Nothing to Lose

by Alex Flinn

  I take the world’s fastest shower and head downstairs for breakfast. My mother’s already in the kitchen when I get down.

  We never went back to Walker’s house. In all the uncertainty that followed the trial and our awkward reunion, that was one thing we were both sure of. We rented a town house in the Grove, far enough from the beach so as not to stir up memories, but close enough to stay in the same school district. I figured everyone would know about me, no matter where I went, so I might as well go where I had some friends.

  Some woman from a battered-women’s advocacy group helped my mother find a job at a law firm. Her boss has been in trial the past few weeks, so she’s been going in early and staying late. I haven’t seen much of her lately. It’s okay. Things are still awkward between us. I don’t know whether I’ve forgiven her for being weak. I do know I want to be stronger.

  When she sees me, she smiles. “You’re up early.”

  “Roster’s today.” I pour myself a bowl of Smart Start with milk, slopping some of it onto the counter.

  “Don’t forget to clean that up,” she says.

  “In a minute.” I slide the bowl onto the table across from her.

  “Well, good luck today,” she says.

  “I don’t believe in luck,” I say.

  “Neither do I, actually. But I hope you get what you deserve.”

  I hear the apology in her voice. I hear it a lot. Since my mother got out of jail, our lives have been spent pretty much in counseling. Individual counseling, family counseling, battered-women’s support group—all to tell us it wasn’t our fault, like Kirstie said. I’m trying to believe that, and I say I do. I’m not sure Mom believes it yet either. It’s like I told Angela. I didn’t think I’d be able to forget. But now I wonder if maybe I don’t need to forget. Maybe everyone you meet—people at school, people you wouldn’t suspect—has something in the back of their lives, something bad they don’t talk about and just know is there. Maybe we’re all like the carnies, but maybe we don’t all run. Maybe some people stay there and deal with it. Like Karpe did. And Angela. I like to think that’s true, because then I could deal with it too.

  I finish my cereal and see my mother sponging up the mess on the counter.

  “I said I’d do it,” I say.

  “I don’t mind. I like it neat.”

  I make sure to rinse out the bowl and put it in the dishwasher before I head to school.

  I went to see Kirstie last summer, in Louisiana. I met her sister, Erica, who I was picturing as a little kid, but who’s really about my age, and also this guy named Casey, who Kirstie met at night school. She said he wasn’t her boyfriend, but I got the idea he wouldn’t have minded being. It was good seeing her, seeing she was okay. But it was different than at the fair. Not as real, somehow. We kept in touch by e-mail for a few months after that. But last time, the Mailer Daemon sent my e-mail back, addressee unknown.

  I haven’t heard from her since, but I think about her sometimes. And I dream about her. In the dream she’s always like she was that first day at the fair. I think that’s how I’ll always see her. I like to think of her that way, in her green T-shirt, someplace where it’s always sunny—a beautiful part of the past.

  I’m in front of Coach’s office now. It’s swarming with guys from the team and guys who hope to make the team. They’re the younger players, the ones who used to look up to me, and a couple who I know think it isn’t fair they have to compete with someone a year older. All around, they’re high-fiving, slapping backs, and generally getting more up close and personal than guys usually get. I see one skinny freshman walking away, trying not to cry. A couple of guys try to talk to me, but I push through. In a minute I know I’ll be part of that whooping, back-patting mob, but somehow, it’s important for me to see the roster for myself, rather than get the information secondhand.

  I finally make it to the front. I look at the yellow lined legal paper and grin.

  “Did you make it?” one of the sophomores asks behind me.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I made it.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author would like to thank the following people for their contributions to this book:

  My readers, Marjetta Geerling and Laurie Friedman, as well as my critique group; my agent, George Nicholson, and his invaluable assistant, Paul Rodeen, for wonderful advice; Assistant State Attorney Mary Cagle, and Mary Mastin, RN, for research help; Joyce Sweeney, reader, handholder, and friend; my husband, Gene, for technical and other support, and my children, Katie and Meredith, for all the times I said, “Mommy’s trying to think,” and they let me; my “amazing” editor, Antonia Markiet—whose faith helped me create the pieces of the puzzle and whose talents helped me put them together. Thank you again and again.

  EXCERPT FROM BEWITCHING

  1

  My mother, in her sweet way, always reminded me that Daddy wasn’t my real father. “Be on your best behavior, Emma,” she’d said since I was old enough to remember. “He could ditch us anytime.” Sooo comforting. I don’t know why she said those things. Maybe she was jealous. True, Daddy and I looked nothing alike. He was tall and slim, blond and hazel-eyed, while I was short and clumsy with frizzy hair the color of rats. Yet on days like this one, as we sat across from each other at Swenson’s Ice Cream, it seemed impossible that I wasn’t Daddy’s and Daddy wasn’t mine. We had been together since I was three, after all; ten years since he and Mother had married. If I’d known my other father, the father that had left, I didn’t remember him. This was the only dad I had.

  It had been his idea to spend the day together, “Daddy-Emma time,” without even Mother. I’d found out just the night before. He’d come home from work and told me he’d gotten tickets to the national tour of Wicked. It had been sold out except for nosebleed top balcony seats. At least, that’s what Mother had said when I’d begged to go. But Daddy told me one of his clients had given him second-row seats and he was taking me as a special surprise.

  I’d breathed a secret sigh of relief. He and Mother had been arguing all week behind closed doors, alternately whispering and yelling, the sound muffled by television shows I knew neither of them watched. I’d sat in the family room, worrying in front of endless Full House reruns. Maybe Mother was right and they were getting a divorce. Maybe I’d end up like Kathleen, this girl in my class who’d had to be a flower girl in her own mother’s wedding. Maybe I’d lose Daddy. Occasionally, I’d hear my own name. Mother would say something like, “What about Emma?” and Daddy would reply, “What about Emma? I’m thinking of Emma.” Thursday night, Daddy had said, “I won’t discuss this anymore, Andrea!” and the house had gone silent.

  But now, I understood. The whispered conversations had been about this. Mother was obviously angry because she’d wanted to go to the play herself, but Daddy was taking me. Me!

  Our seats had been so close I could see the actors spit when they sang, and the play had been perfect, perfect for me because the ugly girl, the weird girl, the girl no one understood was the heroine. I identified with Elphaba, the outcast, except for the part about magic powers. Perfect, also, because Daddy had taken me, which meant he got it. He understood me as my mother never could.

  After the matinee, we went for dinner, and even though I’d ordered an adult cheeseburger instead of the kids’ meal Mother would have pressured me to get in the name of “portion control,” Daddy let me get a Gold Rush Sundae too. “Not much of a meal without ice cream,” he’d said, and I agreed. I tried to eat slowly, like a lady, and also to make the day last longer. Plus, I had on a new dress, BCBG, and I didn’t want to stain it. Dad said, “What do you want to do now?”

  “Now?” A bit of fudge dribbled onto my lip, and I caught it quick with my napkin. Mother would have said it was piggish, but Daddy didn’t wince.

  “Sure. I told your mom we’d be late. Gameworks, maybe?”

  Most people I knew would rather go there than anywhere, but the sounds of Wicked still filled my head,
and I didn’t want to drown it out with pulsing game music. So I said, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the bookstore instead?” I loved going to the big bookstore, selecting a pile of novels, then spending an hour or more examining them over tea. “Would you be bored?”

  Daddy grinned. “No, I can read. They prob’ly even have some of them there magazines with pitures in.”

  “I didn’t mean that.” The kids at school all thought I was a nerd too.

  “I know you didn’t, Pumpkin.” He glanced to the side. “Hey, don’t look now, but you’ve got yourself an admirer.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Right. Nine o’clock. Redhead’s been looking at you since dessert arrived.”

  “Guys don’t look at me.”

  “See for yourself.”

  I shook my head. Parents lived in some happy place where everyone my age dated or had guys in love with them when, in truth, only popular girls like Courtney and Midori did. I looked around. To one side was a crowd of stick-thin girls in Greek letter shirts, pigging out on Earthquake Sundaes. But when I got to Daddy’s “nine o’clock,” I was surprised to see he was right. Someone was looking at me. It was Warner Glassman, a boy from school, a smart boy who’d won a playwriting contest. As soon as I saw him, I wondered if my face was clean, if I had whipped cream on my lips. It wasn’t like I could lick them now, though, not in front of Warner. I’d look like a perv. I fumbled with my napkin. Warner looked away.

  “He’s a boy from school, Daddy. He’s looking at me because he knows me, that’s all. He’s probably trying to figure out where he’s seen me before.”

  Daddy took a sip of his coffee. “You are a beautiful girl, Emma.”

  “Mother says I’d be pretty—pretty, not beautiful—if I lost ten pounds and did something about my hair.”

  “Mothers are too picky. You look great. Boys are going to be swarming.”

  “Right.” Still, I straightened my shoulders and resolved to eat extra neatly until Warner and his family left. Maybe, if they passed close enough, I’d say hi. I took a minuscule bite of ice cream and glanced at Warner again. He was looking. This was the coolest day ever!

  I knew I wasn’t ugly or fat either, just plain, like the heroines in books I loved, like Jane Eyre or Little Women. Of course, those girls usually ended up getting the guy.

  “There’s something I have to tell you, Emma,” Daddy said.

  “Sure.” I took another nibble, trying not to look at Warner. Still, I could sort of see him out of the corner of my right eye.

  “… and her name is Lisette,” Dad was saying.

  “What?”

  “I said her name is Lisette.”

  “Whose name? Start at the beginning.” I slurped up the ice cream that had melted to soup on my spoon. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I said I wasn’t sure if you remembered that, before I married your mom, I had another wife, and we had a daughter named Lisette.”

  Remembered? I was three. But, yes, I knew he’d had a wife before Mother, in some foggy part of my mind. The daughter was news, though. I’d have remembered a daughter. “Where?” I choked out.

  “She’s been living in Lantana with her mom.”

  Lantana. Lantana wasn’t far. We passed it all the time when we drove up to visit my aunt. My aunt was two hours away, and Lantana was closer. How weird was it, that I’d never met her? Had my father had a secret life all these years, like one of those guys on talk shows who turns out to have two families? What else was there, what else I didn’t know?

  “… here on Friday,” Dad was saying.

  “Wait? What, again?”

  “She’s coming here on Friday.”

  “Coming? To visit?” No wonder Mother had been freaking out. She wasn’t big on things that weren’t all about her.

  “No. To live. Aren’t you listening, Emma? Her mother passed away, and Lisette is coming here. You should get along great. She’s exactly your age.”

  The chocolate ice cream fell from my open mouth and onto the front of the BCGB dress. I glanced down at the huge splotch, then at Dad, then at Warner.

  Of course, everyone was looking right at me.

  2

  The first time I saw my stepsister, Lisette, she was crying. A battered white economy car with patches of rust so big it looked like a calico cat pulled into our driveway. The door opened and it disgorged its contents: a girl who was, as Daddy had said, my own age but taller; a carry-on, which I later found out held all her clothes; and a black plastic garbage bag, which I later learned held everything else. All her stuff in one suitcase and one garbage bag? We gave more than that to the Salvation Army. We threw more than that away.

  It was Friday afternoon. I was in the tree house Daddy had built me when I was five, reading Vanity Fair (not the magazine, the novel by Thackeray, which Daddy had bought me after I got my jaw undropped from our talk), waiting for Lisette, but not waiting. Mother said I was too old for tree houses, that it ruined her landscaping. It was Daddy who said we could keep it and was always too busy to take it down when Mother complained. I liked to go there to read. And hide.

  I was doing both that day, plus spying on Lisette. Mother was out, even though she’d told Daddy she’d be home. She’d wanted me to go too, but I said I had homework. I wanted to see Lisette. Since my conversation with Daddy, I’d been wondering what Lisette would look like. Would she be pretty? Prettier than me? Taller? Thinner? I hoped she’d be plain too, so we could be friends. Would she look like my father? Would he like her better? Would she think I was a geek? Would we be like sisters?

  I peeked out from between the branches. Lisette tugged the black bag across the bright green lawn. Whoever had driven her didn’t offer to help. The engine started and the car was gone before Lisette was even halfway to the door.

  Her head was down, so I couldn’t see her face. What I could see was her hair, gold-blond like Princess Aurora’s at the Disney character breakfasts we went to on vacation and spiraling to her waist. My fingers stole to my own frizz. She wore a black dress a size too small and black sneakers that were too large, but even in that, I could see that she was skinny, skinny and graceful, like a ballerina. She stopped to check a hole in the bag, which had something sticking out of it, a bit of sapphire-colored fabric. Her hand reached to stuff it back in but, instead, lingered on it, and that was when she began to sob.

  Something black soared into my peripheral vision. I turned my head and saw it was a turkey buzzard. Two of them, actually, diving and bouncing at some dead thing in the street.

  I should have welcomed Lisette, or at least introduced myself. That would be the normal thing to do. But I wanted to put off the time in my life when I became Lisette’s stepsister.

  As long as I didn’t meet Lisette, everything could be the same. Everything could be possible. My father would still like me best, even though Lisette was his real daughter. I could still imagine that Lisette and I would be best friends. As long as I stayed in the tree house, there was still the possibility that Lisette might love me. But as soon as I approached her, that would all end. She’d take one look at me, with my curly hair and freckles, and realize I wasn’t worth knowing, just like girls at school did.

  I ducked my head lower and went back to reading about Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp, BFFs even though Becky was evil, and about Dobbin, the grocer’s son, who was in love with the wimpy, goody-goody Amelia and stood by her for years, even when she married his unworthy friend George. I had a secret crush on Dobbin and pictured him looking like Warner Glassman. The book was eight hundred pages long, and it was the second time I’d read it since Sunday.

  Which I knew Lisette would think was completely weird.

  Everyone did. Most of the kids at school, even in the smart classes, which I was in, didn’t read books that weren’t assigned, certainly not classics. Sometimes, I’d try to act like them, force myself to slip a Seventeen or an Elle into my binder or spend the time before class texting. But always, by lunchtime, I
’d be at the media center, begging for my Brontë or Austen fix. It was pathetic.

  I pressed my face hard against the slippery slats of the tree house floor, looking down at her crying.

  Mother and Daddy’s arguing had continued all week, and I’d read and read to drown out the yelling, but it didn’t always work.

  “There must be someplace else,” Mother had said.

  “We’ve been through this. There are no relatives on Nicole’s side.”

  “On your side, then. Maybe she could move in with your mother.”

  “Give me a break. My mother’s eighty.”

  “There are other alternatives besides relatives.”

  “Don’t go there, Andrea. I’m not putting my own daughter in foster care for your convenience.”

  “Not convenience, safety. Who knows what sort of upbringing this girl has had. She could be into drugs or … worse. But maybe you don’t care about Emma.”

  “Of course I care about Emma. I’ve always taken care of your daughter.”

  Your daughter. My father’s words were like a shard of ice through my heart.

  “Besides, I’m sure Nicole’s done a fine job raising her. She was always a sensible woman.”

  “Unlike me, I suppose.”

  “Who said anything about … never mind. I know you’ll see reason in this. The girl is coming to live with us, and that’s final.”

  And with that, a door slammed.

  I’d known better than to ask Mother any questions, but the day before, she’d come into my room without knocking and sat on my bed. Taking me by the shoulders, she’d said, “Don’t worry, Emma. This is just temporary. Your father loves you. We won’t let anything change that.”

  Which is when I started worrying that it would.