by Ruth Lehrer
When I came out of the bathroom, I went and stood in line for Christmas cookies and apple juice.
After drinking the last of my juice, I went back to Keely. She immediately pointed to the pamphlet. “What do you think? Doesn’t it just make you feel . . .” She paused.
“Simple?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Yup,” I said. “Not much plot, though.”
When Molly came to pick me up at noon, I almost ran out the door.
“Here’s my ride,” I said. “Merry Christmas.”
Keely started to say something, but I was already out of the building and jerking open the car door.
“Go, go, go!” I said to Molly.
When we got back to Cherry Road, I discovered that Duck-Duck had gone to the soccer field to practice kicks with Darsa, just the two of them.
“She’ll be back in an hour,” said Molly. “Since there’s no snow yet, they’re getting it in while they can. Darsa got new cleats for Christmas.”
I had been dying for visitation to finish. Now I wished I was still there.
The house on Birge Hill was so small, you always knew exactly where everyone else was. You could hear doors opening and closing. You could hear breath where there shouldn’t be breath. Breath lingered as sound, as heat, hovering in the air above you. In a way, this was good, because you weren’t easily caught off guard. It meant you were always ready.
I moved through school halls with that same keen alertness, sensing trouble and moving away from it, speeding past wild packs of jocks, populars, and nerds before they even saw my shadow. If I was sloppy and got noticed, the wolves would descend.
“Hey, freak,” they would call.
“Hey, weird girl,” they would growl.
Fag, fat, slut — their insults were strangely unimaginative compared to Grandpa’s curses. I could have outnamed them, outcursed them, in a second if I had tried.
For me, evading the wolves was simply a way of life, a tactical move I did with a cool that came with long practice. But other girls let their hearts break open in the hall for everyone to witness. We could almost see the blood.
When they called her a slut, Frannie Synolds ran to the bathroom and put her finger down her throat.
One time Patsy Smart started banging her forehead against her locker hard, like a fist on a rock. As I walked by, I could hear her mumbling, “Freakhead, freakhead, freakhead,” over and over again.
I was packless, and I was curse-proof. I had also learned how important it was to be invisible, especially important before I learned to fight back. I was almost as good as Harry Potter.
When Duck-Duck started ignoring me and sitting with the wolf-girls, being invisible didn’t feel like such a good trick anymore. It made me feel sad instead of magic. It made me worry about what would happen when my birthday came around. The wolves always had big parties where they invited everyone except people they wanted to make feel bad. I knew I wasn’t going to have a party. I was invisible and had no one to invite.
For weeks, Keely had been asking the Social Service ladies if she could take me to the Auga-L convention. We’d had one unsupervised visit, where we were allowed to go the drugstore and back, but this was different. It was bigger, longer. Plus it was half an hour away.
“It will be a good experience for her,” said Keely. “She’ll learn about serenity.”
“So it’s a religious organization?” asked Candy.
Keely didn’t answer that one, but she handed out Auga-L pamphlets to Candy and anyone else who would take one. Finally Candy and the other Social Service ladies said okay.
“But you have to bring her back in the evening,” they said. “It’s not an overnight visit. Baby steps, you know.”
Keely was so excited, it almost made me think she liked the idea of working up to an overnight stay. “You won’t be sorry,” she kept saying to me.
I had never been to a convention before, so I was definitely curious. I figured it would be like the Olympics or a football game, with people sitting on bleachers with binoculars. Maybe it would be like a circus, with popcorn and cotton candy and tigers jumping through rings of fire. What made it even more exciting was that it was going to happen on my birthday.
“Are you sure you want to go on your birthday?” said Molly. “We could have a party here if you wanted.”
I knew she was just being nice, but she probably didn’t know that Duck-Duck was my only friend, and even she was turning out to be a wolf-girl.
“Naw,” I said. “I’ll just go with Keely to the convention. They’ll probably have cake there too.”
January fifteenth was a Saturday, so I was going to miss shopping with Molly, but I wasn’t thinking about that when Keely came to pick me up in the green truck.
“See you later,” I called to Molly and Duck-Duck. It felt like a normal thing I was doing, going out with my mother on my birthday. Going somewhere they couldn’t go. Maybe they even wished they could come too.
The heat in the green truck was broken, so my feet were frozen by the time we got there. It turned out a convention wasn’t a big party in a football stadium or even a concert hall. It was only twenty ladies in a living room, drinking shakes. There were a couple men, but I was the only kid.
“Carmel!” said the lady who lived there. “I’ve heard so much about you! Your mother talks about you constantly. I’m Barbara, Barb for short. I’m sure your mother has told you about me.”
I didn’t want to say No, I’ve never heard of you, so I shook her hand and kind of smiled.
“Your mother says you play the piano. You’ll have to play us a song before you leave.”
At first I thought Barb had started talking to someone else.
“Excuse me?”
“Your mother said you play like a prodigy. You’ll have to show us.”
She definitely had me mixed up with some other lady and her kid, since I was sure the word prodigy had never come out of Keely’s mouth. I fake-smiled again and didn’t say anything.
Keely didn’t seem to be listening to Barb’s story about my musical skills. She was on the other side of the room, picking up pamphlets and pretending to read them. I slid up behind her.
“What the hell?” I whispered. “Why are you telling people I can play the piano?”
Keely took a step back from the table she was admiring and ignored my question. “Look at that poster. Now you know I’m not the only one who believes in Auga-L.”
I looked at the picture and saw smiling ladies in black and yellow, holding up black and yellow canisters that said Auga-L in big type. They looked totally satisfied, like they knew for sure all their daughters could play the piano like prodigies and didn’t have to lie about it.
Then, before I could ask Keely again about piano lies, or kick her because that was probably the only way to get her attention, Barb rang a little bell and called out, “Come on, girls, let’s start.”
They weren’t all girls, since two were men. One acted like he might be the husband of one of the ladies sitting on the couch. He sat with his arm around her back. His arm was so long, his hand reached around to her left breast. He would squeeze with the ends of his fingers when he thought no one was looking.
The other man was little with glasses, and he sat, gripping pamphlets, on a kitchen chair in the back. He didn’t look at anyone except Barb. Maybe he wanted to be squeezing her breast but was sitting too far away.
“We are all here because . . .” said Barb loudly, drawing out the because since not everyone was sitting down yet. “Because we have a lifestyle we believe in, and we have a product that makes our lifestyle. What is that lifestyle?” she called out to her audience.
“Auga-L!” her visitors yelled, looking very happy with themselves.
Barb asked, “What is your goal in life?”
Keely screamed, “Simple, Simple, Simple!” But apparently the answer was “Cleaner, Concentrated, Secure, and Free.” Still, the women smiled at Keely.
I didn’t answer any of the questions. Barb obviously already knew the answers. I kept quiet and tried to sink into the couch cushions whenever Keely yelled too loudly.
Then Barb showed a little movie. It had people with big houses talking about how, when they failed at everything else, Auga-L had saved their lives. Saving their lives meant it gave them big houses and something to eat every night that didn’t need cooking. I wondered what Molly, with her shelf of cookbooks and her whole-wheat spaghetti, would think of this.
At the end of the convention, they had a little call-and-response chant. You didn’t need to know the response, because Barb gave it to us before we said it.
“Give me a C,” Barb sang out, and the guests answered, “C!”
“Give me another C!”
“C!”
“Give me an S!”
“S!”
Give me an F!”
“F!”
“What does it spell?”
That was kind of funny. It didn’t spell anything, but that didn’t stop everyone from chanting “C!C!S!F!” Even Keely, who couldn’t read or spell.
I had been hoping for party food, but all they had was shakes. They had flavors other than the vanilla Keely always got, but Keely said the founder had created vanilla first, so that was the most original. I tasted the strawberry, but it didn’t really taste much different from the vanilla. Just pink.
When we left, another woman, who had bought twenty-four cartons of shake mix, came up to us and tried to hug me, even though she was holding the box of twenty-four cartons.
“Carmel, you little darling. Did you learn a lot about Auga-L?”
“Sure,” I said. “But what does the L stand for?”
The woman just laughed and hugged someone else.
“Don’t you feel so serene?” Keely sighed as we got into the green truck.
“Umm,” I said.
“Simple, Simple, Simple,” said Keely, and we drove off.
Keely dropped me at the Family Center. She gave me a carton of shake mix and told me to drink one shake for every meal. I decided I’d drop it in the garbage-that-goes-to-the-dump bin when I got home. I didn’t think shakes were biodegradable or recyclable.
“Did you have a good time?” asked Molly. She was waiting in the car. She looked like she had been baking. There was chocolate on her wrist.
“It was okay,” I said.
“Did you have cake?”
I was about to lie and say yes, when I remembered Keely’s piano lies. “No,” I said. “No cake.” Not even a Yodel.
“I figured I’d make one just in case,” said Molly. “It came out of the oven right before I left the house.”
For some reason, this made me sad instead of happy.
“What kind?” I asked. Then I realized that was rude. “I mean, thank you.”
“Chocolate with raspberry filling. You can help me with the raspberry.”
“Did Duck-Duck help you bake it?” I asked.
“No, she went over to Darsa’s house, but she’ll be home soon.”
That made the chocolate not sound so good, but when we got home, we iced the cake with chocolate on the top and raspberry in the middle. After Duck-Duck got back and we all had dinner, Molly and Duck-Duck lit cake candles and sang.
“Happy birthday, Fishkill,” said Molly. “I’m so glad you’re with us to celebrate your thirteenth birthday.”
That sounded weird. So old. Thirteen sounded too old to have to drink shakes. Thirteen sounded so final.
I started thinking about Birge Hill. I had lived there almost all of my thirteen years. It wasn’t like I wanted to be back there, but it seemed like everyone had a place where they really belonged except me. Keely and me.
When Keely first reappeared, the ladies and the police and whoever else had an opinion said Keely had no shot at getting custody if she didn’t have a stable address. I thought the stable part was funny, but no one else seemed to.
“Stable?” I said. “Horses? Get it?”
They didn’t.
The ladies said Keely couldn’t live in her car, or wherever it was she spent her nights, if she wanted a child to live with her. First, they found her a long-term hotel to stay in while she was looking for something more long-term and more stable. I thought that was kind of funny too. Why call a hotel long-term if it wasn’t? I never went inside, since most of our visits were supervised in the office, but I did see the outside. The roof looked like gray cardboard, and the apartments were stacked like boxes of Kleenex at the store: big and rectangular but easy to tip if you knocked it just a little. I thought about Keely in her Kleenex hotel when the wind blew hard. Maybe that was why it wasn’t long-term; it could blow away, and they wouldn’t know where she had gone. They were all very big on knowing where everyone was. I wondered why they didn’t let Keely move back to Birge Hill, but maybe she didn’t want to. Maybe she wanted something better. She said the shakes were making her better. I had my doubts.
January turned out to be a gray and brown month. There was no snow, and every afternoon it rained just enough to keep my coat soggy and make the pages of my books curl. I caught a cold, and Molly kept me home for three whole days. I would stay in bed until Duck-Duck left for school, and then Molly would make me breakfast. Sometimes she made me soup for breakfast, which somehow felt like something you would do in a book. After breakfast, she read the newspaper and I read the funnies. She bought me lemon cough drops and let me watch television. I knew she was missing work, but she said it was okay, that staying home was what you did when you had sick kids. I wasn’t really her kid, but it made me feel good anyways. I was sorry when I had to go back to school. I wanted to be sick for months.
January was still gray my first day back. I still felt a little weak too, like I had been eating soup for weeks instead of days. I made it through the day, but maybe I was still a little sick and that was why I couldn’t keep up with Duck-Duck when we walked to school. Maybe being sick was why I wasn’t as invisible as usual.
“Hey, you,” called Frank as I walked toward my locker to leave after the final bell rang. He wasn’t hanging out with Worm anymore. Now a skinny kid followed him around and tried to look as mean as him. I couldn’t fight Frank and Worm, but on a non-sick day I probably could have taken Frank and Skinny Kid.
“Hey, ho,” said Skinny Kid.
It made me smile a little. All I could think of was the dwarves: Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go. . . .
“What you laughing at, slut? You can’t even afford new shoes.”
They weren’t close enough for me to worry about having to get in a good defensive punch, so I kept walking. I didn’t get why Frannie Synolds would make herself throw up because someone called her a name. An unimaginative name at that.
They were still trailing me, and now, from down the hall, I could see Darsa and her pack coming toward me. Duck-Duck was with her, second-in-command. I stopped at my locker, and they came closer and closer.
“Hey, Fishbreath, where’d you get those sneakers?” asked Darsa. “The trash?”
I kept my eyes glued to the stack of books in my locker. Math was on top of English, which was on top of social studies.
“Have you ever seen such disgusting shoes?” said Darsa. There was the whisper-growl of wolves. “Wouldn’t she look perfect in one of those Save the Children ads?”
I pulled out the math book and put it in my backpack. I glanced up at Duck-Duck. If she spoke to me, maybe the others would back off.
“Hey,” I said, catching her eye. “Are we walking home together?”
Duck-Duck stiffened and quickly looked away. Without a word, she just walked right past me. I buried my head in my locker. If I couldn’t see, maybe it wouldn’t be real.
They all kept walking, but I could still hear them.
“Oh, my God,” Darsa said. “You’re not friends with that skank, are you?”
I heard a little voice murmuring, “No, of course not. I just help her with he
r homework.”
Darsa and the wolves snorted. “Can’t she just text you questions? Oh, right, she doesn’t know what a cell phone is.” And then a faint Chrissy giggle.
I grabbed my coat, slammed my locker shut, and stumbled out of the building, unsure of where I would go but knowing I had to get out of there before I heard anything more.
But just then a miracle occurred.
“Carmel,” said a familiar voice, “I was just coming to look for you.”
I whirled around, looking for the face. It was my mother.
“Come on,” Keely said. “We have to go.”
I’d never been so happy to see her. Other kids always had parents showing up to take them to doctor appointments or on special camping trips. I never did, until now. I was alone with my mother. It didn’t matter where we were going.
“Come on,” said Keely, walking toward the parking lot. “We have business today. Don’t you remember?”
I didn’t remember, but I was so happy to see her, I just got into the pickup.
“Thanks,” I said. “That was perfect timing.”
“Glad I could help,” said Keely. “That’s what mothers are for, right?” Her foot fumbled with the pickup’s pedals before we started rolling out of the parking lot. “Do you have many friends at school?”
That was the first time she had ever asked about something real. Maybe therapy was doing her good.
“Not really,” I said. “Girls can be mean.” I got a sudden lump in my throat when I thought of Duck-Duck. “I thought one of them was my friend, but I was wrong.”
Keely put her hand on my leg. It was something Molly would have done. “It’s okay. You’re better than they are.” She took her hand away.
“Thanks,” I said. I hadn’t realized how cold I was until she touched me.
“No, really,” said Keely. “You are. That’s why you have a mother who cares.” She turned left. “Now you can do something for me.”