“I don’t know how to skate,” Zoe said, the words echoing out of her vomit bucket.
“We’ll teach you,” Mom said.
“I hate skating,” I said.
“Why?” Dad said.
“You just go in circles. It’s boring.”
“Not on a pond. On a pond, you can go anywhere,” he said.
“No, you can’t. You’re still skating in circles. They’re just bigger circles.”
“But we could fall through the ice,” Jeanine said, suddenly panicked. “Zoe can’t even swim. She’ll drown.”
“I swim,” Zoe said.
“With water wings. Are you going to ice-skate in your water wings?” Jeanine said.
“Can I, Mommy?”
“Look, nobody needs water wings for skating because nobody’s falling through the ice, got it?” said my mother, all serious now. She clearly wanted us to drop the whole subject.
“How do you know?” I said, glaring at her. I didn’t care what she wanted. I might never care what either of my parents wanted ever again. And I didn’t care about ice-skating on the stupid pond either, but I couldn’t win an argument about moving.
“Have you thought about any of this at all?” Jeanine shouted as she burst into tears.
“Why’s Jeanine crying?” Zoe said, peeking up from the vomit bucket. She still hadn’t fully understood what was happening.
“Somebody will test the ice, okay? I promise. We’ll make sure it’s safe,” my father said, as if Jeanine was actually crying because she was afraid of falling through ice.
“Like who? Professional ice testers?” I said, trying to force my face into a smirk and failing because smirking is impossible when you’re dropping out of the sky.
“I don’t know who,” my father said, his smile finally failing. “All I know is that we’re going to figure it out, and when we do, it’s going to be great. The ice, the house, the land, all of it! And you’re all going to love it!”
If it was all so great, and he knew we’d love it, would he have to keep telling us we would?
I knew great. Great was New York City. Great was Barney Greengrass. Great was Charlie Kramer, who’d been my best friend since we were in the Red Room in preschool together.
It was as if my parents had made up this story about some other family, one that loves ice-skating and nature and is bored of living in the greatest city in the world, and we were just supposed to play along and pretend that was us even though none of it was true.
Three hours later, Dad turned off Country Road 21B into woods so thick they cut out the sun.
“We’re here!” he practically sang as we started up a steep, zigzagging dirt road.
But “here” wasn’t where we were. “Here” was at the top of the mountain, and we were still at the bottom. We had another whole vomit bucket to go before “here.”
Finally, we came out of the trees and rolled to a stop in front of a sagging, purple house.
Dad was wrong. We were here now. I was seeing it—the land, the house, and all of it—and I wasn’t getting it. Not the broken-down, grape-colored house with windows popping out in all the wrong places. Not the shed that really was only half a shed because the other half looked like someone had burned it to the ground. Not the miles and miles of lonely sky and house-less, people-less fields and woods trapping us on top of this cliff.
“C’mon, guys, don’t you want to come check it out?” Mom said.
Jeanine, Zoe, and I didn’t move.
“Can I have your phone?” Jeanine asked, sniffling.
“Why?” Dad said.
“To call Kevin.” Kevin Metz, chess champion, is the male version of Jeanine. They met in Gifted and Talented in kindergarten and have been best friends ever since.
“You can call Kevin on the way home. Now you’re seeing the house,” Mom said.
“Where are we?” I asked, looking out the window.
“Petersville,” Dad said.
“Is there an actual town?” I didn’t see another house anywhere.
“About six miles away,” Mom said.
“How are we supposed to get there?” I said.
“Car or bike,” Dad said.
“We need to get in the car just to get milk?” I said.
“What do you think of the house? Big, right?” Mom was smiling that huge smile again.
Clearly, that was a “yes” on needing the car to go get milk.
“No more sharing,” Dad said as he and Mom got out of the car. “You guys each get your own room. Don’t you want to go in and look around?”
Jeanine, Zoe, and I still didn’t move. For once, I’m pretty sure we were all thinking the same thing: if we went inside, that was it. The house was ours. From the outside, it could still belong to someone else.
Mom opened the door to the back seat. “Come on! Come see.”
“Why are the windows all different sizes?” I said, staying put.
“It’s neat, right?” she said. “An artist and her husband built it. They wanted something completely original. Something that would surprise you.”
“Were they color blind?” Jeanine asked.
Mom laughed. “No, the artist’s name is Iris, you know, like the flower. Most of their furniture was purple too. Pretty zany.”
“Is that code for crazy?” I said.
“They aren’t crazy,” Dad said. “We met them. They’re great.”
“Mmm, like everything else here,” I said into my T-shirt.
Dad opened the back door on the other side. “Enough! Everybody out.”
Jeanine, Zoe, and I obeyed but in slow motion, and we didn’t go to the house. We just stood beside the car on the brown lawn. Even the grass looked unhappy to be there.
Jeanine leaned back against the car and studied the house. “Did they give it to you for free?”
“Of course not,” Mom said.
“How do you know it’s safe?” I plopped down on the grass next to Jeanine’s feet. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to get any closer to the house than I had to, I needed to stick with my side. This was us versus them, and we were going to lose—we’d already lost, even if Jeanine didn’t realize it yet. And if we were going down—maybe even because we were—we had to stay together. Jeanine must have felt it too, because a minute later she slid down the car until she was kneeling next to me on the ground.
Dad blew his cheeks out like a chipmunk. He was definitely annoyed we didn’t want to go in the house, but he didn’t try to make us get up. Instead, he and Mom walked across the sad lawn and sat down on the porch stairs opposite us.
Zoe looked at my parents, back at us, and then climbed into my lap. She still didn’t get the everything of what was happening, but even she knew there were sides and which was hers.
“What does an artist know about building a house anyway?” Jeanine said. “Was her husband an architect?”
“He worked for the postal service,” my father said.
“What’s it called when you’re not supposed to go into a building because they’re afraid it’s going to fall on you?” I squinted up at a portion of roof that looked like it was working particularly hard to resist the force of gravity.
“Condemned?” Mom said.
“Oh, yeah.” Jeanine nodded. “It’s totally condemned.”
“It’s not condemned,” Dad said. “It’s completely safe. It just needs some work. It’ll be fun.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Neither of you knows anything about fixing up things.” I guess the parents in the made-up family we were pretending to be were also really handy.
“We’re smart. We’ll figure it out,” Dad said.
“You couldn’t even put together Zoe’s toddler bed,” I reminded him. “And that came with an instruction manual and pictures. You didn’t
even need to know how to read.”
“Fair point,” he said. “But I think I learned a lot from that experience.”
“And how are you going to have time to fix up the house and do a job?” I said.
“Easy. I’m not going to get another job.”
“How’s that going to work?” I asked. Mom hadn’t cooked at a restaurant since I was born, and I was pretty sure we couldn’t live on what she made catering a few parties every month.
“Yeah, don’t you eventually need a job that pays you?” Jeanine said.
“We have savings. Plus, things are a lot less expensive out here, and your mom is going to start a business, so I’ll help with that. Tell them, Kira.”
“I’m going to open a restaurant!” Mom said, smiling her biggest smile, the one that goes all the way to the crooked tooth she doesn’t like to let people see.
“China Palace?” Zoe said, jumping up.
“I don’t think so, Zo Zo. I’m not going to serve Chinese food.”
“But I love Chinese food.”
“I know, but I’m going make food I like to cook. It will actually be the first restaurant in Petersville. Isn’t that exciting?”
“There are no restaurants? How does it even qualify as a town?” I asked.
“Of course it’s a town,” she said. “But think how amazing it will be to open a restaurant in a place where there aren’t any others.”
That wasn’t what I was thinking. What I was thinking was: What was wrong with the people who lived here that it had never occurred to anyone to open a restaurant?
We never did go inside that day. We just sat there on the ground till my parents gave up and told us to get back in the car. So I guess we won something.
Us: 1.
Them: everything else.
3
I didn’t tell anyone we were moving, not even Charlie. He and I spent the whole day together that Sunday after we went to Petersville, and I didn’t say a word about it. I couldn’t. Just like going into the house would have made it ours, saying I was moving would have made it true. So I pretended I wasn’t, and we played basketball till it got dark, practicing for the tryouts I’d never go to.
It helped that Charlie talks a lot, especially when he’s worried, which he was. Charlie could go on forever about our chances of making the basketball team. The closer tryouts got, the more he talked about them. He was like Jeanine in spelling bee season, but unlike Jeanine, he was totally psyching himself out.
“Coach Stiles hates me,” he kept saying that day as he shot and missed basket after basket.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“I know Raul told him the crickets were my idea.”
Last spring, Charlie and Coach Stiles’s son Raul had bought a hundred crickets from a pet store and released them in the ceiling over our classroom. The chirping drove Ms. Patel so crazy, she sent us all home at lunch. But somebody had seen Raul and Charlie go into the classroom super early that day so they were called to Principal Danner’s office. Under questioning, Raul came clean, but Charlie denied everything.
“What did you expect?” I said.
“He got, like, two days’ detention. Boo-hoo. But my dad doesn’t work for the school. I totally would have been suspended.”
“No way. It so wasn’t a big deal. Everybody thought it was funny.”
“Whatever. Stiles still hates me. No way he takes me.”
“He will if the team needs you.”
“He wouldn’t take me if I were LeBron James. It’s just like my dad says: don’t tick people off because nobody’s gonna miss a chance to get you back.” Then he hurled the ball so hard it slammed into the backboard and boomeranged right back to him.
Charlie’s father is full of these cheerful fortune cookie sayings like, “Getting what you want isn’t about what you do but who you know,” and, “Life’s not fair. Get used to it.” I know them by heart because he says the same ones over and over.
Bottom line: Zane Kramer is a nuddy. But you can’t tell your friend his dad’s a nuddy. That’s just something Charlie was going to have to figure out on his own. The problem was, Charlie wasn’t figuring it out.
It wasn’t his fault. You live with stuff long enough, it’s bound to rub off. It happens to all of us. What had rubbed off on me was a serious chocolate addiction. At least eating chocolate makes you happy. What was rubbing off on Charlie was the idea that everything and everyone was out to get him. I hated seeing him going down that road, but I didn’t know what I could do about it.
“Pass!” I called, running to the basket. Distraction wasn’t a long-term solution, but it had been proven to work in the moment.
Charlie threw me the ball. I jumped and tossed. Swish.
Charlie chased the ball down, then stood on the free throw line dribbling, his tongue peeking out above his lip as he eyed the basket.
Charlie, age four, tongue peeking out, planted in a tiny chair outside the Red Room popped into my head.
“Hey, remember the water table?” I said.
Charlie stopped dribbling and looked at me. “The what?”
“The water table. In the Red Room?”
“Oh yeah.” He grinned. “I loved the water table.”
“Yeah, me too. So did Charlotte K, remember?”
He whistled. “Charlotte K. I can’t believe you still remember her name.”
I will never forget Charlotte K.
The day I pushed Charlotte K—she’d been hogging the waterwheel again—she fell, slicing her head open on the corner of the water table. In seconds, her sparkly T-shirt was soaked red. “Charlotte K is dying!” some girl screamed. And I believed her, because how could anyone lose all that blood and survive?
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” I blubbered as Charlotte K was rushed from the room.
No surprise: Charlotte K wasn’t actually dying, though nobody bothered to tell me. I didn’t find out until I got home that three stitches in her scalp at the emergency room were all it had taken to snatch her from the jaws of death.
Charlie had been standing next to me at the water table, and even though he hadn’t said anything, he hadn’t left my side. He even crawled under the water table with me when I dove under there with paper towels to mop up the blood—it seemed the least I could do. Then, when it came time for yard, he refused to go because I couldn’t. I had to stay inside and think about what I’d done (kill Charlotte K). Kylie and Maria explained to Charlie that this was my punishment, that he couldn’t play with me, that I needed to sit alone to think about my evil, evil ways.
“Fine,” he said and dragged his little chair just outside the classroom. “Then I’ll stay here.” And there he sat for all of yard, tongue glued to his upper lip, watching me, fifteen feet away on my own little chair as I bawled for poor Charlotte K (and myself).
Charlie Kramer was something different. Anything else would be something worse.
Charlie eventually found out we were moving from his mom, who’d found out from my mom. He couldn’t believe I hadn’t told him. I tried to explain about not saying it so it wouldn’t be true, but he didn’t get it. He was too mad. He seemed ever angrier that I hadn’t told him I was moving than he was that I was actually moving, but I got why. Mad feels like it’s going somewhere at least. Sad just sits on your chest making it hard to move or breathe. If I’d had the choice, I would have picked mad too.
At home, I went radio silent. I’m pretty sure my parents didn’t even notice since Jeanine was in an all-out war and wouldn’t stop talking, mostly about how she’d never become president if she went to a school with no G&T.
Whenever anyone asked Zoe about the move, she told them that we were leaving the city so Mom could open a Chinese restaurant. Her true feelings were clear from the number of times Mom had to pick her up early from preschool because she’d bit
ten someone.
Just so you know, I’m not saying my parents didn’t notice my not talking to make you feel sorry for me. It’s just a fact. When Jeanine’s freaking out, it’s hard to notice anything else. Besides, it was better that way since if my parents had noticed, they would have just kept pestering me to talk, which is about the worst thing you can do to somebody who needs to go quiet for a while.
I just kept thinking, if this move were really about wanting something different and had nothing to do with money, wouldn’t my parents let us finish the school year? Or at least stick around until winter break?
• • •
Everybody thinks where they live is something special. Here’s how I know the place I lived actually was: it sold in just three hours the day of the open house. In case you’re lucky enough not to know, an open house is when complete strangers are invited in off the street to snoop around and see if they want to buy your home.
On November 3, my parents signed the contract selling our apartment. We wouldn’t be kicked out until the closing though, and I figured we had at least a month because my parents hadn’t even started packing. I hadn’t counted on them cheating.
Did you know you can pay extra to get movers to pack your stuff before they move it? Yeah, well, you can, and those guys are fast, because it’s all just stuff to them. Wrap. Box. Repeat. Wrap. Box. Repeat. Smoothe Move was a packing machine. In just one day, everything that wasn’t nailed down was in a box. Two-year-old Halloween candy? Check. Half a Slinky? Check. I watched one guy Bubble Wrap an ant trap without giving it a second thought.
I couldn’t believe how fast everything was happening.
November 15, a month after we’d gone to Petersville for the first time, we’d be living there. We wouldn’t even get one last Thanksgiving at home. No camping out on Seventy-Seventh Street with a thermos of hot chocolate to watch the balloons being blown up for the parade. Not this year. Maybe never again. At least Charlie’s family had promised to come to Petersville to do Thanksgiving together like always.
The Doughnut Fix Series, Book 1 Page 2