by Ariel Kaplan
I’d developed this maxim last year, after some stoners in my gym class explained to me that the path to Officer Barry’s heart—and out of the school building at lunchtime—is indeed through his stomach.
“Dude,” Jake Ellerson had said to me as we stretched after our quarter-mile run, “all you have to do is bring him a burger. He really doesn’t care if you go out.”
Barry generally spent lunchtime hovering in front of the back doors to keep people from leaving, when he wasn’t halfheartedly busting kids for smoking weed at the far end of the parking lot, which he only did when one of the vice principals forced the issue.
“Won’t he get in trouble for that?”
“With who?”
I paused, one foot propped on the opposite thigh as I stretched my hamstring. “The principal?”
“He never comes out of his office. How’s he going to know?”
I’d been intrigued by the idea that the price of my freedom was a 99¢ Big Mac. So the next week, while Bethany was home with a cold, I’d decided to ride my bike three blocks to Taco Bell for lunch, just to see what would happen. It was an experiment; it was less that I really wanted a seven-layer burrito and more that I wanted to see if I could sweet-talk Officer Barry into letting me out. Because if I could get out for a burrito, someday I might be able to get out for something more important.
Officer Barry stopped me at the door. “Where do you think you’re going?” he’d said. He was very big and very gruff; I’d deliberately attempted my escape without Bethany because I’d known she would fall apart at this moment.
“Hello,” I said. “I have lunch now, and I’m not exactly enjoying the food selections today.”
He pointed back down the hallway, toward the cafeteria. “Go back to lunch,” he said.
“Well, I was thinking,” I said. “See, they have that new burrito with the rice and the guacamole? And I was thinking that sounds better than the sloppy joes in the cafeteria, right? And what I was thinking is that you’ve been standing here at this door an awfully long time, and I’m sure you’re very hungry, since you’ve been standing there smelling the sloppy joes since 10:30. So I was thinking that if I take my bike and go very fast, I could get to Taco Bell in five minutes and be back with a second guacamole burrito for you, and it would even still be hot by the time you got it.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. I did my best to look innocent and winsome.
“Twenty minutes,” I said. “I’m very fast. My name’s Aphra, by the way; we’ve never met because I am never in trouble.”
“Why do I find that hard to believe?”
“Oh, it’s true,” I said. “I have very good grades and everyone likes me, I swear.”
He scowled, but he didn’t look like he meant it. I gave him my best smile and bounced on my toes. “Twenty minutes?” he said.
“Nineteen, if the line’s short.”
And then—and I’ll never forget this—he took a step to the side and turned his back to me. I slipped out the door.
I ran all the way to the bike rack, not really believing how easy it had been. It seemed to me at that moment that the entire world was full of people like Jake Ellerson, people who knew stuff, if you were just clever enough to ask.
I decided not to push my luck that day; I got back in seventeen minutes, and I brought Barry an order of churros to go with his burrito. When I got back to the building, he moved aside to let me in, never making eye contact, and I slipped the handle of the Taco Bell bag into his hand as I walked by.
“Thank you very much,” I said. “I got you two kinds of salsa.”
* * *
—
So when Barry walked by me in front of the vending machine, muttering, “Six more years,” I knew he meant “until retirement,” and I said, “I believe in you, sir.” He smiled, just a little, and kept going, off to make sure no one killed anyone else on their way to the buses.
Bethany ambled up to me a minute later. She was not wearing my tomato-red dress.
What she was wearing was my old GMU hoodie and a pair of leggings. “What do you have on?” I asked. “That’s not your presentation outfit.”
She picked at the kangaroo pocket of the hoodie, which I’d forgotten I’d loaned to her. I have no idea why all my clothes end up with Bethany, but it seems to happen a lot.
“It was cold this morning,” she said.
“It was not cold.” I held up my phone and played the Bethany app for her. It said, Today’s going to be a warm one, a high of 78 with a 30% chance of afternoon drizzle. You’ll be fine in a T-shirt, but take your umbrella.
“Well,” she said. “I was cold.”
I rolled my eyes. I kind of wanted a soda, but the machine was turned off, so we headed out to the parking lot, where we were carpooling to crew practice. “You put on a bikini for him, but you couldn’t manage a mid-thigh dress?”
“That…that was different.”
I wasn’t sure how, but I said, “Whatever. How was the presentation?”
“He was there,” she said.
“Of course he was there,” I said. “He’s been there since September.”
“Yeah, I know.” We moved out of the way of the basketball team coming in the other direction. “I dropped all my note cards on the floor. It was super embarrassing.”
“That’s not super embarrassing. Unless your pants split when you went to pick them up. Did they split when you went to pick up the cards?”
“What? No. My pants are fine. It was okay, I got through it. I was fine as long as I was reading something I’d written down, so I just did that.”
She wasn’t looking quite at me, and her face was flushed.
“So if it was fine, why are you all red in the face?”
She said, “Greg tried to talk to me afterward.”
“Define tried to. He tried to talk to you and fell down a manhole instead?”
“No. He did talk to me. I just didn’t talk back.”
“Oh. Bethany.”
“I know! He was just so…right there in front of my face, and he asked me this question about isometry, right? He said, ‘I don’t really get the difference between chain isomers and position isomers.’ ”
I stared at her blankly.
“I know! And even though I know the answer, I just sort of went gaaaah, and then I ran away.”
“You ran away?”
“I told him I was late to Spanish.”
“That was just now!”
“I know! You think he realized?”
“That you don’t have a class after school lets out? Yes, I think he realized.”
“Aphra, you have to help me here.”
“I’m trying. You wouldn’t even wear the red dress.” Though I guess she hadn’t needed it. “You just have to talk to him. You know, use your words?”
“If I could do that, I would.”
“You’re talking to me right now!”
A couple of girls from crew joined up with us.
“It’s raining,” Sophie whined. “I hate rowing in the rain.”
“You don’t row in the rain,” I pointed out. “You yell in the rain.”
“It still sucks,” she said.
“Hey,” Jenna said. “We’re having a study group at Sophie’s after practice, if you want to come. I brought a box of brownie mix.”
“Can’t,” I said. “I promised my brother I’d help him with his homework after dinner.”
“He’s so cute,” Sophie said. “I wish I had a cute little brother.”
“My brother can’t get his pee in the toilet,” Claire lamented. “There’s this buildup of pee scum everywhere. It’s disgusting.”
“Ew,” Sophie said. “Tell me Kit doesn’t do that. It will shatter my whole little-brother fantasy.”
“We got him pretty well potty-trained,” I said.
“Maybe we need to go back to that with Serge,” Claire said. “What did you do with Kit?”
“Cattle prod,” I said.
“Really?”
“No, we just told him not to pee on the damn floor,” I said. “Only he was three, so we said it nicer.”
By then we were at Sophie’s car, so I climbed into the back next to Bethany, her by the window, me in the middle, as per usual. It was only later that I realized Jenna and the others hadn’t asked Bethany if she wanted to go to the study group, and that she might have actually wanted to go.
Kit was on the floor of the kitchen when I got home, sobbing loudly with his face mashed into his knees.
Kit was my parents’ “Whoops, we thought your mom was menopausal” baby, born when I was eight and Delia was ten. I’m pretty much 100 percent sure my parents didn’t plan to have a third kid; they were kind of crazy-eyed when they told us Mom was pregnant, and it was an expression that didn’t fade until Kit went off to preschool, a “Ha ha ha, what have we done to ourselves” kind of expression.
Fortunately for them (and Kit), Delia and I didn’t mind the intrusion of a new family member. I overheard Dad tell Mom once, “Just wait until the novelty wears off,” but he’s nine now, and so far it hasn’t, maybe because Delia and I were so entrenched in our own lives by then that the loss of parental attention didn’t really register.
Right after my brother was born, Delia and I used to sneak into his room at night to watch him sleep.
Our house only has three bedrooms so when my parents found out they were having their oops, they transformed the basement into a bedroom for Delia and turned her old room into a nursery. There was never a conversation about having us share a room, because it was understood that we would have killed each other.
The first time we ended up in Kit’s room was about a week after he was born. I’d been reading some baby book my mom had left lying around, and there’d been a chapter on SIDS and I was kind of freaked out by the whole thing, so I decided that I’d really better make sure he was still breathing. I waited until my parents were in bed, snuck down the hall, and tiptoed into his room.
Delia’s old Death Note posters were still up, since the conversion of the bedroom had entailed swapping Delia’s bed for a crib and that was pretty much it. I didn’t think they were exactly appropriate nursery decor, but, you know. Whatever. So the first thing I saw when I went into the room was a Shinigami with pointy teeth eating an apple, and the second was Delia herself, sitting on the floor next to the crib.
I squatted down next to her and she whispered, “What are you doing here?”
I shrugged.
“You read the SIDS thing?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Yeah, me too.”
“Why aren’t Mom and Dad in here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they figure we survived.”
Kit opened his mouth and yawned and the two of us held our breath until he settled back to sleep.
“Were you going to stay here all night?” I asked.
“Were you?”
I shrugged again, because I hadn’t really gone in with a plan beyond making sure Kit didn’t asphyxiate. “There’s sleeping bags in my closet,” I said, because those were the ones Bethany and I used when she slept over.
“But if we go to sleep, how are we going to know if he stops breathing and wake him up?”
This was a good point, but neither of us thought we’d be able to stay up the entire night every night. We got the sleeping bags anyway and stationed ourselves next to the crib. Then we proceeded to lie there and not sleep.
“Are you awake?” I asked after an hour had gone by.
“Yeah.”
“Doesn’t he need to eat soon or something?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. Does he wake up on his own, or do they get him up for that?”
“I think usually he cries,” I said. Delia, banished to the basement, would not know this.
“Is he still breathing?”
I checked. “Yeah.”
Just then, Kit started to stir; whether we’d woken him up or it was his empty stomach I’m not sure. Then he cried, softly at first and then full-throated.
“Should we get Mom?” I asked just as Dad threw open the door, staggered into the room, and tripped over Delia’s legs.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, picking himself up off the floor. “What’re you guys doing in here?”
“We thought Kit might die,” I said. And then I started bawling, because it was too horrible a thing even to say out loud.
Dad looked rather alarmed. “Kit’s not going to die!” he said. “Where are you getting that from?”
“We read the book,” Delia said. “About SIDS.”
“Oh,” he said, scooping the baby out of the crib. “I see. But guys, that’s not going to happen.”
“You don’t know that,” I insisted.
“He’s big and healthy and no one smokes in the house. Plus, we always put him down to sleep on his back; he’ll be fine.”
“But,” I said. “But the book says sometimes it happens anyway. And nobody knows why.”
Dad didn’t answer right away; Kit was starting to fuss again, and he bounced him around to distract him. “It’s very unlikely,” he said.
“But can you promise it won’t happen to him?” Delia asked.
There was a moment’s hesitation, and then he said, “Yes, I promise,” and took the baby to Mom to be fed. Delia and I stayed in the room, our eyes meeting in the semidarkness, because we’d both taken note of that pause. Dad couldn’t promise that. Not really.
I think it was the first time I realized that bad things can happen for no reason, and I could not count on my parents to be able to fix them.
* * *
—
“What the hell happened?” I said to my mother, who was putting a lasagna into the oven.
Kit let out a particularly loud bellow. My mother said, “We saw the allergist after school today about that rash.”
“Oh,” I said, petting his little head. “Did they poke you a bunch of times? That sucks. Are you still itchy?” I’d had allergy testing when I was around Kit’s age, and they’d stuck me about twenty times up and down each arm with a little pin covered in various allergens. I am, it turns out, very allergic to ragweed and oak pollen. “So what’s he allergic to?”
“Walnut!” he sobbed.
“Walnuts?” I asked my mother.
He wailed again. “No,” Mom said. “Not walnuts, Walnut, and not just Walnut.” She shut the oven. “Cats in general.”
“He said we have to give Walnut away!” Kit cried.
“What?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“The doctor told us,” she said, with a pained expression, “that the best course of action would be to find Walnut a new home.”
I looked down to where Kit was hiccupping on the floor. “Or,” I said, “the alternative course of action would be…”
“He was pretty emphatic. He said your brother could develop asthma.”
“But the alternative would be…”
“Aphra,” she said.
It kind of made sense: Kit’s always mashing his face into the cat. It’s like a leftover thing from when he was a baby, his need to mash his face into things if he likes them, and I’m pretty sure he’ll get over it eventually, or at least I hope he will, because he does it to me, too. It’s not so bad except when his nose is runny and he leaves snot prints on my shoulders. But the reason he face-mashes Walnut is because he loves him so much. He’d been begging for a pet since preschool, and my parents finally gave in this year, figuring that an adult cat wouldn’t be too much work. The cat had taken one look at Kit in the shelter and that
had been the end for both of them: it was true love. I’m not sure if the Greeks have a name for the love between a small child and a domestic animal, but it was definitely a real thing.
I grabbed a juice box from the fridge and jammed the straw in it, then handed it to Kit. “Drink this,” I said, and to Mom I said, “Mom. Walk with me,” and pulled her out of the kitchen into the laundry room and shut the door.
“You can’t make him give up his cat,” I said. “Just how many therapists do you want to shell out for?”
“You are not helping.”
“Did you even discuss alternatives? You can’t do this,” I said. “He loves that stupid cat.”
“I know that! But this is his health!”
I moved a box of laundry detergent out of the way and hopped up to sit on the dryer. “What about shots?”
She shook her head. “He hates shots.”
“He’d get the shots if it was for Walnut.”
“But they don’t work right away, and sometimes they don’t work at all. Plus, I think at the beginning it’s like once or twice a week. Your dad and I don’t have time to run him over there that often.”
I bent forward until my forehead hit my knees. “Please don’t do this to him.”
The door opened and in walked my father. “Why are you guys in here with the door shut while Kit’s crying in the kitchen?”
Mom briefly caught him up. Dad said, “Shit.”
I said, “Shots.”
Dad said, “Shots?”
“That’s kind of a logistical problem,” Mom said.
“I could take him sometimes,” I said. “For his shots. On the days you guys can’t go, you could leave me the car and I’ll drive him.”
“How?” Mom said. “You have practice after school every day.”
“I’d…I’d just have to take him at lunch.”
“They don’t let you guys leave at lunch,” Mom said. “I’m pretty sure.”
“Please. That place can’t hold me.”
My mother said, “Wait a minute. You leave school? In the middle of the day?”