by Amy Hatvany
Now I waited a minute, then crawled into the bathroom on my hands and knees, pretending to be a cat. Mama had allergies so we couldn’t get a real kitten; pretending I was one was the next-best thing.
“Meow,” I said to my daddy, who was leaning against the bathroom wall, staring up at the ceiling. He looked back down at me and smiled when he heard the noise. “Meow,” I said again, pretending to lick the side of my hand and rubbing my face with it, then inched my way over to press my body against his long legs.
“What’s this?” he said. “An eight-year-old, brown-haired, blue-eyed cat?”
“Meow,” I said. “Almost nine.”
He squatted down and cupped the back of my head in his hand. “Here, kitty kitty.”
I noticed he still had white foam near his ears from shaving, so I grabbed the towel off the rack and wiped it away for him. “Why don’t Gramma and Grampa want to see Mama?” I asked. It scared me to think that my parents could someday not want to see me.
He frowned. “Were you eavesdropping again, young lady? We’ve talked about that a hundred times. Not okay.” He gave the end of my nose a light pinch.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to. I was just walking down the hall.”
“Uh-huh,” Daddy said, but winked at me, too, so I knew he wasn’t really angry. Daddy never stayed mad at me or Max for very long; Mama was the one who took away TV privileges or sent us to our rooms when we misbehaved. With Daddy, I knew I could get away with pretty much everything.
I tried again. “Are Gramma and Grampa mad at Mama? Bree got mad at me once and didn’t talk to me for a whole week.”
“It’s complicated, sweetie. Sometimes grown-ups have problems in their relationships that kids really can’t understand.”
“Like I don’t understand division?”
He chuckled. “Sort of.” He grabbed the towel from me. “Now, you need to scoot so I can finish getting ready.”
“Do you have to go to work?” I asked, carefully searching his face with my eyes. He had brown hair and gray eyes and long, dark lashes. He was the handsomest man in the world.
He gave me a small smile, making his dimple show up. I wanted to stick my finger in it. “I do, kitten,” he said. “It’s how I take care of you guys.”
“But do you have to be gone so long?” I whispered, not looking at him.
He sighed. “As long as it takes to get the business on its feet, baby girl. I know it’s hard, but we’re a family, and we’re going to go through some rough times.”
“Mama’s tired,” I said, still in a whisper. “She cries sometimes, in the middle of the day, she’s so tired.”
Daddy was quiet a minute, pressing his lips together and breathing slowly, through his nose. Then he spoke. “I’ll take care of your mama, okay, Ava? Don’t you worry.”
Nodding my head felt like lying, but I did it anyway. I told my daddy exactly what he wanted to hear.
Kelli
When Jason Winkler sat down next to Kelli in Algebra I, she took it as a sign that they were meant to be together. He was by far the cutest boy in the school—everyone thought so. He was tall but not skinny. His dark hair fell over his blue eyes in a way that made Kelli want to reach out and brush it back with the tips of her fingers, then let them slide down the warmth of his cheek. He had a lopsided smile that was almost always accompanied by a wink—Kelli was pretty sure that on the first day of class, he’d smiled more than once at her before sauntering to the back row and plopping into the chair beside her. He was a junior but spent more time at basketball practice than studying, so this was the third time he was taking the introductory class. Kelli was just a freshman and didn’t care about that. She only cared that of all the open spots in the room, he picked the one next to her.
“Hey,” he said this morning, swinging his head around to look at her. There it was. The smile . . . and the wink. Kelli felt the space between her legs get warm and she blushed.
“Hey,” she echoed, tucking the sheet of her long blond hair behind one ear. It was her pride and joy, that hair. Sleek and shiny, not an ounce of frizz or split ends. She spent hours brushing it at night, staring in the mirror, practicing imagined red-carpet speeches into her comb. Her parents said she was vain; she preferred to think of it as optimistic.
“You get the assignment done?” Jason asked as he stretched his long legs out straight beneath the desk and crossed one ankle over the other.
She rolled her eyes. “Kind of. It was totally hard.” She hoped he noticed the outfit she’d changed into in the school bathroom—peg-legged Levi’s and a tight pink sweater, borrowed from her friend Nancy. They were clothes other girls took for granted, but her parents would have screamed at her for wearing them. Their idea of appropriate clothes for school included two colors, black and white, and one shape—boxy.
“Maybe you need a tutor,” Jason said.
She smiled like she knew a secret and raised one of her eyebrows, another thing she’d practiced in front of her mirror. “Are you interested in the job?” she asked him. She couldn’t believe how bold she was being, but all of the articles she read in Cosmopolitan said men liked it when a woman showed confidence. In order to read the magazine, she had to sneak to the library after school, telling her parents she was doing homework. She was studying . . . in a way. Brushing up on how to get a boyfriend.
“That’s not the only job I’m interested in,” Jason said, and his friends Mike and Rory, who sat on the other side of him, snickered.
Kelli blushed again—her Cosmo textbook had taught her exactly what he meant—but kept smiling as she directed her attention to the front of the room, where their teacher was about to start class. Jason leaned over and nudged her leg with his fist. “You going to the basketball game Friday night?”
She shook her head. Her parents made her go to youth group at their church on Fridays, which was just about the most boring thing in the world.
“You should come,” Jason said. “I’m on the starting lineup this week. Maybe we could do something after.”
He was asking her out on a date! She forced herself to shrug, knowing boys also liked it if you played just a little bit hard to get. “Maybe,” she said. “I’ll see if I can.”
“Cool,” he said.
For the rest of class, Kelli didn’t hear a word of what was said. All she could think about was talking with Nancy, seeing if her friend could help her figure out a way to get to that basketball game. Nancy’s parents weren’t old, like Kelli’s. Nancy’s mother ran a local coffee shop and loved to tell jokes; her father was a sociology professor at Cal Poly who wore jeans to class just like his students. Kelli’s father was a bank manager who wore the same black slacks and white, short-sleeved shirt with a plaid bow tie to work every day. Her mother stayed home, shopping for groceries and cleaning their house, and hadn’t worn a pair of jeans in her life. They’d met at church in downtown San Luis Obispo more than thirty-five years ago and quickly married, thinking they’d start a family as soon as possible. Kelli hadn’t arrived for another twenty years—something they hadn’t expected, having already grown accustomed to a life on their own. Kelli was a blond ball of energy, bouncing into their lives and disrupting the peace. She’d always felt like they didn’t know what to do with her. They hoped for a daughter who liked to sit quietly and listen to stories; they had a daughter who raced into mud puddles. Kelli learned to separate herself into two different people—the one they wanted her to be and the one she was. As she got older, the side of her they didn’t approve of seemed harder to hide. Now that she was in high school especially, and there were dances to go to and dates to be had. She loved her parents, but she wasn’t sure how much longer she could pretend to be the girl they imagined her to be.
Kelli sighed when the bell rang, thinking about how hard it would be to make it to the game on Friday, but gave Jason one last smile, letting her gaze linger on his for a moment, just to keep him interested. “Don’t forget,” he said, and she nodded,
thrilled by the possibility that she might get to fall in love.
* * *
Kelli was only six when she realized her parents were different. Her mother would take her to the park after school, but while the other moms and dads chased after their children on the playground, Kelli’s would settle on a bench with a book, urging her to go play on her own. The other mothers chatted and laughed together, but Kelli’s mom tended to keep to herself. She had a few friends from their church, but none of them had children Kelli’s age.
One night, as her mother tucked her into bed and read her a story, Kelli noticed that her mother had wisps of silver strung through the honey-blond locks she had given her daughter. “Why do you have gray in your hair, Mama?” Kelli asked, and her mother leaned down to kiss Kelli’s forehead, as she did every night. When she pulled back, she smiled at Kelli.
“Because I’m forty-eight, sweet girl,” she said.
“Why doesn’t Janie’s mama have silver hair?” Kelli thought her mother’s hair was beautiful, like it belonged to one of the princesses from the fairy tales Kelli loved to read.
“Because I’m older than Janie’s mama,” her mother said, still smiling. “Most people have babies when they’re very young, but your father and I didn’t. You surprised us.”
Kelli thought about this, knitting her eyebrows together. “Was I an accident?” Kelli’s friend Pete had told her about how he overheard his parents talking about him as an accident—a baby they hadn’t wanted.
Her mother sat down on the edge of her bed and ran her hand along the side of Kelli’s cheek. “Absolutely not,” she said. “You weren’t an accident. You were a surprise. There’s a difference.”
“What kind of difference?”
“An accident is something you didn’t want. A surprise is something you didn’t realize how much you wanted it until it came along.”
Kelli had gone to sleep that night feeling loved. It was hard to remember it now, at fourteen, when her parents seemed so far away from her—so impossible to reach. She wondered sometimes if she’d been given to them by mistake. If she was adopted instead of born to them, simply because she was so fundamentally different from them both. She’d always tried to please them—to be quiet and respectful and comply with their requests. She was obedient, accompanying them to church every Sunday, helping her mother clean the house, leaving her father alone in the den so he could read his paper every night in peace. And yet . . . she imagined another family—the one she was meant to live with. Her fantasy mother would laugh more than she scolded; her father would gather her up for a cuddle on the couch, then help her with her homework. They’d have a dog and two cats, and maybe even another daughter so Kelli would have someone to giggle with in her bedroom into the wee hours of morning. She imagined a loud, messy house filled with happiness and love. A house entirely different from the one she lived in now.
She loved her parents, but she knew they didn’t understand her. Kelli had big dreams—she wanted the kind of passion she read about in the romance novels at the library. She longed for the rush of attraction, the kind of connection she never saw between her mother and father. They never held hands, never kissed more than a swift, dry peck on the lips. They followed strict routines, waking at five each morning to read the Bible and pray together—something Kelli had begun refusing to do just this year. She wasn’t sure she believed everything they believed. She didn’t feel Jesus the way they said she should, even though she had asked Him into her heart seven times, just to be sure He took.
Just last Sunday after church, as they’d walked home together, she’d even been courageous enough to ask her father how he knew there really was a God. He’d looked at her with a cloudy expression, his pale blue eyes narrowing. “I know because I know,” he said, and Kelli thought that was a meaningless response. She tried again.
“But how do you know? I don’t understand how you can believe in something you can’t see.”
Her father stopped, grabbed her arm, and gave her another stern look. “It’s called having faith, young lady. You don’t see God, you feel Him. Do you understand?”
Kelli nodded, a little frightened by the grip of her father’s hand. He so rarely touched her anymore, it felt foreign. Unnatural.
“Thomas,” her mother said, reaching out to pull his hand off of their daughter, and they’d walked the rest of the way home in silence. Kelli’s mother recognized her daughter starting to pull away from them—away from God—and she felt helpless to do anything to stop it. All she could hope was that Kelli might learn the error of her ways and come back to them. All she could do was pray.
Kelli thought about that moment all week long as she considered how to ask her parents if she could go to the basketball game. She knew her parents would never let her go. At the beginning of the year, she’d brought up the idea of trying out to be a cheerleader. “Why would you want to flaunt yourself like that in front of everyone?” her father asked.
She’d sighed at the time, wondering how, exactly, she was supposed to answer a question like that. “I was just thinking it would be good exercise,” she told him. She loved how the girls looked in their tight red sweaters and short pleated skirts. She loved the bounce of their ponytails and the way all the football players swarmed around them like bees.
He’d looked down at her over the top of his black-rimmed glasses. “You can take a walk,” he said. And that was that.
Now it was Friday night and Kelli sat with her parents at the dining room table inside their small brick house. Her mother had made them pasta for dinner—sauce from a jar over mushy egg noodles. “This is good, Mama,” she said, even as the bite she had just taken stuck in her throat.
“Thank you, dear,” her mother said. Her graying blond hair was pulled into a loose bun at the base of her neck and she wore a black dress sprinkled with tiny white flowers. She looked at Kelli’s father. “Thomas? How’s your dinner?”
“Just fine, thank you,” her father said. He took a gulp of milk, then moved his gaze to his daughter. “How was school today, Kelli?” He wasn’t sure how to talk to her lately. She had always been pretty, but now . . . it made him uncomfortable, to see his daughter this way, knowing how men were. What they’d want to do with her. She used to be a skinny thing, with knobby knees and barely any fat on her at all, but her body had blossomed over the last year, her hips rounded and her waist nipped in. But most disturbing to him was the swell of her chest, the way it pushed at the blouses she wore, like it was anxious for the world to notice the change. He wanted to protect her, but he didn’t know how. It was hard to look at her now, hard to understand that this was still his little girl.
Kelli nodded. “It was good,” she said, then took a deep breath. “There’s a basketball game tonight at the gym. All the kids are going.” She paused, feeling both her parents’ eyes on her. “Do you think . . . would it be okay if I went, too?”
Her mother stitched her thin brows together over her pale blue eyes. “You have youth group,” she said.
“I know,” Kelli said. “I thought I could miss it just this once. Please?”
Her parents were silent, staring at their daughter. When they were in high school, both of them were more interested in studying than attending sporting events or dances. Thomas wanted to work in a bank and Ruth never had aspirations to be anything but a housewife. He loved the structure of numbers and strict procedure; she loved the time she spent taking care of their home and volunteering at their church. They didn’t stray outside of the path they knew their parents wanted them to be on; they never pushed any limits.
Though they were not demonstrative people, they loved their daughter, and up until she’d turned fourteen, they’d assumed she’d simply behave as they had at her age. But sometimes, there were traces of makeup on her face when she came home from school, evidence of misbehavior that she’d failed to wash thoroughly away. Ruth told Thomas this was normal teenage rebellion, that as long as she was coming home at all, they should b
e grateful. “It could be worse,” she said. “Much worse.”
They did what they could, of course. Ruth only bought Kelli the most shapeless tops and baggy slacks for her to wear at school. She thought of it as armor against the army of young men who would surely try to have their way with her daughter if given a chance. They kept her busy with youth group and church services; they discouraged the activities that might lead her off course.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Thomas finally said. “Maybe another time, when we can go with you.”
Kelli nodded, knowing it was futile to try to convince them. At least she had asked, which was more than she’d usually do. They finished dinner in relative silence, and after Kelli helped her mother clean up the kitchen, her father drove them over to the church. They had Bible study that night, which met in the far corner of the sanctuary while the youth group gathered in the basement.
Her mother kissed her forehead as they parted ways. “We’ll see you in a couple of hours,” she said, and Kelli nodded, wondering if God would strike her down for telling a lie.
* * *
By the time Kelli arrived at the gym, the game was already over. After her parents disappeared around the corner of the church hallway, she had slipped out the side door and walked as fast as she could across town to the school. Halfway there, she hid behind a huge rhododendron bush and took off the stupid blouse she’d put on over Nancy’s tight pink sweater, which she’d worn again that day. There was nothing she could do about the black slacks she had on—her jeans wouldn’t fit beneath them and her parents would have suspected something was up if she had brought a bag to youth group. She swiped on a bit of red lipstick and took her hair out of the low ponytail at the base of her neck, letting it fall around her shoulders. She hoped Jason would still think she looked pretty. She hoped he might kiss her.