Sure Signs of Crazy

by Karen Harrington

What’s my emergency? There’s a stranger in my room! Help!

  I don’t know much about much, but I do know the black-and-white definition of something leaves out the important fact. The one you feel but can’t describe. And someday I’m going to get the courage to ask Lisa’s mom about those books.

  Lisa invited Renee to our party. Renee is the prettiest of the three of us. She has shampoo-commercial blond hair, the envy of everyone.

  Lisa invited Jimmy Leighton to the party. He acted shy and quiet, which is when I started to have a crush on him. David Watters and Steven Ng were there, too, but they are big show-offs. They skateboard all over Garland and like to tell you so. And if you ask me, David is the one who started calling Jimmy gay. Here are my thoughts on him: Whatever!

  But Steven Ng is one of the cutest boys you will ever see. His hair is perfect, and when he smiles, his whole face shows happiness.

  So there we were at this party, the boys hogging the pizza and the girls sitting together watching The Unborn. I watched to see if Jimmy Leighton would flinch during the scary parts. He didn’t. After, we all went outside, and, wouldn’t you know it, Steven and David got on their skateboards and started saying stupid lines from the movie. Lisa and Renee thought this was hi-larious. This left me and Jimmy alone, sort of. He kicked a rock down the sidewalk, and I sat on the curb.

  Lisa asked me a thousand questions after the boys left. She thought maybe Jimmy Leighton was saying lines from another movie to me. She’s always hoping someone will walk out of a movie screen and talk to her like Hugh Grant talks to Julia Roberts. That would be her favorite thing in the world. But no, Jimmy Leighton didn’t say a single thing to me the whole night.

  We felt sorry for ourselves because it was Renee who kissed Steven Ng. We didn’t actually see it happen, but she came back inside from taking another walk and looked all pink. She told us she kissed him first. After, he stood there and then skated off, saying, “Okay, see you around.”

  This is why Lisa decided about the French-kiss pact. She wants to look like Renee did. I tried to tell her Renee looks happy all the time, but no, she didn’t believe me. She said a light switched on inside her eyes, a switch that comes on when you get kissed. I will have to ask Charlotte if this is so.

  Chapter 14

  As far as I can tell, a recipe is a secret code made up of measurements. The way Charlotte is studying the King Ranch recipe, you would think she is preparing for a test. As if Casserole Man will not know she loves him if it doesn’t have precisely one and a half cups of shredded cheese and a quarter teaspoon of chili powder, thank you very much. And maybe that’s true. She’s had her nose at the paper for some time now, so I decide to be helpful and arrange the items on the counter in alphabetical order.

  Broth, cheese, chicken, rice, soup, spices, tortillas.

  “Okay, we need a nine-by-thirteen casserole dish.” She opens and closes cabinet doors, searching for what she needs. Her mother is away on a cruise this week, so we have the luxury of a whole house to ourselves, except for her brother. Charlotte says he won’t be here much, because he’s studying and has his career in pizza to worry about.

  I like how her kitchen is a lot tidier than ours. The counters are pale yellow, just like the tiles on the wall behind them. The cabinets aren’t solid wood but have glass in the middle so it appears you are looking into minihouses where plates live. Even though the layout of the house is similar to ours, this house feels bigger. The paneling in the living room, for example, has been painted a nice shade of sky blue.

  At our house, we still have the dark brown paneling. It’s like living inside a barrel. If we stay in Garland, I will try to get the courage to talk to my dad about painting the house. We could paint our paneling blue, too. Maybe keep going from the living room and down the hall and put my pink room out of its pink misery.

  “First, we’ll poach the chicken,” Charlotte says.

  “Sounds dirty.”

  She rolls her eyes. “What?”

  “Poach. It sounds dirty.”

  “Where do you get those ideas?”

  “Mostly from all the movies I’m not supposed to watch,” I say. “There are a lot of bad words in good literature. I’ve read the books my dad assigns his students, and they have plenty of uncommon words and romance, which, if you ask me, is even stronger when it’s in a book. It gets your imagination all fired up.”

  Charlotte asks me if my dad is dating. Dating is a trouble word. He hardly ever gets past two dates.

  “No one has made him a casserole yet, if that’s what you mean,” I tell her, wondering if there will ever be a woman bearing food for my dad, and if so, will I have to eat it? Because this King Ranch casserole doesn’t look like it will be too tasty. The last woman hung around longer than any others I know about. It was a couple of months until she found out who we were. Of course, I don’t know all the details, because her name is a trouble word and “Sarah, this is none of your business.”

  Well, she was my business when she was all happy and smiley watching movies at our house. Then she sent him an e-mail saying she’d rather not see him. I know. I read it.

  Tom,

  I’m so sorry to have to write this to you on e-mail, but I can’t see you again. I hope you understand. I’ve just decided I should not be dating right now.

  Deirdre

  Her story might have held up if we hadn’t seen her out at the movies with another man the next weekend. Of course, I wanted to walk up to her and say, Oh, you aren’t dating, huh? That’s how mad she made me. I told Dad I never liked her because her hair was some unrealistic shade of red she got out of a box and who did she think she was fooling?

  I grease the baking pans while Charlotte poaches the chicken. While we wait for it to cook, I make her look up the definition of poach on her phone. Sure enough, the first definition has something to do with cooking, but the second one has to do with crime. You have to love a word that can do that.

  poach v.: to cook in a hot liquid that is kept just below the boiling point; to trespass, especially on another’s game preserve, in order to steal animals or to hunt

  Next, she lets me shred the chicken while she checks her e-mails. Since it’s a long time before she comes back into the kitchen, I decide to impress her by finishing the other steps in the recipe. I am an expert on following directions, and before you know it, I have two casseroles in the oven with time to wash the dishes.

  I make my way from the kitchen to the family room to snoop around. Nothing has changed much since I was here in December. Just more pictures of Charlotte’s mom on different cruises.

  Like in a lot of houses in this neighborhood, there is a minibar in one corner. The back of the wall above the bar is always solid mirror with four glass shelves on top for glasses and liquor. But in Charlotte’s house, the shelves are stuffed with books, which is a nice touch.

  I investigate what books they have worth reading. I touch their spines as I look them over, each one holding a story inside its pages. I pull one down to read the jacket. This is something I love to do. Reading the short description inside a book, getting just enough information so you must know what happens.

  Before I put the book back in its place, I catch my reflection in a small space between the books. I am an unread book, too. I am waiting to know what happens to me.

  Our kitchen table rocks against the floor when you lean on it. We didn’t move it here. It came with the house, which should tell you something. We have to make do with the wobbling while we eat our King Ranch casserole. Turns out, we made two casseroles so we could taste test one of them. Charlotte wants to know what a grown man thinks of the recipe, so I have to collect Dad’s opinion and bring it to her tomorrow. In exchange, she is going to let me download songs for my new iPod. I still haven’t told Dad about the Mr. Wistler assignment and the prize I won.

  So Casserole Man has to wait another day. Until then, I am enjoying a new dinner, which is actually more tasty than I expected. My dad seems to like
it, too. He keeps nodding. I hope he doesn’t ask me about the Funyuns I was supposed to get and didn’t and will have to make up a lie about if he does.

  “So,” my dad says. I can tell by the way he stretches out the “ooooo” this is his verbal entrance into a question he’s wanted to ask me since dinner began. He is so obvious.

  “Did you ever get a card from your mother?”

  He is drinking Dr Pepper and his eyes are sad. I have to think a minute about what I can tell him, run through my mental list of trouble words. I talked to Plant, and we agreed this card was different from the others and should be thrown away. I couldn’t get over the way she’d crossed out her name and written Your Mother as a second thought. I didn’t want to take any chances he’d find it in the trash, so I threw it away in Mrs. Dupree’s garbage can. But he knows. He saw the envelope on my dresser.

  “It had a dog on it. A smiling dog.”

  He tries to investigate more. “Anything interesting inside it? Anything about…” He does not finish his thought. I wait to see if there will be more. This might be an opportune time to slip in a question for my investigation. Opportune is my new favorite word, mostly for how it sounds.

  opportune adj.: occurring or coming at an appropriate time; well-timed

  “She wants to know about my new self.”

  “That’s nice,” he finally says. Then he takes a long drink and stares hard into the glass. I try to gauge if anything I said had a trouble word. He doesn’t get two cards a year from her. Not since the divorce. Before, they sent e-mails once in a while, or so he said. I’ve never been able to find them. The last communication I saw was an official letter from the state telling us they’d moved her to a hospital in Wichita Falls.

  “Want to play Scrabble?” I offer, trying to lighten the mood.

  “Maybe one game. I’ve got all those papers to grade.” His look is still far away, his mind traveling to another place.

  “Why don’t I make you coffee and you can start grading now? I’d rather go sit outside and look at the trees anyway.”

  “Yeah? I think you are trying to spy on the neighborhood.”

  “Well, sometimes that just happens when you are looking at trees.” How does he know I am a spy? I will have to work on being more stealth, which is also my new favorite word.

  stealth adj.: surreptitious; secret; not openly acknowledged

  He touches my cheek in that tender way and smiles. It’s good I have the soft kind of dad today. It makes up for a lot of things.

  “Tell Charlotte this was exceptional,” he says.

  I clear the table, wash dishes, and think about how it might be if I ever have someone to cook a casserole for one day. Why go to all the fuss when you could order a pizza and wouldn’t have to clean the kitchen? But if I do ever have someone special to cook for, I will get a nicer set of plates. Ours all have chipped edges.

  I go and get Plant, and we sit on the front-porch step and look at the night. Sunset isn’t until eight thirty, so the sky looks dirty blue. I pick at the weeds coming up in the cracks of the walk and wish it was completely dark.

  I want to walk around the neighborhood and look in other people’s windows and see what they do at night. Of course, Charlotte is likely saying lovey-dovey things to Casserole Man. And the Duprees, well, they sometimes go for a walk when it gets darker and cooler, so I might see them in person. A few times, I’ve spotted Mrs. Dupree standing at her kitchen window and wondered what they had for dinner. When I threw my birthday card in her trash, I noticed an empty can of tomato sauce, so maybe they are enjoying spaghetti tonight.

  There it is, the sting of being alone. Why do I do this, sitting here imagining other people’s lives?

  I tell myself to shut up, be happy, you are getting the summer you wanted. You would be more alone in Houston with your grandparents. Putting up with Casserole Man isn’t so bad. Well. The whole situation feels somehow out of whack. Like the bed still unmade at two o’clock in the afternoon and so the whole day feels messy. When I get to feeling like this, I wish I had someone to talk to. Like a mom.

  Dear Atticus,

  I would like to begin this letter with an apology. You always say that it is more polite to get a person talking about what they are interested in rather than what you are interested in. Here I am, writing all this stuff, asking your opinions, and I have not talked to you about your interests. Here’s what I know you like:

  - You read the newspapers every day.

  - You are a lawyer.

  - You were called One-Shot Finch because of your shooting skills.

  - You read every night.

  - You do not drink.

  - You prefer to walk to your job.

  I admire all of these things about you, Atticus. If you could somehow come into my world today, I would lay out the newspapers for you, but I’d have to tell you that there is so much news you can find on the Internet, which is a window to the world on a computer screen. There, you could find out about the news all over the planet. I imagine you would still prefer to read the actual newspaper in your hands. I am the same way. My best friend, Lisa, just got a new e-reader, which is a thin, electronic, dessert-plate-sized substitute for a book. You wouldn’t like it.

  Also, I’d love to walk with you. I would show you our town, though there is not much to it. The houses in our neighborhood don’t have porches. Or really, not the kind of porches you have in Maycomb, where you can be a back-porch listener, like your sister. (I think I would be a back-porch listener if I could.) Here, the porches are tiny square concrete things that are only good for the UPS guy to leave a package on or for a guy to give you a quick kiss good night. They are not built for having a long conversation on or for putting a cot out on to sleep, though I think I might try this one night just to see. You’d probably like the downtown part of town the best, which has a square, little shops, a fountain, and lots of benches that no one actually sits on. I am not sure what else is interesting about Garland that I could show you. I will have to find out. There must be something. My own dad works at a community college too far to walk to. That is too bad. He’d talk to me more if we walked someplace together, don’t you think? He does read a lot, too, but then he drinks until he’s drunk, so that sort of cancels out that good thing.

  Sincerely,

  Sarah Nelson

  Chapter 15

  Here I am on Charlotte’s front porch, waiting for her to answer the doorbell. We are going to have a girls’ day today with nail polish, movies, and popcorn. Then I am giving her twenty dollars of my birthday money and she will help me add songs to my new iPod. I love this day. I will pretend we are sisters. I’d like to think no one knows you better than a sister. And there are only some people you want to paint your toes in front of anyway.

  The screen door squeaks open, and there is a guy in flannel pants and a green T-shirt.

  “Um, is Charlotte here?” I ask.

  “Come on in.” He smiles and runs a hand through his light brown hair. “She’ll be out in a sec.”

  I’m pretty sure this is the pizza-delivery brother, who I barely recognize because last summer he always had on a red ball cap with a giant pepperoni on the front.

  He is younger than Charlotte by about a year, so that would make him nineteen now. I have to turn my head away quick when I realize I’m studying him. Is everyone in this family perfect-looking? Some people have the kind of eyes you never forget. His eyes are like that. If perfect is a color, it is this shade of blue.

  “I’m Finn, remember?” he says, putting his hand out for me to shake. “Sarah, right?”

  Charlotte appears then, still in her purple bathrobe.

  “Is it time for you already?” she asks.

  “Geez, Charlotte, nice,” Finn says.

  “Shut up, Finn.”

  “I can wait outside,” I say.

  “No,” she says. “I was working late, late, late.”

  Inside the house, I try to glance in the mirror without it being ob
vious I’m checking out my blotchy neck. I’ve set a record for blushing, staring at Finn so long, but when someone is nice to look at it’s hard to turn away.

  I follow Charlotte into the kitchen. The wonderful smell of coffee fills the air. It smells better here for some reason. She stretches and yawns, and then a new kind of smile fans out on her face.

  “Well, I wasn’t working the entire night,” she says as if to answer the question mark on my face. “I was up late on the phone with Christopher.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy,” she says. “The one I told you about.”

  Casserole Man is named Christopher.

  “Oh. How long did you talk to him?”

  “Forever,” Finn says. She cuffs his head as he pours himself a cup of coffee.

  “Don’t you have to go to work?” she says.

  “I’m here for your entertainment,” he replies.

  “Watch this, Sarah,” she says. “Finn is a human dictionary. I told him about your word obsession. You won’t need me to look anything up for you. Give him a word.”

  “A word?” I am wondering how it is that I have a word obsession and if this is a good sign.

  “Anything.”

  I should come up with something clever and strange, but then he’d be expecting that. A common word will stump him, I just know it. So I choose.

  “How about forever, then?”

  And Finn says, “Everlasting. Eternal. Evermore. As in Charlotte was on the phone forever.”

  “At least I have a life and I’m not a dork,” she replies.

  “Umm-hmm,” Finn says. “Great comeback. Don’t worry. I’ll be out of your hair products in an hour.”

  I am half wondering what two people can talk about for hours, but then I have talked to Lisa for hours at the mall about how some clothes should come in only certain sizes and should not have words on them if their butt is too wide. I wonder if these are the topics Charlotte and Casserole Man talked about. Probably not.