All our carefully sorted piles are gone. The dolls. The stuffed animals. The trash bags. The boxes. All our organized stacks. Gone. Strewn across the floor. Unsorted.
Leslie gives me a wobbly smile.
“What happened?” I repeat.
“Mom,” Leslie says as if the one word explains everything. And, sadly, it does.
“When?” I ask. “How did she find out we were cleaning up here? Did you tell her?”
“No.” Leslie shakes her head. “Last night. After Grandma Nora and I got back from Marcini’s. Grandma Nora finished throwing out the egg cartons, then she went to bed. She said she had a headache. But Mom woke up and came in my room.”
No wonder Mom is so eager to ship me off with Rae’s family—she’s seen Leslie’s room. She knows what we’ve been up to. I stand there, hands at my sides, and let my eyes roam over the damage. The Toy Catacombs look even worse than before we started. There used to be paths between the piles. Now it’s just rubble. Teddy bears and Cabbage Patch dolls are spread out everywhere. And all our boxes and trash bags are strewn among the toys. Mom must have been having one of her nuclear meltdowns to have done this: I can’t find any order whatsoever to the mess.
I want to scream. I want to smash something. How could she do this to Leslie? And to me? A little part of me even wonders if this is some kind of payback for what I said about her on the stairs yesterday. But stronger than all my warring reactions is this terrible, insurmountable exhaustion. Which only makes me more determined to go. “Leslie, why did you let her do it?”
“She said she just wanted to see what we were getting rid of … I couldn’t stop her.”
“I would have.”
“I know,” says Leslie. “But you were in your tent. You weren’t here.”
“You were.”
“I’m not you,” Leslie says, fiddling with the hem of her shirt. “Can we fix it?”
“Yes.” I plop down, grab a trash bag, and start throwing every nasty stuffed animal inside. I don’t have long before I need to start packing, but I can make enough time to help with this. Leslie closes her bedroom door and joins me in the rubble. “If Mom does this again, you have to stop her,” I say.
“I can if you’re here.”
I don’t know how to answer that, so I just grunt. Then I want to crawl into a hole and die, because you know who else grunts? My mom. She grunts when she’s avoiding something or when she’s upset or angry or hyperfocused.
“On the bright side,” Leslie says, “at least Grandma Nora threw out the egg cartons.”
I barely stop myself from grunting a second time. I want to say: Leslie, sometimes there is no bright side. Or sometimes the only bright side is a way out. But this is so not the time to tell Leslie that I’ve found my way out and I’m taking it.
So I don’t say anything, and we work in silence, redoing all that Mom had undone. We’ve probably been sorting for an hour when I find Pukey the Porpoise in the mess, but there’s no giggling stuffed-animal war this time. I just silently put him in a black bag and then leave to wash my hands.
I’m not in the bathroom very long, but when I come back, disaster has struck again. Leslie is seated on her bedroom floor, surrounded by a pile of stuffed animals that I could swear we just finished sorting. Then I notice one of the throwaway bags is turned inside out.
“Did Mom come through here again?” I ask, ready to go ballistic.
“No.”
“Then why did you dump out that bag?”
“I just—I just … ” Leslie shrugs like she can’t find the words. Then she holds up a small bunny. The ears are flopped over. The fur is matted and more brown than pink after being dragged too many places over too many years.
“What about her?” I ask.
“Miss Ears was in the throwaway pile,” she says. “At first I thought it was Bunbun”—she glances toward the bed, where her stuffed rabbit is sitting—“and then I realized that this one is yours.”
“I know. I put her there.”
“But it’s Miss Ears. You’ve had her since I was born. She and Bunbun are practically sisters.”
“Leslie, they’re just stuffed animals.”
“No, they’re not. You can’t throw Miss Ears away.” Leslie stands up and holds out the rabbit like she’s going to force the stuffed animal into my arms. I take a step back and put my hands up like a criminal about to surrender to the police. Only, I’m not surrendering—I just don’t want to take the rabbit.
“But, Annabelle,” Leslie says when she realizes I’m not about to take it. “You used to love her so much. You can’t just get rid of her.”
I frown. I try to think of a reason to put Miss Ears in the giveaway bin, but she’s so old and worn-out and dirty that I can’t imagine anyone else would want her. Part of me wishes I could reach out and take Miss Ears from Leslie, but there’s no room for her in my life. She’s nonessential.
“Whose side are you on?” I ask Leslie, annoyed that she’s actually tempting me.
“Side? What sides?” Leslie asks.
“My side or Mom’s side.”
“What do you mean?” Leslie lowers her outstretched arm. Miss Ears dangles from her hand. Leslie looks incredibly fragile and young. Like a five-year-old clutching her favorite toy by its paw. We have a picture of me, standing almost exactly like that (only I was smiling) before my first day of kindergarten.
“It’s me or Mom,” I tell Leslie, slowly and clearly. “If you want to hold on to everything like Mom, then fine. I’ll just go pack. But if you want to get it together, then let’s put this stuff back in the trash bag. And this time leave it there.”
“Pack? Why do you have to pack?”
Whoops. Well, this isn’t exactly how I wanted to tell her. But since the cat’s out of the bag, I try to sound bright and excited, like I have no clue that this might upset her. “Rae and her mom invited me to go to the lake with them. Isn’t that awesome? We’re gonna water-ski and everything.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“Just a couple weeks.”
“Two whole weeks?”
“Closer to three.”
Leslie visibly deflates. Her shoulders, her head, the corners of her mouth, they all droop. Miss Ears falls to the ground. I grab the rabbit by her foot and toss her in the trash bag. “C’mon,” I say. “Let’s pick this up again and then we can go over the plan for your room. That way you can keep working while I’m gone.”
“Do you have to go?”
She sounds so sad that I stop what I’m doing. Do I have to go? Really have to go? I think about World War III. I think about Drew seeing me scream. I think about Dad not calling and Chad closing the bathroom door in my face. I think about giving up my room to Grandma Nora. I think about what it’s like to sleep in the Toy Catacombs, and I think about what it’s like to clean up after Mom destroys all our hard work.
“Yeah,” I say. “I have to.”
“Please don’t.”
“I think I’ll go crazy if I stay.”
Leslie stares around her bedroom. “I might go crazy if you leave,” she says. I think about her nightmares and her File o’ Death, and I know she needs me.
Then she says, “Annabelle, I can’t do this without you.”
And something inside me hardens. I cleaned out my room alone when I was her age. There was no one to help me when I threw everything out the window. If I could figure it out, so can she. “Sure you can,” I say.
“No, I can’t.” She’s shaking her head.
This is stupid. A yes-no-yes-no fight won’t get us anywhere. So I say: “I promise to help you when I get back. But someday, you’re going to have to learn how to stand up for yourself. You have to be strong on your own.”
“I thought we were stronger together,” she says.
I leave anyway.
It doesn’t take me long to pack. Luckily, Grandma Nora is downstairs waging her war on the house, so I have my room to myself while I stuff my duffel bag
full of shorts and T-shirts and swimsuits. It’s early afternoon by the time I drag my luggage downstairs and find Grandma Nora fiddling with the doorknob of the Forbidden Room. I really do wonder what Mom is keeping in there. All the leaves Dad rakes up in the yard every autumn?
“Are you trying to pick the lock?” I ask.
Grandma Nora jerks away from the door and hides the screwdriver behind her back. She looks like a kid who just got caught stealing chocolate chips from the pantry. She glances to her right and then to her left. “Oh, is it locked ? I just thought maybe the door was jammed.”
And now I know where Leslie inherited her inability to lie.
I smile. “Okay then. Hey, will you tell my mom I said bye?”
“What? Where is she? Is your mother coming?” Grandma Nora takes another step away from the door. Then the second part of what I said sinks in and she focuses on me, on the duffel bag and backpack in my hands. “What’s all this?” She gestures to my luggage, and I see that there are no longer any rings on her fingers. Even her nails are ragged and unkempt.
I consider answering Grandma Nora’s question. I really do. But I know what she’ll say. She’ll say all the things my mom should have said. Grandma Nora will tell me that I should follow through on my promise to Leslie, that I should stay and help her clean. She’ll tell me I should apologize to my mom for the scene on the stairs yesterday. She’ll say all the things I don’t want to hear. So I ignore Grandma Nora’s question.
Instead, I say: “You might want to put the screwdriver away before my mom notices you had it out. You don’t even want to know what happened last time my dad tried to open that door.”
Grandma Nora looks like she’s about to ask what happened, but a creak from the upstairs hallway sends her scurrying off. She must be as tired of fighting with my mom as the rest of us are of hearing them fight.
I pick up my bags, hoping to slip from the house without any more fuss. I don’t make it.
“Are you leaving already?” Mom asks, descending the stairs slowly. Her knees must still be hurting.
“Yeah.”
“I talked to your friend’s mom on the phone.” This surprises me, since I’d told Rae that Mrs. McKinley didn’t need to call. “They seem like nice people.”
“Yeah,” I say again. “Mrs. McKinley is awesome.”
And you’re not.
The unspoken words hover in the air between us. My mom pauses a second and squeezes her eyes closed; it’s like a slow-motion flinch. She opens her eyes again and takes the last few steps in silence. I shift my weight with my bags in hand, wishing that Rae and her mom would just show up already.
On the bottom step, Mom says, “Leslie sounds pretty upset that you’re leaving. I think she’s crying in her room.”
It’s the last thing I want to hear, especially coming from Mom.
“If she’s so upset, why don’t you do something about it?” I say, then I rush out the front door before either of us can say anything else. I don’t stop until I reach the end of our driveway, and it’s a long, long driveway. I stand there, near the main road, like a hitchhiker, and wait until Rae and her mom arrive.
As soon as we get to the McKinleys’ house, Rae and I pull on our swimsuits and jump into the pool. We spend most of the afternoon lying on lounge chairs, and I love the way Mrs. McKinley brings us lemonade and snacks and reminds us to put on more suntan lotion.
“This is so fun,” Rae says. “When it’s just the two of us. We’re definitely the closest friends in our group, aren’t we?”
I’m absentmindedly nodding when Rae’s mom appears with watermelon slices. “Thanks,” I say.
Rae rolls her eyes. “You don’t have to tell her thank you every time she brings something. She’s just trying to clean out the fridge before we leave, aren’t you, Mom?”
Mrs. McKinley laughs a little and rolls her eyes right back Rae. “At least someone taught Annabelle good manners.”
Rae sticks out her tongue at me. So I stick out my tongue back at her. Unfortunately, I have a mouthful of watermelon and a bunch of pink mush oozes down my chin. Some of it sprays on my legs.
“Ew!” says Rae, scooting away from me on her chair, which makes me laugh. More watermelon-tinged spit sprays everywhere. Rae starts laughing, too. And once we start, neither of us can stop. Maybe the sun has fried our brains.
After a while, Mrs. McKinley seems to agree that we’ve gotten enough sun and she calls us inside to help. She wants to leave the house clean. It’s a strange concept to me. Why bother scrubbing down a house we’re not going to use for three weeks? I can totally understand cleaning after we get back … but before we go? It’s so different from the way my family operates that it almost makes me wonder if I’ll miss home. I’ve never been away from my family for more than a couple of nights at a time before. Three weeks is starting to sound like a long time.
Rae and I empty the dishwasher and dust the downstairs. While we work, I keep thinking how ironic life is. I left Leslie to deal with the Toy Catacombs by herself, so I could help Rae dust her sparkling house. It doesn’t make any sense.
As we finish wiping down the dust-free bookshelves, Rae pulls out her phone.
“I’m inviting Jenny over. That way Mom won’t give us any more chores.”
“Won’t she just make Jenny help?”
“Since you’re going on vacation with us, Mom’s treating you like family, but Jenny’s a guest.”
I’m half-pleased that Rae thinks her mom is treating me like family. But the other half of me feels awful. I hate the way Chad always escapes to Will’s house and leaves me to deal with Mom and the house and Leslie. How is this any different? Guilt, guilt, guilt. This is probably why I tell Rae: “I’m not really in the mood to hang out.”
“Too late,” says Rae, hitting the send button.
“Fine. But if Jenny is coming over, we should invite Amanda, too.” Rae gets a funny look on her face. She doesn’t say no, but she doesn’t say yes either. She says, “Only if she can get her own ride. My mom doesn’t have time to pick up anyone else today.”
“Is Jenny getting her own ride?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
I’m not sure what just happened, but I think it might have been a fight. Or one of those weird nonfights. And I have no idea what it was about.
After Jenny and Amanda arrive, we move to the back deck, the one that overlooks the pool. Or, to be more accurate, Mrs. McKinley shoos us outside so she can vacuum a carpet that looks like it was already vacuumed once this morning.
We sit in a half circle. Rae and I are side by side on the porch swing. Amanda and Jenny sit in rocking chairs on either side of us. We talk a little about the party last weekend. I can’t believe it was only a few days ago. It feels like centuries since Dad left and Grandma Nora came to visit.
Then Amanda asks if I’ve finished her book.
“Not quite,” I say, sneaking a peek to see if Rae and Jenny are rolling their eyes at Amanda wanting to talk about books. To my surprise, Jenny actually sets her phone aside (she’s been obsessively texting Melanie since she arrived) and says, “Ooohh, what book?”
I never knew that Jenny liked to read. The one time I asked Rae which books she liked, she said, “Reading is so lame.” I didn’t bring it up again.
Amanda tells Jenny, “I gave Annabelle The Hero and the Crown.”
“I loved that book,” says Jenny. “I read it after Ms. Monroe told me I’d like it.”
“The school librarian?” says Rae, her eyebrows almost disappearing into her hairline.
Jenny nods.
“I know,” said Amanda. “And I read it because you said it was really good. Remember?”
“Oh yeah,” Jenny says. They start talking about the novel, and get in this big debate about whether they like Luthe or Tor better. I have to cover my ears and shout, “Stop! Stop! Stop!” whenever they start to talk about the ending.
“But Luthe saves Aerin,” Jenny is saying. “He brings her to the Lake of Dreams. Without him, she’d have died.”
“So what? If you think about it, Aerin probably would have died as a kid without Tor,” Amanda says. “He was her only friend, and he knows her better than anyone. He accepted her when no one else did.”
Rae is sitting on one foot. She drags the other foot loudly across the wood surface of the deck as I rock us back and forth in the swing.
Jenny says, “Sure Tor knew her when she was a kid, but by the end, he doesn’t know her anymore. She’s different after everything she survived. I mean, when she goes after her evil uncle—”
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” I say for the third or fourth time. “I haven’t gotten to that part yet.”
“Okay, fine. If you’re going to be all dramatic about it,” says Jenny, but she’s smiling.
“Who do you like better?” Amanda asks me.
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Well, hurry up and finish it,” says Jenny. “I know you’re going to be on my side. For real.” She’s texting as she says this, and I assume that she’s back to giving Melanie moment-by-moment updates. So it catches me by surprise when Amanda’s phone chimes.
Since when did Amanda and Jenny become such good friends? I always thought Amanda hung out with our group because of me. But Chatham is a small town, and it occurs to me that Amanda has probably known Jenny for as long as she’s known me. It’s a little disconcerting to hear them talking like this—not as my friends but as each other’s friends.
Amanda reads Jenny’s message, but she doesn’t text Jenny back. She answers out loud: “No. You’re wrong. Aerin has to be with Tor. She has to go back. She can’t just—”
“Okay,” I say, stopping the swing and the sound of Rae’s dragging foot, “if you guys are so determined to ruin the end of the book for me, I’m going inside for a minute, and when I get back, you better be talking about something different.”
Family Game Night and Other Catastrophes Page 12