Number 8

by Anna Fienberg

  “It’s okay, don’t worry about it. You missed out on my mom’s lemon delights though.”

  “Oh, wow, the ones with the custard filling?”

  “Yeah. You know I let the first bus go, waiting for you. And the second one was late. I thought it’d never come. I guess you found something more interesting to do.” Damn, why do I say this stuff? What a pathetic whiner. Let her think you don’t care, you idiot. You don’t care, anyway; you decided that a long time ago in sixth grade.

  “Well, Ez, you know we’ve got this assignment due on Friday? Mitch said he’d help me with the Ancient Egypt stuff. He knows a site on the Internet that’s got all these cool pictures, and my printer’s not working so—”

  “Oh, Mitchell, well that explains it. Did you get your project finished?”

  Lilly giggles. “Not exactly—his brother was using the computer and he said he’d kill us if we got in his way so we went up to the mall, got a drink, just hung around together. Oh, Ez, it was so great. Ez?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you do? Is your assignment finished?”

  My stomach is so tight. I want to tell her about all those amazing minutes between four o’clock and six, and I want to keep it just for myself. I’ve known Lilly since kindergarten. Now we’re in high school and this torn feeling is still happening to me. Lilly calls herself my best friend, but often I feel like I’m just the carpet she walks on: always there, wall-to-wall, keeping her feet toasty. Well, I used to like Mitchell, too. I was the one who pointed him out to her—his awesome imitation of Mrs. Hatfield’s voice, the cool way he faced up to Badman as if he didn’t give a damn, his smile—when he turned it on, you felt like the only person in the world. But after I told her, she focused him on her, like the sun on a piece of glass. His face went red as fire when she spoke to him. He became her slave. I bet he would have worked on a pyramid like one of those Ancient Egyptians, hauled bricks for three hundred years in the flaming sun if she asked him to.

  So what will she do with Jackson Ford?

  “Ez, I’ve got to go now,” says Lilly. “Dinner’s ready. But I’ll see you tomorrow and we’ll talk then, okay?”

  “Yeah sure, Lils. I gotta go, too. Bye.”

  “Ez, set the table for me, would you? Dinner’s almost ready.” Mom’s in the kitchen and I can smell Bolognese sauce.

  “What’s for dinner, Mom?” calls Daniel.

  I stand in the doorway of my little brother’s room. He’s playing PlayStation, his thumbs moving so fast they’re almost blurred. Mom yells something back to him but his eyes never move from the screen.

  “Oh, that’s good,” he calls but I know he hasn’t heard. He’s just died and the screen is going black, showing Game Over. Now he’ll have to start the whole level again from the beginning. He starts whispering all the bad words he knows. I hear a couple even I didn’t know.

  “You’ll beat him next time,” I say, and tickle him under the arm.

  “He’s a poop-head STINKbug,” he shouts, and thumps the floor. There are tears in his eyes. Mom worries about how much time Daniel spends getting killed on the screen. She thinks it must be bad for his self-esteem. Dad worries about how many men, animals, and monsters he murders with such a variety of weapons. He thinks Daniel may become a serial killer. I think Daniel’s just found a way he can escape from the world and Mrs. Hatfield. I had her in second grade as well, and I know she is far more terrifying than any monster he’ll meet on PlayStation.

  “Let’s go have dinner,” I say to him. “You can fight better with some food inside you.”

  Daniel grins, and a tear squeezes out of his eye. He wipes it away quickly. “We must be having onions for dinner,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say, “I saw Mom sobbing her heart out in the kitchen.”

  When Dan and I have set the table, and Dad got home and put on a Mozart minuet (he thinks it will inspire us to have more intelligent conversations), Mom serves the spaghetti.

  “Was that Lilly on the phone?” she asks as she sits down.

  “Yes.” The spaghetti is really good. I realize how hungry I am. Jackson ate far more cakes than I did, and they’re light as air, anyway.

  “So why did she leave you stranded?”

  “Oh, she had homework and stuff.”

  Mom throws down her fork in exasperation. “Why couldn’t she have let you know? Really, Ez, that girl just has no consideration for anyone else. What kind of a friend is that? I was worried when you didn’t get off the bus.”

  I put down my head and eat. Mom goes on and on. I know what she means, but it’s strange how when Mom badmouths Lilly, I want to defend her. I want to tell her Lilly’s good points, like … and anyway, Lilly is my friend, she’s my choice and we laugh together, and I don’t want Mom butting in, giving me advice.

  Now Mom and Dad are going on about interest rates and how they went up today by a quarter of a percent. A quarter of a percent of what? Why is everyone so worried? A percent sounds so tiny, like something the size of a mosquito or a sand fly. I don’t say anything though because if I do they’ll both launch into this long lecture about fixed rates and variable rates, and offsetting your home loan and negative gearing. I swear, all my life they’ve bored me to death about money and the need to save and considering the consequences of your purchases and all that crap that in elementary school I was the only one in the class that refused to have a bank book. “You’ll have to spend a lot more time on your decimals,” says our math teacher, Mr. Norton, “if you want to have a career in the bank like your parents.” As if.

  No, I’m going to be a singer. At least that’s what I want to do. I might not be good enough but I’d really love to sing in a band. I read in a music magazine that the best way to learn is to listen to all different kinds of music. I’d like to know more about that jazz singer, Ella someone, who Jackson mentioned. But how am I ever going to do that? In this house it’s practically impossible to listen to any music composed since the nineteenth century. Mom says “modern music rots the brain,” wrinkling her nose as if someone’s just made a bad smell right under it. She’s like that mayor in New York who declared zero tolerance for crime—except Mom’s got zero tolerance for rock or metal or hip hop or any other kind of popular music so I have to sneak around like a thief trying to snatch moments of listening time.

  It must be so great to have a CD player in your room with headphones and all like Lilly does. You could shut yourself off from the world like a castle surrounded by a moat.

  When I walked into Jackson’s house this afternoon and saw the keyboard and mike and all those instruments I thought yes, this is where I belong. Jackson said his mom decided Valerie Avenue was her destiny. Well, meeting her might be mine!

  I don’t talk much about singing or what it feels like because my parents just get mad, and worry. “Making music is no way to make money,” says Mom, and Dad always backs her up. “Musicians have tragic lives,” he throws in as he goes to get a beer.

  If I’m in the mood, I’ll confront him with the holes in his logic. “What?” I say, frowning as if I can’t quite understand, “all musicians, I mean every single one of them in the world, are doomed? Do you know them all? Or are you really just talking about two percent of them? Or one percent. Or maybe a quarter of a percent. Like, how would you know exactly what percentage of singers’ lives end in tragedy? Maybe the percentage of sad singers is equal to that of sad bankers.”

  Then Dad always does his “I knew a girl once who was so rude to her father that she went to bed early and the night ended in tragedy” routine, so I usually just shut up and go to my room.

  But really, how do I know what I’m going to do when I grow up, anyway? I’m only thirteen, and anything could happen. Why is everyone so obsessed with careers and the future and what may happen in a hundred years? I want to live my life now, this minute. What I love about singing is I stop thinking—I just let go, like a balloon cut loose. Right inside me, like the eye of a hurricane, is a si
lence I only hear when I sing. Listen, and it shows you what to do. Your breath goes in and out like the tide, flowing with the rhythm of the song, and the music rolls through in waves. If I close my eyes I can see them, dark blue and deep green and the happy notes, oh, they’re like blinding sunshine on water, diamonds of light dancing on the waves.

  Lilly-stings and math failures disappear when I sing. They dissolve like smoke on the water. That’s an old Deep Purple song—just four notes, but a good guitarist punching them out can change the world. For a while, anyway. Badman can play it that way. You get goosebumps up your arms when he does. His father taught him all these old rock songs before he left for New Zealand. Pity Badman is such a loudmouth.

  “So did you get your results back for the private school entrance exam?”

  I almost choke on my spaghetti. I take a big gulp of water.

  “Your mother asked you a question, Ez,” says Dad.

  “I thought you wouldn’t mind if I finish choking first,” I say. I hate this. Why does math exist? It’s something human beings invented after all, not some random evil that the universe created, like blue-ringed octopus or stonefish that kill you within a few minutes of contact. Maybe math exams aren’t as swift, but they can wound you slowly, torturously, over all your school years. If I become a singer I won’t ever have to do math again.

  “I got a Participation.”

  “Oh, Ez,” say Mom and Dad together. They say “Ez” with a downbeat, like I’ve just lost both legs in a skiing accident. Sometimes I wonder if they’d rather have a dead math whiz for a daughter or a living dunce.

  “Well, she got something,” Daniel pipes up. “She got a Participle!”

  I try to smile at Daniel. He’s really good at English. He can spot a moving adverb at twenty paces.

  “A Participation, Daniel,” explains Dad heavily, “is just to say that Ez took the exam. Was present. Turned up. Now if she’d tried, she could have gotten a Credit, or a Distinction or a High Distinction.”

  “Like her father,” Mom smiles at Dad.

  “Like her mother,” Dad smiles at Mom. Their voices sound as sickly sweet as melted chocolate.

  Then they both look at me, and sigh.

  I fidget with my knife.

  “Don’t fidget, Bridget,” says Dad.

  “Who’s Bridget?” asks Dan.

  “There are tryouts for the end-of-year concert tomorrow,” I say loudly, changing the subject. “Everyone says I should get in but it’s not easy, you know. Some of the seniors are really good and they only choose three groups from the whole school.”

  “You’ll get in for sure, Ez,” cries Daniel. He looks at Dad, frowning meaningfully. Then he turns back to me. “Are you going to sing with Lilly? Are you going to do that Britney Spears song?”

  I sigh so hard that the little pool of salt that Dan spilled flies up into his nose. I wait for him to stop sneezing. “I guess so,” I say. “Lilly wants me to. But you know, I’d really love to try something, like, oh, I don’t know…”

  “What, Ez?” Daniel’s leaning toward me, concentrating so hard I can hear the snot from his sneeze hurtling through his nose.

  I smile at him. Sometimes it’s a little scary having a brother who is so much on your side he seems to care more than you do what you do with your life.

  I lean toward him, and our foreheads touch. I whisper something I’ve only half thought about, and never said aloud. “I’d like to sing in a rock band with Badman. I’d like to go wild.”

  There, now, I’ve said it. I look at Daniel. He’s shocked. I can see him struggling, trying to cope with the idea. He knows all about Badman, his Walls of Jericho wrestling holds in the school grounds, his practical jokes that send people to the hospital, his rattlesnake temper. But he’s also heard him play.

  “I think you would be great,” he says loyally. “But you’ll need someone there to guard you. That’ll be me.”

  “Thanks, Dan.” I start to get up. “Still, Britney Spears it’ll be, I suppose. I’d better go and rehearse…”

  “If you spent as much time on your math as you did on your singing, your grades would be excellent,” says Dad.

  I narrow my eyes until the world is a thin screen with black borders, like those foreign movies on TV. Everything looks better that way for a second, until I drop the silverware I’ve picked up.

  “Oh, Ez, if you keep narrowing your eyes like that, you’ll get a squint,” Mom says. She turns to Dad, “Drives me crazy.”

  He nods. “She’ll get crow’s-feet.”

  “Crow’s-feet!” Dan shouts, slapping his leg. He rushes around the table flapping his arms like wings. “Aark! Ark!” he cries in a very good impersonation of a crow. I always think that bird sounds like a swear word. Dan stops suddenly. “What are crow’s-feet?” He looks at me in a worried way.

  “Wrinkles around the eyes,” says Dad. “And both of you can sit down and wait until your mother and I have finished our dinner.”

  In video clips, all the girls squint. It looks cool. Lots of singers even close their eyes during the whole song. You can drift off that way. The rest of the world disappears. Lilly can’t do it for long. She’s always too eager to see how the audience is reacting to her. Squinting plus singing are the only things I do better than Lilly. I put my whole heart into them.

  As I watch my parents chew, I think about Lilly. I can hear Dad’s teeth squeaking. It’s actually quite hard being her friend. Lilly is tall and very slim—thin as a supermodel, like Kate Moss or someone. When she does stretches in dance, the teacher tells the class to copy her: “Bend like Lilly, our supple young willow!” It’s nauseating. Everyone notices her. Lilly has long blonde hair and sky-blue eyes—she’s like a postcard from an expensive holiday. She seems fragile, as if she might break if anything sharp happens to her. Badman never says the f-word around Lilly.

  I look down at my thighs on the kitchen chair. They spread across the width of the plastic. When I press them lots of dimples appear, like the two on either side of Lilly’s mouth when she smiles. Leg dimples are not considered attractive. And only witches have black hair.

  Of course Lilly’s voice isn’t bad. I mean, she sings in tune and she hardly ever wobbles. She doesn’t get stage fright, particularly if she’s singing with someone else (like me). But her voice doesn’t give me goosebumps. It’s sort of sensible, like orthopedic shoes. Still, it’s always Lilly who’s picked for choir leads because she’s so stunning that she lends class to any performance, just by being present. Just by turning up. Lills believes in the stars—she’s a Virgo, with her bed made every morning and her room tidy—and she sticks all these Affirmations up on her mirror with Post-it Notes. The Affirmations say things like I am beautiful (as if she needs it) and I can do anything. Sometimes I think she likes hanging around with me because I’m fatter and darker than her, with hairy arms. I’m a good contrast to her fair beauty. I wonder when Jackson will notice how much more beautiful she is than me?

  Finally my parents put their knives and forks together in parallel lines and we’re allowed to clear the table. As we’re scraping the plates Mom says, “So how’s the new boy? Jackson, is it? Did he like my lemon delights?”

  “Yeah, he was starving. There was nothing in their fridge, because they’ve just moved in.”

  I watch Mom’s face wrinkle with horror. “Oh?” she says, “where was his mother?”

  I know what’s she’s thinking. She’s thinking any mother who doesn’t work part-time in the bank and get home early on Tuesdays is neglectful and doesn’t deserve to have children. Talk about zero tolerance. And now I have to tell her that Jackson’s mother, the mother who had no food in the fridge, is also a singer. Another life ending in tragedy.

  Personally, I can’t wait to meet her. Jackson is so lucky. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have a mother who plays the guitar and practices her vocal scales in red satin dresses instead of harping on about math exams. I bet Valerie doesn’t even care about math exams
. I bet she wouldn’t ever expect her child to be a cardboard cutout of her.

  I look at my mother’s back as she starts washing up the dishes. Her shoulders sag a bit and she throws the frying pan down too hard in the sink so the gray greasy water splashes up into her face. She’s saving for a dishwasher. Mom’s finally convinced Dad that it’s worth it. He argues that washing up together means that we have “quality family time.” She says she’d rather do that sitting down. I feel guilty, gazing at her back. I know she’s worried about money and being able to keep up the mortgage payments and that if she stops keeping her eye on the bottom line it will reach up and devour us all. But my math is not going to save this family. No matter how hard I try. I can see it plain as day. So why can’t they? I’m just no good at fractions or long division or lattice multiplication. And I never will be.

  I pick up the dish towel and Mom starts telling me about Doreen, this woman at the bank who has six children and a husband who just lost his job. But I keep thinking about Jackson. He can do lattice multiplication—can he ever! Today he finished ten problems in the time it took me to consider one. And he acted like he was enjoying it. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. There was a grin on his face, and he kept giving these tiny squirms of excitement—until his pen stopped working that is. Then I saw his face close up, and the little glow in his smile went out. It’s strange, but I felt a pang, right up under my ribs, and I wanted to do something to bring the light back. So I lent him the pen. Pity it was leaky, but he didn’t seem to care. Lilly would have been furious at being left with black all over her hands. Not Jackson. Sure enough, he got busy again, and the little grin came on slowly, like a campfire on a wet morning. He scribbled away until Mr. Norton said “stop” and then he sat there, quiet and self-contained, with the grin inside him. He looked to me as if he was singing a song in his head that he’d just made up.

  It was then that Badman poked me in the back. “Check out the try-hard,” he said, jerking his thumb in Jackson’s direction.

  We both looked at Jackson’s double page, filled with neat columns of numbers crisscrossing each other. It was a perfect lattice, just like the stuff our neighbor put on the fence for his potato vine. I leaned out further across the aisle. On Jackson’s page there were even more problems than those set on the board. He’d actually invented his own to solve! It was awesome—like watching magic happen, like the time I saw a magician open his wallet and it burst into flames.