by Annabel Lyon
“Mom!” I say, mortified.
Robert’s mom says she wants us all to go to her restaurant to celebrate. “You can’t say no. I’ve already made a cake.”
“It’s true,” Robert says. He and Dex are holding hands, beaming at me.
Around us, everyone starts to applaud. We turn to see Merry, still in her costume, running toward Aunt Ellie, who catches her in an enormous hug.
Regan is close behind. “The wings!” she says. “Please don’t tear my wings!”
While everyone tells Merry how amazing she was, Regan gingerly removes the wings and carries them away to use again tomorrow night. She holds them high over her head as she disappears down the hall. I watch them catch the light and sparkle until I can’t see them anymore.
The drive to the restaurant seems to take about five minutes, five minutes crammed with laughter and breathless, non-stop talking. Mom and Aunt Ellie and Daniel have gone with Robert’s mom. Robert, Dexter, and I are squished in the back seat of our car, Dex in the middle, with Merry in the front seat and Dad driving. I lean my forehead against the window, for the cool, and listen to everyone laugh. We park on a busy avenue I recognize from our drive to the planetarium, and meet up with the others on the sidewalk outside Robert’s mom’s restaurant. A sign taped to the door says CLOSED FOR PRIVATE FUNCTION. Robert’s mom punches a code into the lock and lets us in. “Make yourselves comfortable,” she says, flicking on the lights.
“Oh my god,” I say. “You didn’t.”
“Surprise!” Robert and Dex shout.
A huge banner saying WAY TO GO, EDIE! swags from one corner of the ceiling to the other. Chairs and tables have been pushed against the walls, leaving one long table in the middle of the room, set for all of us. There are balloons and streamers and pictures of clowns stuck to the walls. “We did it this afternoon,” Dex says proudly.
I say, “Clowns?” but fortunately no one hears because someone’s just turned on some music. I recognize the song from the CD Dad gave me for my birthday: “Embraceable You.”
“There’s a cake, too,” Robert says. “Shaped like an old man, with a robe and a big beard. Mom wasn’t sure what King Lear was supposed to look like, so she made a wizard cake.”
I say, “What’s a wizard cake?”
“She collects unusual-shaped cake pans,” he says. “Buys them on the internet. It’s one of her hobbies. She had the wizard one from my birthday when I turned twelve. I was really into Harry Potter.”
“No kidding,” I say.
“Like you weren’t.”
I say, “Clowns?”
“They’re supposed to be fools.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Aw, don’t be mad. Everyone just does their best, Edie.”
“I’m not mad,” I mumble, but that too gets lost in the noise.
Daniel comes over and puts an arm around my shoulders, grinning. “You are crazy brave, String Bean. I admire you so much. You inspire everyone around you. You are the most amazing—”
I mime shooting myself in the head with my finger.
“Ignore him,” Aunt Ellie calls across the room.
“Sit, everybody.” Robert’s mom comes back in from the kitchen with an apron on and a tray on each arm. “I made a few snacks.”
“A few!” Robert says.
“Merry, right here. Ellie, Daniel, James”—that’s my dad—“Dex, honey, next to Robbie”—that’s Robert—“Anne”—my mom—“Edie, sweetie, over here. A toast!”
“To Merry!” I call quickly, holding up my glass. Everyone says, “To Merry!”
“Bathroom?” I say, hopping up before anyone can propose a toast to me. Robert’s mom takes me back through the kitchen and points down a flight of stairs.
“Don’t hide, Edie,” she says, touching my shoulder. “We’re all really proud of you.”
I tell her I just need to pee.
The bathroom is tiny but clean. Each wall is painted a different colour: orange, purple, blue, green. The ceiling is pink. There’s one of those funhouse mirrors on the inside of the door that make you look super-tall and skinny. A sign over the mirror says, YOU LOOK LIKE YOU COULD USE A SANDWICH!
I wash my hands with soap that smells like mangoes and dry them under the XLERATOR. When I was little, I was scared of XLERATORs because they were so loud and strong, like sticking your hands under a blast of wind from the Sahara. Mom says I got scared of them the day Dex dared me to stick my face under and I did, which sounds likely, but I don’t remember that.
I start to think about what I’m scared of now, today, this minute, with my hands under the dryer. Three hours ago I would have said singing in public, and those first moments onstage were excruciating. For a second I was afraid to open my mouth to sing because I thought I might throw up instead. But then I thought about Merry, and everything I’d put her through, all the times I’d been mean or impatient or tried to use her to show how smart I was instead of just letting her be herself, and I knew I deserved some kind of punishment. It made sense to humiliate myself in front of everyone I had wanted to prove myself to. So I sang, and it was bad—my voice cracked and wobbled all over the place, and I could see Sam in the wings desperately signalling me to be louder—and when the applause came, it was polite, pittering, with some laughter too. I stumbled over my lines, the lines I’d written myself, and tripped over my feet, and blushed, and was certainly a fool, though not much of a Fool. When it was all over, I let myself think for the first time about Dex and Robert, a thought I’d somehow managed to push away throughout the performance. I was a fool, all right.
The XLERATOR stops suddenly. I stand in the silence, realizing what I’m scared of is the way I’m going to feel when I go upstairs and see my sister and the boy I turned down holding hands, again, still.
Edie in the Sky with Diamonds
“This is cute,” Dex says. “You should try this on.”
“Blah,” I say.
She holds the baby blue T-shirt up to my chest and looks at me appraisingly. “Maybe the colour’s a bit too light for you.”
“Do they have it in black?”
“Pink,” she says, flicking through the rack. “Orange, green, yellow. Maybe the green?”
“Blah,” I say. “Lemme see. No, blah.”
We’re shopping. Dex and I are at the mall, actually shopping together. Mom dropped us off by the doors with fifty dollars each and said she’d pick us up again in the same spot in two hours. It’s the first week of July and we’re leaving for our summer holidays in a few days. We’re supposed to be getting holiday clothes. I’ve been along while Dex shopped lots of times, complaining to Mom the whole way, but I’ve never actually shopped alone with her before. She’s making a supreme effort to be nice: staying with me instead of abandoning me at store entrances to go off on her own, finding clothes for both of us, telling me how I could look good. Mom put her up to it, I guess.
“This,” she says. It’s a hoodie, black, with a row of white surfboards down one sleeve. “It’s black.”
“Because I surf,” I say, and she puts it back.
I wander over to a rack of candy-striped flip-flops and pick out the loudest, neon-pinkest pair. “For you,” I call across the store, holding them up.
“Oh my god,” she says, and we both start to laugh. The girl at the counter gives us a dirty look.
I grab a brown pair in my size and a pale rose for Dex and go back to her. “Actually,” she says. We buy both pairs. “Bathing suits, now.”
The bathing suit store has bikinis all over the place, a wall of board shorts for boys, and a single small rack of racing suits hidden in a back corner. I go straight there and Dexter groans. “Wait, let me guess,” she says. “Black. You need to splash out.”
I pick out a navy blue.
“You’re hopeless, you know that, Edith?” she says. “A lost cause. Seriously.”
“Don’t call me Edith.”
“Robert says—” She stops, flustered. We pick through
the racks in silence for a few minutes and then she says, “I’m going to go try this on, okay?”
“Whatever,” I say.
“Yeah, but don’t take off on me. I want your opinion.”
I raise my eyebrows, because when has she ever wanted my opinion? She goes into the change room and fiddles with the curtain from the inside, making sure there are no cracks to peek through.
“Finding everything okay?” a salesman asks, startling me.
“I’m just waiting for my sister.”
He picks a two-piece off a rack, long baggy shorts and a tight racer top in olive green. He holds it up as though picturing it on me. It’s not a bikini, not exactly.
“Matches your eyes. I’m just saying.” He hands it to me, smiles, and goes back to his counter. He reminds me of Daniel. I twitch the change room curtain aside and go in.
“Edie!” Dex shrieks. She’s got a bikini on, purple. It fits her perfectly, of course.
“Shove over,” I say.
“Is that a two-piece?”
“Just shut up,” I say.
The suit fits. Dex starts digging in her purse for her cellphone. “I am so calling Mom. Edie’s buying a two-piece.”
“Grow up,” I say. I put my clothes back on and walk out of the store, leaving the suit with Dex in the change room. She catches up to me a few minutes later. I’m leaning against the railing, looking down at the food court below.
“I bought both suits,” she says. “It looked really good on you, Edie.”
“What does Robert say?”
“What?”
“You started saying something before about Robert.”
“Oh.” She flushes a little. “Nothing. I was just remembering he told me he couldn’t believe how two people could be so different and still be sisters. Hey, you want to play a game?”
“I want coffee,” I say.
We take the escalator down to the food court and order frozen caramel lattes from the fancy coffee place. “Inside or out?” she says, meaning where should we sit.
“In.” We get the best table, at the far back of the store, behind the palm plant, under the picture of the Eiffel Tower. I want to hate the creamy sweet drink, pure Dexter, but it’s delicious. “Okay,” I say. “What’s your game?”
“You make a list of everything that’s, like, totally you. Like, colours and clothes and music and—I don’t know. Just everything that makes you you. Then you make a list for me. I make a list for me and a list for you. We compare lists and see if anything’s the same.”
“That’s it?”
She goes up to the counter and smiles at the man working there. A minute later she comes back with two pens and paper napkins for us to write on. “No peeking,” she says.
“You know this is lame, right?”
She’s already writing.
I sit for a while, sipping my drink, staring at the picture of the Eiffel Tower. One day I’ll go there. There’s a famous bookstore in Paris called Shakespeare and Company; that’s a place I’d like to see. I write down EDIE and under that I write Shakespeare.
For the last three years we’ve been going to the same place for our holidays, a cabin in a pine forest on a lake on an island. That’s where we met Robert and his mom; they had the cabin just down from ours. Robert’s mom called our mom a few weeks ago to make sure we booked our holidays at the same time, so we’ll all be together for the fourth year in a row. Except, I guess, some of us will be more together than others.
I write DEX and stop. Right this second, I can’t think of anything to put under her name that isn’t mean. I go back to my own list and write cheese, jazz, black nail polish, black coffee, Sam, ice cream, books.
“Almost done?” Dex says.
Quickly, under her name, I write pink lipstick, ballet, Mean Megan, cinnamon bagels, sushi, top forty, learner’s licence, princess clothes, Robert.
“Okay, trade,” she says.
I give her my napkin and she gives me hers. Under my name she’s written coffee, Bollywood, green, singing, flip-flops, murder mysteries, writing. Under her name she’s written sushi, beach, purple, mangoes, historical fiction, university, photography.
“Singing?” I say.
“Joke,” she says without looking up from my list. “What are princess clothes?”
“Like, you know, pink and sparkly. Like you.” She looks up at me now. I suddenly feel as if I’m seeing her for the first time. Jean shorts, short-sleeved white lace blouse over a coffee-coloured tank top, black ballet flats. “Like you used to wear. Purple? Not pink?”
“Not so much anymore.”
We both read some more.
“Cinnamon bagels!” she says, slapping herself on the forehead. “How did I forget that?”
“Bollywood,” I say, copying her gesture, meaning Same here. “I guess I do wear a lot of green. I never really thought about it.”
“You have never in your life worn black nail polish,” Dex says.
“I always wanted to try. Photography?”
“I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do for a career,” my sister says. “It kind of interests me. Fashion, or maybe movies. Music videos? I don’t know. I’d like to learn to use a movie camera.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No,” she says.
“What about ballet?”
She shrugs. “There’s no future for me in dance. I’m not good enough.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Seriously. I was good when I was ten, but you should see some of these girls now. It’s all they do. They home-school so they can spend all day practising. I can’t keep up with them. Plus, my body is wrong. I’m too big and heavy.”
I point to her drink and ask if she’s going to go puke it into the toilet when we’re done.
She laughs. “No. That’s the point. I don’t want to be that person. I think I’m almost through with ballet. I’d like to try something else.”
“University.”
“It’s not so far away. I think about it a lot.”
“Is that why you’re always looking at the IKEA catalogue? Picking out stuff for your dorm room?”
I mean to be funny, but she just nods. I wonder if Mei does that too.
“We didn’t overlap much,” she says. “But we both got lots right, too.”
“You got more than me,” I say. “I guess I’ve been distracted this year.”
“You got lots right about me. You got cinnamon bagels and sushi. You got Robert.”
“You got Robert, actually,” I say.
Then we’re both blushing and not looking at each other.
“Hey, pass me that bag,” I say, too brightly, right at the same time as she says, “Stay here, finish your drink, I just want to run to the drugstore for a sec. I’ll be right back.”
“I’m done anyway,” I say.
We meet five minutes later at the top of the escalator. I open the bag and pull out the flip-flops I just exchanged for her: purple instead of pink, to match her new bikini.
Dex hands me a bottle of black nail polish.
“How’d it go?” Mom asks when we get in the car.
“Edie!” Mom shouts.
“Edie!” Dad shouts.
“Edie!” Dex shouts.
I sigh. I’m lying on my bed, painting my nails again. The only thing more fun than black nail polish, I’ve discovered, is peeling off black nail polish. I’m a compulsive peeler. Dex says this is disgusting. At breakfast this morning she said, “Every time I look at you, you’re all picky and disgusting.”
I said thanks.
“You need help,” she said. “I’ll take you shopping again before school starts, okay? I’ll fix you up.”
I picked and peeled a black strip off my pinky.
“Gag reflex,” Dex said, and left the room.
Now I paint a last slick black stripe across the same pinky, making it perfect again. I must have picked and painted half a dozen times since Dex gave me this bottle. Down
stairs, Mom and Dad and Dex are loading the car. We leave for the cabin today, supposedly on the one o’clock ferry. My duffle bag is packed so full it stands upright all by itself in the corner of my room. Books, mostly. I should be downstairs right now, helping, or at least making funny faces with Dad and Dex behind Mom’s back because she’s panicking about where she put the tea towels and the sunblock and that we’re all going to miss the ferry, as though there will never be another one ever, ever again.
“Edie!” everyone calls again.
I flutter my fingers in the sunlight that lies in a hot stripe across my bed, admiring my newly glossy black claws.
Feet stomp up the stairs—Dex. “Mom is going to freak,” she says when she sees me. “You’re not even ready.”
“I was ready last night,” I say, waving at my bag in the corner. “I’ll bring it down when my nails are dry.”
Dex rolls her eyes. “I wish I never bought you that ugly junk. You’re supposed to try it one time and then you realize how stupid it looks and you move on. It’s called maturing. I was trying to help you accelerate the process.”
“Whatever,” I say.
“I’m taking this down,” she says, grabbing my bag. “We’re going to have to repack the trunk again to fit it in.”
I flop back on my bed, arms and legs splayed like a sea star, and listen to my books go bump bump bump down the stairs.
Two weeks. Fourteen days. Three hundred and thirty-six hours, one hundred and ninety-six of them waking. One hundred and ninety-six hours to kill. That’s eleven thousand, seven hundred and sixty minutes; seven hundred and five thousand, six hundred seconds of not knowing where to put myself. Some of that time will be meals and showers and peeing, I guess, but after that—I can just see it. Of course we don’t mind if you come with us, Edie. Actually, it’s a two-person boat—maybe you could watch our stuff on the dock? You can have the next turn. We’re going to watch a movie in Robert’s cabin tonight, do you want to come, Edie? You don’t have to. You look tired. Oh, you do want to come? That’s great! You can sit—how about on that chair over there, and we’ll take the couch? It’s pretty much a two-person couch, actually. Hey, Edie, could you go make some popcorn? Hey, Edie, could you run get some ice? Hey, Edie, could you go jump in the lake?