by Anna Jarzab
“You’re taking your sister to the DMV,” my mother said, setting a plate with a bagel on it down in front of me.
“No way!” I cried, pushing the bagel away. It smelled like bribery.
“You’re going to do it, and you’re going to do it with a smile,” Mom said, looking at Dad for support. He looked at me and pulled his mouth into a Cheshire-cat grin with his pointer fingers.
“Ugh, you two are the worst,” I groaned. “I was just at the DMV!”
“I remember,” Dad said. “I drove you there. Both times. To get the license we paid for to drive the car we generously loan to you. Not doing this for Hannah will disqualify you from using the car yourself. Got it?”
He and Mom stared at me. I relented.
“Fine,” I said, taking a bite out of my bagel. It might’ve smelled like bribery, but it tasted like coercion.
Pawel surprised me at my locker that morning. “Hey,” he said, leaning against the wall. “Did you get all that physics homework done?”
I nodded. “It took me forever, though. Didn’t you do it?”
He shrugged. “I considered doing it. I finished a couple of problems. It was really boring.”
I laughed and stood up, slinging my bag over my shoulder. “It’s homework. It’s supposed to be boring. Come on, we’re going to be late for class.”
“Do you always do your homework?” Pawel asked, matching my speed as we walked through the hallways.
“Usually,” I said.
“You’re a straight-A student, aren’t you?” His voice had a note of amusement in it.
“Pretty much,” I said. There were lots of things I didn’t like about myself, but the one thing I was never ashamed of was my dedication to school. Both of my parents believed in the value of a good education, and they had passed that belief on to me. On to us, I mean to say. In the flickering nickelodeon of my early-childhood memories was a short clip of me standing in front of the refrigerator while my mom cooked dinner. I was staring at the various tests and papers sixteen-year-old Hannah had brought home with big red As on them.
Your sister is such a good student, Mom said in my memory. Are you going to be a good student, too?
Yes, I told her firmly. At five I was already determined to be just as good as Hannah was. I’m going to get straight As.
At least, that was how I remembered it.
“Your parents must be proud of you,” Pawel teased.
“Sometimes,” I told him. “Mostly they’re just annoyed with me.”
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“They think I have a bad attitude,” I said. “But I maintain that it’s the other way around.”
“And you’re the youngest?” he guessed.
“How did you know?” Almost everybody who knew I had an older sister had forgotten years earlier, yet he picked up on it immediately, without knowing a thing about me. “Does my bad attitude scream ‘spoiled baby’ to you?”
“No,” he said, smiling. “First of all, I don’t think you have a bad attitude. Second of all, you don’t act like a youngest child at all. You work hard, you don’t coast. You don’t have a car of your own.”
“Reb has a car, and she’s the oldest,” I said.
“Who?”
“Reb. My best friend. She’s in our French class.”
“Oh, right. I’m not saying that all youngest children have their own cars, or that no oldest children have their own cars, but in my experience a younger child is more likely to have one than an older child.”
“I could be one of the exceptions,” I said.
“You could.”
“Or I could be an only child.”
“You’re not.”
“How could you tell?”
“You’re just not. Only children might as well be wearing Christmas lights made out of fluorescent bulbs for how easily they stand out at school. You’re the youngest. But you’re not spoiled. Curious.”
“What are you, some sort of aspiring anthropologist?”
“Not really. This is just a game I like to play.”
“Okay, so what made you think I was the youngest?”
He scrunched up his face, as if debating whether to say what he was thinking, or trying to think of a better way. “You don’t seem desperate for attention, I guess.”
“Thanks?” I wasn’t sure how to take that, although it sounded like a compliment, or at least a non-insult.
“There’s more,” he said. He searched my face as if to see if I was interested in hearing it. I gave him an expectant smile and he continued. “You’re friendly and outgoing, but you’re also really secure in your friendships, so you don’t seem to care very much if strangers like you. I could tell when I first talked to you that you weren’t putting on a show. You were just being yourself. But it’s weird, you know.”
“What’s weird?” I asked.
“You’re, like …” He searched for the right words. “You’re really into school and obviously a total overachiever, which fits better with oldest children. But you don’t seem to be as neurotic about school as an oldest child would be. My oldest sister, Magda, is a bossy know-it-all but you’re not like that.”
I nodded, smiling.
“You think it’s bullshit,” Pawel said.
“No, no.” I rushed to assure him.
He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s just a goofy thing I do for fun sometimes, when I meet new people. It makes it easier, you know. It gives me something else to focus on besides how nervous I am.”
“I understand,” I said. The notion of Pawel’s being nervous around anyone was odd. He seemed so sure of himself, so easy to be around. Had he really been nervous around me? If he had been, I couldn’t tell.
“So how many Mitchells are there?” he asked.
I considered carefully how much to tell him about Hannah. “Two,” I finally said. This was the first time in a long time I’d mentioned Hannah to anybody, even obliquely. Part of me felt like it wanted to tell Pawel everything, every single thing I was thinking and feeling about Hannah, even the things I hadn’t quite figured out how to express in words; I thought once I started talking about her, it might all just pour out of me like a dam had burst. But there was another part that was afraid I had already said too much. I was used to pretending Hannah didn’t exist, and if I told Pawel, I might have to tell everyone else, too, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that. That part of me wanted to lock it all away where nobody could get at it, where I was free to figure out how I felt and what I wanted at my own pace.
“Older sister?” Pawel said, pulling me back.
“How do you do that?” Although it was mostly guesswork, I had to admit that Pawel was skilled at this strange little game of his. “You should take this show on the road, maybe get a job at Six Flags guessing people’s ages or something.”
He laughed. “It’s just if you had an older brother, I’m sure I would’ve heard about him by now. Baby sisters tend to be proud of their older brothers. They mention them more than they think they do, especially to guys.”
“Is that so?”
“Yup.”
I could feel myself beaming at Pawel. I was getting a kick out of his confidence in his weird talent, how proud he was of what he could figure out about me just by paying attention. It wasn’t something I was used to, having someone really take an interest in me. I loved my friends—there was no doubt in my mind that I’d be lost without them and they tried their best—but they had their own lives and their own troubles and they were mostly focused on those. And Derek—forget it. Derek hardly noticed anything I ever did unless it was directly related to him.
“Maybe I have a reason for keeping my hypothetical older brother a secret.”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe he’s a CIA agent on assignment in Saudi Arabia and any information I might have about his mission or his whereabouts is top secret and likely to get us both killed,” I proposed.
>
“I like the way you think, Caro,” he said. “What’s your sister like?”
I hesitated. “Older than me,” I said. “Much older.”
“Oh, that explains some things,” he said, rubbing the base of his neck thoughtfully. “How much?”
“Eleven years,” I said, determined that it would be the last thing I said about her. “What about you?”
“You tell me.”
But I wasn’t nearly as good at this game as he was. I feared I hadn’t paid attention to the right things about him to make an educated assessment. So I guessed. “You’re the middle. And you’re the only boy.”
“Right and wrong,” Pawel said. “I’m the middle, but I have a younger brother and two older sisters.”
“Lucky you.”
“Honestly, it’s not that bad,” he admitted.
“We’re here,” I said, stopping in front of the door.
“Where?” he asked, still looking at me.
“French.” I opened the door to Madame’s classroom and slipped inside. Reb looked up at me, then to Pawel, who had followed me in, then back at me. When she caught my eye, she winked.
“What happened this morning with Pawel?” Reb asked. Erin, who had been picking at her tuna salad sandwich, perked up.
“Walk-and-talk,” I said. I was glad Pawel and I had different lunch periods. It ensured that I had fifty uninterrupted minutes to talk to my friends about him, which I’d been doing with increasing and alarming frequency since I’d met him.
“How was it?” Erin asked.
“Good.” I couldn’t believe how much I liked talking to Pawel. I’d loved being with Derek, but I couldn’t say that our conversations were the most thrilling I’d ever had. But it was my mission to play it cool. You couldn’t be too obvious about liking a guy. You didn’t want to be one of those girls, as Reb and I called them. Erin was one of those girls. We loved her, but she was.
“Do you think he likes you back?” Erin pressed.
“Who says I like him?” I don’t know whom I thought I was fooling, but my friends weren’t going along for the ride. They knew me too well.
“Uh, you did.” It was nice of her not to point out how glaringly obvious it was, how I glowed like a light-bulb every time I was near him.
“Lies! I did not.”
“You cyberstalked him,” Reb reminded me. “Unsuccessfully, of course, but you did try.”
“We cyberstalk everybody.”
“Yeah, but you got upset when you couldn’t cyberstalk him,” Reb pointed out.
“I wouldn’t say I was upset,” I said, correcting her. “I was curious. Interested. Intrigued, if you will.”
“I won’t. You’re smitten,” Erin insisted. I opened my mouth to protest, but she held up her hand to silence me. “No, I won’t hear it. You love him.”
“Will you two give it a rest?” I cried. “I don’t even know him.”
“Well, due to his lack of Internet presence, that would require talking to him,” Reb observed.
“I do talk to him.”
“I meant talking to him about him. Not you.”
I took Reb’s advice to heart and decided to find out more about Pawel.
“So,” I said to Pawel as we left precalc together late that afternoon. “Where did you go to school before this?”
“Fairview,” he said as if it was the least interesting fact in the world. Pawel didn’t seem to like talking about himself. I found it sort of strange. You couldn’t get most people to shut up about themselves usually.
“Did you like it there?” Fairview was another big high school, just a few towns over. The Sobczak family hadn’t moved very far.
He shrugged. “It was okay. Nothing special. Not like this place,” he said sarcastically. He gestured widely, looking a little like Maria whirling around on the mountains of Austria in The Sound of Music. I laughed.
“This is a great school,” I mock-scolded him. “Look at how shiny the lockers are.”
“Good point, counselor,” he said, shifting his backpack onto one shoulder. “Locker aesthetics are very important.”
“So you transferred because your family moved?”
“Mmm-hmm,” he murmured absently. I could’ve asked, “Is my head on fire?” and I probably would’ve received the same response. I didn’t get the feeling he was ignoring me, really. He just seemed bored by his own story.
“Tell me about your family.”
“Why?” he asked, looking genuinely baffled.
I could see that home life wasn’t a sufficiently interesting subject, but I was committed to it. “Because you mentioned them earlier and I want to know more.”
“Well, okay. I have two sisters and a brother.”
“I got that much.”
“So you were taking notes,” he said.
I tapped my right temple. “Like a sponge.”
“That explains the grades. My parents are from Poland, and they immigrated in the late eighties, when my sisters were really young,” Pawel told me. “Jake and I were born here.”
“So you still have a shot at the presidency,” I said.
“Only when Americans find room in their heart for a Catholic candidate that isn’t as devastatingly handsome as JFK,” Pawel joked.
“You’re Catholic?” I asked, surprised.
“Mass every Sunday,” he said, rolling his eyes. “My mom’s pretty devout.”
“Hmm.”
“Did I lose your vote?” he asked, more serious for that moment than I’d ever seen him—not that I had very much experience.
“No.” I laughed softly. “You were saying about your sisters …”
“I was?”
“No, but I’m asking.”
“So there’s Magda, who’s twenty-two, and Monika, who’s twenty. They’re both at Loyola, but they come home every weekend to do their laundry, so it’s like they never left.” He sighed. “And then Jake—Jakub, actually, but he’s gone by Jake since he started school. He’s thirteen.”
“Nice big family.”
“Really? I don’t know. My parents are both one of ten.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. We’re good breeders.” He smiled. “And it’s just you and your sister.” I didn’t miss the shift back to me, although I had to give him credit for subtlety.
“Well … I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Hannah’s eleven years older than me, and she went away for a while when I was eight, so it’s not like we were raised together,” I told him. There was a sudden buzzing in my head, a sound like white noise, like the flutter of insect wings, and I could feel the fact of Hannah’s absence from my life slipping out of my hands as I scrambled to figure out how much I trusted Pawel, and how much I really wanted him to know.
“Where did she go?”
“Oh, college, and then … other places,” I said. Maybe if I was vague about it, he would back down.
“That’s a great story,” he teased, waiting for more.
I shrugged. “So anyway. I was basically raised like an only child.”
“But you saw her at holidays and stuff, right?” Pawel asked. “I mean, she wasn’t totally gone.”
“No, not totally …” I knew I was bullshitting him, but I still didn’t want to talk to anybody about Hannah. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed, necessarily, but that I didn’t know how to explain her in such a way that I didn’t come off as an asshole and she didn’t come off as a total freak. And it wasn’t the nun thing; there was nothing wrong with being a nun. It was her age when she went in, and the secretiveness with which she made such a life-altering decision, and now the mystery surrounding her return.
“Where does she live now?”
Here we go, I thought. “At home, actually.”
“Really? She must be”—he did the calculations in his head—“twenty-seven now, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Kind of old to still live at home.” I stiffened, but he barrele
d right on forward, prying me open with an expectant look. I took a second to consider what he must be like with his family. They were close; they must be for him to assume that I would have no problem talking about my sister, that I wouldn’t be secretive or closed off about such a straightforward subject.
“Sure. No, of course you’re right, but Hannah just got back from—” I thought quickly. “The Peace Corps. She was with the Peace Corps in Africa and now her term of service is over and she’s not quite sure what she wants to do next. So she came home for a little while.”
And there she was, Caroliar, back again with a vengeance out of some deep dark pit. My old nemesis, after all that time, come to sweep me away on a wave of misdirection and falsehood. Except I wasn’t twelve years old anymore, and I should’ve known better. I should’ve told the truth.
“The Peace Corps. That’s no joke,” Pawel said. “Where in Africa was she?”
Goddammit. Why did I have to lie? I knew precisely zero about Africa. “Chad.”
“Cool,” he said. “Your sister has kind of a kick-ass life, you know that?”
I smiled uncertainly. “She sure does.”
“Hi,” Hannah called, hearing me come in through the garage. “How was your day?”
“Fine,” I said, taking immediate refuge in my room. She was the absolute last person I wanted to see at the moment, after the way I’d completely lied about her earlier to Pawel. I kept hoping the sick, guilty feeling I had in the pit of my stomach would go away, but it stayed put to remind me how once again I’d denied my sister. Worse still, I couldn’t even pretend that I was trying to protect her. It was none of Pawel’s business where she’d been and why she was back, and really, who was he to pass judgment on how old she was and the fact that she was still living at home? But that wasn’t why I’d done it and I couldn’t trick myself into thinking that it was.
I shut the door, threw my bag onto the bed, and sat down in front of my computer. Almost instantaneously, an IM from Reb popped up.
Rebelieuse: I saw you went active. How was precalc?
Reb knew precalc was the last class I had with Pawel. It was her subtle way of getting me to spill any juicy details. Unfortunately for her, there really weren’t any.