by Laura Ruby
This is not the first time she’s had such thoughts. She’s a daydreamer, and sometimes the daydreams take all sorts of twists and turns. In the dreams, she’s held the hands. She’s touched the face and the pumpkin-colored hair. The black mole has disappeared. The thin lips don’t feel as thin, and they taste like lemon tea.
Now, she feels a weird sort of bloom in her stomach. Not hunger, exactly, though it’s a little like hunger. The bloom spreads until it warms her whole body. She glances around nervously. She shifts in her seat, making it creak. She’s sure everyone can tell by looking at her.
But then, she is in a strange city. No one knows her here. They don’t know where she comes from or how old she is. They don’t care. To these people, there’s nothing here to see except the art.
The teacher doesn’t notice the bloom, the wanting. He’s drooling over all the desserts. “These look so good,” he says. “Maybe I’ll have a little something after all.”
He reaches out. She thinks, what could happen? Who would know? Who would tell?
She grabs his hand before he grabs a cookie. “Now don’t think this means I’m trying to trade cookies for grades. I wouldn’t want you getting any ideas.” His skin is warm, but his fingertips are slightly rough, like cats’ tongues. She slides a thumb down the inside of his wrist—so soft!—feeling for the pulse.
“Tola,” he says. He gently pulls his hand from hers. “Teachers aren’t allowed to have ideas.” He stands and gathers his bag, forgetting The Kiss between them.
After he has walked away, the girl hears a strange sort of snorting laugh from across the cafeteria. She knows that laugh.
But when the girl turns to look, the other one is gone.
( comments )
“I was there to see the art, same as anyone. I just happened to be walking by the café when I saw them. The look on her face. Holy crap, she was desperate. I mean, I’ll-do-anything-for-you-if-you-please-love-me desperate. Pathetic. And then she tries to hold his hand. I laughed out loud, and then I had to duck behind a group of Japanese tourists so she didn’t see me.
“And Mymer? Never liked that guy. His dumb hair and his stupid T-shirts. Who the hell does he think he is?
“Oh yeah. Fired.”
—Chelsea Patrick, classmate
SCREAMO
The doctors keep saying that the drugs they used to fix Grandpa’s pneumonia have side effects like loss of appetite and diarrhea, that this happens to lots of old people, and that he’ll get better soon. Every time we come to the hospital, we expect to find him sitting up in bed, cracking jokes, slurping chocolate pudding, teasing the nurses. But when we visit, he’s barely able to keep his eyes open, and we can’t get him to eat. We crowd into the room—me, my mom, Madge, Mr. Doctor, Grandma Emmy—our faces screwed up with hope and then worry. We bounce around like atomic particles, bumping into the IV pole and one another. Madge starts glaring, and Mom starts ranting about incompetent doctors, and Grandma Emmy starts wringing her hands and saying maybe we should let him sleep. Look at him. He’s tired. He just wants to sleep. Let him sleep.
So we let him sleep. Normally, people seem so peaceful when they sleep, but Grandpa is too peaceful. I perch on the end of my seat, watching his chest go up and down, occasionally putting my hand on his bony rib cage to feel the heart fluttering like a bird with a broken wing. He hasn’t bothered to put his false teeth in for days—his mouth is all caved in. His breath comes in pants, as if he’s dreaming about something that scares him. What scares me:
Grandpa’s roommate, ancient and hairless, his two broken ankles in casts, muttering “Babydollbabydollbabydollbabydoll” under his breath. When the nurses come to change his sheets, he screams as if they are killing him.
A white-haired woman in a wheelchair out in the hallway yelling, “Don’t touch me, I hate you! You lie you lie you all lie!” The man who wheels the woman around is her son, his face carefully ironed to a blank.
The nurse, a woman with hot pink fingernails and teased blond hair straight out of the eighties, always talking about the squirrels digging up her yard and how she tried to talk her cop husband into shooting them all. The stray cats, too. Dirty animals.
Mom can’t take it. She drags Mr. Doctor to the nursing station and is threatening lawsuits against the hospital. Grandma Emmy is down in the cafeteria playing cards with Madge, but I know Grandma’s heart can’t be in it. She’s not losing money. She’s just losing.
I sit alone with Grandpa Joe, wondering what to do. I want to tell Grandpa Joe that I keep forgetting to call Dad but that he seems to have forgotten about me, too. I want to tell him that I never lied about what Mr. Mymer did; I just lied about what I did, and I didn’t really do that much anyway, and now it’s all blown out of proportion. And I want to tell him that even good people do stupid things and don’t tell the whole story later. Exhibit: Mom and Mr. Rosentople.
But I don’t say any of these things. Grandpa can’t even put in his own teeth; he can’t even get up to use the bathroom. The guy next door is muttering under his breath: “Baby-dollbabydollbabydollbabydoll.” Grandpa breathes in and out, in and out, like some mixed-up version of Sleeping Beauty. I wonder if I should tell him a story. I wonder if he can hear me in his sleep. Madge says that even people in comas respond to the voices of their wives and children and brothers and sisters, so why not Grandpa, who is only sleeping? I try to think of a good story, an uplifting story, but what pops into my head is all wrong. Like the story “The Death of the Little Hen.” When Little Hen chokes on a nut, her rooster husband asks every animal in the forest for help, but it all ends in disaster and everyone dies, including the rooster, who has just enough time to bury the little hen before keeling over on top of the grave and dying, too. Or the Spanish version of “Snow White,” where the evil queen doesn’t ask for the huntsman to bring back the heart of the princess—she asks him to fill a vial with Snow White’s blood, stoppered with one of her severed toes.
Then I think of the story of Little Red Cap. Seems safe, seems happy. And I start the way every story starts, “Once upon a time, there was a little girl…” Grandpa stirs a little in his sleep, his arm lifting like he’s greeting someone. I take this as a good sign and go on.
“Her name, stupidly enough, was Little Red Cap. Little Red Cap is supposed to bring some wine and bread to her sick grandmother, because those old Germans thought that some good booze would cure everything. And maybe they were right. I can ask Mom to sneak you some booze if you want some.
“Anyway, back to Little Red Cap. Her mom tells her not to talk to anyone on the road, to go straight to Grandma’s. No detours. But of course she doesn’t listen. Little Red Cap probably isn’t that little. I bet she’s a teenager, thinking her mom is all stupid and overprotective and scared of the forest. Maybe she thinks she’s totally too old to be told what to do. Maybe she sits down by a tree and takes some hits off the wine, so when the wolf starts talking to her, she doesn’t think, My, what big teeth you have, she thinks, Hey, pooch, you’re not so scary. The wolf gets Grandma’s address out of Little Red Cap, who’s too drunk to notice, runs ahead along the road, gobbles Grandma, and waits for Little Red Cap to come stumbling along so he can eat her, too. And he does. She’s just lucky that the huntsman’s walking by when he is, that he hears that wolf snoring after such a big dinner. He cuts Little Red Cap and Grandma out of the wolf’s belly, and everyone lives happily ever after.”
Grandpa twitches in his sleep. I lean in closer, to whisper in his ear.
“But Grandpa, what if that’s not what happened at all? What if Little Red Cap never veered off the road? What if she never even met the wolf or she got away from him? What if the huntsman just made all this stuff up and everybody believed him? What if he ruined Little Red Cap’s reputation for all eternity? Just because he could?”
Grandma Emmy comes back to the room and brings us all back down to the cafeteria for dinner. We grab whatever looks edible—pizza and pasta and salad—and drag it to a table.
Nobody’s hungry but me. Mr. Doctor checks the messages with his answering service. Madge fiddles with her iPod, which is loaded with the most oppressive classical music she can find. June once burned a bunch of screamo for her, thinking it’d be right up Madge’s alley, but Madge said, “What do I need this for? If I want to hear someone shrieking at me, I can just piss off Mom.”
But Mom is quiet. She’s been pretty quiet for almost thirty-six hours, which is beginning to sound an alarm in my head. Mom hasn’t been so quiet for so long since Dad left, and who wants to go through that again?
I’ve eaten all the food except for one piece of pizza, and that’s only because it has black olives on it, and I hate those. Madge turns off the iPod and pulls out the earbuds. Her face is shifting, her eyes growing bigger and darker and fangs creeping over her bottom lip, the jaw jutting like she’s preparing to bite. For safety, I slide closer to the wall.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Madge says suddenly, in a low, ominous voice that promises pain, pain, and more pain. I tug on her sleeve, but she yanks her arm away.
“Say anything about what?” my mom says. She doesn’t look at Madge but rummages around in her purse.
“That isn’t bronchitis, Mom. I’ve had bronchitis, I know what bronchitis looks like, and that is not it!”
“It’s a touch of pneumonia. I know he looks bad, but…” she says lamely, and trails off. This is so unlike her, the lameness, the trailing off. I want to bring up Mr. Mymer, distract her, energize her. I want to hand her the phone and tell her to call the school-board president, the principal, the police. I want to tell her what I did. That it’s my fault. That there is an emergency and only she can save us.
“He has cancer, doesn’t he?” says Madge.
“No,” my mom says. “He doesn’t have cancer.” Her purse thumps to the floor. She doesn’t pick it up. People at the surrounding tables are staring, but in the way people stare when they’ve been there themselves.
“Then something else,” says Madge. “Some sort of emphysema or blood disease.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“What aren’t you telling us?” Madge screams. Someone drops a tray, and the room is filled with the sounds of shattering glass. “We have a right to know what’s happening!”
“I’m not keeping anything from you,” Mom says. “I know this is hard, but what’s happening is that your grandfather is an old man who caught a bad cold. The fluid settled in his lungs. Sometimes old people have a hard time with colds. Their hearts and their lungs don’t work as well. They don’t recover as quickly.”
“Have you gone crazy?” Madge says. “This can’t be from a cold.”
“In the future,” Mom says, “we’ll have to be more careful when we go over for dinner. Make sure none of us has anything he could catch.”
“In the future? What future? What are you talking about? Grandpa looks like he’s going to die, and you’re just sitting there talking about dinner. What is wrong with you?”
“Tiffany. I’m so sorry,” my mom says. “This is just one of those things. It’s going to take some time.” She throws her hands up, once, twice. We’re playing charades, guess which movie she’s in now, the one with the crazy daughters, the one with the sick dad. “Grandpa loves you.”
“That’s not the point!”
“I love you.”
“You don’t love me,” Madge says, biting the end off each word. “Nobody loves me.”
My mom shakes her head and stares at the salad bar, blinking. It makes Madge insane. She doesn’t need screamo; she is screamo. She starts shrieking at Mom, why didn’t she tell us things were so bad, why does she keep saying that Grandpa will be fine, why is she so horrible, why is she so uncaring and stupid, why does she think we’re stupid, Tola might be uncaring and stupid, but she, Madge, is not, and she is nineteen years old or almost and needs to understand exactly what’s happening with her family, and if her own mother won’t tell her, how is she supposed to live, that’s what she wants to know, how am I supposed to live, Mom, how? How how how how how how how how how, until Mr. Doctor, who never says anything, who never gets involved, who drives everywhere without complaining, says in the calmest voice, “Tiffany. That’s enough.”
Madge is so shocked, she doesn’t know what to do. She stares at Mr. Doctor as if she’s never seen him before, as if he just sprang fully formed from the thin, cheap carpeting.
This time, she doesn’t scream. She whispers. Somehow, it’s louder. “I hate you.”
Mr. Doctor nods. “I know. But does it matter right now?”
We go back to the room. Grandma Emmy naps in the big chair. Mom and Madge whisper-yell in the corner. Mr. Doctor leans against the wall.
I don’t talk. I don’t tell any stories. I hold Grandpa’s hand. I squeeze. I think he squeezes back.
It’s amazing to me. How holding someone’s hand, something so small, could be so big.
( comments )
“As annoying as it is, there’s a benefit to having a sister who doesn’t remember much about her childhood. She doesn’t remember any of the bad stuff you did to her, either. She doesn’t remember the times you pinched her until she screamed. That you stole a drawing she made for your daddy and claimed it was your own. That there were two bath toys, a mermaid and a fish, and you always made her play with the fish. That you thought your parents loved her more, and sometimes you wished she had never been born.”
—Tiffany Riley, sister
“One time, me and Spit found this website dedicated to this dead kid. I think he was sixteen. Get this: He tripped over his own shoelaces, hit his head on a curb, and died. I’m not kidding. So all his friends made this site and talked about him and how much he loved his iPod and that he was listening to his tunes when he died. We read this crap and couldn’t stop laughing. We took some of the pictures of the kid from the website and pasted the kid’s head on some porn. Spit found the kid’s number and we cranked it. We’d say, ‘Hey, Mom! I can tie my shoes!’ Or ‘I can’t rest until you bury my iPod in my grave!’
“I passed Tola in the hallway, and she didn’t even look at me. Someone told me that her grandpa was sick. Poor baby. Maybe I’ll add something about that to the site. With a few skulls and crossbones, maybe pictures of graveyards. I could post the grandparents’ phone number, so anyone looking for laughs can give a call.”
—Chelsea Patrick, classmate
GEEK FORCE
Snow turns to rain turns to ice. The world is encased in glittering glass like Snow White was, beautiful and dead.
Thankfully, no more bio for me. I have a study in the library instead. Ms. Esme, the librarian, is in charge of my “studies.” When she sees me, she grins and gives me a book on Joseph McCarthy.
I go to cooking class. The whole room smells like roasting chicken and onions. We figure the Duck is cooking a feast for the teachers’ holiday party. Just to taunt us.
She passes out the recipes for the mayonnaise again. Plain, spicy, mango-chutney. Drop, drop, drop. We are old pros. We finish in a few minutes: no accidents with the eggs or the oil.
The Duck passes out a second set of recipes. Not for more mayo, but for sandwiches. Chicken with peppers and spicy mayonnaise in a tortilla. Chicken with red peppers and mango-chutney mayo on wheat. Chicken with lettuce, bacon, and tomato and plain mayo on rye. For the vegetarians, she has a recipe for a roasted vegetable sandwich with sundried-tomato mayo.
The Duck takes the chicken and the vegetables out of the oven. Nobody asks the question, but she answers it anyway.
“It’s cold outside,” says the Duck. “I thought we could all use some comfort food.”
Mr. Mymer isn’t back yet, so we have another sub in art. She is round and happy, with a gray halo of hair and earrings made from red Christmas ornaments. She shows us pictures of her cats. They are all named after hobbits. Bilbo, Merry, Pippin, Rosie, Myrtle. She tells us to pick a cat and draw, paint, or sculpt it. I draw my own cat. I give him a hat, a sword, an
d a sweet pair of boots.
After school, Mr. Doctor picks me up, drives me home. Madge is watching one of her movies. I’ve brought home the drawing of Pib, which I think I can turn into a painting.
I set up in my room. First, I do some studies—sketching what the painting might look like. Then I get out my paints and palette and start mixing some colors for the fur—white and sienna and bronze. It smells good. It feels good. It’s been a good day. Grandpa’s still sick, but Mom’s visiting him alone tonight and hopes to pin the doctors down on the treatment. Madge is still crazy, but she’s taking some medicine and maybe it will work. Mr. Mymer is coming back. Maybe I’m coming back, too.
Madge kicks open my door. She sits on my bed and opens her laptop. Pib tries to walk across the keyboard, but she shoves him off. She brings up The Truth About Tola Riley on screen. Chelsea’s saved the best for last: ART, A STATUTORY LOVE STORY. It’s a grainy video of me and Mr. Mymer at the museum, slowed down and jazzed up. You see the talking, the smiling, the paging through the Klimt book, me reaching for his hand, holding it. My face, so naked, so hungry, so obvious. The images morph and blend, changing colors like Andy Warhol prints. Scrolling underneath the video is a series of quotes and comments: this girl is a crazy skank, i heard she totally did Michael Brandeis too, he’s sooooo ugly! eewwwww, and on and on.
And over it all is the sound of my voice, from the day Chelsea Patrick turned me into a happy face: “Sorry for what? Sorry for what? Sorry for what?”
When Mr. Doctor gets home, I ask him to drive me to the mall. I find her at the electronics store where she works. I crouch in the video game section across the aisle, watching. She’s in the computer department, stocking the shelves with adapters and flash drives while a bunch of guys wearing Geek Force T-shirts hang around the shiny new Macs, not doing much of anything. A girl walks by, one of those stick figures with boobs, and the guys stare and nudge one another.