Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks

by Lauren Myracle

  Anna frowns.

  “Fuzz,” I repeat. “As in actual dustball-y stuff? Because he’d just moved from Holland. He’d never heard anyone call the police that.”

  “Because nobody does call the police that.”

  “True. Only Eddie, and actors in cheesy sitcoms.”

  Anna attempts to claim more sheet. I slap her hand.

  “I don’t get what this has to do with Roger not being your love boodle,” she says.

  I sigh, because I don’t, either. All I know is that while Roger is sweet and wonderful and sometimes even adorable in his gentle-giant sort of way, he’s not boodle material. He’s just, well, Roger.

  “Maybe I should become a nun,” I say.

  Anna yawns. She rubs her nose with the back of her hand. “You’ll find your love boodle,” she says. “You just have to paddle harder.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ONE-WAY TICKET TO HELL

  On Friday, we have our first all-school assembly. We’ll have these babies every Friday for the rest of eternity—or until the end of high school, whichever comes first—and they will enlighten our souls. Holy Redeemer’s all over that, because it is Holy Redeemer’s mission to develop not just our minds, not just our bodies, but OUR WHOLE PERSON, soul included.

  Today, our lecturer is Dr. al-Fulani, who taught my seventh-grade Bible class. I don’t like him.

  “Jesus is living water,” Dr. al-Fulani is saying. “He satisfies our thirst when we are parched.” Dr. al-Fulani is a short, swarthy man, and when he leans forward on the podium, he resembles a troll. “Indeed, it is through the baptism of Christ that we are born anew, wet and dripping like a naked tot.”

  Snickers ripple through the auditorium. We’re na-ked tots, we’re na-ked tots! They’re friendly snickers, though, because when it comes to disliking Dr. al-Fulani, I’m in the minority.

  I used to like him. I used to like him a lot. On the first day of seventh-grade Bible class, he announced a weakness for Gummi Worms, and I thought he was adorable: a Gummi Worm-eating troll who emerged from the center of the earth and discovered the wonder of sugary candy. Almost every day someone would bring him a bag of Gummi Worms, and he would smile and thank whoever it was. In a stroke of genius, I once brought him sour Gummi Worms, but made no mention that they were different from the normal kind. The whole class erupted in laughter when his face puckered like a clam.

  Dr. al-Fulani laughed, too. He shook his finger at me, but he laughed.

  Then, two months into the semester, Dr. al-Fulani taught us that according to the Bible, divorce was a sin, and that any person who got divorced would go to hell. Literally.

  “But, Dr. al-Fulani, my parents are divorced,” Lucy Rothchild had said. Lucy, who had thick ankles and carried boxes of raisins around for snacks. “They got divorced when I was five.”

  Dr. al-Fulani didn’t waver. If anything, he grew more solemn. “I am sorry, Lucy. It is God’s law.” He went on to explain that divorcés weren’t the only ones who would writhe in Satan’s flames. Jewish people would go to hell, too, as would Muslims and Buddhists and basically anyone who didn’t accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior.

  At that moment, I lost all respect for Dr. al-Fulani. Not only was he cruel to Lucy, telling her that her parents were going to fry, but even at twelve, I knew that any God worth His (or Her) salt wouldn’t play eenie-meenie-miney-moe like that, tossing people willy-nilly into hell just because they grew up with a different religion, or no religion at all.

  Anyway, I don’t believe in hell.

  Didn’t then.

  Don’t now.

  After assembly, I find Roger out on the quad and flop down beside him. I lie back on the grass and kick off my sandals. I dig my toes into the freshly mown grass and let out the aggrieved sigh I’ve been holding throughout Dr. al-Fulani’s talk.

  Because he’s Roger, he understands. “I hear you,” he says.

  “That man gets my goat,” I say.

  “Two thousand years earlier, he would have burned your goat.”

  I snort-laugh. Burnt offerings, sheesh. Here, God, would you like a slab of charred ram?

  “Why is this school so weird?” I say. “Do kids in normal schools get lectured about the state of their souls? Do normal kids get told that they have to do A, B, and C in order to get into heaven?”

  “Nope,” Roger says, leaning back on his elbows.

  “Everybody acts like . . . la la la, life as usual. It’s like they don’t even consider the possibility that Dr. al-Fulani could be wrong. Or that the other Holy Roller teachers could be wrong, or their ministers, or their parents . . .”

  Roger chuckles.

  “What?”

  “You know what their religious beliefs are? All those people?”

  “Yes.” I shove him, knocking his elbow out of place and making him fall.

  “Ow.”

  “Doesn’t it bug you?” I say. “Please tell me it bugs you.”

  “Doesn’t what bug me?”

  “I don’t know. Just . . . everything.”

  He lies on his side and props his head on his hand. He gazes at me. “Some things bug me. Not everything.”

  I blush. I also rip up a handful of grass and throw it at him. And then, because it’s still not enough, I reshove him so that he topples onto his back and can’t stare at me anymore.

  When enough time’s gone by, I say, “Maybe it’s just . . . you know.”

  He waits.

  “The transition. Summer, which was lovely and free, and now school, which isn’t. All the God talk. All the pious faces, soaking it in.”

  “It is a Christian school,” he points out.

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “Half the kids in my row weren’t even paying attention during assembly.”

  I sigh again. He’s right, I know he’s right. But just because the kids in Roger’s row—or mine—weren’t paying attention, that doesn’t mean they disagreed with Dr. al-Fulani. It just means they didn’t feel the need to even think about his message, because they’d already swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

  I pull up more grass, wondering why this twists me up so much. It doesn’t twist Anna up. I saw her in the front of the auditorium with her friend Georgia. They were scrunched in close, giggling at something on Georgia’s cell phone.

  It doesn’t twist Roger up, either. He just observes—sometimes chuckles—but mainly does his own thing.

  He’s my hero that way, the ultimate example of someone who just is. Roger is Roger is Roger.

  Where does that leave me? Who am I at my core, beneath my shifting thoughts and lack of clarity on pretty much everything?

  “I don’t believe that Jesus is the only way,” I say at last. It sounds insanely stupid.

  “I don’t, either,” Roger says.

  “You don’t?”

  “I don’t get worked up about it, though.”

  Coming from anyone else, Roger’s remark would sound like a dig at the fact that I do get worked up about it. But Roger’s just being his laid-back self. All of a sudden I feel lighter.

  “So . . . it’s okay that I believe in God, but that I don’t go around praising Jesus?”

  “You can praise Jesus if you want. You can praise Muhammad if you want.”

  “Or the grass. Can I praise the grass?” I pull up another tuft and sprinkle it on him.

  He jerks reflexively, like a dog shaking off water.

  “Praise grass,” I say.

  He looks like he’s going to sneeze. “Praise grass.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  KIM-HUE LOVES WORKING ON MAUREEN’S FEET

  That afternoon, Mom takes Anna and me to get celebratory mani/ pedis.

  “What are we celebrating?” Anna asks from the backseat of Mom’s Beamer.

  “The fact that our first week is over, and we survived,” I say from the front. One week down—yahoo!

  “I just thought it would be a nice treat for you girls,” Mom says. She gl
ances at my toes, which are peeking out of my Jesus sandals. They are perhaps a bit grass-stained. “And Carly, your feet could use some attention.”

  “So true,” Anna says. “You know Kim-Hue loves working on your feet.”

  “Shut up,” I say. “She loves working on Mom’s feet, not mine.”

  “Girls, don’t be disrespectful,” Mom says, taking a left out of Holy Redeemer’s back gate. “Kim-Hue has worked very hard to get where she is. Do you know she used her manicuring money to put her sister through college?”

  “Yes, Mom,” we chorus. We have heard (and heard and heard) how wonderful Kim-Hue is. How she came to America with her younger sister, Linh, five years ago; how she put Linh through college; how she then brought her parents over from Korea and had them move in with her and her husband.

  “And she insisted they take the master bedroom!” Mom marvels whenever she trots out that particular nugget of Kim-Hue gold.

  “We’re not being disrespectful to Kim-Hue,” I tell Mom as we drive down Moores Mill. “It’s just funny that she says she loves your feet.”

  “Well, who’s to say she doesn’t? I keep my feet very clean.” She glances at me. “Don’t you think she’d rather work on clean feet than filthy feet?”

  “Mom,” I say.

  “Carly has filthy fee-eet,” Anna sings.

  “Anna is a stu-pid head,” I sing back.

  Anna flops back against her seat. “Hey, Mom, did you bring us a snack?”

  Mom indicates her purse. “Carly, would you please hand your sister a granola bar?”

  I fumble in her bag and pull out two foil-wrapped bars. They’re not granola bars. They’re ninety-calorie Special K cereal bars. I hand one over my shoulder to Anna and drop the other back into Mom’s purse.

  “Blech,” Anna says. “Can we stop by Whole Foods and get monster cookies?”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have time,” Mom says.

  That is extremely unlikely, because Whole Foods is five minutes from Cloud Nine. What’s more likely is that Mom doesn’t want Anna to have a monster cookie. So to call her on it, I say, “By which she means, ‘No, you porker. Eat your nice cereal bar and be quiet.’”

  Anna kicks my seat.

  “Remember when you were the littlest Billy Goat Gruff in Reader’s Theater?” I say. “And Georgia said you were too chubby to be the littlest billy goat and you should go on a diet?”

  “I was in first grade,” Anna says.

  “She said you tromped too loud. Remember?”

  Anna doesn’t respond, and her nonresponse has a bad feeling to it. I peek back at her, and her expression tells me that what I intend as a tease apparently doesn’t feel like a tease to Anna.

  “You’re mean,” she says.

  “I’m just kidding,” I say.

  “You think I’m fat.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yeah-huh. That’s what you just said.”

  “Anna,” I say impatiently. “You weren’t fat then, and you aren’t fat now. Right, Mom?”

  Mom frowns and keeps her eyes on the road.

  “Mom?” I prod.

  “No, Anna, you’re not fat,” she says carefully, and I think, Ah, crap, because her intonation implies, But you could stand to lose a few.

  What started off as me being punchy has turned into something that’s totally ruining the mood.

  “You think I need to go on a diet?” Anna says.

  Mom hesitates. Mom, who is a size four and who goes to Pilates and yoga and now a new class called Nia, which Peyton’s mom persuaded her to try. Peyton’s mom is an instructor at Gym Atlanta, where Mom has a membership.

  “Mom, tell Anna right now that she doesn’t need to go on a diet,” I say.

  “Carly, I wish you would remember that you’re not the parent,” Mom says. “And Anna, you are slightly heavier than you should be.”

  “Mom!” Anna cries.

  “It’s my job to be honest with you,” Mom says. “Being overweight is a health issue.”

  “More like a looking-good-in-clothes issue,” I say, trying to redefine who’s on whose side here.

  “Carly,” Mom says sharply. “Do you want me to drop you off at home?”

  “Sorry,” I mutter. “But, Anna, you’re not fat. You’re beautiful. And I don’t know why I brought up that stupid Billy Goat Gruff thing. I just . . .” You just what? says a voice in my head. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  We’re silent for the rest of the drive, but I continue thinking about bodies and weight and beauty. And boobs. Is it possible that Mom’s as startled by Anna’s new figure as the rest of the planet? Startled by, jealous of, slobberingly interested in . . . whatever. I mean, a single summer went by, and now Anna wears a bigger bra size than Mom does.

  Truth: Anna has a different body type from me or Mom.

  But also truth: Anna isn’t fat. She’s curvy, and she has hips. Her body is softer in general than Mom’s Nia-sculpted body, or my own strong body, toned by six weeks of grueling physical labor. And turns out—why look! Anna’s body type is the body type every male on the planet seems wired to notice. And appreciate.

  Or maybe it’s Anna in particular they appreciate.

  But she isn’t fat.

  When we get to Cloud Nine, I apologize to Anna again.

  “Seriously, I’m sorry,” I say, the two of us falling behind Mom as we walk to the nail salon. “I don’t know why I feel compelled to push Mom’s buttons.”

  “It’s okay,” she says grudgingly. “But I wish you wouldn’t talk about things like that.” Like being fat, she means.

  “Deal,” I say, zipping my lips.

  But then—ack—the topic comes up again as Anna’s getting her nails done. This time I’m not the instigator. Kim-Hue is. I’m at the rack of polish, picking out my color, and Mom’s on the sofa reading Southern Living. Kim-Hue and Anna are chatting about Vitamin Water. Anna’s fave is Dragonfruit; Kim-Hue’s is Orange-Orange. She’s got a twenty-ounce bottle at her station, already half empty. Kim-Hue’s husband, however, won’t touch the stuff.

  “Thanh, all he drinks is Coke,” Kim-Hue says. “I tell him, ‘Be careful, or you will get fat like Americans.’”

  At first Anna doesn’t respond. Then, in a lowered voice, she says, “Kim-Hue . . . do you think I’m fat?”

  I pretend not to listen.

  “You? Never!” Kim-Hue says. “You have very good figure. Not too skinny, like your sister.”

  Hey! I want to say. But I’m not listening, so I can’t.

  “She got skinny when she was off on her wilderness adventure,” Anna says. “I think she looks good.”

  Thank you, Anna. I realize my hand has been hovering over the same bottle of polish for a long time. I skim it along the other bottles so it’ll look like I’m absorbed in my task.

  “Miss Maureen tells me Carly only washed her hair once while she was gone?” Kim-Hue asks. “Is that why it’s that color?”

  “No, she dyed it, but kind of by accident.”

  “And she didn’t shave her legs?”

  “Well, there were snakes in their water hole,” Anna says. “But she shaved once she got home.”

  “Oh, good,” Kim-Hue says with what sounds like genuine relief.

  “Okay!” I say brightly. I turn and display a bottle of electric-blue polish. “Picked my color!”

  Mom lifts her head. “Oh, Carly.”

  “What?” My face is warm. I go sit by Anna and Kim-Hue so they can’t talk about me anymore. I check out Anna’s French-manicured toes and say, “Pretty.”

  Kim-Hue smiles, first at me and then at Anna.

  “So different, you two,” she says. “But that is the way of sisters, yes?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CONSIDER YOURSELF LUCKY

  A month and a half into the semester, we start our swim unit in gym. So far, PE with Anna has proven to be nothing other than “PE with Anna,” meaning that it’s been fine, and even fun. I haven’
t felt too terribly jealous over the fact that Anna looks like a Hooters waitress in her gym outfit, while I look like a ten-year-old boy in mine. Holy Redeemer’s PE classes are single-sex, like our homerooms, so that helps. Some of the girls in our class do the thing where they point at Anna’s chest with their eyeballs and share a snickery look with their friends. But that’s to be expected, I guess.

  It makes me feel bad for Anna, though. When guys ogle her, they’re thinking, Dude. Sexilicious. When girls ogle her, they’re thinking, Slut, which is ridiculous. It’s not as if Anna pushed an inflate-o-rama button and made herself swell up.

  Would I trade figures with her, if I could? I tell myself I wouldn’t . . . but I don’t know.

  Our PE teacher, Coach Schranker, is hot in a Captain Awesome sort of way, and Peyton thinks she and he would make a cute couple. She’s decided that today is the day to make her move. Her logic: he’s going to be seeing her (and the rest of us) in our swimsuits, and if she doesn’t snap him up, someone else will. Lydia, perhaps. Or Bad Attitude Cindy, who has even bigger boobs than Anna, and whose pubic hair tufts out of her underwear when we change into our gym uniforms. Although hopefully she’s taken care of thatbig issue, since today is naked-except-for-small-amounts-of-Lycra day.

  I wonder why I think that leg hair on a girl is acceptable (in theory), but not pubes.

  There is no way I could wear a bathing suit and have my pubes sticking out.

  “Am I hot, or am I hot?” Peyton asks in the locker room. She twists so I can get the full-on effect. Her bathing suit is green and has cut outs along the sides, revealing her tan skin.

  “You are hot,” I say. The bathing suit I brought for PE is blue and modest. It’s got a built-in lining, which is essential, because I have pokey-out-y nipples.

  “Hold on,” Anna says, coming over from her locker. She’s wearing a red one-piece that Mom had to go and buy her just for PE, because no way was she going to wear a bikini to gym class. Not on my watch.

  Anna fixes Peyton’s strap so that it’s no longer twisted and says, “There. Now you’re hot.”