Girls Don't Fly

by Chandler, Kristen

  The phone rings. I pick up.

  “Hi,” says Melyssa. Her voice is high and breathy.

  “Hi,” I say. I’m lost in Deadendia.

  “I ... Zeke and I had a fight.”

  “How bad?” I say.

  “He took his stuff.”

  This gets my attention. As far as I know Melyssa has never had a fight with Zeke before. They always just do what she wants.

  “What did you fight about?”

  She chokes up a little and then lets her words spray like a fire hydrant. “He lives on his scholarship and this measly trust fund. If we get married and have a baby it won’t be enough and he’ll have to work. He says he can’t write and go to school and work because he’ll flunk out. I work and I’ve got a 4.0.”

  “And you probably pointed that out to him, I guess.”

  She chokes up again. “Well, I can’t help it if I’m smarter than he is.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  She blows her nose and starts crying again.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Do you want to come home for a while?”

  “I want to come home, home.”

  “Home, home? But you aren’t done with school.” I’m talking to myself as much as to Melyssa. I’ll be camping in the yard if she comes.

  She says, “I can’t go to school like this. I’m a mess.”

  “You’re going to drop out? You’ll lose your scholarship.”

  “I’m going to get a medical extension.”

  I’m trying to think about her, or at least sound like it. “Until when?”

  “Until I feel better,” she says. “Which is most likely never. I can’t believe he left.”

  I’d like to tell her not to worry, but I can’t.

  The boys are staring at me when I hang up the phone.

  “So who’s going?” asks Andrew.

  “Going where?”

  “With the pirates,” says Brett with disgust.

  “Oh, I have to tell you tomorrow night. It’s a surprise.”

  “Aw,” says Carson.

  “I hate surprises,” says Andrew.

  I nod my head. “You should all go play outside.”

  As bad as things are in Deadendia, I think they are about to get a whole lot worse.

  8

  Molting:

  Dropping old feathers to get new ones.

  On Monday nights I leave the kids with Dad and work at the Lucky Penny. That’s one of the nights Erik works too. Howard puts Erik at the front counter and me in the back, making shakes. It’s not that Howard’s being considerate or anything. It’s just that Callie told him I might throw up in the ice cream if I had to stand next to Erik.

  Making shakes is not brain surgery, but you have to keep your wits about you. For one thing, if you don’t hold the cold steel cup you blend with just right, you send ice cream flying. For another thing, you have to get a feel for how the ice cream blends with what you’re mixing so the shake doesn’t come out runny. If the shake doesn’t stand up out of the cup when I’m done, I’ll pay for it myself and start over. The last thing is that you have to clean the blender blades as you go. You can’t just stick the blade with grasshopper shake all over it into a pumpkin shake. You have to blend the blades in water until they’re completely clean, which is time-consuming and drives Erik nuts, because patience isn’t exactly his best thing.

  So when the entire population of Salty Breeze Retirement Home comes in and pretty much orders enough ice cream to plug every artery they have left, and then Erik comes back with a shake in his hand and says, “They wanted Chocolate Banana Caramel, not Peanut Butter Chocolate,” I’m going about eighty in a twenty-five, if you know what I mean.

  “Where’s the order?” I say.

  Erik rolls his eyes. “I don’t know. They said they didn’t order this.”

  “Show me the order,” I say. I know he has the receipt on a pin out front, and when there’s a mistake that costs money we’re supposed to find out whose fault it is.

  “I don’t have time,” Erik says. “Just do it over.”

  A truckload of adrenaline races to my head. “Can I see the order?” I ask.

  “I know you’re upset,” he says, laying it on thick. Like I’m one of those old women out there who just lost her teeth in a sundae.

  I’ve covered for Erik since I started working here. He messes up about once a week because he’s so good with customers he forgets to be good with typing in the right code. But I’m not covering for a patronizing me-dumper.

  I put the shake I’m making down on the counter. Everyone stops what they’re doing and looks at me. I walk out to the cash register and pull the receipt off the pin. I look at the order. The prehistoric woman who ordered the shake, who obviously thinks she’s caught me at something, stares me down.

  I walk back to Erik and show him the receipt. “You put in the code for Peanut Butter Chocolate. I’ll make another one, but I’m not paying for it.”

  Everyone looks at Prince Charming now.

  “This is just stupid,” he says, and takes the receipt out of my hand. Erik looks innocent, but there is a reason he wins on the track field. And it isn’t because he loves running. It’s because he loves to win. He has to.

  “Don’t you mean I’m stupid?” I say.

  The back room silence brings Howard charging in. He says, “Holy hell. We’ve got the whole town out there. You two get to work. Myra, don’t be a bitch about this just because he dumped you for what’s-her-boobs out there.”

  I look at Erik. He has what’s-her-boobs guilt written all over him.

  Erik says to Howard, “Myra’s just been under a lot of pressure lately. You know how she gets.”

  What a stroke of genius to make me look like a whack job while pretending to care what kind of pressure I’m under. Who finished Erik’s paper on morphology when he had a track meet all weekend? Who convinced Erik’s dad it was a recycling project when his dad found beer cans in his truck?

  Howard guffaws. “Yeah, I know the kind of pressure you give her, buddy. Those Morgan girls ... they’re all about pressure.”

  Yeah. That does it.

  I take off my apron, fold it, and hand it to Callie, who’s practically wetting her pants. I walk out of the Lucky Penny through the back door so I don’t have to see what’s-her-boobs.

  The crazy part is that when I’m driving home, instead of thinking about how I’ve lost my job and been called a slut from a family of sluts, I think of those dirty blades of ice cream. You never think about the clean-up when you’re eating those big chunks of Oreo, but you would if someone didn’t do it. And that’s the thing about cleaning things up—it sucks to do it and it sucks if you don’t.

  9

  Mounted Specimen:

  A stuffed bird skin that people hang on their walls because it looks pretty but doesn’t make a mess.

  There are two kinds of jobs in Landon:(1) Rotten.

  (2) Less rotten, unless you’re a dentist like Erik’s dad, which actually I don’t think is all that great except the money, no matter what I told Erik.

  And there are two kinds of people in this town:(1) Losers: We work for the other kind of people.

  (2) Winners: There aren’t many of these types. They move.

  Of course there are variations. You can be a First Lieutenant Loser, like Howard, or an Assistant to the Winners, like my dad. He is an engineer for the copper mine. Or like my mom, who has a loser job cleaning offices until late at night, but thinks it’s okay because it makes it so she can be home in the daytime with Danny. But if you are a high school senior with no skills but baby busting, food flipping, and cleaning crew, you probably shouldn’t quit your job because your boss and your ex-boyfriend are jerks. That really limits where you can work around here.

  So when I go home early my parents are less than thrilled. I give them the overview minus the specifics of Howard calling my sister and me sluts. When I finish, my dad,
the engineer, wants to hear the story again.

  “What do you mean?” he says when I get to the part where I walked to the front so I could get the receipt.

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “Erik deserves a swift kick in the butt, but you quit in the middle of a shift? What happened to everyone else when you left?”

  “What happens to you without a job?” says Mom. “How are you going to pay for dental assistant school?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Dad says, “Maybe you should have thought of that before you let your temper get the better of you. This is exactly what that little puke wanted you to do.”

  Maybe it was what I wanted me to do, is what I want to say. But what comes out is, “I know.”

  Sitting at the kitchen table with bills and a checkbook stacked in front of her, Mom looks as tired as I feel. In her jagged voice she says, “We just can’t do it all, Myra. Now that we have to pay for an uninsured baby there is no way we can pay for your dental hygiene class. What are you going to do without that job?”

  No matter how bad I feel, my parents can always make me feel worse. “I’ll start looking tomorrow after school.”

  “I guess you heard Melyssa is moving home?”

  “Yeah, I know,” I say with more frustration than I mean to.

  My mom leans backward, away from her pile of bills, and sticks her pen in her gray-streaked ponytail. “Well, I guess you know everything then,” she says.

  Dad looks at me and Mom and sighs. I bet he wishes he could stay at work. Where everything is logical, and there are a lot less women. If only everything could be as beautiful and tidy as a smelter the height of the Empire State Building.

  “I don’t think you will have trouble getting another job, actually,” says Dad.

  I didn’t see that coming.

  “No, I don’t,” he says. “You’re capable. You take care of a lot around here. I’ve seen you hustle around that ice-cream parlor. You’re a hard worker. You work a lot harder than plenty of people I pay union wage.”

  I say, “Thanks, Dad.” Maybe there are some things I don’t know.

  “But,” he says, putting his finger to his nose like he does when he’s measuring something, “you have to get that money for school. So you’ll just have to go out there and find a new job tomorrow. Or your mom will make you pour the cement with us.”

  “I still need you here after school until your dad gets home,” she says.

  “I’ll work it out,” I say.

  I guess this isn’t the time to tell them that I want the money to go as far away from this place as I can imagine.

  10

  Homing:

  When a bird comes home after getting lost.

  Up until Melyssa graduated a year and a half ago we shared a room, sort of. She’s a night-person-talks-in-her-sleep slob and I’m a crack-of-dawn neatness freak. We survived because she was never home once she hit ninth grade. Now that she’s back, pregnant and miserable with nothing to do but be high maintenance, it’s likely we are going to kill each other.

  It’s Friday afternoon, I’ve had the week from Hades, and Mel’s junk is everywhere.

  Mel says, “So you told Old Howie to stick it, huh?”

  “I didn’t say anything. I just quit.”

  “I’ll bet you folded up your apron and walked out politely.”

  I really hate it when she pegs me.

  She says, “At least you quit, right? That’s good.”

  “It would be good—if I had a job.”

  “Oh, you can get one of those. You’re like a poster girl for all those waitress-nanny jobs. I mean look at you. You’re like Domestic Goddess Barbie.”

  I sit down on the floor to put my things in stacks so I can figure out a way to put them away in half as much space. I want to very neatly die of sadness. Normally I would let Mel say whatever, but everything hurts too much right now already. “I do other things besides mop the floor and babysit.”

  Melyssa rolls around on her bed like a pill bug. She’s not even big yet, but she acts like she weighs four hundred pounds. She sighs. “I’m not knocking it. Martha Stewart is totally smart.”

  “I’m not Martha Stewart.”

  “You iron your money and put it in order in your wallet.”

  Carson runs into the room. He still thinks it’s like Christmas because Melyssa’s home. “Mel, come see what Myra made under my bed. It has a lake made out of a milk jug and mountains out of egg cartons with little wire plants and everything.”

  Melyssa raises her eyebrows. “Little wire plants? Good job, Martha.”

  I don’t answer. Thankfully they both leave so I can shove my underwear into storage baggies without being psychoanalyzed. When Melyssa comes back she says, “Maybe you could get a job making little wire plants. That’s a unique skill.”

  I say, “Are you going to go back to school after you have the baby?”

  She lies back down on the bed and pats her bulging stomach. “Don’t worry. I’m not staying in this room for the rest of my life. What are you going to do after graduation?”

  I shrug my shoulders. Right now I’m concentrating on getting through the morning.

  “I heard Mom say you want to be a dental assistant.”

  “That was Erik’s idea. But Mom and Dad are all set on it. I said I was thinking about it, but I’m not now.” It’s surprising to hear the words out loud.

  “No?” She looks over at me. “You have something else in mind?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can tell Big Sis.”

  “Big Sis, would it be possible for you to put your socks inside your drawer?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “What subject?”

  “Are you going to be a topless dancer? Chimp trainer? Politician? What?”

  “I don’t know, really. This guy came to biology and talked about a scholarship contest where you can go on a trip that sounds . . . you know, far away.”

  “Science, huh. I can see that. You could kill things, sterilize them, and then organize them. That’s perfect for you.”

  “I don’t care about science. I want to get out of town. But for me to go they’d have to pick my proposal out of all the others written by the genius kids applying and I have to raise money. A lot of money.”

  “Where do they go?” She’s sitting up now.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’d have to raise a thousand dollars by May.”

  She whistles through her teeth. “Spill it.”

  “The Galápagos Islands.” I’m sorry the moment the words fall out of my mouth.

  “No way.”

  “I’d have to write a research proposal that’s better than Erik’s.”

  “You’d be competing against Prince Charming?” She laughs and then she laughs again. “Now, that’s perfect.”

  I pair my socks. Telling Melyssa is proof of my stupidity.

  She says, “Wow. Do you want to do it?”

  “No.”

  Melyssa adjusts one of my favorite pillows under her rear end. “You only go around once. And the ride ends sooner than you think.”

  I want to get a ride out of this room. I want to be with Erik and tell him how crazy Melyssa makes me, except I can’t because I’m a dumped space-sucker. I say, “I’m not you, Mel. I can’t just be brilliant on command.”

  Mel adjusts the pillow again and then takes it out from under her and throws it at the wall. “No. You aren’t me. But you know what the real difference is?”

  The list of the ways that Melyssa and I are different could fill my journal, and has pretty regularly, since I was old enough to feel inadequate. She won so many awards and trophies in high school, Dad built her a special shelf. When she left I filled it with a vase of dried flowers and a picture of me with Erik at the state fair. I stare at the mound of socks on the floor. Most of them are white but none of them matches. How can I have so many abandoned socks? How does this happen?

  Mel says
, “The difference is that I go after things. Even when I make a mess, at least I go after what I want.”

  The irony is painful. Unless Mel’s big dream has always been to be pregnant, not go to school, and live in her old bedroom and not speak to her baby’s father.

  She says, “You should do it, Myra. You’d look great in a bikini and a headlamp. You could be Biology Barbie. Plus it would completely piss off Prince Charming.”

  “I’m not trying to make Erik mad. I just want to go somewhere. Do something.”

  My sister sits up slowly on the bed and crosses her legs under her. Her eyes are lit up like the old Mel, the one who cut my hair off with dull scissors when we were four and six. She says, “You can’t go at this like a kindergarten teacher, Myra. If you do this, you need to win. Make him sorry for every broken promise he ever made to you. Can you do that?”

  “Probably not,” I say.

  “Come on, Myra!” she says, her voice suddenly hard. “Don’t end up like me and Mom.”

  I look up out of my cloud of self-pity. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She stands up and starts putting away her stuff.

  I wait. “Mel?”

  “What?” she says.

  I wait. Mel can’t stand silence.

  She keeps her hunched back to me. She says, “I thought you knew.”

  “I’m not going to guess about this.”

  “Haven’t you ever wondered about my birthday?”

  I stand up alongside Mel. I am six inches taller than she is now. It’s like talking to one of the boys. I say, “I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about your birthday.”

  She puts her hands in her pockets. “I mean, have you ever wondered about that story Mom and Dad tell about how I was premature?”

  I say, “Why would I wonder about that? Mom miscarries if you look at her wrong.”