The Steps

by Rachel Cohn

  “Bubbe always says to put your money where your mouth is,” I told Lucy.

  She rolled her eyes and got in the cab.

  Lucy directed the driver to the train station. He looked into the rearview mirror twice, trying to decide whether or not we were old enough to be in a cab going to the train station on New Year’s Eve.

  Lucy pushed out her new bosom and said to me, for the cab driver to hear, “Like, I am so totally excited about James’s party! like, I am going to get so totally wasted and totally make out with him all night when the clock strikes midnight. Like everyone is going to be at this party!” She pulled—get this!—a cigarette out of her purse and leaned toward the front seat. She asked the driver, “Mind if I smoke in here?”

  My eyes almost burst out of their sockets. I remembered that Lucy had said she wanted to be an actress, but I had no idea she could be this good.

  “Yeah, I do mind,” the driver said. But he drove on.

  I decided to play the game with Lucy. “Like, I am totally having the most major sweet sixteen party for my birthday this year!” I tried to talk in an Australian accent too. I wasn’t half bad.

  Lucy said, “I had one for mine. Sixteen was such a great birthday. Now that I’m almost seventeen, my mum goes, she goes, ‘So, like, how do you want to celebrate?’ and I go, ‘Like, with my friends, okay?’ because I am so tired of having birthday parties with my parents around.”

  The driver stopped looking at us in the rearview mirror.

  We had to run from the cab to catch the overnight train to Melbourne. We might not have gotten past the train conductor at the platform, who was directing people to their seats, if it had not been for the middle-aged couple who were totally drunk, standing ahead of us in line to board the train. “Dad’s totally trashed,” Lucy whispered to the train conductor as she showed him our tickets, the tickets she and Angus were supposed to use before it was decided I was coming to visit Australia instead. “Please excuse him.” She blushed as if on cue. Impressive!

  “I’m your father now, eh?” the drunk man slobbered.

  “Shut yer trap!” the woman yelled at him.

  Lucy and I both put on our most embarrassed looks. “They do this every New Year’s Eve,” Lucy mumbled to the conductor.

  The train conductor shook his head with contempt for our “parents” and concern for us. “I’ve got two seats open in first class if you two good girls want to get a good night’s sleep and let those two sleep it off in economy.”

  “Oh, yes please!” Lucy said.

  “Do you think they’ll be okay if we leave them alone?” I asked her. I scrunched my face into a worried look.

  “Mum and Pop can take care of themselves! I’ve had enough of this!” Lucy said. She stomped toward first class as the train conductor shook his head at our “parents.”

  First class was nice (it didn’t actually look that different to me from economy, but I was impressed all the same), but it wasn’t like the extra seat space meant we would get any extra sleep. The adults riding in the car were drinking champagne and chattering, waiting for that “10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1, Happy New Year” thing.

  Once the conductor left us alone at our seats, we burst out laughing for about fifteen minutes straight. We almost fell out of our chairs from laughing. If I had been drinking a Coke, I would have been snarfing it all over our seats. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed that hard with Justine, Gloria, or Keisha.

  “We are toooooo smooooooth,” I giggled.

  “Oh, we were the bomb!” Lucy laughed. She got that expression from me. Nobody in Australia says that.

  After we stopped laughing, we sat side by side, silent for a few minutes, as if we were both wondering, Now what? When we shared her room, we rarely said much to each other. Well, when I first arrived, Lucy had talked a lot, but she had figured out pretty quickly from my silence that I did not want to be chatterbox queen with her.

  “When do you think they’ll figure out we’re gone?” I finally asked her, to break the silence.

  Lucy shrugged. “I don’t care.” I knew she was lying.

  I felt kind of freaky. As the train raced from the suburbs into the countryside, I pressed my nose against the window so I could see the landscape outside without the light reflected from the train car. Pitch-black darkness, with occasional bursts of street, house, or farm lights, whizzed by. Loud adults, drinking and smooching, partying, made the train ride seem especially weird and lonely. They did not notice us at all. Suddenly, I was scared. I had never been farther from Manhattan than Miami, and now I was a continent and a hemisphere away, a runaway, on a train bound for endless black sky.

  Lucy seemed to sense my nervousness. She handed me a blanket and wrapped it over me. “We’re okay,” she said very softly. Then she asked if I wanted anything to eat. I shook my head. “Well, I’m starving!” she said.

  She left for the food car and came back carrying Cokes and “pasties” (pronounced “PAH-stees” in Australianese), which are these weird pastry rolls filled with meat or vegetables, and which I had detested when I first arrived but had come to like a lot.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t come back with beers, too, Miss Actress,” I said. Lucy giggled.

  “Need the pasties to grow up and out.” She jutted out her chest, and we started laughing all over again.

  “My Bubbe and I were in Bloomingdale’s buying my first bra, and she told the saleslady that my chest was ‘perky’! I almost died right there,” I confessed to Lucy.

  “If you think that’s bad, I heard my mum talking on the phone to her best friend and she told her friend that I had started my period and then described my bozzies as ‘gorgeous.’ Can you believe that?” Lucy blushed at the memory.

  “Your ‘bozzies’?” I asked.

  Lucy pointed at her bosom. That ie thing again.

  “You started your period?” I whispered.

  “Uh-huh, three months ago. I thought I would be happy about it, but really it’s a drag. I feel all cramped up and hungry all the time.” Lucy was not bragging about having started her period, the way Justine does. You would think that periods were invented just so Justine could tell you, “I’ve had mine, you know.”

  I’m still waiting for mine. At least I could console myself—my Kleenex bozzies were bigger than Lucy’s.

  Lucy shivered from the cold train air. I extended the blanket to her. We sat huddled under the blanket, maybe a little uncomfortable that we were telling each other private things.

  “What’s your mum like?” Lucy asked after another spell of silence.

  That was hard to answer. Before that call from Hawaii, Angelina had been one of my favorite people in the whole world. Now I wanted to shut her out of my mind. I was running away so I wouldn’t have to think about the wedding, about Harvey, Wheaties, or another half sibling. And I especially didn’t want to think about moving in with those people. I liked living with Bubbe.

  I pulled a picture of Angelina out of my backpack and handed it to Lucy. It was one of Angelina’s head shots, which is a black-and-white photo with a listing of her acting credits on the back that she has to give to casting agents and producers to get acting parts.

  “WOW!” Lucy said. “Your mum’s an actress. She was on Days of Our Lives! We have that show here! Mum doesn’t let me watch it.”

  “She was on Days of Our Lives for like a day,” I mumbled. Angelina had two lines on one episode—“Help, Doctor, my boyfriend’s been attacked!” and “Oh, God, he can’t be dead!”—and then she screamed in glistening, white-toothed splendor. That was when Angelina had spent a month in Los Angeles for pilot season. She hadn’t gotten any acting roles on new TV shows (the pilots), but she did get three commercials.

  “And she was in Home Alone Two!” Lucy exclaimed.

  “She was an extra,” I groaned.

  “She’s beautiful!” Lucy said. “Her hair is so straight and long. The brown color is so shiny. That’s probably why she’s gotten all these hair commer
cials. She has a face like a doll’s. You have the same shaped eyes as her. Angelina Waverly. What a great name.” Lucy pronounced “great” like “graayate.” She sounded exactly like Penny.

  “Sounds better than Amy Finkelstein,” I added. Angelina’s birth name.

  “She must be terribly rich from all those acting jobs. She must know loads of famous people.”

  “Hardly,” I said. “She does okay. But mostly it’s Bubbe’s money. Bubbe pays for my private school. Bubbe paid for me to come here.”

  “What’s she like, your mum?” Lucy was leaning into me. I could tell she was really curious about my other family.

  I said, “EXCEPT for the fact that she is marrying Wheaties’ dad, EXCEPT for the fact that she is having a baby without asking me first, EXCEPT for the fact that she thinks I am moving in with those people, Angelina is pretty cool, for a mom. She likes to go down to Greenwich Village to get coffee and yummy desserts, or to Soho to go shopping and to look at funky art. Our favorite place is the Cloisters, this really cool medieval museum uptown. She lets me pick her clothes for her auditions and her parties. We read together every night. We just finished this gothic romance called Rebecca. It was about this mousy lady who married this rich guy who she thought was still obsessed with his first wife. And the first wife’s housekeeper at this ancient old mansion was really ticked off about the second wife and spooked the second wife practically to death. Angelina is hysterical to read with. She plays all the parts and makes these really funny faces and does great strange accents.” I sighed. “Lately, though, she hasn’t been around as much. She’s been going away for lots of weekends with Wheaties’ dad. And look what that’s come to!”

  Lucy said, “That’s how Angus and I knew something serious was going on with our mum. When she extended her vacation to America by two extra weeks. We were staying with our Granny Nell. When Mum came back from America, she was like in this glowing other world. It was sickening almost! And she was engaged to your dad! Angus and I were sooooo mad.”

  “But you got Jack!” I protested.

  “I know,” Lucy said. “But we didn’t know that then. We didn’t know we were going to end up loving him. Mum had been married once before, about a year after our real dad died, and that was a disaster. She was miserable. Granny Nell was furious! The fights they had! For a while Mum didn’t let us spend time with Granny Nell because Granny had been so mean about Mum getting married again.”

  “What happened?” I couldn’t imagine not being allowed to see Bubbe anytime I wanted.

  Lucy shrugged. “Dunno. The marriage never felt real, you know? It was like they were playing house, playing grown-up. His first wife was also dead. Mum explained after it was all over that maybe she and Patrick—that was our other stepdad—were just grieving. That they thought they were in love, but really they just needed somebody. Soon after Patrick moved out, Mum left for America to go ‘figure things out,’ as she said. That’s when she and Granny Nell made up.”

  “Wow,” I said. I had no idea the Steps had been through so much. I thought I had it bad, but they had lost a dad and a stepdad, and had a Jack-dad come into their lives without their invitation. Plus they had been moved around, it seemed like, every year.

  “When your dad first came to Australia, I hated him,” Lucy announced.

  I jumped in my seat. “How could you hate Jack!”

  “Well, I didn’t know he was going to turn out to be, you know, Jack. I just thought he was some weird guy with a funny accent who probably wouldn’t be around for long anyway, so why be nice to him? I tried hard to ignore him, but he wouldn’t let me. He always wanted to take us places and read us books and play games with us. Mum was soooo happy. He talked about you all the time. You were the only thing that interested me about Jack at first. I thought it would be pretty cool to have a sister the same age as me in America, in New York. But every time he had you on the phone, you refused to talk to us. I should have known then that you’d be like that in person,” Lucy said.

  “Like what?”

  “All snobby and picky. ‘The Frosties don’t taste right here.’ ‘You shouldn’t wear that blouse with that skirt. It doesn’t match.’ ‘Your television shows suck here.’ ‘I don’t want to go to the museum, I want to go shopping.’ ”

  You would think that I would have been mad that she was talking trash about me, but instead I laughed. Lucy did a perfect impression of my New York accent, and I had said all those exact words. I really had behaved badly.

  “Sorry, sorta,” I told Lucy. “But I was mad that you called him Dad. I thought he had forgotten all about me.”

  “You’re crazy!” Lucy said. “He talks about you all the time. We talk about you all the time. It’s like you’ve been this invisible member of the family for two years. You were always there, but we couldn’t see you. He was so excited that you were finally coming to Australia.”

  Just then I felt really bad about running away. I hoped Jack and Penny wouldn’t worry too much when they realized we were gone. Lucy must have felt kind of bad too, because she murmured, “We’re really going to get into trouble for this.”

  “Big trouble,” I said.

  All of a sudden the people in the train car shouted out, “Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Happy New Year!” They popped open champagne bottles and threw confetti into the air and kissed one another.

  Don’t ask me why, but suddenly I leaned over to Lucy and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Happy New Year,” I said. Tears came to her eyes, like she knew we were having a Moment. She hugged me.

  I guess it was an okay way to start the New Year, by realizing my stepsister was pretty amazing. That she was my friend. My sister.

  Chapter 16

  All my life I have been waiting to experience what Brittany Carlson experiences with Brad Dufus the Third, what Titanic Rose experienced with Jack Dawson, what Lucy would like to experience with Bo, her E-mail love from Atlanta. I had no idea that the major crush factor would jump in live and in person right on New Year’s Day. I guess that’s the thing about love—it just kicks you in the face when you least expect it.

  If I had known that Dream Boy was coming into my life that day, I might have hurried Lucy to our destination faster during those first couple of hours in Melbourne.

  Lucy and I began our day in Melbourne by deciding to wait before heading to her grandmother’s house. We knew we would be in big trouble once we got there, and we figured since we were already in trouble, we might as well have some fun first.

  “My friends will be hanging out on the oval on New Year’s Day,” she promised. The oval was a game field in a park nearby her granny’s.

  We had changed out of our Kleenex-stuffed dresses and taken off the makeup from the night before in the train car bathroom. To mark our new solidarity, we traded outfits. Lucy wore my favorite summer outfit, a short stretch dress with a panoramic black-and-white picture of the Manhattan skyline for a pattern, with my black platform sandals. I wore Lucy’s navy-and-white bike shorts, which, thank you, matched the striped Australian football T-shirt of Lucy’s favorite Melbourne team, the Carlton Blues. We each kept our own hats, however. Lucy wore her straw hat, and I wore my “dreadful hat,” as Lucy called it, the brown felt cowboy hat with the beads hanging down from the rim and the letter A on the front that I had bought at Paddington Market.

  “That hat totally does not go with that outfit,” Lucy said in the train station bathroom after we had changed, imitating my American accent.

  I imitated her Australian accent, using the phrase everyone in Australia seemed to say at every opportunity. “Graayate!”

  Lucy really knew her way around Melbourne, like I know Manhattan. Once we left the train station, we headed right for the tram, which was this neat old-fashioned bus-train combo that ran from cables hanging on the street.

  As we put our fare into the tram machines Lucy’s shoulders dropped a little in sadness. “The connies are all gone,” she said. “They were the tram conductor
s who used to take everyone’s fare. Now it’s all done by machine. I’ve missed so many things since we moved to Sydney! I’m glad we ran away!”

  The tram ride was not that long. Melbourne didn’t feel like a big, vast city like Sydney, which was pumping with energy and activity. The streets in Melbourne seemed more polite, less hurried. There were a few skyscrapers in the middle of the city, where the train station was, but the rest of the city, at least the sections we had passed through on the tram, looked very quiet and somewhat industrial, like New Jersey without the noise.

  We got off the tram on a street near the university (Lucy called it “uni”) that was lined with Italian pastry and coffee shops. It was about nine in the morning, and I was starving. “Let’s eat!” I said.

  Lucy locked her arm in mine, grinning from ear to ear at the sight of her familiar old neighborhood. “The nice thing about having no parents around is we can eat anything we want for brekkie.” She guided us into a milk bar and picked out a box of cookies and two Cokes.

  “Cookies for breakfast?” I asked. But I wasn’t complaining. I had discovered that Australia was not the place for a good old-fashioned American breakfast with pancakes, eggs, and home fries. In Australia brekkie feasts were not common like in America, and I had long ago given up on their Rice Bubbles (pathetic excuse for Rice Krispies), crumpets (English muffins), and pasty-looking bagels. Cookies I was more than willing to try. I added some Kinder Surprise chockies to our brekkie booty, figuring we could save the toys inside for Angus as a souvenir of our adventure.

  “We are too sick,” Lucy said. Between Lucy’s piggy bank and the money Bubbe had given me, we could survive on junk food for a very, very long time.