by Неизвестный
“The team’s going out for a victory celebration,” Aidan informed me on Saturday afternoon. “Since we’ve won every game this season so far.”
I said, “Oh. That sounds terrific.”
“It should be fun.”
I smiled. “So, where are you going?”
“The coach got the department van so he’s driving us all to The Steak Out.”
The Steak Out’s one of those gigantic hunks of meat and all-you-can-eat salad bar places. It’s miles out of town. And as soon as I realized that, I heard Bethany say, He goes out with his friends, doesn’t he? And I decided I’d go out with my friends too. It would be fun. Just like old times.
Aidan put his arms around me. “I’ll call you like I always do.”
I said, “Great.”
“For God’s sake,” whispered Bethany while we waited for Josie to run into the candy store for some gum. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Yes, there is. You’re all tense and distracted. And you almost walked into a tree back there.”
“It’s because of the rain.” This was a lie. I almost walked into the tree because I forgot for a few minutes that I didn’t have to walk with my eyes on the ground. “I can hardly see. And I’m not tense and distracted.” But I was. What if we ran into Aidan after all? I felt like I was wanted by the government and that someone from the FBI was waiting around the next corner to catch me. But I wasn’t going to tell Bethany that. It was one thing thinking it, but even I knew that saying it out loud would make it sound really stupid. “I just miss Aidan, that’s all.”
“Miss Aidan?” Bethany stared at me as if she’d just seen a Klingon. “What are you talking about, ‘Miss Aidan’? He’s gone for a meal with the soccer team, not to war.”
“I know . . . but . . . you know . . . I’m not used to being out without him.”
“Well, you used to be. You used to be just dandy without him.” Bethany linked an arm in mine. “Why don’t you try to relax and enjoy yourself, Mi? Forget about Aidan till the morning.” She squeezed my arm. “He has no trouble forgetting about you for a night.”
“That’s not true. He always calls me when he’s out with his friends.”
“Not tonight he doesn’t.” Before I could stop her, Bethany snatched my cell phone out of my pocket. She turned it off and stuck it in her bag. “Tonight you’re incommunicado.”
Maybe it was because Bethany took the phone from me like that, but right away I started to relax. Because even though Aidan probably wouldn’t call till he got home, if he did call while we were at the restaurant, I would’ve felt I had to answer it. And if I’d answered it, he would’ve known that I wasn’t in my room doing my history homework like I’d said I would be. I’d take the phone back when we got to Bethany’s, and when he called I’d go to the bathroom to talk to him and he’d never know the difference.
Once I relaxed it didn’t take me long to get used to it being like old times. You know, not making sure I didn’t accidentally glance at anyone. Not worrying that my boobs jiggled when I laughed. Smiling back at the waiter. Not having to pretend to be interested in the complexities of soccer passes. That kind of thing. It’s like when you buy a new pair of shoes that need to be broken in. You hobble around for days and days until you don’t really notice that you’re limping and your toes hurt. And then you take them off and put your old sneakers on, and right away you feel so good you forget how bad you felt ten minutes ago.
It took us ages to get through our meal because we were talking and laughing so much. I couldn’t remember the last time I had so much fun.
We stopped to get snacks and a couple of movies on the way home. We were planning to stay up all night.
Bethany’s folks were just walking out the door when we got to the house.
“Mimi, you still live around here?” joked Mrs. Parrish.“It’s ages since we’ve seen you. I thought you’d moved away.”
“Well, as happy as we are to see you, we’re not staying here with three nonstop talkers and shriekers,” declared Mr. Parrish. “We’re going to the fights to get some peace and quiet.”
Mrs. Parrish rolled her eyes at Bethany. “We’ll be at the Menczers’ playing cards, honey. I left the number on the fridge.”
“Put the alarm on after we go,” said Mr. Parrish. “You know how to set the new system, don’t you, Beth?”
Bethany’s dad is always waiting to be robbed. He changes his security systems the way other people rotate their tires. The old alarm was supposed to be totally foolproof, but it kept going off for no reason, so now he’d gotten a new one. Bethany says the only place her dad would feel really safe is inside the White House, and even then he’d be checking every door and window all the time to make sure they were locked.
Bethany groaned. “Oh, Dad . . . ”
“You can’t be too careful nowadays,” said Mr. Parrish.
About halfway through the first movie, we called an intermission. Josie went to get the pillows and blankets to turn the TV room into our bedroom, and Bethany and I went to the kitchen to make popcorn and nachos.
I was still grating the cheese and Bethany was still looking for the popcorn when Josie came rushing in. She was gibbering.
“For God’s sake, Jo. Slow down,” I ordered. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
Josie took a few deep breaths and started again. “There’s someone trying to get into the house. I saw him prowling around the back from the bedroom.”
“Oh please . . . ” Bethany emerged from the cabinet with the popcorn in her hand. “I can’t believe you listen to my dad. You know what he’s like. He’s the man who called the cops because there was a raccoon in the attic and he thought it was a burglar.”
“This time it’s not a raccoon,” Josie insisted. “I’m telling you, there’s a guy trying to break in. He was at the windows. We’ve got to do something. Quick.”
But Bethany lives with the Man Who Cried Wolf and was used to this sort of crisis. She calmly put oil in the pot. “There’s nothing to panic about. The alarm’s on, remember? It’s even got lights. If he sets that off, it’ll give him the scare of his life.”
I said, “Is it?”
Bethany looked at me. She was still trying to act calm but her eyes were wide.“Oh my God . . . My dad’s going to kill me! I never put it on, did I?”
“What’d I tell you?” Josie turned toward the door. “I’ll call the cops.”
“Don’t bother. They won’t come unless they happen to be passing by. The raccoon was the fourth time in six months.” Bethany took a flashlight from one of the drawers. “I’ll go put the alarm on, and then I’ll call the ’rents. Jo, you check all the doors and windows up here. Mimi, you take the basement.” She handed me the flashlight.“You’ll need this; the light’s not working. They did something to the circuit when they put in the alarm.”
Beth, Jo, and I had a clubhouse in the basement when we were little, but I hadn’t been down there in years. I went quietly and carefully down the stairs. I was really scared, but I was cautious. The light from the kitchen was enough for me to see my way down the stairs, but when I reached the bottom I was pretty much swallowed by darkness. I turned on the flashlight. It didn’t work.
I stood there for a few seconds trying to remember where everything was. The Parrishes’ basement was once an apartment, but it hadn’t been used for that since they moved in. The room straight in front of me was the one we’d used for our clubhouse. There were two more rooms off of that. One is the old kitchen, which is just a storeroom now, and the other is where Mr. Parrish keeps his pool table. Each room has one small window. The sound of the rain echoed through the cellar. I made my way to where I remembered the first window being. As far as I could tell without the advantage of sight, it seemed to be shut tight.
I turned and went back past the stairs.
I was just about to open the door to the poolroom when I heard something drop to the floor in the old
kitchen. My first thought was that it was Mr. Parrish’s raccoon, who’d been forced to relocate. My second thought was that it was something bigger than a raccoon. And wearing shoes. I held my breath. Oh, if only Mr. Parrish was as efficient at making sure the cellar windows were all shut and locked as he was at being paranoid.
Somewhere in my frozen brain I knew what I should do next. Someone a lot dumber than a goldfish would’ve known what to do: run upstairs, lock the basement door behind me, and call the police.
But I didn’t do that.
I was so scared that for a couple of seconds or a couple of minutes I just stood there, my heart chugging away like one of those old-fashioned locomotives. I might as well have been cemented to the spot.
It wasn’t until I heard someone fumbling for the door that I finally moved. I wasn’t really thinking, but I knew it was too late for me to start charging up the stairs in the dark. I wasn’t even sure where the staircase was anymore. But I knew where the old kitchen was. It was straight ahead. I went toward it. I crouched down so whoever it was wouldn’t feel me breathing in his face, and as he stepped through the door, I hauled off and whacked him in the thighs with the flashlight.
There was a bloodcurdling scream of pain.
I guess my aim was a little off.
“Mimi!” Bethany shouted from the top of the stairs. “Mimi! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I called back. “Bring a flashlight that works. I got the burglar.”
“What happened?” Josie peered over the banister into the dark. “Did you kill him?”
The burglar stopped moaning long enough to shout back, “No, she didn’t kill me.”
I said, “Aidan?” I couldn’t have been more surprised if it had been a raccoon wearing shoes. I guess I should’ve known, really, but I’d been having such a good time that I’d completely forgotten about him. I hadn’t even taken my cell phone back from Bethany.
“You know, I’ll probably never have children now,” he groaned.
I said, “Aidan? Aidan, what are you doing here? We thought you were a burglar.”
“No kidding.”
Bethany came thundering down the stairs with Josie right behind her.
“Good God!” Bethany shone her bike light on the crumpled figure by the door. “It’s Aidan McClusky. What are you doing in my house?”
Aidan glared at me. “It’s all your fault.”
It was my fault because when he couldn’t get me on my cell phone, he rang my mother and she told him I was spending the night with Beth.
“I thought you were up to something,” said Aidan.
I just stood there staring at him like I’d never seen him before. “I was up to something. I was making nachos.”
“You know what I mean.” He glared some more. “I thought you were having a party. You know, with guys.”
“So you followed me here and broke into the Parrishes’ house?”
“I wanted to catch you in the act.”
Yesterday I probably would’ve thought that was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. It wasn’t any less reasonable than “I don’t want you to see your friends” or “I don’t want you to make eye contact with any other boy.” But now, standing there in Bethany’s basement, my heart still pounding from the heavy dose of fear it’d had, it didn’t seem reasonable at all.
“Why don’t we all go upstairs?” suggested Bethany. “I guess you two want to be alone to talk.”
If Aidan had come through the door like a normal person, things would have been different. But he came through the window. All this time I’d thought his possessiveness meant that he loved me—but all it meant was that he was nuts.
“We have nothing to talk about.” I said this really calmly. “Aidan’s just leaving.”
“If I go now, that’s it, Mimi. I’m not coming back.”
I figured that was the best news I’d heard in weeks.
FIFTY PERCENT
Irina Reyn
Right after I ripped open the envelope that would decide where I could go to college, my parents said they wanted to talk to me.
“We want to talk to you,” they said, and I was certain they knew. They knew the contents of that envelope, the numbers that revealed only a rudimentary understanding of mathematics and would rip all picture-perfect, leafy campuses out of my grasp. No doubt they could read the print on the return address; the SATs blazoned across the corner in large capital letters. I was in a wretched mood.
My parents sat stiffly on the couch, Cheshire smiles radiating on their faces. These were expressions I was not used to seeing.
“I know you are wondering how I did on my SATs.” I began the speech that I imagined would wipe those foreign smiles off their faces. They looked at each other, as if raking their mental Webster’s for the vocabulary word “SAT.” “But don’t worry, I can take them over again.”
“Take what over?” my father said.
My mother blurted out, “No, we wanted to talk to you about something else.” Something something brother or sister something something you always wanted one something something next summer. There was a long pause as I did the math on my fingers, to make sure I did not miscalculate. So that meant I would have a sibling and he or she would be born when I was almost . . . seventeen? Were they kidding?
Sure, I’d always wanted an older brother or sister. At seven, I wished for a companion who would immigrate to the United States with me, who would have my back in school when the other kids were mean to me, a clueless Russian girl. I fantasized about a sister who would play the male Barbie to my female Barbie (I had no Ken dolls, so poor Barbie was forced to play both roles), whose Strawberry Shortcake would rest alongside mine, who would let my Hungry Hippo gobble up all the marbles.
When I became a teenager, my sibling fantasy was tailored to a newfound interest in boys. My imaginary brother would bring his buddies, all the cute and popular boys at school, home where I would offer them freshly squeezed lemonade in an outfit easily mistaken for Madonna’s, complete with lacy gloves and a bandanna tied rakishly across my forehead.
Of course, I understood that an older brother might be hard for my parents to pull off, but in those imaginary forays, I never expected my forty-year-old mother to come home and announce that I was going to have a sister a year before I graduated from high school.
“My sister.” It sounded weird on my lips, like I had acquired some kind of extra limb or diabetes. It had never been a resonant word in my vocabulary. She could have been mine, and this became a joke in our household. As if I were a pregnant teenager who handed my baby over to my mother to raise. Ha ha.
When she arrived at the beginning of August, my sister was a dark, blurry thing wrapped in a thick blanket. My parents unwrapped her as though she were a souvenir from one of their vacations. Meet your sister Elizabeth, they said. Upon closer inspection, she was even more foreign than I’d imagined—olive skin, patches of black hair splattered on her head and body, tight, scrunched lids that would eventually unveil large brown eyes. I was fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and light-haired, while this creature was an exotic Gypsy child.
It was my senior year in high school. There was the school play to act in, college applications to worry about, and of course, the prom. I found myself marveling as social structures broke down and popular people began to mix with the rest of the crowd as though they realized their reign was coming to an end forever. Even our teachers appeared different— more enthusiastic, respectful—prowling the front of the room, cramming ideas into our heads as if we were actually on the brink of adulthood.
At home, my sister cried. She cried while I was filling out applications, typing my college essays, and discussing with one of my girlfriends my chances with Andy, a cute lead singer of a band. Elizabeth cried when I came home with a gift from Andy, a Billy Joel tape I played every night for a week. She cried when Andy asked another girl to the prom after raging at my football clumsiness in gym class. She cried when I decided to go to Rutger
s, a college an hour away from home, and she cried when I decided to go to the prom, wearing an aerodynamic black and white dress, with one of my best male friends.
I would go to her room and stare at her while she was asleep. Why did she have to cry so much? This was not what I’d imagined a sister would be like. When would she be old enough to borrow clothes from? When would she be old enough to discuss with me my high school disappointments and boys and why they did what they did? I wanted to tell her that I was proud of being in the school play, and that I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to chat about the color pink—was it better for my pale complexion or her duskier one?
Throughout my meditations, she never opened an eyelid, so I imagined her silently answering me: “Yes, you can borrow my bunny, Frances, any time you want.” “Don’t worry, it will get better in college— you’ll have friends, boyfriends, new experiences.” “Boys appear strange, but in the end, they are not so different from us; they just show their emotions differently.” “Good job in that play—you made a believable Jamaican maid.” “Be an English major and decide later.” “Pink is really better on your skin. I look good in darker colors.”
Sometimes, I looked down at her and hoped for our future. Other times, I looked down and didn’t like her one bit. My parents no longer had any time for me. As an only child, I was used to being at the vortex of their concentration and now, at this juncture in my life, I needed it more than ever. But they had little time to consider where I would be going to college or to help pick out my prom dress or even to look at my report cards. They were busy and exhausted with the baby, whose demands were swallowing all their time and vigor. Surely, this was a phase I might have gone through if her arrival had come when I was two or three or five—but at seventeen, to be jealous of my sister? Preposterous.
My friends sympathized, but my concerns were as foreign to them as the problems on TV Afterschool Specials.
“Come out for ice cream,” they offered. “We’re all meeting at Friendly’s.” We stood on a street corner up to our ankles in the last snow of high school, inhaling the faint pear scent of spring. We stamped our boots and blew on our mittens, shifting from one foot to the other—to the left lay Friendly’s and its warm, brightly lit coziness, intimate girl conversations, and tall Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup sundaes; to the right lay my house with a cranky, sleep-deprived mother and a wailing baby.