Lennie watched it all without budging. When I whirled to see if he was going to help, he held his hands out by his sides, palms up. “You said to leave you alone.”
I got back on my bike, tears stinging my eyes, and rode off—leaving the potatoes scattered across the parking lot.
THIRTEEN
“Where’s Mom?” I leaned the bike against the side of the house and lugged the bags of potatoes toward the back stairs, where the twins squatted with their sticks. It was rare to see Brady unsupervised, because wandering off was a constant worry. He’d collected an impressive pile of gravel that had migrated all the way to the backyard.
“Upstairs,” said Kaya. She pointed to the first-floor apartment. “Miss Carla is watching us. She went in there.”
“Then she’s not watching you, is she?” I shifted my lopsided load of potatoes, my shoulders aching under their weight.
Kaya silently mimicked my grumpy remark. I made like I was going to swing an armload of potatoes at her and she ducked.
I hadn’t really spoken to Carla since we’d moved in. I knew what kind of underwear she wore, however, because she hung it to dry on a line out back. When she emerged from the house, I was struck by her style, which did not scream “Lakeside landlady.” She was tall and fit and slender, with dark, spiky hair that shimmered with a hint of deep purple highlights. She wore silver hoops in her ears and a vibrant blue scarf over a simple white blouse, jeans, and black boots.
I looked down at my drab hoodie and jeans and felt underdressed.
“Hello, Ivy.” She spoke with the slightest tinge of a Spanish accent. “Did you have a nice day at school?”
I nodded. “Mm-hmm.”
She held out a plate. “Cookie?”
“No, thank you.” My arms were about to fall off. “I’m just going to put these away.”
I climbed the stairs, let myself in our back door, and dropped the potatoes on the kitchen counter. Mom was in the shower, I could tell, thanks to the high-pitched whine that reverberated through the pipes. I peered between the kitchen blinds to make sure Carla wasn’t ignoring the twins out there again. She had placed the cookies on a small plastic table and was pouring glasses of a bright-orange liquid from a pitcher. The twins gobbled and gulped, wet orange mustaches curling up around their lips. I had a feeling it wasn’t the organic, all-natural juice my mother used to buy for us.
Plopping on the couch, I let my head fall back to stare at the ceiling. It was that kind of ceiling that looked like stucco. It hid cracks and flaws but was impossible to clean. You could see where someone had tried and rubbed off a section of the nubby surface.
My brother and sister were all giggles and chatter outside. The windows were closed, but I could hear every word through the thin walls.
I started thinking how nice it would be to stay on the couch for the rest of the day (the week, the year, my entire life . . .), just slip between the cushions and hide until the movers came and took us back to where we belonged.
Things got quiet outside, so I lifted my head to make sure the twins were still alive. They weren’t at the plastic table anymore, and their mud hole was vacant. I heard the music then, and felt it. A dance beat pulsed from below, setting the glassware in the kitchen cabinets vibrating. Our landlady was partying with the twins? I threw open the door and ran down the stairs.
Kaya answered Carla’s door when I knocked, a silky purple scarf wrapped around her head. She shimmied to the Latino pop song blaring on the stereo. “Hola, Ivy!”
Behind her, Brady danced around in a too-big cowboy hat, with castanets on his fingers.
His eyes sparkled. We’d all been so worried about how he’d adjust to the new place, but I swear he was handling it better than I was.
I looked around Carla’s apartment, which was so much nicer than ours. Its hardwood floors were covered with richly colored rugs, not the wall-to-wall beige carpet we had. The couch was a creamy white. A large, rustic wood table took up most of the space, though. It was draped with fabrics, books, and magazines. I didn’t even see Carla sitting there until she jumped up and turned down the music. She was a chameleon blending into her surroundings.
“Come in, come in.” She handed me the cookies again and this time I took one.
“So, you’re at Vanderbilt High?”
“Yes,” I said, biting into the cookie. It was still warm, and a bit gooey—delicious.
“Then you must know Molly Palmer. She lives around the corner. And Lennie, of course.” She took a cookie and bit into it, watching Kaya dance in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror.
So Willow was right about Molly living in Lakeside—though our neighborhood was hardly a trailer park. Maybe some of the houses were trailer-ish, but ours definitely was not. Unless someone had turned a trailer on one end and slapped a roof on the other.
“Has he offered you a ride yet?” Carla was still talking to me, I realized. “Lennie. He said he would. It’s silly for you to be riding that bicycle. . . .”
“I’m fine,” I said quickly.
She studied me for a moment. “I see. Well, I’m sure he’d be happy to take you if you change your mind. He’s a good kid. Smart, too.”
“Mm-hmm.” I blinked a few times. He clearly had her fooled. And if Lennie was so smart, why wasn’t he in any of my AP classes?
“You should get to know him,” said Carla.
“Yeah, I don’t, uh . . . We’re not going to be living here very long, so . . .”
Carla’s eyebrows raised upward a hair but she didn’t say anything, just kept smiling. Which was infuriating.
“We better go.” I scooted the twins out the door. “Thanks for watching them. And for the cookies.”
“Oh, sure.” She stared at me. “Anytime.” She saw us out and leaned in her doorframe with arms crossed as we clambered up the stairs.
“What happened to the sixth bag of potatoes?” Mom barely waited for me to get through the door before she started in on me.
“I dropped it,” I said. “It isn’t exactly easy to carry thirty pounds of potatoes, you know. Want me to go pick them up off the side of the road?”
She huffed. “No need to be surly about it.”
“Whatever,” I mumbled, and retreated to my room. I tried to focus on my trig and chemistry homework, but my brain wouldn’t cooperate. Half of it wanted to talk to Reesa, tell her about Lennie and the potatoes and James. The other half was considering a lobotomy. It felt like I was playing a board game with the wrong pieces or something. Nobody was matching up to who they were supposed to be or where they were supposed to go. Lennie Lazarski, “a good kid”?
Mom declared it breakfast-for-supper night, Brady’s favorite. I came back downstairs, ate my pancakes and scrambled eggs in silence, then retreated back to my room to continue my homework. I heard Dad singing “Blackbird” again and looked at my clock; it was bedtime for the twins. As the melody rose up into the attic, my chest ached. I missed it so bad, singing to them. But I couldn’t do it here. This wasn’t the right place.
I dug my earbuds out from the depths of my backpack. It was silly to take them to school, since I couldn’t exactly walk around listening to music on a phone that was supposed to be lost. Desperate to block everything out, including my own thoughts, I quickly scrolled past my usual homework-friendly choices of Vivaldi and Bach, and blasted Queen. If Freddie Mercury couldn’t banish “Blackbird” and Lennie from my brain, I didn’t know who could.
Around midnight I closed my books and fell asleep to “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” When I woke an hour later, the music had stopped and the wind was howling in a way I’d never heard before, like wolves in the distance. I scrambled to the head of my bed, reaching for the corner post, but it wasn’t there. This wasn’t my room . . . this wasn’t my bed.
I fumbled for my lamp in the darkness but my knuckles knocked up against a wall. Not my wall.
Then it all came flooding back to me.
I found the lamp on the wrong side o
f my bed but didn’t turn it on. No need to illuminate what I didn’t really want to see. This wasn’t the lavender-and-white room I’d grown up in, the room that held all my memories.
What would happen to those memories now?
I felt detached from them, from my old life. From myself. I sank under the covers and turned to the wall, running a finger along a peeling edge of flowered wallpaper. I tried to push it back into place but it kept springing out, farther each time.
I pulled my knees up to my chest and hugged them in the darkness. I just wanted to go back to the way things were.
FOURTEEN
The next morning passed without incident. But then lunch came. After packing for a few days, Mom calculated the expense and decided I should start buying what the cafeteria offered. “I tried for the free lunch program, but we didn’t qualify. Still, it’s much less expensive to buy something,” she declared. “Just make sure you grab whatever fruits and vegetables you can.”
When I arrived at the table with my tray, you’d have thought I’d slapped a dead chicken carcass on the table.
“Ew,” said Wynn, looking at my chicken patty on hamburger bun with pickle and a side of corn. “That’s nasty.”
Willow opened her designer lunch bag. “How can you eat that?” She took out her usual portobello and sun-dried tomatoes on focaccia.
I closed my eyes and took a bite. “It’s not that bad.”
Reesa held her apple out to me. “Trade you for the pickle,” she said, nodding at the limp sliver of green on my plate.
“Ew,” said Wynn again. There were days when it was the only word in her vocabulary.
“You sure you want it?” I waggled the droopy pickle at Reesa. She nodded, so we made the swap. I snarfed down the apple because it was the only edible thing on my tray. Reesa never touched the pickle.
As I finished eating, Reesa kicked me under the table, her eyes flicking up to someone approaching from behind me. “Incoming,” she whispered as Willow and Wynn sneered. I turned slowly, just in time to catch the object Lennie tossed to me.
A potato.
Every ounce of blood in my body raced to my face. I held the potato in my hands like I was cradling a baby chick.
“Good catch,” he said. “You dropped that. I can bring the rest of the bag by your . . .”
“No! Uh, no.” I was desperate to stop him from revealing my location. That he knew where I lived at all. “That’s okay. I don’t need them. Thanks.”
Lennie’s eyes flitted from my face to my friends behind me. I could only imagine the looks they were giving him. He put his hands up. “Whatever, dude. Have it your way. You know where to find me if you change your mind.”
There was a moment of silence. Several long moments, really, until he was out of sight. I still had the potato cupped in my hand when I turned back around.
“What. The. Hell?” said Willow. “You know where to find him? Who does he think he is?”
“He’s nobody. He works at the grocery store. I dropped some potatoes. That’s all.” I tucked the potato into my bag and picked up my chicken sandwich. “He’s nobody,” I mumbled. No chance I’d be able to swallow anything, but I took a bite, anyway.
“What store? Not Bensen’s,” said Willow with dismay.
I shook my head. “Some crappy store my mom stopped at the other day. I don’t even remember the name of it.”
“But where . . .” Willow pressed.
“Who cares where he works?” said Reesa.
Wynn ducked low to the table. “He could be stalking you. Wasn’t he bothering you the other day? And you were talking to him. You should never engage with a stalker. It encourages them.”
I shook my head. “He’s not a stalker.”
“You talked to him?” said Reesa.
I wanted to yank my own head off and throw it across the room. “You mean when I thanked him for opening the door for me?”
“You shouldn’t encourage him,” said Wynn.
I took a few breaths and spoke slowly. “I am not encouraging him. Can we please just drop it?”
Reesa tossed the uneaten pickle back onto my tray. “Just stay away from him, Ivy.”
I stared at the pickle, trying to figure out what Lennie was up to. If he was trying to be nice, he had a funny way of showing it. He knew the school hierarchy—why would he keep trying to talk to me, especially in front of my friends?
As soon as lunch was over, Reesa shuffled me down the hall and into a corner under the stairs. Her face was red. “Please tell me you are not hanging out with Lennie Lazarski.”
“I’m not hanging out with him. He lives in my neighborhood. In the house beside ours.”
“Lazarski lives next door to you?”
I shushed her and explained how he offered me a ride and gave me the bike helmet, and what happened at the Save-a-Cent with the potatoes. I left out the part about seeing James.
“And he stopped and helped me when I fell off my bike.” It was like a confessional, and I had sinned.
“Great,” said Reesa. “So what, you’re, like, buddies now?”
“We’re neighbors. That’s all.”
“Look,” she said, “I’m trying to cover for you, but if you’re going to start hanging out with the scariest guy in the entire school? There’s not a whole lot I can do.”
“I told you,” I said, teeth clenched. “I am not hanging out with him.”
“Well, he obviously didn’t get the memo.” Her nostrils were flaring. “Just tell him to stay away from our lunch table, okay? I don’t want to be associated with him . . . and you shouldn’t be, either. People will start to think we’re dealing drugs.”
I watched her storm off, absorbing her anger like a sucker punch. I gasped for breath. How could she be mad at me? And what exactly was she mad at?
I stumbled up the stairs, away from my locker and my next class. I needed to pull myself together, and the secret room beckoned.
When I got in and shut the door, a sense of quiet calm washed over me. I looked over at the shelf. There were only Gatsby, Shakespeare, Hitchhiker’s, and Jane Eyre. But I found a note penciled on the inside flap of Jane Eyre.
So serious? Love me some J.E., but what do you read for laughs?
I smiled. I knew just the book to offer in reply. I simply had to steal it back from my sister, who, unlike me, had been smart enough not to leave all her books at our old house.
FIFTEEN
On Monday, nobody said a thing about the potato incident and I was foolish enough to consider it forgotten. Then the cafeteria served mashed potatoes on Tuesday. Jeremy Dillon brought an ice-cream-scooped blob of it to me on a napkin. “I heard you really like potatoes,” he said, laying it on my tray while the rest of the basketball team laughed.
Willow and Wynn wasted no time bailing on me and laughed right along with everyone. I turned to Reesa, who wasn’t laughing but moved away from me, clearly mortified.
“Uh, no thanks.” I handed the napkin of potatoes back to Jeremy.
“Oh, I get it,” he shouted to his friends. “She only likes Lazarski’s potatoes!”
The entire cafeteria erupted in hoots and the gossip started flying.
“Lazarski gave her a potato?”
“Sure it wasn’t a dime bag?”
“Are they dating?”
Willow and Wynn inched away from me now as well, as if I had suddenly contracted a highly contagious disease. I tried not to make eye contact with anyone, until my gaze landed on a familiar face at a distant table. Molly was sitting there smiling at me, in a see-how-it-feels? sort of way.
Molly’s banishment had been set off not by her move to Lakeside, but by her saying yes when Trevor Freebery asked her to the Jack Frost dance freshman year. Willow had been planning to go to the dance with Trevor (unbeknownst to Trevor, but that’s beside the point). Rumors started circulating about Molly—that her dad was in jail, that she was pregnant with the baby of a guy who was in jail, that she was a cutter, that she was ha
ving an affair with a teacher . . . all kinds of crazy stuff. Trevor swore he’d never even invited her to the dance, that she’d made the whole thing up. Then she disappeared from school for a couple of months, and when she came back, she didn’t talk to any of us anymore. She sat by herself or with the other outcasts.
Caught in Molly’s gaze, all I could think was: I barely made it a week.
For the rest of lunch period I kept my eyes on the table in front of me, not even looking at Reesa, who seemed just as uncomfortable as I felt. I finally mumbled some excuse about using the bathroom and left early, shuffling toward my next class upstairs. As I passed the supply closet, I saw a light on under the door.
I had snuck in earlier—before school started—to leave the book I’d snagged from Kaya’s shelf . . . the one book that always made me laugh, no matter what: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes. I could skip class, sneak in there and see if James had found it and left a note. He’d barely acknowledged my presence in English, but I had a feeling that had more to do with avoiding Reesa, who kept asking him nosy questions.
“I asked him where he was from, and he said, ‘around’ all mysterious,” she told me after class. “Around where? Why won’t he tell me?”
“Maybe he’s in a witness protection program,” I offered.
“Then he’d have a whole story prepared,” she said. “And I don’t buy that ‘country boy’ stuff. He’s wearing Diesel jeans. They don’t sell those at Walmart.”
“How do you know? You’ve never been to a Walmart.”
She shot me a look. “He’s too well dressed to be some hick.”
It didn’t occur to Reesa that maybe James wasn’t interested in her, that maybe he was interested in someone else.
I stood outside the supply room door, looking at the slit of light beneath it, and listened for a sound. I knocked quietly, not really thinking what I’d do if someone other than James answered (or if James answered, for that matter). But no one came. So I knocked again, louder. Nothing. I was about to walk away when the light went off. My breath caught as I wrapped my fingers around the knob. I pulled the door open and peered into the darkness.
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