Mirrored

by Alex Flinn

  “Don’t worry. I won’t take you home,” Goose whispers, reading my thoughts. Then, real loud, so everyone around can hear. “We’ll just go get that paper you forgot, then come back.” He tugs my arm. He is brilliant at navigating through the legs of taller kids, and he just pulls me along.

  I’ve stopped crying, at least. “Okay, let’s hurry then.”

  Finally, we reach his car. The parking lot isn’t crowded yet. The bus always gets there so early. I think I hold my breath the whole time we’re buckling our seat belts and pulling out against traffic, but in a minute, we’re free. Goose drives a block, then another, not looking at me. When we reach the park, he pulls into the parking lot.

  “Are you okay?” he says.

  When I collapse in tears against his shoulder, he says, “Okay, dumb question. Dumb question. Aw, Celine.” He puts his arms around me. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I have nobody,” I say. “There’s nobody left.”

  “There’s nothing I can say. I wish I could make it better, but . . . I’m going to shut up, like I never do.” He holds me harder. His arms are surprisingly strong, and I sink against him and sob. My head, my neck, my jaw hurt. Everything aches with the emptiness that comes from wanting to talk to Dad and realizing I never will, never again. Goose just holds me.

  Finally, when it’s almost eight, I say, “I don’t want to go home. I came to school because it feels so empty there.”

  “I understand. We can go to my house and watch TV or something. My mom’s home. I mean, I’m not trying to lure you there for immoral purposes.” He’s trying to make me laugh.

  “Your mom’s home? Won’t you get in trouble?”

  “She works from home. She’s an artist. And nah, she’ll write me a note. She knows people need personal days sometimes. I needed a ton of them in seventh grade, when I took PE.”

  “That must’ve been tough.”

  “I’m not into sports . . . especially when people try to use me as the ball.”

  I finally laugh. “You’re the best.”

  “I know. I’m awesome. We covered that. Come on. I hate missing Hoda and Kathie Lee. I hear they’re doing makeovers.”

  I really don’t want to go to school or anywhere else. “Okay. I love a good makeover.”

  “Girl, there is nothing to make over about you.” He turns the key in the ignition.

  “Yeah, just my life,” I say. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”

  We pull out of the parking lot, driving right past a police car. Goose nods at the guy. “Seriously, if you ever need a place to go, you can stay with us.”

  “Right.”

  “No, really. My mom is big on taking in strays. Stray dogs, feral cats, foster kids. She has a kind heart. She probably wouldn’t even notice you’re there.”

  “Great. I’m a stray.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I meant you’re a friend, and if you were in trouble, we’d help you.”

  “Okay.”

  He stops the car again. “Look at me.”

  Since there’s not much choice, I do. The sun streams through the windows, and I blink at him.

  He says, “I’d do anything for you.”

  I’m stunned for a second. It’s a strange thing to say. Then, I recognize it. He’s quoting the song “I’d Do Anything” from Oliver! I laugh. “Anything?” I parrot the song.

  “Anything.” He says it seriously, not a joke.

  “Okay. Thanks. Can we go now, before we get picked up for truancy?”

  He nods. “Anything.” He starts the car again.

  We pull up to a big yellow house with marigolds planted in the front flower boxes. “After you, milady,” Goose says in a Cockney accent. A spotted cat jumps out of our way as we approach a black door that’s a little wider than usual. “The woman who owned the house before us was in a wheelchair, so they had lower counters and stuff,” Goose explains. “That’s why the door’s so wide, which we didn’t need, but the other stuff was perfect for us.”

  I notice the cat doesn’t try to murder me. I like that in a cat.

  He walks in and calls, “Mom!”

  The house smells of coffee, a homey smell. A blond woman, shorter than Goose and wearing light blue sweatpants, comes out of the kitchen. She’s carrying an African American baby in one arm and a bottle in the other hand. “School’s out a little early, isn’t it?” She sees me. “Oh, I didn’t know we had company.”

  “Celine, this is my mom, Stacey. Mom, this is Celine. She’s having a rough day.”

  “Aren’t we all?” She looks at Goose. “Don’t you have a test in history today? You can’t just blow off school for no reason.” She has a southern accent. Over her head, I can see three kids, two boys and a girl, eating cereal at the island in their downsized kitchen. An orange cat is walking around. It rubs against my legs, but it doesn’t try to attack me or anything.

  “It’s more than a normal bad day, Mom,” Goose says. “Celine’s father died Friday.”

  “Oh my God.” Stacey rearranges the baby in her arms so she can give him the bottle. “Oh, sweetie. I’m so sorry. You didn’t want to stay home with your mother?”

  My throat feels tight. “I don’t have one of those either. She died when I was eight. I just have my stepmother now, and she’s flipping out. I had to get out of there, but then, I couldn’t handle school. Goose was really sweet and brought me here. I hope he’s not in trouble because he was just being nice.”

  “Yes, my sweet boy. You poor thing.” The baby turns away from her, but she coaxes him to take the bottle. He sucks for about a second, then starts fussing again. “I have to get them ready for school, but you stay. Of course, stay as long as you want.” She adjusts the baby again.

  “Thank you. Um, can I hold him for you?” I suddenly really want to be useful.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to.”

  “Well, that would be nice, thank you. Do you want to sit on the sofa and hold him?”

  I can tell she’s worried I’ll drop him, so I sit down on the squashy white sofa. She settles him into my lap. “His name is Jeron. After he drinks the bottle, you rub his back until he burps.”

  “Okay.” The baby feels warm and a little sweaty, but when he is in my arms, he starts to suck on his bottle contentedly. “Good boy, Jeron.”

  “He likes you.” Stacey disappears into the kitchen, where I hear her telling the kids to hurry. Goose sits next to me and starts flipping through the channels, which are mostly morning news shows and cartoons. He settles on SpongeBob for a minute, then changes his mind. Stacey walks through the room with the three kids behind her, wearing blue and white school uniforms. The two boys look about the same age, maybe eight, and they’re dwarves or little people (I don’t know which is the right term, and I’m afraid to ask). One has dark hair and looks a lot like Goose. The other has red hair and freckles. The little blond girl is about five, an average-sized five-year-old.

  “Are they all your brothers and sisters?” I ask.

  “They’re all my brothers and sisters,” Goose says. “But if you mean did my parents have all of them, no. Tyler, the one with red hair, is adopted. His parents abandoned him. He’s the same age as Tony, my other brother. Department of Children and Families contacted my mother because he was a person of short stature, and they thought she’d deal with him better than his parents had. She was fostering before that.”

  I file away person of short stature in my mental bank. I wonder if Tyler’s parents ditched him because he was one. It seems impossible, but clearly, some parents suck.

  “And Jeron is a foster kid, but we might get him too. We’ve had other babies that got sent back to their parents. My mom really likes babies. She had one that died, right after my sister, Isabella, was born. There’s this genetic thing. So that was sort of the e
nd with her, and she started fostering instead.”

  “So there are seven of you here?” I say. “Must get crazy in the morning.”

  He shrugs. “I’m usually out of here before they wake up.” He flips through the channels some more and settles on a movie. “Oh, man, I love this movie. I love this! Have you ever seen it?”

  “What is it?” Onscreen, a red-haired girl in crazy clothes and a hat is talking to a guy in even weirder clothes. All the extras look like corporate lawyers. Like, they’re high school students who don’t own jeans.

  “Pretty in Pink. It’s a John Hughes movie. He was, like, the god of teen flicks in the 1980s.”

  “Yeah, my dad made me watch Breakfast Club together last year. That was him, right? I loved it.” My stomach drops at the realization that, now, I will never watch another movie with Dad. I feel my eyes starting to fill, but I inhale and try not to cry.

  “Breakfast Club’s great too.”

  “Let’s watch this,” I say. “Did it just start?”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty close to the beginning. It’s about this girl, Andie, from the wrong side of the tracks, and she likes this rich guy, Blane.”

  So I get totally engrossed in the story of red-haired, offbeat-dressing Andie and her best friend, Duckie, a short, weird guy who has a crush on her. People at school make fun of them because they’re poor and also sort of weird. By the time Stacey comes back with the kids trailing behind her, Jeron is asleep in my arms.

  “Oh, my gosh,” Stacey whispers. “You got him to sleep? That kid never sleeps.”

  “I forgot to burp him,” I whisper back.

  Stacey says, “Hey, if he went to sleep, that’s better. Do you want to try to put him in his crib?” She says it like she doesn’t think it’s a great idea.

  “Nah, he might wake up. I can keep holding him if you want. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “We’re watching Pretty in Pink, Mom.” Goose has paused the TV.

  “That’s a great movie. Good music.”

  “If you like music from the eighties,” Goose teases.

  “Hey, I’m from the eighties,” Stacey says.

  The little girl is starting to sit down with us, but Stacey gestures to her to come on. “We’ll be late, Isabella.” To me, she says, “I’ll take Jeron off your hands when I come back.”

  “It’s no problem. It’s sort of . . . life affirming.” The same cat from before rubs against my legs again. I sort of jump. “Sorry, cats hate me.”

  “Oh, these cats are harmless.” Stacey takes Isabella and Tyler by the hands and says, “Come on” to the other boy. He follows her out.

  “She seems like a really great mom,” I say. “You’re lucky.”

  “Guess I am.” Goose unpauses the movie. “This is my favorite part.” Onscreen, Andie’s friend, Duckie, is wearing a yellow jacket and doing a crazy dance to an old song, “Try a Little Tenderness,” trying to impress her and obviously failing miserably. I giggle.

  “That’s love,” Goose says, “when you’re willing to make a total ass of yourself for a girl.”

  “Have you ever done that?”

  “Not so far. Not on purpose anyway. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Nothing. I talk too much. Shh. Let’s watch this.”

  I wonder what he means. Stacey doesn’t come back for a while, and in the movie, Andie accepts a date with Blane, breaking Duckie’s heart. Then, Blane breaks her heart by asking her to the prom, then canceling because his rich friends don’t approve. My arm is starting to ache, and I ease Jeron onto the sofa, planting myself on the floor so I can keep him from sliding off.

  “I don’t see what Andie likes about Blane so much,” I say to Goose. “He’s got no spine. He doesn’t want to admit to his friends that he likes her.”

  “I guess he’s supposed to be hot,” Goose says.

  “He’s not that hot. And hotness only goes so far.” After seeing my dad spend seven years with beautiful but crazy, I know that for a fact. “After you’ve known someone a while, you stop looking, I think. Character is more important.”

  In the end, Andie wears a pink dress and goes to the prom by herself. But Blane apologizes, so she walks off into the bright prom lights with Blane.

  And Duckie tells her it’s fine!

  Totally lame.

  “That was a crazy-stupid ending,” I say to Goose. “The girl had no pride.”

  “Right?” he agrees. “Did you know that in the original version of this movie, Andie wound up with Duckie, but test audiences didn’t like it. So they went back and changed it. They re-filmed the whole ending to make it that bad.”

  “Really? Test audiences have no souls. She should totally have ended up with Duckie.”

  “Absolutely. You get it. I knew you’d get it.”

  “It was so stupid. He would never have said that.” I imitate the actor who played Duckie. “‘He’s different from the others. Go to him.’ It must have hurt the actor’s soul to even have to say that.”

  Goose nods. “I agree.” He switches the TV back to SpongeBob, which is still on. Or on again. Patrick is obsessing over getting nachos. “So you’d go with Duckie instead of hot Blane?”

  “I told you, hotness only goes so far. My stepmother is obsessed with appearances, and it makes her crazy. Besides, I sort of think Duckie is cute. In his own way.”

  “Really? He didn’t strike me as your type. You’re still marrying Jonah Prince, right?”

  I laugh. Does he think I’m silly for obsessing over a rock star? “Oh, absolutely.” I turn over my hand so he can see the faded writing on my fingers, where I’ve written J.P. 4-ever. “We talked last night. He promised to take me to homecoming next year. On his private jet. And then we’ll go to Paris and buy a horse—two horses, one for each of us.”

  “Get me a horse too.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I agree. “He totally said three horses. Wanted to know what color you wanted. I said palomino.”

  “Good call.”

  We fall back into silence, watching SpongeBob.

  “I’ll miss school again tomorrow for the funeral,” I say after a while.

  “I was thinking about going to that too.”

  “Really?” I know Laurel’s going, and her mom. But having more people as a buffer between me and Violet would be good. The thought of sitting there all alone with Violet is just freaky, almost as freaky as my father’s body in a box in the ground.

  “Would you want me to go?” Goose asks.

  “Yes. Yes, I would so want you to go. But . . . you’d do that?”

  “Like I said, I’d do anything.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Can we just sit here and watch SpongeBob for the rest of the day?”

  “Absolutely. Sometimes, watching SpongeBob is the best thing. SpongeBob never disappoints.” He sits back down.

  So we keep watching. My eyes feel about to close. In the background, I can hear Stacey talking to Jeron and making him another bottle, the next-door neighbor’s lawnmower, and the squirrels outside, at war with the blue jays over a bird feeder. We watch maybe three more SpongeBobs, maybe more than that. I’m not sure because, at some point, I give in and I fall asleep.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  12

  After the funeral, Kendra moves in with us. She says it’s to help Violet. I’m still not sure I believe she’s Violet’s sister, but it’s good to have her there because Violet is definitely several pins short of a bowling alley. She doesn’t go to work. She doesn’t eat. She doesn’t even cry.

  Instead, she spends day and night sitting on her bed, staring into her hand mirror.

  She doesn’t talk to it anymore, just stares. I wonder if it sti
ll answers back.

  A week after my father’s death, I hear Kendra talking to her as I’m passing by on the way downstairs.

  “Don’t you think you should go to work?” she asks.

  Violet draws a brush through her hair. She holds it up so the auburn strands catch the light. “I have no reason to go to work.”

  “Of course you have. Your job is important. You help people.”

  “I don’t care about helping people. When have I ever?”

  “As a girl you did.”

  “I’m not that girl anymore . . . thank God.”

  “I loved that girl,” Kendra says.

  Grimalkin brushes by me. She takes a swipe at me with one paw. I should go. I start toward the stairs again.

  “Your beauty, then,” Kendra says, and I stop again. “It used to be so important to you to be beautiful. Perhaps you could do some modeling, commercials.”

  I see a circle of light moving on the wall, as if someone was flipping a mirror over and over. The cat is stalking back toward me. I can’t bring myself to kick it down the stairs, even though I hate it.

  “I am beautiful, aren’t I?” Violet’s voice says.

  “Of course you are, my darling,” comes Kendra’s reply. “But your hair is messy.”

  “Am I the most beautiful woman in the whole world?” Violet asks.

  Kendra hesitates. “You are one of them.”

  “I mean, if I brushed my hair?” Violet asks.

  Still, Kendra doesn’t just say yes. Just agree with her! Lie to her!

  Besides, who is more beautiful?

  “My dear, you are very beautiful. Any man would be happy to have a woman of your beauty.”

  “I don’t want any man. I want Greg! I’ve only ever wanted Greg!”

  From the bedroom, I hear glass break. I run downstairs before they can know I was eavesdropping.

  That day, I forget my book for English class. I ask the teacher for a pass to go to my locker. When I get there, I find a mirror inside.

  Violet’s mirror.

  Which is weird in and of itself because I didn’t put it there and I didn’t leave my locker open.