by Jen Larsen
The kitchen is chaos. All the cupboard doors are open and coolers are stacked up by the door to the patio. Catering trays full of tamales and rice and beans and empanadas cover the entire kitchen island, and discarded wrappers from all the streamers and stars and napkins are a safety hazard all over the floor, and the dogs are circling around the island wondering when someone is going to pay attention to them, then stopping at the least convenient moment. I had wanted to cook all the food. Pinto beans bubbling all day, potatoes fried with onions, and warm, handmade tortillas. Soaking corn husks and kneading masa. My mother’s recipe. She never taught me. I found it on an index card stuffed in one of my father’s romance novels. But we did not have time for that. And it felt weirdly personal, too.
Mateo says, “If you knew anything about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles you’d know that the masks are an essential part of their identities.” He opens the fridge and takes out a can of Coke.
“I don’t know what that means,” I say. “Give me a Coke.”
“You don’t need one,” he says. “It’s all sugar and chemicals.” He takes a long sip from his can. He doesn’t burp, but that’s just because Jolene is in the room. Sometimes he has dignity, though he never worries about what he says in front of her. He has known Jolene since her parents were still calling her David.
I say, “Shut up, Mateo,” and he rolls his eyes and throws a can at me.
“Jolene?” he says, and hands her a soda very carefully.
“You suck,” I say to him.
“You should open that before the fizz goes down and it doesn’t explode all over you.”
I set it down on the counter and take out a new one and smirk at him. “Check me out. I’m a criminal mastermind.”
“I’ve licked the top of one of those cans and you’ll never know which,” he says. Jolene grimaces at her can. “Not yours,” he assures her.
“I’m tired of you now,” I say, hopping up onto one of the counter stools. “What are you doing? What have you been doing?”
“I napped,” he said. “Now I’m going to go have a couple of beers and call my girlfriend.”
“Grandmother wanted you to get chairs out of the studio.”
He snorts and heads out the back door.
“Get chairs!” I yell after him. He yells back something I can’t hear but I’m guessing isn’t polite, because he always has to have the last word.
The party is just a few hours away but things are not ready yet. Laura arrived at noon. I have been cleaning floors and finding places to stuff away my father’s romance novels and gathering up my mother’s plates. She collected ceramic from everywhere. I don’t know if she started before my grandmother let them move into the house or after. But her plates and cups are in every room. They are under the end tables and stacked on bookcase shelves and behind the couch. There is a pile in my closet that I will never move.
Laura’s been putting up the streamers, accompanied by the gentle jingling chime of her bracelets sliding up and down her arms. Streamers are hanging in the foyer and the hall and the dining room and kitchen. Now she’s back in the dining room, standing on a chair and sticking up glow-in-the-dark stars in between each streamer.
“Laura!” I call. “Jolene is here.”
“Jolene!” she yells. “Tell Ashley she’s got to wear the sequined skirt.”
Jolene frowns at me. “Do you want to wear the sequined skirt?” she asks me.
“No,” I say.
Jolene leans through the door. “She’d prefer not to wear it,” she says. “Why are you not using a stepladder?” Jolene looks at me. She is tapping on the doorframe in an anxious rhythm. “She’s standing on a chair.”
“I keep telling her she’s going to fall.”
“I’m not going to fall,” Laura calls.
“You have the rug all bunched up under the chair legs,” Jolene points out.
“Well, that isn’t very safe,” I say.
“Homeowner’s insurance covers her, right?” my father says, wandering into the room with a paperback in his hand.
“I’m not sure the policy extends to personal injury,” I say. Jolene is still peering around the corner and worrying her hands.
“I do what I want!” Laura shouts. Her voice echoes. It’s louder than the ice cubes crashing in the freezer.
“Here,” I say to Jolene. “Will you help me wash my mom’s plates?” I pat one of the piles.
Jolene is twisting her fingers together.
“Don’t worry,” I say.
She puts her hands behind her back as if she has seen me notice her twisting them. “I don’t want to break one.”
Lucas, hauling an armful of folding chairs through the door, snorts. “No one will notice. You know that.”
My father says, “Don’t break them, though.” He reaches for the shook-up can of Coke Mateo had thrown at me.
“She will not break them,” I say. “You won’t break them,” I tell Jolene. I take the can of Coke out of my father’s hand and replace it with my unopened one. He shrugs and wanders off.
Jolene is looking at the stack I’ve made. We have no idea how many plates there are, or how many stacks we’ve missed. This is a very large house. I remember my mother saying they were important parts of history even though they came from mostly thrift stores. That’s probably why she didn’t take them with her.
My grandmother ignores them because my father wants to keep them. The house seems full of her, in every room.
I hand Jolene a stack and she looks alarmed but resolute. When she is given a task, she is very serious about it. Mateo shuffles back into the kitchen, talking on his phone, and Lucas throws himself at his back. They wrestle, and overturn the box of masks. My father wanders back into the kitchen with his Coke in one hand and a string cheese in the other.
Hector comes through the sliding doors from the back porch and hauls Toby up into his arms. Toby stares stoically off into the distance, all four of his paws sticking straight out as Hector bounces him gently, cheerfully singing the Toby song. “Toby! He’s silly and he’s cuddly! Toby! His belly’s pretty fuzzy! Toby! Let’s tell him that he’s great! Good job, Toby!”
Toby doesn’t seem impressed.
I find Laura in the study on her rickety chair. She has added dozens of pink bead strands around her neck. Her hair is a halo in the sun and she looks perfect. She always does and I am not sure how it is possible.
“I’m almost done!” she says when she sees me. She jumps off the chair. Her arms go around my neck and she squeezes. “I love you!” she says to me. “Happy birthday! Look how amazing this place looks, look at it!” The whole house is filled with stars and lights and streamers and it all comes together to make something beautiful. That’s what Laura does.
She stops and looks at me and says, “Are you okay?”
I shake my head. “Noise,” I say. “You know. They’re so loud.”
“I know,” she says. She hands me a roll of streamers and gets up on a chair. “Hold this for me please? I have developed a system that has made it slightly more efficient to tape and hold and move and arrange but I am the first to admit that it’s also very nice when you have someone come and be your backup tape-holding person.” She grins at me and drags the chair over to the last corner, the throw rug still stuck on one of the back legs.
Laura is good at being silent, too, even when there are so many things we should be talking about. She tears off lengths of crepe paper and tapes them up. I steady the chair for her when she hops down and then I hold it when she hops back up. We fill the corner slowly. The noise in the kitchen gets louder but it seems far away, and it feels like we’re leaving a comet tail of streamers behind us.
“There,” Laura says. With a hand on my shoulder, she jumps down and says, “Okay?”
I say, “Thank you,” and things are okay.
She kisses me on the cheek. In the kitchen Lucas is lugging in yet more chairs from the garage.
“Wait, do we need ev
en more folding chairs?” I say.
Lucas shrugs. With one hand he pops open one of the catering trays and scoops a bunch of empanadas. He tosses an entire one into his mouth. “Where’s Clara?” he asks me with his mouth full.
My grandmother is in her office at the top of the stairs because she will help fund a party but she will not help plan it or set it up. The details are important but they’re for someone else to worry about. Not her. My grandmother has very particular ideas about delegation and taking care of the work you’re best suited for. She is not suited to getting her hands dirty, she says. Know where your skills lie and maximize your talent, she always says. She will come down for the party later, circulating through the crowd and remembering everyone’s names, shimmering in something elegant.
“She is probably hiding from us,” Jolene says.
“Hiding from your noise,” Laura says. She is covered in star-adhesive backing.
“Mine?” Mateo says. “Ashley’s a thundering herd of wildebeests.” He pokes me in my knee and I kick him hard.
I have heard this enough. My brothers are the only ones who dare say a word to me and Laura is astonished and enraged every time. She is only sputtering now, but not for long. Before I have to listen to her lay into him, I gather up all the boxes and bags and trash, and their clatter drowns out her voice. I carry my mountain of refuse to the front door. I can’t reach the handle, but I can’t just drop everything. I am inching toward the floor to set the boxes down when the front door swings in toward me, knocking everything out of my hands and me almost onto my butt.
“Watch it,” I say. I stagger to my feet and am looking at Laura’s twin. Brandon. As stupidly gorgeous as ever. We haven’t been alone since I asked him out last year, and my heart staggers to a halt.
Brandon takes my hand and says, “Are you okay?” He says it like he means it. He is narrow-shouldered and thin and not graceful. Though he looks like he should be graceful.
I like his mouth, I think. I shake that thought off and shake my hand out of his. “Yes!” I say. “Embarrassed about being clumsy mostly, I guess?”
He’s got olive-colored eyes and he has cropped his afro short so it is dark against his scalp and I want to touch his face. “I’m early,” he says, looking around. “I’m sorry. Are you still getting ready for the party?”
I look down at myself. “Is that a comment on my fancy formal wear?” I say. It’s a joke because I’m still wearing ratty jeans and my T-shirt and I can feel my hair sticking to my neck.
“No, you look beautiful,” he says. He says it emphatically and I’m sure he is sincere. I remember him saying, “You’re beautiful” when I asked him out. It was something I know he wanted me to believe, because he had looked very steadily into my eyes. He said, “You’re beautiful. You’re just not my type. You understand that, right? It just happens sometimes.” Then he smiled and said, “It’s chemistry,” and tapped the chemistry textbook he was holding under his arm, since it was directly after class.
“Sure right okay,” I had said, because I am not one to mourn for lost causes and I didn’t want to stand in the hallway for much longer. I didn’t laugh at his joke, because it wasn’t funny.
“Is that okay?” he had said. He looked so anxious.
“Yes of course it’s okay,” I said. And I meant it. Because there was no way I’d let him think any differently. I didn’t want him to think I gave a damn that, whatever came out of his mouth, it was obvious that he thought—that he thinks—I’m too fat to date.
He smiles at me now in a way I recognize as hopeful. As if friendliness will erase his stupid words and everything that happened.
I want to tell him he doesn’t need to erase anything, because nothing happened. I don’t want someone who doesn’t want me. I try to smile back and wonder what I look like in that moment, my mouth stretched over my teeth and everything about me feeling about three inches shifted to the left. I hate that my skin still prickles when he’s near, a chemical reaction I have no control over, and it’s even worse than the jittery uncomfortable feeling I have not been able to shake, the one that feels just a moment away from my stomach lurching again.
“Thank you,” I say now. “You are very beautiful too!” He laughs, as he was meant to.
“Champagne,” he says abruptly. “That’s for you.” He thrusts the paper bag he’s been holding at me. “You have to chill it. It’s from our stepmom.”
“Oh,” I say. “Does she know we’re seventeen?”
He shrugs, and looks around at the mess. “Who cares? Here,” he says, and turns and gathers up the boxes and trash in just a few sweeps. His shorts are worn and his T-shirt looks old and has a band on it that I don’t care about. I stop thinking about what he is wearing before I get to his skinny ankles and his beat-up shoes because it is not important even though it is perfectly casual.
“Thank you,” I say. I hold open the front door. “Could you toss them in recycling?” He smiles at me and I close the door behind him too quickly and then stop and crack it back open and flee through the streamers and down the hall. My brothers are sitting on the kitchen island, and Laura is making them laugh. My father is talking to Hector and Jolene, making big sweeping hand motions, which means he is telling a very bad and very long joke with a punchline like, “Do you have any grapes?”
Brandon comes in behind me, slips around me—making me shiver—to poke Laura in the side. She says something to him I can’t hear over the noise of my brothers arguing. Brandon and Laura both look at me with their identical olive eyes. I shrug at them. My father says, “Brandon! Just the burly man I was looking for to do some weight lifting!” He claps Brandon on the back and points to the sliding door. They are going to go get even more chairs from the garage.
“What is it with the chairs?” I say to Laura, sliding the champagne into the freezer. I have no idea if it’s okay there but it seems efficient.
“Are you mad I told Brandon to come?” she asks. Her mouth is pinched up in a tiny grimace. Jolene jumps down next to us.
“What? No. I’m pretty sure everyone we have ever met is coming tonight,” I said. “As per usual. It’s fine.”
“There will be so many people you will not even notice him,” Jolene says. “He will be very busy also.”
“There are no activities!” I say, freezing. “Oh god, do you think I should have planned activities? Is it too late to figure it out? Are birthday parties supposed to have activities?”
“You worry about this every year,” Jolene says. “You don’t need activities. Everyone will be just fine without party games.” She pats my arm.
“I don’t know,” Lucas says. “I’d love to see Clara do a keg stand.”
“No,” I say.
“Beer pong.”
“No!”
“Quarters.”
“Maybe,” I say. “I do have skills.” But I am thinking longingly about how the noise and chaos could let me melt away into the crowd and not be found. At least for a little while. Though putting off the inevitable only makes the inevitable loom larger, more dangerous and terrible.
A stomach lurch. I slip out of the kitchen while Lucas is arguing with Laura about whether quarters should be an Olympic sport, and I run up the stairs to where everything is quiet for just a little while longer.
I know the party is starting because my bedroom window is at the side of the house, and I can hear the cars come down our quiet gravel road. They are pulling up in front of the house and lining the road on both sides. There’s laughing and talking and then a loud, drawn-out honk.
Laura’s on the bed with her feet tucked under her and the My Little Pony pillow on her lap, next to a pile of Soto and Toby. I think Annabelle Lee is in there somewhere; I can hear her noisy little snores. Laura is sipping champagne from a plastic cup, though it isn’t quite cold yet. Jolene is combing out my hair and flat ironing the waves. She hasn’t touched her glass. My tongue stings from the bubbles. My hair looks, I think, like someone spilled a puddl
e of chocolate sauce. This is incredibly poetic of me. I am trying to think about anything, everything else. Another test on Monday, all the studying I have to do, the essay I still haven’t written, the reprimand from Dr. Ellman about how I’m putting my grades in jeopardy just because I’m being lazy about writing, the essay I may never write even though the early-acceptance deadline is two weeks away. November 1 and I’m done. I have until December 31 for the real deadline, but I cannot do that. I can’t wait that long. I can’t throw my application into a pile so large and broad and just hope.
“Oh my gosh, hold still!” Laura says from the bed. “You’re bouncing around like you’ve got to pee and you’re not going to like it when you end up knocking that flat iron out of her hand and into your lap. Or she’s going to flat iron your ear.”
“She’s not going to flat iron my ear,” I say. I take a slow breath in and hold it, trying to fill up the space in my gut with something besides these roller-coaster lurches.
“I am not going to burn her,” Jolene says, pulling the comb down again expertly and sliding the iron smoothly. “You’re okay,” she says to me, patting my shoulder with her comb hand.
I know it is one of my brothers who puts his iPhone into the speakers above the fireplace in the parlor. The music is louder than the noise outside. In the mirror I see Soto’s head pop up with a growl, and the little dogs start barking. Laura cuddles Annabelle Lee into her arms. Toby is bouncing on the bed, every bark taking him higher into the air.
“Hush, Toby.” I sigh. “The neighbors are going to be so unhappy.” Toby hops off the bed and trots to the window. He jumps up, putting his paws on the windowsill. “Toby!” I say. He jumps down and ducks his head. My heart twinges. “Aw, it’s okay, buddy.” I hold out my hand and he comes snuffling over and then presents his butt for scratching.
“Your dad said he talked to them. He invited them all, I think,” Jolene said, waiting to continue her combing and flat ironing while I scratch my dog’s bum.
“Of course he did,” I say, sitting up and throwing my hair back. My dad buys the supermarket out of hot dogs every year on Memorial Day so he can invite everyone he has ever met to a barbecue and he knows none of them will turn him down. Toby whines and I glance down at him. “I know, buddy,” I say.