Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks

by Lauren Myracle

“Carly, you could use some freshening up,” Mom says. “We’ll need to leave in an hour.”

  My bad mood worsens. I am not a feminine hygiene product, nor am I in need of one.

  Mom frowns at my tie-dye with its swirls of red and orange and yellow. “And please, change into something cute.”

  Up in my room, I try to figure out why I’m so pissed. Then I short-circuit that plan and say, Screw it. I’ve had a crap day. I’m going to have a crap night. Psychoanalyzing myself won’t make things better, and anyway, there was nothing I could do. Anna failed the dive on her own. Anna. And if it feels as if I’m the one who failed her . . . well, so what? There it is. Can’t do anything about it now.

  I turn on my iPod and spin the dial to a Cat Stevens song called “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out.” It’s a happy, feel-good song, and I try to push what happened during PE out of my mind.

  But I can’t stop thinking about Anna, crouched down at the end of the board. The pale backs of her thighs. The way they squished out unattractively because of her position.

  Stop it RIGHT NOW.

  I fish my cell phone out of my backpack and punch in Peyton’s number. Peyton is always good for distraction therapy.

  She answers by saying, “Hey, babe, one sec, ’kay? I’m trying something I read about called ‘hair plopping.’ One sec.”

  “Hair plopping?” I say, but she’s gone.

  When she returns, she says, “And now we wait.”

  “For what?”

  “If all goes according to plan, I will have smooth, lustrous curls in thirty short minutes.”

  “Hair plopping,” I say again.

  “That’s right,” Peyton affirms.

  It’s working already, the distraction bit. I sit on my bed. “And hair plopping would be . . . ?”

  “I read about it on the Internet,” she says. But then, typical Peyton, she doesn’t explain the plopping at all. She blabbers about hair extensions instead.

  “I want them so bad,” she says.

  “Why?” I ask. “Your hair is already halfway down your back.”

  “But if I got extensions, I could actually sit on my hair.”

  “But it wouldn’t be your hair. It would be someone else’s.”

  “It would be mine once I paid for it.”

  She asks if I knew that not all hair extensions are made of human hair, and I say, “Gross. No.”

  I lean against my pillow, and she tells me all I want to know and more about how the best hair extensions come from India, because it’s a tradition in India for women to go on a pilgrimage and have their heads shaved to demonstrate that they’re not corrupted by vanity.

  “And then American women buy that hair to show that they are corrupted by vanity?” I say.

  “Exactly!” Peyton crows. “The monks at the temple sell the hair to American salons. It’s a win-win situation.”

  “Go, monks!”

  “But for now I’m holding off, because I read a post from a woman whose extensions, like, ruined her life. She got into a bar brawl—”

  “A bar brawl?”

  “And this other woman ripped out huge chunks of her hair. Since the extensions were glued to the woman’s real hair, her real hair came out, too, along with pieces of her scalp. Isn’t that nasty?”

  “Are you thinking you might get into a bar brawl?” I cross my bare feet on my comforter.

  “Hey,” Peyton says, like this is no joking matter. “You never know.”

  “So,” I say, moving on. “Plopping.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I’d never heard of it—”

  “Go fig.”

  “—but it involves washing your hair very nicely and then not drying it at all when you get out of the shower.” She giggles. “‘Very nicely,’ those are the exact words in the instructions. As opposed to washing your hair meanly, I guess.”

  From down the hall, Mom calls, “Carly? I hope you’re getting ready!”

  I put my thumb over the microphone part of my cell. “Yes, Mom!”

  Meanwhile, Peyton continues her hair-plopping how-to. “So then, with your hair all Rapunzel-y on the towel, you roll the towel into two sausages, kind of. And then you clip them together, and twenty minutes later . . . voilà!”

  I’ve missed a step somewhere, I think.

  “I still don’t get why it’s called hair plopping.”

  “Because you plop it against the towel. You plop it and plop it and plop it, and that’s how the excess water gets out. You weren’t listening, were you?”

  “I was!”

  “Want me to come over and show you the final result? If it looks fabulous, that is.”

  “I wish,” I say. “But I said I’d go out with my mom and dad. Fancy client dinner—wh-hoo.”

  “Bummer.” She pauses. “Is Anna going?”

  “No, she’s going to Georgia’s. At least I think that’s her plan.”

  “Why would someone who lives in Atlanta, Georgia, name their child ‘Georgia’?” Peyton asks.

  I hear Mom’s heels clipping down the hall. I scramble off the bed and hunt for an appropriate blouse.

  “Seriously,” Peyton goes on. “If they’d lived in Utah, would they have named her ‘Utah’?”

  “‘Utah’ would be a horrible name.” I pause. “‘North Dakota’ would also be a horrible name.”

  “Just plain Dakota is cute.”

  “For a dog.”

  Mom raps on my door. “Carly?”

  “Almost ready!”

  “Know who else is cute?” Peyton says. “Georgia’s brother, Jim.”

  “Joe.”

  “Joe. Yes. Now, there’s a name. Manly, broad-shouldered, nice tight butt . . .”

  “Names don’t have butts.”

  “But Joe does.” She giggles.

  “Show me what you’re wearing,” Mom says, opening the door and peering in. When she sees that I’m still in my tie-dye, she tilts her head and says, “Carly.”

  “Gotta go,” I tell Peyton. “My mom is glowering.”

  Mom points at my tie-dye and says, “Change.”

  “She wants me to change,” I report to Peyton. “She doesn’t like me the way I am.”

  “I want you downstairs in half an hour,” Mom says. She spins on her heel and heads downstairs.

  Peyton says, “So, uh, Carly . . .”

  I open a drawer and push shirts around. “Yeah?”

  “You care if I hang with Anna and Georgia?”

  I go still.

  “Since you’re already doing something,” she says. “And since I’m sure Anna could use a friend after the day she had.”

  “She has a friend. And she’s going to said friend’s house, where she will be loved and stroked and plied with ice cream.”

  “You know what I mean. That wouldn’t bother you, would it?”

  I close the drawer. Nothing good in there, anyway. “No, of course not.”

  I have the fleeting urge to cancel on Mom and Dad and hang out at Georgia’s house with Anna and Peyton and possibly cute Joe. But how lame would that be, tagging along with my little sister?

  “Have fun with Anna and New Jersey,” I say. I snap-shut my phone.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BOOBS OVER BRAINS

  Dinner with Mom, Dad, and Dad’s client proves to be almost as dull as I suspected. The one highlight comes when Dad’s client—a hunch-shouldered, sixty-year-old gay man named Bernie Waters—tells a story about how he first knew he “played for the home team.”

  “The doctor in the delivery room spanked my bare bottom, and I twisted around and turned the other cheek,” Bernie says. “‘Again, please,’ I said.”

  Dad guffaws, Mom pretends to be scandalized but can’t stop laughing, and Bernie downs the rest of his martini. Maybe the fact that I don’t fit in at school is to be blamed on my parents. Most Holy Roller parents would find Bernie appalling, not entertaining.

  But mainly, the dinner conversation consists of business, business, and mo
re business, which is boring, boring, and more boring.

  I wish I’d swallowed my pride and invited myself to Louisiana’s house.

  Anna isn’t back by the time we get home, so I go to my room, close my door, and call Roger. I tell him about Bernie, and he laughs. He tells me about how his mom accidentally washed her cell phone along with a load of laundry, and how she’s got it in a bag of rice, hoping the rice will draw out the moisture and magically make it work again. I laugh. We shoot the breeze for fifteen minutes or so, and then I get off, wondering why Anna isn’t home yet.

  When she does get home, I hop off my bed and scurry to my window. I’m in time to see Joe’s red MG backing out of our drive. He toots the horn as he speeds away.

  I call Peyton. I want to be busy when Anna comes upstairs to prevent any mistaken assumptions regarding my possible boredom while she was gone. Plus, I want the scoop.

  “Did y’all have fun?” I ask. I walk with my cell to my bedroom door, which I push shut with my foot.

  “Omigod, we had a blast,” she says. Not the response I was hoping for. She tells me about how Joe taught them all to take shots, and when I say, “What?!,” she tells me to relax.

  “Of apple juice, dummy. We used apple juice.”

  “That’s retarded,” I say, and it’s a sign of how peeved I am that I would use that word. Retarded. I hate it when people use that as an insult.

  “We’ll be taking shots eventually,” Peyton says matter-of-factly. “Might as well learn how.”

  “Who says we’ll be taking shots? I won’t be taking shots.”

  She laughs and says, “No, you probably won’t.”

  “Well, I’m glad you had so much fun without me,” I say, hating myself even as the words come out. “I’m going to bed now. Bye.”

  “Don’t you want to hear about Joe, and how he hit on your sister?”

  I don’t hit the hang-up button. I check to make sure that yes, my door is shut, before lowering my voice to say, “Excuse me?”

  “He couldn’t stop staring at her boobs. That’s the only reason he hung out with us. Really, he just wanted to hang out with Anna’s boobs.”

  “Lovely,” I say. “She’s fourteen.”

  “So? In India, she’d be married by now.”

  Why are we talking about India again? Do girls from India really get married at fourteen? And is that before or after they get their hair lopped off?

  “Are you obsessed with India or something?” I say at last.

  “Yes,” she deadpans. “I’m obsessed with India. I’ll probably move there after high school—except, wait. No, I won’t, because I hear there’s poop in their water supply.”

  When I don’t reply, she says, “Carly, he didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “How can you stare at someone’s boobs and not mean anything by it?”

  “He has a penis. Hence he will stare at boobs. I agree that it’s annoying, but it’s not worth huffing and puffing about.”

  Bernie Waters doesn’t stare at boobs, I think. What I say is, “who says I’m huffing and puffing?”

  Even I can hear how defensive I sound.

  “Oh, sweetie,” she says, her tone changing. “I’d be jealous, too, if I were you. Heck, I’m jealous, and I’m not you. It must suck to have your little sister be the girl guys write about on the bathroom walls. To know she could have any boy she wants just by shaking her ta-tas.”

  “Wow,” I say. I try to come up with an appropriate response. “Her ta-tas?”

  “I’m just trying to be honest. Would you rather I lied?”

  “No.” Yes.

  “But, Carly, you’re smarter than she is, so it all balances out. Wouldn’t you rather be smart than pretty?”

  “Would you?”

  “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you. And somewhere in the universe is a guy who would choose brains over boobs.” She giggles. “But I don’t know where. And it’s not Joe. If Anna’s boobs had hands, he would have introduced himself and given them a firm shake.”

  “Thanks for that image,” I say sourly.

  “You’re welcome. And now it’s time for my beauty sleep. But, Carly?”

  “What?”

  She hesitates, then says, “Cut her some slack, you know? Anna’s Anna, and you’re you. There’s nothing either of you can do about it.”

  Shame squeezes my lungs, because her words bring back the reality of the dive and how Anna couldn’t do it, big boobs or not.

  But I could.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  FULL MOON

  Later that night I’m awakened by a thump, or something thump-like. I was asleep, and now I’m awake, and I don’t know how I got from one state to the other. I clutch the top of the sheet and listen hard. I don’t hear anything.

  I glance at the glowing numbers on the clock. It’s 2 A.M., which means Mom and Dad have long since gone to bed. Anna, too.

  Go back to sleep, I tell myself. Whatever you heard, it’s nothing.

  Sleep doesn’t come.

  Peyton can fall asleep like that, and often does, even in the most exciting part of a movie, or when we’re spending the night together and I’m in the middle of telling her something. It can be annoying—but it’s a skill I wish I had.

  Did Dad turn on the alarm before he went to bed? I’m sure he did. He always does . . .

  . . . except when he forgets.

  Just a couple of weeks ago, I went downstairs on a Sunday morning and saw the green light glowing on the alarm panel instead of the red. When I pointed it out to Dad and reminded him of all the bad stuff that could have happened, he said, “Carly, relax. We obviously weren’t murdered in our beds, and why don’t you go get my New York Times while I make your mother her coffee.”

  So I went outside and got the paper from the special New York Times box under our normal mailbox, and life was sunny and bright. Not a serial murderer in sight.

  Bad things do happen, though. They do, and no one is immune, and I’m the only one awake in this huge frickin’ house which creaks and moans. And just say someone does jump out of the shadows, there’s a zero percent chance that Dad will come running with a baseball bat to save me. Even if I scream, he won’t hear. And why? Because Mom and Dad’s master suite is at the opposite end of the hall. A thick wooden door separates their bedroom from their bathroom and walk-in closet, and a second thick wooden door separates their bathroom and walk-in closet from the long hall that leads to Anna’s and my wing of the house.

  Mom and Dad keep both doors locked throughout the night for “privacy” reasons, and our house is old enough that the locks in question are dead bolts rather than wimpy push buttons. I have a dead bolt on my door, too—so does Anna—but I don’t like to use it. Sometimes it sticks, and I have to bang the door with my hip to get it to unlatch. I don’t like the idea of being locked in a room any more than I like being locked out.

  I hear another noise. Definitely a thump, coming from outside the house. My body goes rigid.

  Last spring, a jogger got raped in our neighborhood.

  When I was like, eight, a house was broken into a couple of blocks away, and the lady who was there, but didn’t answer the door, was shot in the face. The investigators figured the burglars got scared.

  “Carly?”

  It’s Anna, her voice barely audible from her room across the hall. I push back the covers and don’t think, just bound across the cold wood floor to her bedroom. She slides over in her bed, and I scooch in.

  “There’s somebody out there,” she whispers.

  “I know,” I whisper back.

  “Should we get Dad?”

  “I don’t know. Should we?”

  We look at each other. Getting Dad would mean braving the long, dark hall, with both closed doors to negotiate.

  There’s a plink on Anna’s window, and we clutch each other. There are more plinks, followed by boys’ laughter.

  “Oh, man,” Anna says, her demeanor changing.

>   “The Millers,” I say.

  I bolt out of her bed in my pj’s and march across the room. Anna follows in her T-shirt and undies. I raise the blinds and spot four pale bottoms—four pale naked bottoms—gleaming in the light of the moon. They’re lined up on the stone wall that separates our houses.

  “No way,” I say. Anna’s window is heavy and practically sealed to the rim with paint, but with a grunt, I lift it. Anna and I lean forward.

  “We see you!” I yell.

  More laughter, and the butts slide off the rock wall. Ow. One of the Miller boys pops his head up over the wall and yells, “And we see you! Your shirt is see-through, you know!”

  Anna and I both glance down. My pajama top is navy blue and completely fine, but Anna’s thin shirt is like tissue paper in the moonlight. She gasps and covers herself.

  The Miller boy grins. “Your milk shake brings all the boys to the yard!” He drops down and disappears with his brothers.

  I slam down the window. “What idiots.”

  Anna goes back to her bed, but doesn’t lie down. She sits on the mattress, props her back on the headboard, and pulls the sheets up around her.

  I lower the blinds. “Who made the milk-shake comment? Larry?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Anna says in a voice that says she does.

  “God, he’s twelve. Should a twelve-year-old make comments like that? No.”

  “Carly, everyone makes comments like that,” Anna says tightly. “Tonight, Georgia’s brother said, ‘Whoa, don’t knock me over with those things’ when I walked past him to get a Coke.”

  “That’s so obnoxious.”

  “Even Dad says stuff, Carly. It’s like . . . so wrong.”

  I perch on the edge of the mattress. “What has Dad said?”

  “Well, he said that top-heavy thing. You were there.”

  Oh yeah, I think.

  “And last weekend he told Mom I was ‘bouncing,’ and that she should get me a new bra. I was like, ‘I can hear you, Dad! I’m right here!’”

  “Yuck,” I say. Fathers shouldn’t notice anyone’s boobs except their wives’. No, strike that. Fathers shouldn’t notice boobs, period.

  Does the same go for sisters?

  I decide to change the subject.