “Please! It’s really important to me!” Like that time “Puff, the Magic Dragon” got stuck in my head for three days, Becky’s whisper-shout about the ring making sure we stayed popular rang in my ears. If I showed up to school without that ring, who knew what would happen?

  “Absolutely not.” Dad turned his back to me and lifted the lid of the laptop again.

  “If I don’t have that ring, Tom might break up with me!”

  “Then he didn’t really care about you to begin with,” Dad said without turning around.

  “Dad!”

  He punched the words DOWN SYNDROME into Google.

  “It’s not my fault!” I screamed.

  “Of course it’s your fault,” he answered automatically. “You took off the ring and forgot to put it back on. Who else is to blame for that?”

  “No!” I snapped, knowing the words about to spill out of my mouth wouldn’t help but not being able to stop them. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, it’s not my fault Molly’s retarded and you’re all—”

  I couldn’t finish, not with Dad jumping to his feet and storming toward me. Somehow I had never noticed just how big and scary my dad could be. But standing so close in front of me, his face twisted and red, his hands in fists, for the first time ever I worried that maybe I did something, said something, that made my dad hate me.

  “Get to your room! Now!” he bellowed. I swear, my hair flew back when he yelled. My dad—he never, ever yelled at me. I was too scared to move. That is, until I saw his red face turn purple. “Go!” he screamed even louder, his arm jerking out to point toward my room down the hall.

  I ran, slamming the door behind me. In the living room, Molly screamed and Mom sobbed.

  At lunchtime, I figured Dad would come to my door and apologize. He might even have my ring, so overcome with guilt at the way he had treated me that he went straight to the hospital and found it. I would hug him and tell him I loved him and knew he loved me. Everything would be fine, fine, fine.

  Only he never came to my door.

  I smelled grilled cheese (Dad’s specialty, since he adds spinach and uses pepper jack cheese and rye bread), but he never called me to the table. Mom did, patting gently on the door with her knuckle. “Come have some lunch, Lucy.”

  I walked slowly down the hall, but Dad wasn’t at the table. He must’ve taken his plate with him to the office. And my grilled cheese was just white bread and American cheese.

  Mom sat with me, but just picked at the crust of her sandwich. Just as I finished, she cleared her throat. “That word,” she said. “That word you u
sed to describe your sister. That’s a hateful word. A mean word. It’s a word we’re not going to use in our house.”

  “Retarded?” I whispered. Just because I wanted to be sure.

  Mom squeezed shut her eyes. “That’s the second and last time you’ll ever use that word. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded. Mom patted my hand. “This is confusing for all of us. When I was pregnant with Molly, all the tests came back normal. That happens sometimes, the doctor said,” she whispered and her eyes got wet again. “We knew the statistics, because of my age, but we weren’t prepared . . . I mean, is anyone prepared . . .”

  I squeezed her hand back. “Mom, about my ring—”

  “Lucy,” Mom snapped. “Forget about your stupid ring.”

  “My ring isn’t stupid. Why can you use that word? Isn’t that a mean word?”

  Mom’s eyes narrowed and dried up. “Back to your room,” she said in her quiet, scary voice.

  Maybe by dinnertime they’d realize what jerks they were.

  Sometimes your parents don’t realize they’re jerks. Sometimes you even wonder if maybe, just maybe, you might actually be the jerk. I heard the radio click on in the kitchen. That’s Dad’s first signal that he’s about to start cooking. For some reason, that one little click made me feel sorry. I should be in the kitchen, part of our robot unit. I shouldn’t be alone in my bedroom while my brand-new sister gets cuddles from everyone but me. I should be talking to my dad, not scared that he doesn’t like me. Of course he likes me. What’s not to like? So I took a deep breath and skipped down the hall.

  “Hey, Daddy-o,” I said.

  He looked up from his cookbook, eyebrows raised. I gave him my sorry-I-was-mean-but-now-I’m-sweet smile. He flashed back his glad-to-see-you-and-of-course-I-like-you grin. “I’m feeling creative,” he said.

  “Oh no!” Mom called from the couch. “Another DD.”

  Soon we were chowing down on spaghetti with canned clams and chili sauce. Not one of my favorites, but I ate a little of the sauce then switched to buttered noodles. One upside of Mom not being pregnant any more: she didn’t insist on a leafy green vegetable with each lunch and dinner.