by Laura Preble
“Anybody home?” Fletcher taps lightly on my skull.
“Sort of.” The sliding glass door whooshes open in the front room; I hear Dad stumbling over something and uttering a mild curse. If there’s something lying in his path, he will instinctually fall over it. “Hey, Dad!” I call, a bit too loudly.
He pops into the living room. “Hi, everybody. How was the Comic-Con?”
“Great.” I watch as my friends look awkwardly at each other. Nobody likes to give too many details to dads. It seems like the larger the group, the more uncomfortable everybody is. Is this because nobody wants to look like a suck-up? I don’t know. I’m just the observer. I can’t explain the behavior. “We had a blast. Our costumes were a big hit.”
“Yeah, it was all great until I got tasered,” Fletcher adds. Dad arches an eyebrow and looks to me for explanation.
“Not at Comic-Con, Dad. It was Euphoria.”
The look on his face goes from worried to freaked out. “Oh my God. She tasered you? She’s only supposed to do that to people breaking into the house without authorized entry!”
“He actually just walked in ahead of me, that’s all.” I put a hand on my dad’s forearm. “Nothing to worry about. Fletcher’s not going to sue us. Are you, Fletcher?”
He tosses a handful of popcorn into his mouth. “Only if you break up with me.”
“Break up?” Dad asks, then parks himself on the couch next to Fletcher. “That implies there’s something to break up.”
With my dad staring at him, Fletcher suddenly seems a bit less brave. “Uh, well, I just mean that we’re dating. Nothing serious. Really, nothing serious at all.”
“Gee, thanks.” I pick up the TV remote. “Maybe I’ll just call Euphoria in here and have her taser you again.”
“No. No! That’s okay.” He turns to my dad and takes his hand, which looks really hilarious. “Mr. Chapelle, I want to come clean with you. Your daughter and I…well…” He looks over at me. I have no idea what he’s going to say, but I hope it won’t get me grounded, killed, or sent to a girl’s boarding school. “Shelby and I have…eaten together.”
Dad nods with that yeah-you-got-me face, and gets up. “Okay. I see I’m not wanted here.” Turning to me, he says, “Can we talk later?”
There’s that sinking feeling again. He’s mentioned it twice, so it must be serious. I just nod and he walks out of the room, leaving me with the hormone twins, my boyfriend, and acute paranoia.
8
PLEASE, NOT THE TALK!
(or Some Bunny Loves Me)
We hang around for about an hour, talking about nothing. Fletcher doesn’t bring up the club again, which is just as well. He and Amber and Jon take off eventually, leaving me with that yawning chasm of a conversation with my dad.
I try to sneak off to bed without him noticing, but he hovers in his den, just waiting for me to be alone, kind of like a parental stalker. “Hey, Shelby. Are all your friends gone?”
“Yep.” I do that big fake yawn thing, hoping to avoid the conversation. “Boy, I’m tired. I think I’ll just get to bed.”
“Oh.” He sounds so disappointed. Rats! Why does my dad have to do the puppy-dog eyes so well?
I say, “Why? Do you need something?” As soon as the words fly from my lips, my internal alarm system starts whining, revving up for a major panic attack.
Dad puts his arm around my shoulders and walks me toward the living room. “I just wanted to hear about your day.”
Yeah, right. Just wants to hear about my day? Boy, that’s lame. “Oh, it was okay. We had a good time. We didn’t win the website competition, and my headpiece kept poking strangers in the neck and upper body, but otherwise, it was pretty fun. I got to see—”
We’ve reached the sofa, so he gently guides me to sit next to him. Bad news. “Sounds fun.” He leans against the pillows and just stares at me.
“What is up with you, Dad?”
He bites the inside of his cheek, a bad habit that I do too when I’m nervous. “I want to talk about Fletcher.” He looks like he just pulled off a really painful Band-Aid from a really scabby wound.
“Oh. Is that all?”
He leans forward suddenly and takes my hand. “Honey…I just want to be sure you’re…safe.”
Oh no. Please. Not this. Not my dad trying to talk to me about sex. Anything but that.
I feel myself blushing violently. “Oh, Dad. You don’t have to worry about that—”
“Now, hear me out.” He nods his head in what I guess he believes is a real paternal way, but he looks like one of those birds that dips its head into a cocktail and then flips back out. “You don’t have to tell me anything. I just want to tell you some facts. Did you know that for every baby born to a mother under sixteen—”
“For God’s sake, Dad!” I jump off the couch as if he put a bottle rocket under my butt. “I do not want to have this conversation!”
“Shelby. Sit down right now.” He still has that dadlike tone that means I must obey him, so I sit. “You’re just too young to have a child.”
“Dad, I’d actually have to have sex to have a child, and I’m not having sex. End of story.”
“But, honey, I was a teenage boy. I know how they think. Right now you say that you’re not interested, but when you’re in the heat of the moment—”
I cannot stand it another minute. I feel like my skin is blistering off my body, that hot oil has been poured in my ears and is draining to my kneecaps. I run screaming, literally, dash down the hall to my room, slam the door, and lock it from the inside. I stand against the door in the dark and listen for him; he doesn’t follow me.
“Well, that went well.” Euphoria is parked in her usual spot, recharging in my room. Her green lights blink on, off, on, off. “Why were you screaming?”
“You wouldn’t understand.” In the dark, I rummage through my drawer and pull out my oldest, least attractive nightgown to wear to bed. I feel sort of unclean, like I can never wear anything even remotely sexy again.
“Let me guess.” She whirs confidently. “Your father wanted to talk to you about the birds and the bees.”
“Do you even know what the birds and bees are?” Frustrated, I plop down on my bed and pull the covers up to my chin.
“I’m pretty well read. Plus, your father told me what he wanted to talk to you about. Why are you crying, Shelby?”
I am, indeed, crying. I really don’t know why; sometimes I just do that. Euphoria, being a robot, doesn’t really understand emotions that much, so it kind of confuses her. The closest thing in her experience is a fluid leak.
“Are you crying because your father was insensitive?” Her red lights now start to blink rapidly. “If he was, I’ll give him a talking to. And maybe a taser.”
I laugh in spite of myself. “No, no tasering necessary. He just wanted to talk about it.”
“Why does that bother you?”
Why does it bother me? A good question. A very good question. I do not have a good answer. “I don’t know. I want to go to sleep now.”
“Hmmm.” She turns on her music function and starts to play a sweet Irish lullaby with no words, no thoughts. Perfect for me at that moment. I lay on my bed and as I drift off to sleep, my pillow is wet and I’m exhausted.
I am awakened the next morning by the phone. Euphoria is nowhere in sight, so I have to answer it myself. How rude. “Hello?” I croak.
“You will never believe this.” It’s Becca. Of course.
“What will I never believe?” I stifle a yawn and notice the black streaks on my pillowcase. That’s going to leave a stain…. Euphoria will be really pissed.
“I found a note on my front door this morning.”
“Yeah?” The black streaks sort of form a pattern, kind of a Chinese I-Ching symbol or a rune or something. Maybe I should look it up—
“Are you listening to me?”
“Yes,” I lie.
She sighs heavily. “You really need to get more sleep. Was
Fletcher keeping you up all night?”
“Please. Let’s talk about you.” I know that’s a favorite subject, so it shouldn’t be that hard to get her to focus on that instead of me and my love life. “What was posted on your front door? A bloody handprint? A notice from the health department? What?”
“It was a letter.” She pauses for dramatic effect. “From the bunny man.”
I don’t immediately remember the bunny man, I must admit. I search my brain database for references to bunnies, and all I come up with are Playboy bunnies, Easter bunnies, and Bugs Bunny. I can’t imagine why any of these three would leave a note on Becca’s front door.
She’s impatient, though, so she explains: “The bunny man from the Comic-Con! He left me another poem.”
Ah, yes. The rhyming rabbit. “And is it any more clear than the other one?”
“Not really.” She clears her throat and I can tell by the inflection (and yes, you can have an inflection when clearing your throat) that she wants me to invite myself over. But instead of doing that, I just hang silently on the phone. She says, “So…I guess I’ll let you go.”
My previous day has made me sort of cranky. In fact, it would probably be good if I talked with her about the whole Dad/sex conversation and Fletcher and Jon and Amber. “Can Thea come and pick me up? I’ll come over. Or you can come over here. But I’d rather come to your place. Dad and I had some weirdness last night.”
“Let me check.” She covers the receiver loosely with her hand, I know, because I can hear her screaming for her mom. “Thea! Thea! Where are you? Crap. She’s never around when you need her.” She uncovers the phone and says, “I can’t find her at the moment. She’s probably getting a green tea massage or something. I’ll call you back.” Click.
I grab the portable phone and wander into the kitchen, praying I won’t run into Dad. If I have to talk about sex before I eat anything, I’ll probably have the dry heaves. Luckily, only Euphoria is there, putting dishes away. “Good morning, Shelby.”
“Hi, Euphoria.” I grab a bowl and blindly pour some Golden Grahams into it, followed by skim milk. “Is there coffee?”
“You shouldn’t drink coffee.” She pours me half a cup anyway.
“Lots of stuff I shouldn’t do, I suppose.” I sip it; it is good. “Where’s Dad?”
“He left early. Said he had to go into the office for something. But I can tell you, he seemed awfully worried about you. His blood pressure was high all night.”
“I don’t want to go into it.” She whirs disappointedly. “Oh, don’t be like that. I’m just tired, and I don’t want to rehash the same discussion.”
“You’re going to Becca’s house?”
“Have you been listening to my conversations again?” I pour more coffee, just to spite her.
“No. I just deduced it using good, old-fashioned logic.” She finishes putting the dishes away, rolls over to me, and pats my hand.
Becca calls back and tells me that Thea is, indeed, coming over to pick me up. “But try to be ready when she gets there,” she says, annoyed. “She’s right in the middle of some mud sculpture, and if it dries too much, her work is ruined.” She says the last part with a fake English accent.
“You’re so mean about Thea’s work.” I pull on a pair of shorts while trying to balance the phone under my chin.
“I think her ‘work’ is a travesty against art. Remember last year’s vegetable mosaic? That got trashed in the L.A. Times. They said it looked like a windshield repair truck crashed into the Farmer’s Market.”
“I still think you could be a little nicer. Anyway, I’ll wash up and wait on the porch.”
I grab my stuff (iPod, cell, bag, perfume) and take up my position on the swing. It’s a warm morning, not too hot, with a breeze floating the smell of roses through the air. Mom used to love roses. She’d come outside and dig around their roots and cut off the dead parts so carefully…. What’s strange is that when I sit down for a minute and think about her, I can’t see her face in my memories. I see her hands. Her hands were always kind of red, from gardening or washing dishes (she did them by hand all the time, Dad says.) And she had a ring on one finger, a little gold ring that looked like a four-leaf clover with hollowed-out leaves, with a tiny diamond in the middle. I can see that ring whenever I think of her; Dad has it stowed in a safe place in anticipation of the magical day when I get old enough to “wear it responsibly.”
I let my thoughts just kind of drift on the rose-scented air for a while, and close my eyes. I guess I fall asleep, because the next thing I know Thea is in my driveway in her Jeep, honking like the zombies are after her brain.
“Hurry, Shelby!” She waves frantically at me from the driver’s seat. “I’ve got mud that’s drying out!”
“I know, I know.” I climb in and before I can even fasten my seat belt, she’s peeling out down the driveway. That mud must be something special.
Once we get to Becca’s, Thea bolts from the car, barely turning off the engine, and I get out a little more slowly. Becca comes running outside in her jammies waving what I presume to be the mystery poem.
She is so excited she’s jumping a bit, sloshing coffee all over her well-tended lawn. “I need your help. I want to decode these things.”
“Is it possible that it’s just a prank? Somebody trying to get you all excited about nothing?”
She looks deflated. “Why would someone do that?”
“We’ve done it to other people, so why do we do it?” I say.
She cocks her head to one side like a puppy listening for a car, and thinks for a moment. “We’ve never done anything intentionally mean, though. Making me think that there’s a mysterious man out there who likes me—”
“A mysterious creature. We cannot assume he’s a man.”
She snorts in annoyance. “Fine, a creature. A living, breathing something. Making me think that when there’s no one really there is just mean. I just don’t think that’s what’s going on. But let’s go in the house. You probably want coffee.”
“I do. Euphoria would only give me half a cup.”
“Now that’s mean.”
Becca leads me to her kitchen, where a stack of books is piled on the glass-topped table and an intense reading light is focused on the note as if it’s a criminal waiting to be interrogated.
“Wow. You are taking this seriously, aren’t you?” I slide into a chair and pick up a few of the books, and check out the titles. “The Annotated Alice. Wonderland Revealed. Poems of Lewis Carroll. So, is this your summer project?”
She brings a bowl of Golden Grahams to the table, no milk, and digs into it with a spoon. “Want some?”
“Already had. Thanks. As I was saying, is this your summer project?”
She crunches loudly, making a face to tell me that she’d answer, but she has too much food in her mouth. Finally, she replies: “Not a summer project, really. Just kind of interesting.”
“Well, you’re spending an awful lot of time thinking about this guy. What happened to your undying love for Jon?”
She shakes her head sadly. “I’m afraid I have to admit defeat, Shelby. He is clearly into Amber.”
“You’re going to admit defeat.” I cross my arms and give her my best I-don’t-think-so stare.
“Sure, why not?” While munching her cereal, Becca squints at the letter. “Realistically, I don’t have a shot at Jon. He couldn’t care less about me.”
“So why did you keep trying to touch him in the car yesterday?”
Her head snaps up, and her eyes are blazing. “What?”
“I was sitting in front. I saw you trying to touch his arm.”
“I was not!”
“Okay, okay.” I don’t know why she’s in such denial about this crush thing. It’s sort of unlike her, really; she’s usually brutally honest when it comes to self-evaluation. I make a mental note to keep a close eye on the Jon situation. “Let’s have a look at the poem.”
The handwriting is t
he same as what I remember on the other note, and the poem is written in basically the same style. Out loud, I read:
’Twas Brillig and the slithy toves,
Were walking at the Comic-Con.
All radiant wherever Becca goes,
This bunny wants to be the one.
My evaluation? “That is some pretty crappy poetry.”
Becca is biting her fingernails, and she wrinkles her nose at me. “Yeah, it is pretty bad, huh? Maybe the guy is just too in love to think straight.”
“Well, it’s obvious that it’s got something to do with Alice in Wonderland, which I see you’ve already figured out,” I say, pointing to the stack of books. “I guess I’d be wondering how this guy knows that you are an Alice in Wonderland fanatic. Doesn’t that fact creep you out just a little bit?”
Becca clearly hasn’t thought of that angle. She blinks a bit, bewildered.
We both stare at the stack of books, trying to puzzle out how some big lug in a rabbit suit would possibly know about this small detail, and I personally am a little big dismayed that he might have Google-stalked Becca.
Becca laughs, relieved. “Oh, I know! It’s my MySpace. I have the whole thing done with Alice pictures and quotes. I totally forgot.”
I’m secretly kind of relieved about that. At least the rabbit guy isn’t some secret agent with super spying capabilities. I hope. “Well, good. Mystery solved. Beyond that, I don’t think there’s any secret message or anything. It’s just kind of crappy poetry by a crush-struck guy in a rabbit suit.”
“Right.” Becca leans forward, eyes glowing with excitement. “But maybe there’s a code hidden in there, some first-letter-of-each-word kind of code or something, to give me a hint about where to meet him.”
This girl is desperate, I realize. I don’t even know what to say. Becca has always been the one who just barely noticed guys, and she certainly never let them run her life. But here she is, obsessing over somebody she’s never even met, and crushing over some guy who’s dating her friend. It’s kind of incomprehensible. “A code, huh?” I pick up a piece of paper and a pencil and begin writing down the first letter of each word.