by Nora Olsen
While I was doing the feeding, Jenna was outside in the ring, riding her horse Peaches. Jenna waved at me when I walked by. I waved back. I was glad Jenna was behaving casually, but I couldn’t tell if she was being nice or just oblivious.
When I was done, I put everything away and headed for my car. I wondered how smelly I was, so I tried to discreetly smell my own armpit. At that moment Jenna drove by and honked the horn, and I was caught in the act.
As I pulled into the driveway at home, I couldn’t help but notice the pile of flyers and postcards dumped on our front steps. I knew they were all from real estate agents, promising they could do a short sale on the house. Whatever that meant. I knew our house was in pre-foreclosure, but I didn’t really know what that meant either. I decided to park the SUV in the garage. After that man sneaking around the house, I thought it was safer.
The Beemer was also parked in the garage, but I did a double take when I saw Dad was sitting in it. Why was he sitting in the dark in the car in the garage? I left the door of the garage open to keep it a little brighter. I went over and opened the passenger-side door and slipped into the seat. I breathed in the rich smell of the leather upholstery. “Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, pum’kin,” he said. I leaned over and gave him a kiss on his stubbly cheek.
“So, ah, whatcha doin’ out here?”
He sighed. “Waiting for you. We need to talk.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the horse, and you had to find out after. And I’m sorry about that man who broke in.”
“Not your fault,” I said. I was being semisincere. I didn’t think the guy who broke in was his fault, but I was pretty mad about Sassy.
“It is my fault. A man is supposed to protect his family. I have three girls to protect, and I didn’t do it. Anyway, from here on out I want to tell you everything that’s gonna happen before it happens. So you don’t have to find out after.”
I pictured myself driving home from school one day to find another family living in our house. And Mom saying, “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t know how to tell you. We live in a cardboard box now.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said softly.
“We’re going to sell the SUV,” he told me. “You’re going to have to take the bus to school like your sister.”
“Ugh, I hate the bus,” I said. “Can I ride my bike?”
“If you want to show up at school all sweaty and gross, be my guest,” he said. “And I’m going to trade this car in. If I can get anything for it. It’s been repaired so many times, I don’t know what it’s worth now.”
I was wondering how I would get to and from Mrs. A.’s now, but I didn’t want to get sidetracked on that. We were falling into a very familiar pattern. I was complaining, and Dad was talking about cars. He could do that all day. I had to switch things up or he wouldn’t actually tell me anything.
“Can you just explain this whole thing from the beginning? What’s going on?”
What I really wanted to ask him was, How could you let this happen? But I couldn’t quite get it out. I knew he felt bad enough.
“Our mortgage was originally with our local bank. It was sold to Bank of America, then Countrywide Home Loans, then City Mortgage, Wachovia, Lender Wells Fargo, and finally MegaBank.”
“Slow right down,” I said. “Explain it to me just like you’d explain it to Desi. What is a mortgage?”
He laughed. “That’s when you want to buy a house, but you don’t have enough money. Hardly anyone has enough money to pay for the whole thing up front. So people go to their bank and get a mortgage. That’s a loan. The bank is lending you money so you can buy a house. And you pay them back over time. A long time. But it’s like the bank owns part of your house. That’s what they get in return for giving you a loan. So if you can’t pay them back, they take the house away from you. That’s foreclosure.”
I sort of remembered this from Monopoly. You had to flip the property cards over when you mortgaged something, and no one paid you if they landed on it. It was hard for me to apply this knowledge to real life.
“And that’s what happened?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s what happened. But I swear to you, pum’kin, I’m only three months late on the payments. I’m pretty sure they shouldn’t throw us out over that. Something hinky is going on. The thing is, I’m having some real trouble making the payments. The rate they signed us up for when we bought the house was a teaser rate, $1,559 per month. And I didn’t know. I thought it was fixed-rate, but it wasn’t.”
“You lost me again.”
“When I signed the papers, they said I would have to pay $1,559 per month. And I thought it would always be that amount. But in the small print it said that rate would only last for three months, and we didn’t realize. It was adjustable, which means they can change it. Now it’s $3,600 per month. We had to find all that extra money every month. We did it for a while. But then we didn’t anymore.”
“That’s like a bait and switch,” I said. “That’s not fair. They tricked you.”
“I was supposed to figure it out,” Dad said. “But I didn’t. I’m a self-made man. I never even passed the Regents in high school. It seemed like such a great deal at the time. And I really wanted to live in this nice house.”
Magnificent Manor, I thought.
“It’s so much better than that dump we used to live in, right?”
“Yeah.”
“The other thing is we refinanced the house. That means when you take out a second mortgage. Like, you say you need thousands of dollars to fix up your house and make it better, and they loan it to you because it’s going to make your house worth more money. Only we didn’t actually end up using it on fixing up the house. That was right when your sister got her front tooth knocked out in gym class, and we spent some of it on her new tooth. We just used the leftover money on this and that. I gave some money to my brother when he started that ostrich farm. I was a silent partner. We thought for sure ostrich meat was going to be the next big thing. But it wasn’t.”
I couldn’t stand thinking about Uncle Hal and his stupid ostriches. If anyone had asked me, I would’ve told them it was a dumb idea.
My father cleared his throat. “Anyway, what I really need to tell you is that today we got a letter saying the house is going to be put on the sheriff’s sale.”
“Wait, what?” I said. That sounded really bad. I pictured the Sheriff of Nottingham, the bad guy from Robin Hood. “What is that?”
“That’s a public auction,” he said.
“They’re going to auction off our house to the highest bidder? Like on eBay?” I asked.
“Yup.”
“You’re kidding.” This had to be a practical joke. No way was my father just sitting there telling me that someone else was going to buy our house out from under us.
“I wouldn’t kid about this,” Dad said, looking down at his hands.
“When?” I asked.
“Next Saturday.”
I got cold all over from sheer icy terror. This was a nightmare, right?
“That’s so soon!” I said.
“I know. That’s why we’re having this little chat. I wasn’t expecting this either. Your mom’s been on the phone all day trying to talk to someone at the bank who can explain this.”
“Where are we going to live?”
“Hal says he’s always got room for us on the farm. But I hope it won’t come to that. We’re still trying to work out a deal with the bank.”
Someone knocked on the car window and I jumped. It was Bryan, Desi’s boyfriend. He was wearing a T-shirt with The Rock on it, which didn’t surprise me because he was obsessed with wrestling. He liked to do bodybuilder poses, but he never actually flexed his muscles, so the effect was marred.
I rolled down the window. “Hi, Bryan,” my father said. “Did your mom just drop you off?”
“Uh, yes, she did. Uh, Desi and I are watching Lord of the Rings tonight.
Are you going to watch with us?”
“Not my kind of movie,” I answered automatically, still thinking about the sheriff’s sale. “I can’t keep all those hobbits or orcs or whatever they are straight.”
“I’ll probably watch with you,” Dad said. He didn’t like that kind of movie either, but he liked to chaperone them. “Desi isn’t back from her driving lesson yet. You want to get yourself a Pepsi or something and wait for her? And Skippy’s home from the vet. He’s all better and I bet he’ll be happy to see you.”
“Thanks,” Bryan said. He made some kind of weird wrestling symbol with his hands and headed for the door to the house.
Bryan was kind of goofy like that, and I used to think he wasn’t good enough for Desi. He was two years older and a greeter at Walmart. He talked the customers’ ears off, telling them all about wrestling if they let him. I guess at first I was kind of a snob and thought that wasn’t a great job, even for someone with Down syndrome. Plus I thought he wasn’t as smart as Desi, and I didn’t like how he sometimes started arguments with her. But I’ve mellowed out and gotten pretty fond of him. He’s always at our house and went skiing with us, so I’d had time to get used to him. Desi was like the princess of my family, so maybe I would never think any guy was good enough for her. The main thing was that Desi loved him. If Desi had to leave Bryan to live in Arizona, she was going to wig out beyond belief.
Just then, Desi and her driving instructor Mr. Metzger pulled into the driveway. They were in the Metzgermobile, a tanky-looking blue car with a sign on the top that says METZGER AUTO-DRIVING SCHOOL and, crucially, a second set of brakes on the passenger side. Mr. Metzger was driving and Desi looked all red and blotchy, two bad signs.
“Uh-oh,” Dad muttered. “Today they were going to work on changing lanes. I better go see how that went.”
He left me alone in the car. I tried to absorb the news he had given me about losing the house. Losing the house this weekend.
My whole world was completely falling apart. Desi said that very phrase all the time, about any old thing, and I knew I had been guilty of saying it about minor problems too. But this time it was real. I thought losing Sassy was the worst thing that could happen. But having to go and live with Uncle Hal?
“Thanks a lot, Dad, for giving me so much notice,” I muttered. My parents had obviously known that this could happen for a really long time, and they never told me. What the hell were they doing to fix this? Nothing.
I was not going to move to Arizona and live on an ostrich farm. That was for damn sure. It was called a farm, but Uncle Hal lived in a double-wide trailer, and the ostriches lived outside. I was not going to live there.
If my parents weren’t going to take care of things the proper way, I was going to have to do it myself.
Chapter Twelve
Lexie
I had devoted an entire week to not falling in love with Clarissa. Between that and finally finishing my mom’s essay for Simon’s Rock, I’d kept busy. Both projects were going great. With Clarissa, initially I had tried to focus on how annoying she was and how she was just no damn good. That hadn’t worked well. My brain was softening up toward Clarissa in some way. So I turned to the same person I always turned to in times of trouble, a man who had been dead for two thousand years. No, not Jesus. It was the poet Ovid.
Ovid had been a consolation to me during my breakup with Ramone. We had argued over something completely stupid, whether life was better or worse before the invention of agriculture. I mean, a) who knows and b) who cares? But I took the position it had been a golden age when people spent less time procuring food and had fewer diseases. Before I knew it, Ramone was calling me willfully ignorant and stubborn and had thrown her necklace, which I had bought her at the Dutchess County Fair just two weeks earlier, at me and stormed out.
I was too dumb to realize that Ramone was just tired of going out with me and had picked this flimsy pretext to break up. So I spent the next couple weeks locked in my room, trolling the Internet, or in the Adriance branch of the library, reading books on agriculture versus primitive times. I thought if I explained my point of view really clearly with a lot of supporting evidence then Ramone would reconcile with me. Then I heard she had been seen around with a girl who went to Vassar. The only thing that consoled me was a poem by Ovid that said, in part:
Earth offered better things then, rich harvests
without ploughing,
fruit, and honey discovered in the hollow oak.
No one ever ripped the soil with the plough.
Against yourself, human nature, you have turned your cleverness
And ingeniously injured yourself.
I had felt totally vindicated. This guy from ancient times agreed with me about agriculture. Plus, talk about turning my cleverness against myself and injuring myself, that was my MO big-time.
Now, like a BFF, Ovid was there for me again when I needed him. In his Remedia Amoris—Love’s Remedy—he made several helpful recommendations: to stay busy, focus on your beloved’s physical flaws, avoid poetry that idealized the concept of love, and duh, avoid the person. So I listened to Coil’s cover of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” and “Either You Don’t Love Me or I Don’t Love You” by The Magnetic Fields. I also took cold showers. Ovid didn’t recommend that, but they probably hadn’t invented hot showers yet, or maybe even showers, so he wouldn’t have known.
Ovid’s last suggestion, avoiding the person, worked okay at first. The only class we had together was English. She sat behind me and she mostly was pretty quiet, except one time when we were reading an excerpt from The Cherry Orchard, a play by Chekhov. It was about this aristocratic family whose estate was going to be auctioned off because they couldn’t pay the mortgage, and they didn’t even try to do anything about it. Everyone was saying what a bunch of stupid losers the family was, and Clarissa went all postal and argued with everyone. Other than that, total silence, and I could pretend she wasn’t even there.
Avoiding her didn’t work well the next Monday when I had to meet Clarissa and Desi after school for a strategy meeting. Especially when it turned out Desi wasn’t there.
“She’s home sick,” Clarissa explained. “She’s got a cold. I hope I don’t get it.”
“Oh,” I said. No chaperone.
“I have a proposition for you, though,” Clarissa said.
I focused on Clarissa’s stupid bangs. They had grown too long and she was trying to tuck them behind her ears, but they kept popping out and hanging in her eyes. This happened over and over. I had zeroed in on this as her most unattractive physical flaw.
“I know you said you don’t want to join the GSA,” Clarissa said. “But I figured we could call this a meeting of the GSA, and then say our project is Desi’s campaign. Because I posted that the GSA meets at this time on Mondays, and someday a student might actually want to join the GSA, so I have to sit here anyway in case they come. It would be good if I could multitask.”
“Whatever,” I said. We were sitting in a typical Parlington classroom: cinderblock walls, chairs with little desks attached, depressing lighting set into speckled square ceiling tiles, and anti-inspiring posters on the wall. This setting made me want to throw up and then die. I didn’t know why I was even involved in the Desi campaign. I had been trying to avoid Clarissa, and now everything was spiraling out of control.
“I’ve been working on your list of influential students whose endorsements we need,” Clarissa said. “You really did pick the most key people. I never would have thought of Arnetta Johnson, but actually she’s like the lynchpin of the Christian students, and if she votes Desi, that’s probably fifteen others voting Desi. She said she would do it. I don’t know how you can have such a breadth of knowledge about the social structure of this school and yet not…Um. You know.”
“Have any friends? Just because I know doesn’t mean I care.”
Clarissa rolled her eyes just a tiny little bit. “Anyway, so far it looks pretty good. The real p
roblem is Heather.”
“I figured as much,” I said.
“She told me she’s been working toward this since she was ten years old, and she’s not going to give up her chance at the crown for a Jenny-come-lately. She thinks Desi is well-intentioned but misguided.”
“That is bad news. If she’s willing to take this to the mat, she can probably get half the class at least. All the Christians and greasy grinds in all the world can’t help us.”
“Yeah.” Clarissa sighed. “I’d really like for this to go right for Desi.”
I noticed the dark circles under Clarissa’s eyes had gotten worse, and she looked beaten down in general. “Are you coming down with something, the cold Desi’s got?” I asked. “You don’t look so good.”
“Thanks a lot,” Clarissa said. She pulled out a little compact and started eyeing herself in the mirror.
“No, I just…I just meant you don’t look well. You look, uh, fine otherwise.” Actually she looked very fine otherwise. She had just the right amount of junk in the trunk, and oh, those legs got me every time. But she did look ill or tired or something. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m not okay, thank you for asking,” Clarissa said, applying some powdery substance to her face with a tiny thing that looked like a sponge.
“Is there anything I can help with?” I found myself asking.
Clarissa put down her makeup and eyed me suspiciously. “You haven’t heard anything?”
“Who would tell me anything?” I asked.
“Slobberin’ Robert, for one. I wonder if he knows. I know you hang out with him sometimes.” It sounded like an accusation.
“We just talk about movies. Sometimes TV.”