

### The Avocado Grove

### Emily

By

L.A. Wolfe

The Avocado Grove: Emily

By L.A. Wolfe

Copyright 2015 L.A. Wolfe

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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To Marty, Ashley, and Noah for all of the roads we've traveled together.

"This is life in low gravity, floating about on the moon except without the bulky astronaut suit. I kiss the moon and circle around through nebula after nebula watching stars being born. The brilliant light from the universe makes me cry." - Emily

Contents

Chapter I

October 31

Dear Marianne

My Lies I

Foul Shots

Necessary Detours

Wild Things

Chapter II

What's Your Name?

The Cancer Lie

Before Skipping Gym

Skipping Gym

Chapter III

The New Girl in the House

The Deli of Distractions

The Butterfly Cake

Outer Layers

Outer Layers II

Beef and Cheese Meditation

October 15, 2014

Chapter IV

My Lies II

What's Up with That?

Train Talk

Fashion Math?

Blue Jell-O Party

Liar Squared

Chapter V

Emily's Shopping List

Julio's Girls

Are You My Father?

Those Soccer Boys

Mother Talk

Chapter VI

The Girl in the Stands

Shush

Shush II

Mess, Mingle, and Chop

Centers

Are You My Mother?

The First Steeple Hands

Lady Steeple Hands

Chapter VII

Wanna?

Sparkly Shoes

Surfaces I

Surfaces II

Sparkly Everything

Chapter VIII

Ghost Girl

Mickey and Emily

Wanna? II

Typical Girl

Chapter IX

Shot Clock

Double Dribbling

Open Your Eyes

Pad Thai

Chapter X

At Night with Father Beni

Flickers

Crashing Prom (First Kiss)

Floating Glittering

What I Never Told You: There's Something About Your Moves

Chapter XI

Easier

Fairies Riding Thunder

Outta My Room

Bleaching Out

Bleaching Out II

The Crumb Universe

Chapter XII

Fairies Riding Thunder II

Emily's Room

Bad Company

Chapter XIII

Grizzly's Time Travel

Mine and Mine

Concessions of a Monster Bride

Chapter XIV

Don't Go: Minus Signs Flash Everywhere

All the Things

Marianne's Pineapple Upside Down Cake

The Don

You're not on a Train

The Face You Never Forget

Chapter XV

Confrontations

The Lifting Part

Chapter XVI

What Happened Girlfriend

Graduation Day

What Happened Girlfriend II

Chapter XVII

Dear God: Delucca Calls

What Happened Girlfriend III

About L.A. Wolfe

Excerpts from The Avocado Grove: Vanessa

More
**Chapter I**

October 31

October 31, 2013

"Man, aren't you going to ask her to dance?"

And you morph into the girl that sits in front of me in math class and then into my aunt from Cuba, and then you are my latest girlfriend. How you change into these people I'm not sure, but all of you easy going souls get bored sitting on the sofa sipping beer and wander off, and I follow your changing shapes through the crowd and the way your hair goes from long dishwater blonde to short bleached blonde to almost black.

"Which one?" I laugh. I point you out to a guy I don't know at all, but he's nice enough so I play along. "She has a cheerleading competition."

"In Tampa, who's he?" You ask. I don't even have to fumble for an answer. This guy wants to help you with the classes you already make A's in. It doesn't take you long to go turn the music up.

I stumble to the patio with you. The music is fast and loud but we act as if it's slow. My hands find their way up under your shirt.

"Come on, let's go finish this party in your car."

Later we are surrounded by smoke and noise. There's a flash of red in your shiny blonde hair. We're caught in the crush of people dancing together in a speeding car. Is the stereo screaming or are those sirens?

I'm messed up and you are not my mom. But for a second, I am a small child again and you are my mom and you tell me, "You don't look so good."

"You look perfect." And you do – as perfect as if I just picked you up for our date. You spent hours curling your hair and those curls sparkle in the moonlight. "What did you put on your hair?" I ask.

But you do not answer me. You push open the car door that moments before was crushed in but now looks as if nothing at all happened. And the door seems far away and you seem far away too as if you are in another place. I try to get back to the car as fast as I can but there's only the road beneath my feet. I can't find where you are, you have disappeared, and after what feels like days I follow the road back home.

Dear Marianne

June 30, 2014

Dear Marianne,

When you chatted it up at the block party with Roberto Dennis and his pack of macho friends, it seemed as if you didn't know me. A few months ago you acted like we were sorority sisters.

"Tell me about the neighborhood," you said. And you winked at me and looked at me encouragingly. We sipped our tea. You smiled but said little about anything.

I gossiped about everything. How Roberto's wife, Delucca Dennis has the worst temper and hollers every morning at her dogs that will not stay in her yard and how those dogs run wild all over the neighborhood as if they are possessed. I told you the Johnson's daughter is a high-school dropout and also has a druggie boyfriend. I sipped my tea. I gossiped more.

Your face is wise like Grizzly's when she isn't drunk, and I started to tell you about my sister and her child. But it was like I forgot you were even there. It was like I was speaking to a ghost in the room. You sat so quiet and still.

"My niece drives me crazy," I said. "And I hate her hair. It looks angry as if she couldn't decide between pink and red and the gorgeous blonde she was born with."

"That's just teenagers and that's just hair." And I jumped when I heard your voice. You sipped your tea. I spilled mine all over my new shorts.

I wanted to ask how much bleach makes you look like you were born with the pale, white blonde hair that some babies have. But the most I managed after staining my outfit was, "How often do you have to go to the salon, every four weeks, right?"

You rolled up your pant leg and showed off an ankle tattoo. The brown spots fanned up. It looked as if you stepped into a giant mud puddle, except it felt like I was the clumsy one. I slipped up. I didn't say anything about your tattoo.

I thought I might catch it and see it in the pattern of the spilled tea all over my cream colored clothes.

When you wiggled out of your skinny jacket, I saw the butterfly canvassing your arm. That butterfly looked alive, as if it might take off at any moment or stay and show me its teeth, and whisper your secrets.

You smiled at me but you never answered my question about your hair. But I felt as if I had helped you. My house guests are all anyone gossips about now.

Here's some of the stuff I've been asked:

"Is Emily your daughter or your sister's kid?"

"Is Don Emily's father?"

"Did you see the video of Emily and Delucca's boy and what she did?"

But I imagine you already know this. I outrank the antics of Delucca's dogs or the wheelies Juniper's boyfriend does on his motorbike at midnight, or any of those guys Roberto introduced you to and you hang out with now (neighbors I never bothered to know well).

Welcome to the hood, this Avocado Grove.

P.S. Father Beni says I don't have to give this to you, but I wish I were brave enough to do it. There's a cool factor to you Marianne I'll always admire. And I'd bet all the nurses I've met at the hospital would be your friends. I don't have any good answers for them. I've tried a dozen different ones. Everything I say sounds hollow or wrong. Good enough isn't enough. Maybe why perfect blonde hair matters? I don't know. Father Beni doesn't know and G-d remains silent.

My Lies I

1. "Call me Kimmie." My name is Emily; I've only asked you to call me Kimmie. But sometimes I say, "My name is Kimmie." And yes this is a lie.

2. This is my house. My aunt is staying with us for a while.

3. My dad is on a long trip. (I don't say he's been dead for seven years.)

4. My mom is the most responsible adult I've ever known. She works downtown at a bank there. If you ask me which one, I'll tell you a story about the big bank, you know the one that's been in the news?

5. I've moved a lot too. All the cities in California turn into cities I've heard about in China. The same goes for Colorado and Florida. Sometimes I switch China out for Japan. A lot of people have been to Europe, but Asia is farther.

Foul Shots

The whole place stinks.

"Ready for the tour?" My aunt says.

New place, new stuff stink is everywhere here mixed with the heavy scent of burning vanilla candles. I wonder how long they have lived here but don't ask.

I hear the word "new" in speaking about the house. But I don't have to hear that word to know it, to smell it, to understand this house is bigger and better than anything I have ever lived in.

The place reeks of new furniture smell and paint and all the walls look covered with some shade of vanilla ice cream minus the black spots from the bean. There isn't any plastic on the floor but it's like the builders have just pulled away. Windows are everywhere too letting in the brilliant South Florida sunshine, an incredible brightness that bounces off all the plainness.

Grizzly coos, "This is some place."

And Ally answers back, "Six bedrooms."

We only had two in California along with a tiny cramped bathroom and that had been fine. This has a three bathroom look, it's big, has fancy furniture and my arms and legs feel clumsy as if I could easily break something and, "Sorry Grizzly this isn't going to work out, you and Emily have to go." If I stick to the sofa, I won't have to worry about having a safe place to pee in the middle of the night.

"You wouldn't believe how they cut corners, they leave out screws. Don was too busy golfing to notice," Ally says. And I imagine Grizzly's eyes are hungry and my whitish, bony and fried looking mother tries hard to understand what Ally is even complaining about.

"Emily, do you want to check out your room?" My aunt asks.

I jam the fat pillows on the sofa over my head and muffle my aunt's whiny notes and all of her shrill sounds.

It is too sunny in Aunt Ally's house where she lives with my six-year old cousin Thom and her boyfriend, Don. I remember what Grizzly said on the drive down about Don. He isn't a talker on the phone but what she's heard has made her want to find out if he looks as smooth as he sounded, like a dude she'd ask out for a beer. I wonder if Ally has anything to drink besides soda.

When Ally walks back downstairs with Grizzly, I repeat, "Uh-huh," over and over in response to their chatter. All the prettiness around me makes me twitch in places I have never twitched. Even the muscles in my face above my eyebrows dance.

"I'm going to check out the block."

My aunt and Grizzly are so busy talking and not talking the only indication either of them gives of hearing me is a look on Grizzly's face, a look that says, "Take me with you."

The crystal comes at me from every corner, from the curios, the China cabinet, even the water glass in Ally's outstretched hand. They are all opportunities for me to slip up. Outside isn't much easier. I look down at the sidewalk to avoid the blaze from the sky. The radiance follows and ricochets off other things, the sparkling pools in the distance, the sidewalk, and the brightly colored homes. I dream of the light like I remember in California, the periwinkle blue, the comfortable cloudless skies, where I imagine Peter Pan and the lost boys still sail their ships into sunsets. And I pretend that sky is just around the corner and I can slide into it again.

Necessary Detours

The pretty looking soccer player looks about my age and seems as if he is having a good time in this thicker feeling air, a thickness I will need to get used to. He is black and fine, with the kind of lean, athletic body that comes from dedicated physical exercise and from chasing a ball and attempting to control its destiny. After a time, he notices me. Our eyes meet and he kicks the soccer ball up into his hands in one smooth, rolling motion.

"Good moves." This appears to work a kind of magic because he smiles then, a most brilliant smile, the kind of smile that reminds me of those times I'd done something really smart and my dad beamed at me like I was the most awesome creature on the earth. Soccer Boy tells me he watched me unload my bags earlier (this gives me a thrill).

"Visiting?" He asks.

"We'll be staying for a little while. Just helping my aunt move in."

I never say how long. With Grizzly it has always been this way. This strange rhythm of coming and going offers its own freedoms from being like every other girl. And while, "Just until my mom finds a place" seems like a reasonable answer and one I want to give, it can mean anything (a month, three months, a year, never); and I began some time ago to cling to unpredictability.

"Have you had the tour yet?"

"Of what?"

"The neighborhood."

It is the way he says the word neighborhood, the way he beams at me again and brushes my hair back from my shoulders that makes me sense he'll be gentle. So I let him shepherd me around the block showing me this and that, how close we are to the drugstore and the new Publix grocery if I ever want to go. I gather Publix is big news because he says, "We used to drive five miles for milk."

We dip into the woods behind a small church with a coral rock facade. This church marks the end of Avocado Grove. It sits between the Grove and a giant, empty plot of land and the Redlands beyond. I wonder whether his family attends the church or if he knows anyone that does.

I don't believe, "I won't tell a soul." But I let him touch me anyway aware all this is not new, probably for either of us. When we finish, I smooth my too short skirt and exit the forest as if nothing has happened.

"What's your name?" He asks.

"Emily." I let the silence drag and saunter back to my aunt's. I go past the stone church and several vacant stucco homes.

"Don't you want to know mine?" He stops strolling with me. His hands slide up to his hips and his nostrils flare. "I'm the best quarterback at Denman high, the best in the whole state." I shrug as if what he's said isn't a big deal. And he pouts.

I squint and blink my eyes. He has become glaring, as if the skin on his face has perfect beads of sweat that don't slide off and he looks almost photo shopped like the inside of my Aunt Ally's house. (Yes, I want to know his name) even though he looks like a bragger, the kind of guy I imagine will tell his buddies: Emily and I went into the woods. And I bet being a bragger he'll even tell them my underpants are cheap, a cotton kind with way too many flowers. I figure he will lie about the size and maybe even the color too. _She wore these tiny pink panties_. So what do I need to know his stinking name for?

His eyes no longer beam. They look hard, angry.

"Forget this."

He stomps away. (I don't know what to say or which direction to go, and I think about all the things I might say to make him come back. But I don't say anything.

I twirl my hair in the place of a necklace I had a long time ago and shrug off the memory of what happened to it like I shrug off what happened in the woods. The ghost of the delicate chain dances around my fingertips, my thoughts drift from Soccer Boy to another distraction that waits for me back at my aunt's place, a distraction sure to erase any of this afternoon's unpleasantness where all of this excess brightness is replaced by a light I can handle and one that won't cut.

I'll be okay in a little while, in a place where nothing and no one can touch me. And this is all that matters.

How I hate new places.

Wild Things

"Got any matchbox cars?" Thom asks.

I put fake curls on my head and he cracks a smile. He helps me pull out other things from the box - a few books and a couple of _National Geographic_ magazines I stole from my other aunt.

We look through the magazines at pictures of lions roaring. I had read that D.H. Lawrence said he never saw a wild thing sorry.

"I wish I could morph into something so fearless that could flee this place and Soccer Boys and Mondays."

"I would be sorry if you turned into a lion."

"Why?"

"Because you wouldn't be able to stay."

I smooth my cheeks back with my hands and pretend I'm putting on a lion's mask. My nose twitches as I sniff the air. My eyes grow big and I look around the room, but it is not a room anymore, it is the jungle, and the floppy canvas purse in the corner has snacks. In seconds, I pounce on top of the bag and swat at it with my paws. Thom thinks it's funny when I pull a moon pie out with my teeth. And we both turn into lions. That pie is gone in milliseconds.

"Can I borrow your lion?" Thom asks.

He points to the family of fierce looking lions on the cover of the magazine on the floor and disappears with it tucked underneath his arm, and I return to playing with the synthetic but strangely real feeling hair on my head. I wander around my giant new cave with its own bathroom. How long will we be allowed to stay this time?

I straighten and comb out my disguise and glance long enough at my reflection to believe I don't look ridiculous. I am dressing up for crazy hair day again or maybe I am a circus clown instead of a lion and I'm going to Denman high to entertain the students at a large assembly. Wouldn't it be prettier for me if either of these things were true? Both are better fortunes than what I imagine will happen if Soccer Boy recognizes me and points me out to all of his friends.

When I look back in the mirror, a fairy twirls the ends of my faux mane. I think about earrings and what color to paint my nails and soon more fairies drop by to help me peel back the layer of brightness in the room. We close the blinds and turn the lights down low. I blow a kiss to the fairy that twists and twirls my hair into a ponytail. She whispers to me about learning how to fly. I lean out of my doorway and listen to my voice vibrate the walls. "Thom, show me your tallest trees."

Back to Contents

**Chapter II**

What's Your Name?

I want to ask my imaginary sister how I look for my first day at the new school. I stop primping and listen to her.

"Soccer Boy will talk," I say. "This is the only way." I give the wig several hard tugs and it doesn't come off easy.

"You're making a huge mistake," Big Sister says.

She gives me the stink eye with her hands on her hips. She's Big Sister, been there, done that, told you so. The imaginary friend I can't control. She comes to visit whenever she wants and disappears for months before dropping in again to shout her sage advice. I did sort of ask her this time, though.

I play with the silvery strands dangling from my ears and wash my courage down with orange juice. A whole tribe of fairy girls joins me for breakfast.

"They'll find you out," Big Sister says. She tosses back hair that is blonder than mine and longer. Today she wears a loose ponytail, something I am never able to get right. Her eyes are bluer too – the color of the sky at noon on a perfect day. Mine resemble the color at first light when you aren't sure whether it will rain or not. She doesn't seem to notice the fairy girls.

"If you don't look too closely, all you'll see is Hollywood hair, I even flat ironed it." I tuck a straight pink lock behind my ear.

"I can't believe it didn't catch fire," Big Sister says.

One of the fairy's whispers, "Don't listen to her, no one will ever know. If you don't wear the wig one day, tell anyone who asks your pink alter ego is your big sister by three minutes, got it?" Fairy girls are so smart.

The Cancer Lie

My name is Kimmie and I am wearing the bravest earrings in the world. But as cool as my earrings look, I stumble onto the bus. I see many pairs of unfamiliar and mostly tired eyes. _Who are you? What do you have? What do you want?_ The bowl of mushy cornflakes I barely touched sloshes in my nervous stomach.

I used to always feel anxious but more so the first day. I was too excited about the classes, a new teacher, and the wishful thinking maybe I'd make some friends. All I can think about is will Soccer Boy recognize me? How long are we staying? How long do I have to pretend to be somebody I'm not?

I enter a concrete block fortress two stories high. I don't know where anything is and there are people everywhere flowing around me; I am a rock in a fast moving river.

My first day at Denman is like Ocala. It is like Atlanta. It is even like Boulder too. There's a system. You only need to know where you're going. Move when the bell rings. Shuffle back shuffle forth.

Where is Chemistry? First floor, two doors down past the library. No, who told you. Second left, next to the band room. Get a map.

Right. Pretend you are like them, another lemming in the flow and you know all the moves.

So far I haven't crossed paths with Soccer Boy. Good Move.

"What's your name?" They ask.

"Kimmie," I say.

"That your real hair?"

I can almost taste the blood from my heart racing. The girl that asks isn't muscular like Big Sister. She's a tiny thing. But what she has is attitude. I watch her edge closer.

"Cancer." The word pops out of my mouth. Poof, the girl backs away clutching her books. Now I am Kimmie here.

Before Skipping Gym

"Going to throw up from all the chemo?" Big Sister asks. She kicks one sneakered foot in my face and tells me our ghost dad, G.D., bought her the shoes. "Maybe you'd get a pair too if you weren't such a liar," she says.

"No one will find out." I arch my shoulders back and stand up tall – taller than I'm feeling.

A basketball appears in her hands and she slams it on the terrazzo floor and starts dribbling.

"You might want to skip gym class." She bounces the ball to me but I let it roll past my ripped up basketball shoes. I don't ask her why I shouldn't go to gym. I get the feeling she's right and I spin a story about all the stuff Aunt Ally and Don are going to buy me, the belated birthday party I'm going to have and I say, "You're just jealous, those new shoes aren't even real." And I kick her basketball down the stairwell and sprint to class.

Skipping Gym

I skip most of gym (after the sprint and a whole nasty incident after I arrived – which I will describe later). I am told to take my sick, sophomore self to the nurse's office, but I detour to the girl's bathroom instead.

The bathroom stinks. It smells like someone else asked to be excused from class and they detoured here too. I rush into a door with a giant black heart that says Pam loves Ron. My aunt's face pops in here with me. I watch her floating head cringe at the avocado green walls. She starts talking sofas – how Uncle Frank got the best deal on their first real furniture.

"It was a whale of a couch but no one wanted to sit on it," she says. "Must have been the color." I shake my head. She's still there. Her mouth keeps moving but no sound comes out. Grizzly's face pops in next to her sister's and her voice echoes in my head.

"That sofa could work in here," Grizzly says, "but maybe Emily needs a barf bag." My brain crunches two conversations at one time. All chatter stops. And when I leave and drag my bones on the bus, I feel twisted and wrung out, fuzzy and used.

I am not expecting the guy that slides next to me, the cool guy that starts in with sweet, sugary talk who asks, "Aren't you glad you ride?" I almost ask him if he knows the fairy girls. I wonder if he is even real.

Back to Contents
Chapter III

The New Girl in the House

Don comes home early. There's a new girl living in his house. She's Ally's sister's kid. She's been here for a few days. He isn't used to her sounds (or lack of sound). The place is too quiet and the girl, Emily, she's too quiet too.

"I'm going to the store," he says. "Wanna come?" It is all he can think of to ask. Emily seems out of it. Her mind is someplace else. Maybe it's the kid he once was, the one that never got asked to go places with his dad, maybe this kid, this long ago Don is the reason he asks her anything at all.

I'm not a father, and I'm not her father. I just want a sandwich.

"Want to go?" He asks again. She hears him this time. Her eyes focus on him instead of on the door.

"I'll go," she says. But she keeps glancing back at the front door.

"Is someone coming over?" He asks. He doesn't imagine Emily would make friends that fast, he has heard her talking in her room some nights to someone and he thinks – is this ghost dad? This guy named Eddie, a real winner Emily's father (or so he's heard from Ally).

Don isn't expecting an answer about the door and he tries again, "Want anything for lunch, bread, peanut butter, chips?"

She shakes her head. "I buy," she says. He detects the edge in her voice. He can't help it, as a salesman, he is trained.

"Anything good in the high school food court these days?"

"The desserts are okay," she says. "Although the brownies are dry, they almost always have Oreos in packs. But they never make anything with cookies and brownies together. And they don't leave chocolate syrup on the table. Some days you need big food."

It is the most she has said to him at one time.

"Is today like that?"

Emily nods her head.

"Should I buy extra ice cream?"

"Ally gives me money, and Grizzly takes care of the rest. There really isn't any need."

The Deli of Distractions

Don doesn't tell her Grizzly hasn't put anything in his refrigerator in weeks and the rest isn't in his kitchen but in some slot machine or at a bar. And he starts thinking strategy – how fast can he get through the store so he doesn't have to play father and even think about Eddie and he doesn't even know Eddie. But he knows he doesn't like him for leaving his child.

"They give free samples at the bakery," Don says. And he thinks about the supplies he needs for Fridays and making sandwiches with Thom, Ally's six-year old son. Thom's father didn't leave. Is this the difference? He doesn't know. This girl makes him remember his dad's favorite sandwich that was always heavy on the meat.

"You look like you could use big food too," Emily says.

"Your mom asked me to pick up a few things."

"Sure." Emily doesn't ask what Grizzly wants and she doesn't make any additions to the list, and Don plans to pick up extra sandwich making supplies. He says nothing about Friday and his ritual with Thom. And he thinks I am not her father. And he keeps thinking this during his whole trip through the store.

Don moves so fast he skips the cheese and meat samples at the deli. He goes through the checkout and drives home before he realizes he left Eddie's daughter there. And he blames the giant new deli, the great selection of meat and cheese and bread as the reason. He blames Eddie too. He pulls into the Expectant Mother parking space and rushes towards the bakery.

The Butterfly Cake

"My mom is over there, she's the lady in the green t-shirt," I say.

The bakery lady nods as if she knows who my mom is and we start talking parties. I tell her I'm having a big birthday party and she offers me extra samples.

"You sure only twenty-five people?" The bakery lady asks. "I thought you invited all the junior and senior girls in your school. And that's a lot of cake, if they all show."

The woman in the green shirt with a dragon on it and the name of a town I've never been is going to fix the fake party mess I've made. She's going to come over and convince this cake boss what I meant to say was I need enough cake for twenty-five people, but all those people are celebrities (at least that's what I heard at lunch, the talk at the table, the gossip of other girls and how superstars actually do show up for one of Gitt Robert's birthday parties.)

I stand at the counter and stuff another cake sample into my mouth, a big sample with a ton of frosting.

"There you are," Don says.

"I need a cake," I say. "Remember about big food?"

He glances down at the display case and asks me, "Which of these cakes do you want?"

I point to a giant butterfly covered in powder blue frosting.

"You sure that's going to be enough?" The bakery lady says. "I'm not sure how many people she means, twenty-five or two-hundred and fifty."

Don doesn't seem to mind the confusion. He glances at me and then he says, "That cake will be fine." And he doesn't cancel the order when the bakery lady and I talk about writing "Happy Birthday Emily" on the cake even though I imagine he knows my birthday was months ago. I'm not his daughter and he's at most my aunt's younger than her, live-in boyfriend. But unlike other pretend fathers, Don asked if I needed bread for lunch.

On the way home I ask how he likes the new Publix and he goes on about the deli and tells me next time I should try the meat samples. "You might start bringing your lunch," he says. It isn't until we arrive that I understand about the cake.

"I heard how Aunt Ally is about sweets. We can say I won it or it was a giveaway?"

"Don't worry about it," he says. And I think what a great guy Don is. I haven't thought much about my rotten first day at Denman and how Big Sister warned me not to wear the wig. I even offer to help Don put the groceries away.

I open the fridge and see two full gallons of unopened milk, fresh bread, and plastic bags from the deli stuffed with meat and cheese.

"You already put the food away?" I ask. He tells me I had been forgotten, that he drove home before realizing I was still at the store. "I got distracted," he says.

It isn't hard for me to picture this, Don in the deli with all those samples. "This was my lucky day," I say. "I got a free cake." But he doesn't say anything to this or anything when I reach for a plate and cut into that giant butterfly. He doesn't even tell me to wait until after dinner, or for the rest of the family. Some part of me wishes he would.

Outer Layers

The girls in front of me in the lunch line debate the nutritional merits of a brownie versus an Oreo in terms of fat grams. On my tray I have both the brownie and the Oreo along with a cheeseburger and fries.

"Shut up about fat grams," I say. I almost get into things with Brownie and Oreo. But "Excuse me, ladies," intervenes. He has the kind of skin that tans dark in the sun, his hair is short, almost black, and though I try not to notice, he has these teen idol brown eyes.

I look down at my tray and reconsider all of my food, especially the cookies. If I could, I'd find a way to disappear from the line and melt into the pea soup cafeteria walls, the posters from pizza and burger restaurants and the clubs at school. Not one of those posters tells me anything about how to speak to this boy. But he talks first and I don't hear Brownie and Oreo after that.

"You into Rush?" He asks.

I glance up from the desserts long enough to see he smiles at me and not in the leering predatory way some boys do. But he smiles like someone I would like to know. "They're awesome," I say. Rush's music filters through headphones that dangle from his neck. I think I hear the word, "Subdivisions." I know the song.

I smile up at him and nod in time with the beat. He has a clean and casual way. His shirts look too pressed, too neat as if his mom and dad send laundry to the dry cleaners. He is unusually confident too, but there's no meanness like some boys wear, as if they have this outer shell, a coating of artificial toughness. This guy has none of that. He is perfect like he belongs in one of those supermarket commercials around the holidays, where all the relatives gather around a long dining table with a ton of presents and a turkey as big as a whale and everyone is bubbling over. He smiles carefree without it being annoying.

The boy slides his headphones in my ears.

"Conform or be cast out." The words remind me I am supposed to hang with kids my own age. But none of it, the typical "It," doing typical, normal teenage stuff works out right. Grizzly and I are always passers through towns. I know how to shuffle along and make imaginary friends but mostly what I know how to do well is slip away. How long will it take this time?

I think about what Big Sister said about the wig. But my head moves up and down in rhythm like I belong. "I'm into this," I say."

"Really?" Is that your real hair?" He asks.

Everything stops. I point to my hair. "Cancer," I say. "Maybe we can listen to music together some time, you might even get community service for it."

"Maybe," he says.

I glance forward in line at Brownie and Oreo and consider if I paid attention to fat grams, would a hot guy like him ask me out? But there is nothing in his face that indicates he minds the meal on my tray, or my Halloween store hair, or that I've just told him I have cancer.

"I'm Mickey, what's your name?" I hand his headphones back and shrug like he and Rush are about as interesting as the stray lint on my jean jacket before I tell him my made up name. He doesn't notice the hiccup of hesitation when I say it.

"You're the stop before mine," he says. And we make it through the line and I bypass the chance to add a fruit cup or reach for the water or ask him if the turkey tastes as good as it looks on TV and it's "see you around," as if "Subdivisions" never happened. And I spend most of lunch trying to remember where he sat on the bus that morning.

There are all those unfamiliar eyes again and their questions, "Who are you? What do you have? What do you want?" I wonder until the bell rings about his eyes and whether I will see him again.

Outer Layers II

In the afternoon, I lap up "What's a pretty girl like you doing riding the bus?" I am awestruck someone this cool would sit next to me a second time. All I can think about besides this guy's skinny jeans appeal is washing down today's trouble with a can of Crush and telling the fairy girls all about it. (And after being called a "fatso" in gym class both yesterday and today, it will be Diet Crush.)

I understand only bits after he calls me a "pretty girl." My mouth hangs open and nothing but air spills out. But amazing chats at me while I stare mesmerized by his whole cool, slick self. I might as well be the parakeet at the pet store. _Pretty girl, pretty girl_.

My responses become some kind of ancient and programmed code. I flash him a coy smile showing none of my poor, crooked front teeth I have been told look impish by relatives. But bullies have teased me about these teeth for as long as I can remember, one asking me when I was getting tracks to fix my ugly mouth.

"People pay thousands to get messed up gorgeous like you," my dad said. Thinking of my dad makes my lips turn up, but I still don't reveal my teeth (even for the bird seed).

"Do you mind?" I ask. My eyes drift down to where the cool guy's fingers play in my hair. Does he detect anything unusual about its texture?

"Even that space between your front teeth is cute."

He avoids my questions except for one. He tells me his name is Julio. And he says my name as he twirls one long, fake pink lock. I move away but only slightly. Things move too fast. I drift outside of my body like a bystander.

Beef and Cheese Meditation

I imagine Don shows me how to make one of his sandwiches, and Julio and I instead of doing and saying all of the heavy things we did after school, we make sandwiches and drink sodas and talk about nothing at all. But Julio left. Big Sister breaks into my thoughts and says, "You told Julio everything."

"We were upstairs in my room, on my bed. We were alone." But I wonder about what she says.

"His fingers were between your thighs," Big Sister says. "Don't you get it? Boys act like they understand?"

"I didn't tell him about the woods and Soccer boy or the girl in the hall..."

"...Or the boy in the lunch line who you lied to about having cancer," Big Sister says.

"Cancer stopped her, stopped everyone from touching me."

No one from here really knows me at all; I'm the new girl, from they don't care where, so it's many places and none of these is California. But Big Sister just shakes her head.

Julio seems to get my different problem. And this is the part I don't tell Big Sister. He pushed up from my bed and pulled on his skinny jeans and then straightened a few hangers sticking out inside my closet. And he went further and began re-arranging my clothes. "I'm fixing you," he said.

He never told me not to tell anyone about his mothering side. And after my confession about the wig and my name, and my great lie, it was like he showed me his big secret.

My wig came off and my natural honey blonde spilled out. I looked down at my arms, they were red and I started thinking ahead to covering them up. I imagined the angry purple, blue or black looking marks that were sure to be there in the morning, (marks that weren't anyone's fault). Besides, it was over fast. And I will never forget the gentle organization of my shirts after.

I stretched out on my bed and listened to the jangle of the hangers as he fixed them. They are a mix of wire and plastic, the rustling movements are like stillness and forward motion at the same time, almost like being rocked to sleep by sliding sounds.

Here in the kitchen after Big Sister leaves, it is silent and I am safe with sandwiches. I pretend roads don't exist at all (and wherever you are you are). If I close my eyes, I dream I am back in California with my father, and there aren't any highways out of town. I imagine the worst parts of this day didn't happen, a boy never called me a fatso, I never ended up wobbly and I never let Julio talk to me and walk me home in wobbliness (even if he did organize all of my clothes).

And I imagine until very late at night (after my last problem in Geometry is done) what would have happened if I had not lied to anyone. If I had never worn the wig would Mickey have sat next to me on the bus ride home? Or would Julio have gotten there first? And would I have looked less interesting or less whatever it is that made him sit down and start up the conversation that ended up with me making sandwiches and thinking too much about the way he re-arranged my clothes and all those second, third, and fourth thoughts. Maybe I would have sat alone if I had been just Emily and would that be so bad?

October 15, 2014

Emily's Diary

This guy named Mickey said, "This line is crazy, are you bored too? Want to listen to this?" These two skinny girls stood in front of us in the lunch line. They argued about whether or not to eat a brownie or an Oreo for lunch. Why didn't he ask one of them to listen to tunes? Maybe he doesn't mind the hamburgers and fries, the brownie and the Oreo pie on my plate or my head of fake hair. Maybe he was making conversation about the hair when he asked me if it was real. I told him I have cancer. I didn't try to hide the tray that said everything else. Sometimes that tray is piled high with junk food, but on other days, it isn't filled with much.

I'm not sure, but I think he likes me.

Back to Contents

**Chapter IV**

My Lies II

6. Who is Soccer Boy? I won't tell you I've met him before and how he gave me a tour of my new neighborhood. I never knew I could pretend so well nothing happened.

7. I look cool like Katy Perry in the wig.

8. I have cancer. You're curious? You really want me to go into the gory details about my illness? Do you mind if I use your lunch bag? It's the chemo.

9. Julio who?

10. I'm with the Purple Wave. Actually, I lead those Wave girls and guys. I'm up here in the bleachers watching the routine to see how we look.

11. Mickey is some guy in the band. I don't know what he plays ( _it's the bass drum_ ) or whether or not he's popular ( _he'll probably be crowned prom king_ ) or anything about him at all ( _he wears the most pressed looking polo shirts every day except for Wednesdays_.) "Wednesday is the middle place, the compromise." But that's all he said about it ( _all I overheard him say about it)_ to his girlfriend... the most popular girl in school, Gitt Roberts.

What's Up with That?

"So what's up with that?" Bev asks.

I push away the tuna salad I brought from home and follow Bev's polished pink nail and watch it pierce the bubble of Julio eating lunch with another girl. I've seen this girl before and suspect Julio's been hanging with her for a while since before Gitt's Twister party.

I shrug as if none of it matters and conjure up images of sick kids, kids with scarves covering up bald heads, kids like Kimmie. I imagine Bev's nail the size of an entire football field and this gigantic fingernail slices their table in half (like the F5 tornadoes in the Twister movie that played endlessly at Gitt's.) Kimmie is no longer sitting next to my boyfriend.

I stare hard at Bev's pretty, glittering tip as if she can spawn this kind of weather in our cafeteria and do the thing I imagined. I glance down at my own half bitten thumbnail and wrinkle my nose.

"Are you going to let cancer girl get away with that?"

"Even if Kimmie is one of those St. Jude's kids, she shouldn't be snuggled up next to Adrianna's boyfriend sharing a soda," Gitt says.

I huff and start to dig my nails into the chipped table until I realize I'm tearing up my fingers and the table doesn't deserve any more gouges. I head over to where Julio and Kimmie lounge.

Kimmie's skin flushes the exact shade of baby pink and makes me think of my old dance costumes, those tutus I secretly treasured but how my Grand mom used to go to my recital and sit off by herself and sleep while everyone else took pictures and cooed, "Aren't they adorable?" Even in dreamland, Grand mom didn't crack a smile – not like this girl's dopey – 'how you doing smile' that makes me want to knock it off. Julio still hasn't looked up and said, "Hello."

I drum my fingertips on my hip and my arms start tingling as if both sides of me compete for the opportunity to smack her shine free face and turn it the same color as her hair. My fists clench remembering the party and how sweet Julio had been before Kimmie showed up, before she draped all over Julio and before I ate all that Jell-O to forget all that draping.

I think about the power of a dime-sized pizza grease stain on Julio's shirt and the way he acts as if the stain is the meanest bully you ever saw and he stops talking and laughing and eating. I imagine launching Kimmie's loaded lunch tray at him.

Bev and Gitt glare at me from the other side of the cafeteria world. They want fireworks. I can almost see the whole show in their large, waiting, and watchful eyes - the way Kimmie's lunch lands on Julio, the barely eaten burger splitting open unleashing all the ketchup and mustard inside, and the finale where I rip into Julio's new bird, her fake fruit punch colored feathers float all over the cafeteria.

I glance down at the floor imagining those feathers are there but Kimmie's feet are in the way and I almost laugh. Her dirty white basketball shoes are so worn they even have holes. She must be some kind of joke. And I wear hand me down shoes. I study my gunmetal pedicure. Any minute now Julio will push her away from him. _You didn't really think you could take Adrianna's place?_

Bev and Gitt will punch my arm as if they were all in on it too. And Kimmie will cry and disappear along with her gross pinkness and all of her scarves and baldness and cancer. But this isn't April Fools. It's October. I can still taste the blue Jell-O from the party.

I try to blame the pounding in my head on the hazy glow of the fluorescent lights, on bad tuna fish, on anything other than Julio and his new girlfriend. But nothing works. And despite my best daydreams, I'm the one looking stupid.

"What are you doing with her?"

"I'm eating my lunch," Julio says. "Why don't you join us?"

If it were possible for plasma to shoot out of my eyes and incinerate the two of them, this is the moment it would happen.

Julio shrugs. "Sit down, Adrianna." He pats the spot on the other side of him. "This space is all yours."

I look back at Bev and Gitt. They want feathers. And I turn back to Julio and Kimmie.

"Where's your other boyfriend?" I ask.

At first Kimmie doesn't understand I am talking to her. But I keep staring at her until she stammers, "Who?"

"Tell Julio about the Mustang that gives you rides home sometimes." And I wink at Julio and saunter back to Bev and Gitt. Did I dare look back? Oh yeah.

Feathers are everywhere, colorful, long feathers of the fight I started between Julio and his other girl. And I play them over and over.

_What boyfriend?_ _I don't know what she's talking about._ _Who is he?_ _Who is she?_ The feathers dance around our heads, and Gitt and Bev laugh and tap each other silly.

I get caught up in their celebration too and how it seems almost choreographed. And all of the best moments from lunch today too, from Gitt and Bev's high-fiving and their contagious goofy grins from other sisters hanging around sisters at the table, sisters I do not even know. It all makes me believe in an outcome.

My eyes turn towards Julio. I imagine he will beat a path straight back through the mess to me. But this isn't what Julio does. He follows the girl with the dirty sneakers. And my seconds ago smile slides off my lips. I see a ton of feathers all over the speckled linoleum, but they aren't all Dodo bird pink. Some of them are two tones, black with salon pink highlights. And I feel bald.

When I get home, I stitch myself up by flipping through Vogue, one of a dozen collecting dust in Gitt's closet. I peel back the fruity scent from a perfume sample and rub it between my boobs. There's a woman in the ad with fantasy long, glossy black hair, the kind a rock star's girlfriend might have. But the most interesting thing about her isn't her flashy red highlights that look as if she just had them done at Panic, Gitt's favorite salon; this woman has something you can't buy. She knows there's nothing she can't do in the world. I sit the same way she does but instead of the cool swing in some mythical looking forest, I'm on top of faded cartoon sheets.

The handsome devil in the ad with her kneels down with his six string, "I'll make you queen over Kimmie in just one song."

I look out of my window and think about Julio saying the same words and try to feel the way that would sound. It isn't hard. The sun has started setting but the patch of artificial turf out front still looks hot.

Train Talk

What I overheard Julio tell Adrianna at lunch, in the halls, and again in my classes. His voice was everywhere always whispering:

1. It will take us out of here.

2. It's our secret.

All the things Julio told me today about the whispers at lunch, on the bus ride home, and when he came over:

1. It can take you all the way to California.

2. No one will look for you.

3. You won't even look for yourself.

4. Don't tell anyone.

"I can be Julio," he says.

I want to ask him more, but he slips away down the hall. I follow his voice as long as I can through an endless stream of noise, until I give up and speak with Big Sister instead.

"You don't get it. Everybody pays attention to what I wear and what I say," Big Sister says. Her voice drops. I can't tell anymore she's Big Sister. She looks like Julio now with a pale face and long hair as black as a crow's feathers. "I'm not sure you understand. I'm offering you this great opportunity. And you don't have to go alone. So what's the problem?"

I remember the road and Grizzly and me and what that had been like, and I don't say anything for a few minutes. "You know what you'll find in California."

And she's Big Sister again with her hair blonder than mine, and we joke about Julio and the way he mixes styles and about how he would build his own brand. But her hair turns, the crow's are back in it and she asks, "And what's out there for you?"

"I don't know how you do that quick change with your hair and all the rest," I say.

"Yes you do," she says.

I think about what it would be like to go on the journey Big Sister suggests. "I'm not sure if I will even recognize the place. It's been a long time since I've been back."

Fashion Math?

I don't really know you, but what you do screams in my ears.

Julio flirts with some girl in the cafeteria. She has big, watery goo-goo eyes. He winks at me (and I almost wish he was in the room the other day when Big Sister and I laughed about him and said things that would have made him cry). But Adrianna makes him stop and makes Goo-Goo Eyes disappear, and when Julio passes by where I'm sitting he asks, "Did you have fun yesterday?" He kisses my cheek and takes off before I call him names.

Did I imagine that kiss? Julio doesn't eat lunch with me today. He sits with Adrianna, Gitt, and Bev. I'm a few feet away, but he acts as if I'm not there and his friends don't see me or anyone else. They own the whole place.

"What is the math for fashion?" Gitt asks.

She reads the text on her phone about Math for Fashion, an after school presentation by the math department. Adrianna makes a face. "Staying after school to talk algebra and geometry isn't my thing. Even if cool clothes are involved."

"Did someone say bra?" Julio asks.

"Get out," Adrianna says. She punches Julio's arm.

"Quit boxing. I'm eating with you today." Julio rubs his arm.

Gitt slides closer to Julio.

"Will you go with me?" Gitt asks.

"What do I have to do?" Julio says.

"Be a girl," Bev says.

Julio cradles his arm and looks at Adrianna as if he expects another punch. "That isn't true," Julio says. "You just need style. Are you going to come?" He looks over at Adrianna. And Adrianna stares back. She doesn't say anything for a few seconds and he eyes her fist the whole time.

Julio's friends are not my friends, and after the way Adrianna reacted when Julio and I ate lunch together, my guess is she'll go to the math thing, even if Julio never asks her nicely.

I grab a wad of napkins and use a few of them to wipe my eyes but most of them go towards mopping up the pool of grease on top of my pizza. And I am diverted from Julio's drama with his other girlfriend by chatter about this year's prom king. That chatter goes like this:

What's your guess for prom king?

They all play the drum.

Who?

What drum?

Hot guys. Last year's king did too.

A bass drum.

What about the queen?

Easy.

Gitt Roberts.

And this future king passes by and sits down next to his future queen. I forget the pizza and look away from them. ( _Of all the people I could have told my great lie about having cancer to, it seems I picked the most popular guy at Denman high._ )

Adrianna and Gitt tell Julio how to look and act like a girl. The future prom king, Mickey laughs. It doesn't matter if they are aware, I wonder if any of them knows how much Julio would enjoy dressing up in Gitt Robert's clothes.

Blue Jell-O Party

"You really have cancer?" Gitt asked.

Gitt watched Kimmie startle for an instant as if she had been discovered in her camouflage as Julio's coat. The music was cranked up loud, screaming amusement park loud and Gitt couldn't hear her answer but Kimmie's head bobbed up and down like an annoying boggle doll. Gitt didn't like Kimmie's whole body language, the way she draped over Julio for most of the party as if she was a comfortable jacket he didn't want to remove and Kimmie didn't mind. It was humorous for a while the way Adrianna got wild over the situation. Everyone knew Julio got around.

"Will Julio let you play Twister?" Gitt asked.

"I'm not dressed for exercise," Kimmie said. Gitt agreed. Kimmie's clothes made her want to turn away as if a sneeze was coming on, as if she might catch fashion disease.

Kimmie's jeans bothered Gitt the most. They had holes all over them but not the kind that come from a designer, not the cool kind of machine made tears, but holes and rips from wear, from not having enough money to buy new jeans. But the shoes made her ask, "Did you borrow those sandals from your mom's closet? I'm amazed you can even walk."

"I wore them to look tall."

Gitt shook her head. "They make you look fat." The thick heels reminded Gitt of everything else about Kimmie's outfit that didn't pass, she seemed attached to Julio and appeared so connected with him that they looked thick together.

"Leave her alone," Julio said.

Gitt ignored him and pointed to where Bev stood next to an elegant buffet table featuring a big, crystal bowl of wobbly blueness. "Jell-O," Gitt said. It was so blue, it made you want to float around the living room and imagine something other than the chemical raspberry flavor, the blueness brought the ocean jacked up. And after you drowned in it, you were outside, on the lawn, in the sky (unless Gitt got to you first). "When you're done watching Helen and Bill, come play the real game with us," Gitt said. "We've already sent one home." She winked at Kimmie.

Kimmie stared at her and at her house, at the things in her house and this made Gitt's nose twitch as if last night's pizza take-out was still in the room. She knew she was being ridiculous but she didn't care and she wrapped one arm around Kimmie, "Do you like?"

Gitt heard only bits — practice, Wave routine, and something about joining next year which almost sounded like a question but Gitt couldn't be sure above the volume of the music and she tuned in only when Kimmie said, "Julio tells me I should be nice to you." She glanced at the new girl's clothes again. Julio was experimenting. Maybe preppy meets grunge didn't make her nose itch too much.

Gitt trotted over to the bowl and scooped out Jell-O into a big Styrofoam cup.

"Here," Gitt handed the cup to Kimmie. "Your cure."

Liar Squared

Julio pulls the elastic on my bra so it snaps on my back.

"Bloated today, huh? Wear something to my sister's party that shows all this." He pushes again on my chest. I should tell him to get out after the way he ignored me at lunch today. But he says, "I can see your collar bones. You lost a couple of pounds?"

My brain sticks in what happened in gym, another fatso moment. I don't say anything to Julio about the way he blew me off at lunch or about the party dress I don't have and his lightening quick hands wander up and down my spine. The same as I let Soccer Boy walk all over me and into the woods. Julio unhooks my bra too fast the same way Soccer Boy did too.

I imagine hundreds of pairs of eyes and they sear the extra large pants off my body. My stomach growls and I turn away from Julio.

"Don't worry," he says.

I'm wrapped up in one word. "Fatso." It's like the kid witnessed the cheese burger with the extra mayo and the double crispy fries I didn't eat for lunch today and called me out, only that was his lunch - I don't have him recorded on my new phone. And everyone in Health class laughed. Everyone agrees with some "Gym Jerk" about the lunch they think the fat girl eats.

I look up at Julio. His hands squeeze my arms tight like he's afraid I might disappear or fight him like Adrianna does. I'm heavier, and if I wanted to, I'd pummel him.

"You're the most beautiful girl in the whole school."

"Liar."

I edge closer to him and stop wondering too hard whether I should be doing any of this.

Back to Contents

**Chapter V**

Emily's Shopping List

"I've been invited to a Quince, Julio's sister."

"I thought Delucca said they weren't going have a party." Ally says. "When do you want to shop for a dress?"

"I have a dress."

"I've seen your clothes, Emily. Make a list. I'll buy you whatever you want."

The tiniest flutter starts in my belly and goes higher.

These butterflies turn into manic shopaholics. Shoes, shorts, and shirts (among other things) crowd inside a closet in my head, a closet that belongs to a make believe Emily. I want a basketball. I want a bike and Converse and one of those slap-on watches in every color. (I don't care if they're cool.) I don't want to think about a dress for a party, a giant birthday party. I want to wear my dirty sneakers to the Quince and really would anyone besides my Aunt Ally care?

I am not nine. And there's other stuff you can't buy in a store like a whole chunk of childhood gone along with a dad and a mom. There's a whale of a whiteboard in my brain and the power to make my real and made-up childhoods go away.

I am motherless and fatherless and pretend I do not ache. What's left are the things that do not matter. I write them all down on paper: basketball, bike, shoes, watches, everything from before, including my best friend's Labrador I never met. She ate a frog.

I don't give my aunt any list when she asks. Although, I'd like to see her reaction to the words: _dead dog_.

"There must be something you need for the party."

I think about the lunches Gitt Roberts eats, the flavored vitamin water and the fancy vegetable wraps, and the would be prom king and the way he laughs at everything she says. And I remember the jacked up Jell-O from Gitt's Twister party. And I am high all over again. I remember how I wrapped myself around Julio at the party and became numb from the things Gitt said, and how I laughed the same way Mickey did the day I saw him sitting with all of them in the cafeteria. Great peals ripple through the silence in my room. And I tell my aunt, "I don't need a dress for the stupid party, what I need is more lunch money." SoBe water and skinny spinach wraps are expensive.

Julio's Girls

Corkboards of opportunity are everywhere filled with messages that lost me long ago pressed back against peeling avocado green paint. I push on my best, dark expensive looking sunglasses, so black they completely hide my eyes, like the kind Gitt wears - no letters on the side just fancy swirls that mimic the way she spins. (She says they cost four hundred dollars online.) Julio doesn't seem to notice my cheap shades or anything at all but the damn lunchroom doors. He swivels his head in my direction.

"Halloween Hair's coming to my sister's Quince."

I heard he asked Kimmie and the way he tells me about her and his sister's party stings. The super boys appear out of the corner of my wet eyes. The super boys come in all shapes and sizes. Some wear glasses and know all the answers in Geometry. Some are make believe, they live in glossy magazines, they are guitar players, travelers with fancy cameras, or models with impossibly perfect slicked back hair. Something in their eyes tells me they would treat me better than Julio. They wouldn't watch Kimmie and invite her to parties, and I wouldn't wonder or stare out at boring blue cafeteria doors (the paint still looks fresh as if they were recently touched up, the only thing in here that was). Super boys gaze into eyes and want to go places. And maybe I'm still hopeful Julio will turn into one.

"Why should I care if you invited her, besides, Gitt's having another party." Just saying the word party makes me think about the stuff that happens whenever Julio and I are alone.

Electrical impulses dance up and down my spine and over my arms and legs and reach into every body part and canvas where I wish his hands would touch.

"When is Gitt having this party?" Julio asks.

I smile wide and bask in this victory over Kimmie, even if his interest has been fueled by the promise of a carnival of fun, even if my eyes are soggy after hearing the news second hand he even invited her to his family thing.

"We could go early to class?" I ask. "I'll tell you about it." Julio just shrugs.

I spin away from him and imagine I'm hanging out with the super boy from our English class, the one with curly hair and scolding brown eyes (he wears clothes the way Julio does and looks like a character from our required reading list. He's straight out of Austen, or Bronte, or Shakespeare). And like a good female lead, I tell him all about Gitt's.

We'll laugh, cry, or feel warm and fuzzy as if we are on an island and gab with superstars. And you might believe the boy or girl you like, likes you back.

I look down at my press on nails and think about running home to change the polish as if by doing this I can change my life; and when I return, Julio will magically be interested in talking to me.

"Adrianna, wait, we can go early to class."

"No one is your girl."

And this time I move like Kimmie moves, fast through the heavy doors, I fly around the corner like a super girl (I fly so fast the sweater around my neck becomes like a cape). I dive past shiny black and white and color ads and walls with painted on orbits and painted on stars. They turn into blurry images. I shatter my illusions about Julio on the way to class and won't be troubled almost like that me that liked him never existed (for however long that lasts).

Are You My Father?

"What happened to your mother?" I ask. Adrianna laughs.

"Bad PMS?" I say.

"Eat something," Mickey says. But he couldn't be talking to me. And before I get a chance to ask him anything, he gets up from the table and checks out the food. Adrianna pushes beans and rice around on her plate.

Julio comes and sits beside Adrianna. "Did you bring me some food that isn't burned?" She asks. And when she's stuffing forkfuls of steaming pig and rice and beans into her mouth as if she has not eaten in days, he whispers in my ear.

Say nothing about the train.

"Maybe this could work out," I say. "The three of us heading out of town."

"Who's leaving?" Julio's dad asks. He looks down at my plate. "How come you're not eating?" I shrug my shoulders and Julio doesn't say anything to help me out. When Mickey returns he tells me I should try the pig. This time I get he is talking to me. "Yours is fine," he says.

I glare at Julio as if Mickey hasn't said a word about the food.

I haven't been eating for a few weeks. I squeezed into one of Aunt Ally's sundresses. "This one's loose," Ally said. She swallowed the words, "on me," when she put the dress in my hands, but I heard her. And I can't let it go, the stuff she said about the dress and what I want to say to Julio about leaving town.

"You told me, and I've decided I'm going on this trip."

"Why don't you tell everyone more about your plans," Mickey says. "Don't you have some kind of competition in Tampa?"

"Right. I'm going to Tampa."

"Really? I'm going to Tampa too," Bev says. "Cheerleading." But she doesn't ask me what I'll be doing.

I look over towards Julio's father, and he nods as if he understands everything about my life, the last place I saw my dad was California and he knows what I meant. I don't continue the lie, and he mumbles something about twenty dollars a plate to his wife who looks as if she could be our age.

"Is something wrong with the meat?" Julio's dad asks. He counts the number of people picking at their meal of rice and beans and pig.

"I'll go turn the music up," Julio's mom says.

"Why _are_ we going out of town?" I ask.

"What makes you think you're going?" Adrianna says. "And you don't understand."

Julio scans the restaurant as if there is something out there besides his mom and dad ready to destroy his plan to leave town. And he has this amazing and great idea about the whole leaving, as if this will solve everything. But this is all in his head - the expectation of a better place than the one he is in, this belief a new place will mean a new life. (Julio should talk with Grizzly for a while and ask her about the wonderful lives she's lived all over the U.S.)

I climb on top of my chair and shout over the music. "We're going to be superstars. Wish us well."

Julio and Adrianna stare at me as if I'm speaking an alien language. I've shared their secret and asked everyone to come on the journey too.

"Get down, dumb ass," Julio says. My mind starts spinning and how I landed on the carpet in the crush of people dancing remains a mystery, but I follow the movement of gold highlights in black hair and the way they swing with the music.

I'm nine years old again. "Getting late."

"Let's go outside," Mickey says. "You need some air."

I want to tell Mickey how pretty he is and I can't believe we're at the same party together. But the words don't come out right and instead I ask, "Are you my father?"

I wave Mickey's hands away and stumble towards the door. The door is far away, in another place - back when I was nine I could find it, but at sixteen I'm no good at finding exits.

"You forgot your purse," someone shouts. It sounds like Mickey's voice, but I do not turn around. There's no snow like I imagine, only a parking lot and it's a hard place to be sick.

Julio's dad asks, "Maybe it was something she ate?" And Don scoops me up and we ride with the windows rolled down. The sounds of the night and the smells of blooming jasmine mixed with burnt pig take over. I remember the frown on Julio's dad's face, the frowns on all the faces at my table, but most especially Mickey's.

I try to forget you, Mickey, all the people you are, the kiss I imagined you gave me at my door, how you said the pig tasted good, and how I didn't eat any of it.

Those Soccer Boys

Soccer Boy is a Seminole. But if you are a Gator or a Hurricane, he is a _Semihole_. Not long after his arrival, a controversy surfaces that he has been paid more than his scholarship to come to Tallahassee and play on the team. One of his teammates says Soccer Boy bragged about his extra dollars and those cool trips to Daytona he enjoys. Soccer Boy's dad says he handed him a wad when he made quarter back. The university denies involvement in any pay for play schemes. When asked by the media if he will be taking any trips to the beach on the weekend and how this affects his game, Soccer Boy says only, "I'll be home."

Mother Talk

Everything from the noise, the light from the fluorescent bulbs flickering over our heads, and the greasy smells from the lunchroom pizza takes a while to sink in and I mostly ignore it. I ignore the fact that Adrianna and I aren't friends.

"What was your mother like?" I ask.

Adrianna's tough, dirt brown eyes glare back, and in spite of my breakfast, my toes curl up inside my sneakers. I study my shoes. If I clean every last speck of dust and grime off with my shy blue eyes, maybe my world will get better. I'll move up to replace the baggy jeans that slide off my hips and onto the floor. I've worn these jeans so many times and believe they are fashionable with their uneven holes, the lace from my underwear peeks out. I lost all this weight in a few short weeks from a diet of sips of SoBe water and lettuce wrap nibbles. Now everybody believes I have cancer.

I fidget and stretch the frayed denim.

"I don't believe in mothers," Adrianna says. "They are the same thing as Santa Claus, all make believe." She wrinkles her nose at the pizza. The giant pool of oil on top makes it gross. We've both gotten used to water and lettuce, and it's what she said about moms.

"What about fathers?" I ask.

"No mothers, and no fathers either."

A gospel, a motherless and fatherless religion, this faith has always existed. And the way my jeans slip and slide around my hips connects pizza and the avoidance of all greasy, fat filled foods as part of the testament too. Adrianna's nose crinkles up in the lunchroom's yellow light, and I look at the oil soaked slice and push it aside too.

"My mom isn't much." But I don't confess all the things I think about my own cold, fried, isn't all that mother. I look at Adrianna's uneaten pizza and wonder if visits to outer space and visits with fairies can make me believe starvation satisfies and can make me think I have a good mother too.

Adrianna comes from messed up like me, and I can almost see her uneven place. It comes across in how she stands, a little too high and proud on one side and she droops over on the other, like she lets gravity pull her down. The way she leans, she exposes her cleavage to the whole lunchroom.

"What does that mean? Your mom isn't much."

I shrug and attempt to copy her posture. My stomach growls louder.

"Either you have a mother or you don't," she says.

I fit three fingers through the latest hole in my jeans' pocket and I think how I want to be more relaxed so I can forget about mothers, forget about pizza, and forget about cleavage.

"You are so right." But am a disciple or not? And I study Adrianna and the way she shifts in her seat and exposes more skin on one side of her chest, the lace edge of her bra peeking out, and I can feel the heat from the gazes of both boys and girls passing by with their lunch trays as they stare too. She is unaware, her slit eyes track Julio, and I marvel at how swift she can be after eating nothing, how she serves up more garbage about mothers while minding Julio and some girl in the lunch line making goo-goo eyes at him while everyone else follows the graceful friction of her front.

"Check out my shoes."

She wears fancy red leather sandals (not flip-flops, but something straight out of one of those upscale shoe boutiques). Adrianna lifts her shoe high and shows the sole and the pebble sized hole near the big toe.

"It doesn't bother me," she says.

"They're pretty. They look new, you would never know they weren't perfect."

"They were Gitt's mom's shoes."

And we both get quiet for a moment. I glance down at my worn out triple markdowns, a pair I keep wearing even though they are tight. She doesn't say anything more about Gitt or about Gitt's mom or the shoes. And I don't ask. (I've been given clothes and shoes by my aunts and friends of friends before - but there are rumors about Gitt's mom.)

"Mine was crazy," she says. "We're all motherless, fatherless too. Hadn't you figured that out yet?" But as I chew on Adrianna's ideas, I am not sure if they fill me up like the hamburgers and fries I first thought. I remember my dad; we played basketball. He taught me to dribble and slam-dunk. And I am not sure if I can pretend he didn't matter.

I'm clueless about how a conversation about fathers (and I think of my father) could ever begin with Adrianna, but I start it inside my head when Soccer Boy cruises past. I scream inside to Big Sister and pretend to disappear into the pink Halloween wig on my head. Soccer Boy stops by our table, he's checking out Adrianna's curves.

I remember the way he said, "How about a tour of your new neighborhood?" and the way I let his good gaze peel off my shirt. I disappear into my hair and wrap my thoughts around a talk about fathers. Big Sister whispers in my ear, _Super stars impress her_. And I turn this future conversation with Adrianna into a gossip fest about the Academy Awards. Though I don't know much about movie stars.

"She will push around her food," Big Sister says. "It will be meatloaf next time, but red carpet fashion will get her gabbing and isn't that how you make friends?"

"Julio will move on by then," I say.

"What was that?" Adrianna asks.

I peer out from my hiding place behind the cotton candy disguise in front of my face and glance over at Adrianna. She seems energized and happy after her conversation with Soccer Boy. Is this the same Adrianna that does not believe in mothers and fathers?

"Where is Julio going?" But her question lacks its usual edge. Her sandals don't look as if there is anything wrong with them and she dresses like Gitt.

"I just wondered how long it will take him to find another transfer student with a D-cup that sits next to him in English and wears chunky sweats."

"Someone desperate for his compliments and fashion advice," Big Sister says.

"Are you hearing voices from all the chemo?" Adrianna laughs.

"Like I'm back in L.A." I smile wide as if my dad is whispering secrets about the universe and boys like he did when I was nine, things I wish I remembered when I moved here.

I look down at my faded, dirt caked sneakers. Those shoes transform into Clipper's Colors, a bright happening red.

People pay thousands to get messed up gorgeous like you.

And the wig begins to itch.

Back to Contents

**Chapter VI**

The Girl in the Stands

There's this girl in the stands during practice. Sometimes I think I've seen her before, around school, in the halls, in class. She seems haunted. If I reach out and touch her, she won't be there. Do I dare? She's at most of the practices, but by the end, she's gone, disappeared to wherever ghost girls go.

She dresses in the Wave girl uniform from last year. I don't ask Gitt about it. I almost did ask Gitt, but it means a conversation.

"See that girl?" I ask. The other drummers look at me as if I've been to too many parties.

"Up there." I point to the bleachers.

The ghost skips out or floats off. Her timing is remarkable, perfect actually. But their attention is on the other Wave girls and one in particular. _Look how Gitt moves that thing,_ they say.

And I am momentarily distracted by hip swings. Gitt seems superhuman. And most of us can't keep up with her, her astronomical G.P.A. Sometimes I wonder when the mother ship will return ready to take her away to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, or if the rumors are true and she's set her sights on a tiny, private liberal arty school in Wales.

The ghost seems as if she has a secret or many secrets she wants to share, many something's she is trying to say, but each time I wait until the end of practice to find her and find out, I miss the great mysteries. What classes is the ghost girl in? Is she a freshman, sophomore, junior, or a senior? Have we met before?

"I'm leaving early."

The other drummers act as if I'm not there. My ghost girl and I can't compete. The drummers start up a beat, this cool rhythm goes with Gitt's moves.

Da-Da-Da. Amazing. Look, this is the part where Gitt bends over. Da-Dada... Da.

I wave them away and walk off the field in the direction of the stands.

Shush

My sound is a hum next to their hoots.

I can't imagine screaming, "Go Denman!" What would it sound like to let go in front of all those people? "Go Denman," I whisper. And this hush inside my head seems so far from Normal in the evolving dream inside my skull, it exposes my hiding place in the bleachers.

"Shush!" Big Sister says. Even though no one turns to look at me, when I glance down at my outfit, I understand I do not wear their colors at all.

"Can I go?" (Thom asks every week.) "To watch you twirl?"

I lean down and whisper in his ear. "They call us the Purple Wave. Sometimes during our show, we bring a smoke machine down on the field, and sometimes we pretend we're dragons." And now the schedules on the refrigerator change as if my lies are some kind of new energy bar, the sweetest, most guiltless thing my aunt and Don and Grizzly and even Thom have tried in a long while.

I tell them I am a star baton twirler even though I know nothing about baton twirling and I've never even been to a game. And what I say about twirling is everything I imagine and the things I learn from television and listening to the other Wave girls when they're at lunch talk about their routines and what they do and the stuff they say about their uniforms. _Sleeveless, short-skirted, tight._

The skirt I pick up from the thrift store makes it easier to get Aunt Ally to buy into this whole idea and purchase me a real baton. But I can't twirl and I cannot dance, at least not well. I practice anyway. And I imagine I am one of them, like Gitt and Bev, and even Adrianna, though she's not a Wave girl or even a cheerleader or anything like this at all, but she's popular and twirls in an altogether different way. She spins through a room, gliding her hips like she's some kind of superstar, sucking all the air out of the place with her when she goes, collecting the gasps that follow mostly from other girls angry at their boyfriends for watching her progress.

I daydream I move the way a Wave girl moves.

Shush II

"Fantastic." Gitt says.

I toss my baton high into the air, and for a split second I am convinced I can follow where it will go. I stumble forward whether the grass on the field is wet or dry. My arms reach out, and I stagger back, and I miss the rotating metal by a mile. It is the loudest thud in the world. And I work hard not being sorry I ever breathed a word about baton practice. After my family drives away, I perch high up in the bleachers on the opposite side of the field where no one seems to notice one of the Wave is missing. I don't worry too much anyone will ask what I'm doing up here. And in case anyone asks:

I'm just waiting for a friend.

"One more time before we wrap up." Gitt leads everything with the Wave. Always.

Mickey hangs out on the field with the band. His head turns towards Gitt, he watches her flashy color guard dance, batons spin, purple and white flags flap, and cheerleaders swoosh their pom-poms around. Everyone moves together, one big teenage tribe. I wish I knew the steps. I remember some of this routine from watching, but not enough to dance too. And I hear Julio's whimper inside my head, "You look real nice in the purple mini-skirt." And I consider leaving early.

"Same time Monday afternoon," Gitt says. Everyone claps and hoots.

Gitt got a 2100 on her SAT and I think how good she is at showing Wave girls which direction to step or hop. I close my eyes and imagine I am the leader of the Wave. I dazzle everyone with my golden hair and flash my movie star crooked teeth and dangle promises. ( _You'll never be able to keep._ )

"And let me guess," Big Sister says. "There's a boy, lightheaded from all the air you sucked out of the stadium with your great bod and your big brain?" She looks like the perfect Wave girl and when she tosses her baton up into the air it disappears.

"Most of us make do with one or the other." And I don't point out she doesn't fall into either category. She's like the intersection of the two, bod and brain. And the baton appears in the sky and hurtles towards her. Of course it lands in her hand.

"I could show you that trick," she says. "And it's a lot more fun than sitting on the sidelines. Pouting."

"Are you with the Wave?" Mickey asks.

He must have hugged his way up on my side of the bleachers and I missed it. My face, my fingers, my arms, my legs, and all the way down to my toes flush the color of the bright red lipstick Gitt wears.

"I'm here for a make-up practice, but maybe next time?" I incline my head in Gitt's direction as if she has all the answers.

"A practice with Gitt?" Mickey asks.

"I'm next."

Gitt seems distracted by Bev and a dance move they are trying to figure out. They don't turn their heads and glare at us when I point at them as if Gitt's tutoring Wave girls and cheerleaders on how to shake one's butt is their entire universe. I think about how the leader of the Wave would answer Mickey. And I think about how I could be any other kind of girl than who I am.

It sinks in what I blabbered about hanging out another time instead of now. What's worse is after one sparkling smile after another, Mickey believes me. I am his baton twirler is one of many broken dreams.

Mess, Mingle, and Chop

"Nothing fills me up here." Julio reaches across Aunt Ally's whale of a couch and pats my hands and I slip him two weeks' worth of lunch money. He preaches, the same way Father Beni does when Ally drags us sometimes for mass. I pretend Julio pushes a program on Adrianna and me, like a summer camp for smarty-pants kids (the kind of place I have seen fliers for attached to math exams except all I can think of to do with those fliers is ball them up).

Whatever Julio's agreement with Adrianna is about me, our new religion is the train and leaving town. And the same as Adrianna's gospel - we are all motherless and fatherless, I dip into everything he says. My mind plays out conversations with them, yes and then no about the train, yes and then no about whether even hanging out with them in Ally's living room is a good idea.

"Stop it," G.D. says.

It sounds as if G.D.'s outside and as if he knows I took a swig out of Thom's water bottle. He knows I want to get sick.

"Ally's yard is a mess. Can you do something with it please?" G.D. asks.

"Not today. I don't feel good. Where is Big Sister?" I ask. But G.D. doesn't answer.

Don's giant pruning shears start chasing the small clippers and they fly around like remote controlled airplanes before smashing into one another and crash landing on the tile. I applaud and look around for G.D. but he's gone. I gaze past the gardening tools and into the yard.

"G.D. I'm tired, my throat hurts."

"No one here will pluck the mangoes when they're ready. And Ally will thank you for pruning her trees and for saving her from all the nastiness, from all those flies around spoiled fruit," G.D. says.

Someone giggles out there in the yard. It sounds like Big Sister.

"Julio will never jump on a train, and Adrianna doesn't want you to go," Big Sister says. I don't remember why Julio and Adrianna left, maybe it is Thom, Thom is sick. I'm wondering about what he has and whether I'll catch it too and how sickness shelters you from things for a while, so maybe I want to catch whatever it is Thom has.

Big Sister's bubbly voice swells as if she's on the public address system at school. "You drank from Thom's water bottle, then you poured it out on the grass." She's so loud, I can't stand her anymore and I grab Don's shears and head for the mango.

Did G.D. say the mango is sick or is it the avocado? Or are all the trees ill?

"I can't see Don making guacamole with bad fruit." Big Sister's peals continue and only ease up when I begin to hack away at anything green.

Centers

"A whole pie for me?" Mr. Morris asked. He said, "Lucky Friday" four times (the last morning Gitt skipped - the week before Christmas). She went to a pancake place for breakfast instead of English class. And she breezed into Morris' office at 10:30 am.

"This looked better than some dinky reindeer coffee mug. Merry Christmas."

But Gitt doesn't eat pancakes and sunny side up eggs and sausage biscuits this morning or hear "Lucky Friday" either. She lounges on her canopy bed in a sea of fluffy pillows, one of her legs tangled in a goose down comforter. She listens to the whir of the bathroom fan and considers shutting it off, but her mind wanders and she doesn't get up, she stays stuck in her sheets. When the phone rings, she doesn't answer, but she remembers something her dad said yesterday or was it the day before about eating dinner together. Her finger presses the speaker button. "Hi pumpkin... don't wait dinner on me," echoes.

She stares up at a white ceiling - the only uncluttered space in her room and makes no move to do anything, she's floating - she's nothing and everything, in a state of stillness like being awake but caught up in a dream. She plays her father's phone call again in her head. But this time, the words are different. Her mouth moves but the words she mouths no one hears. She's like a girl underwater making bubbles and drinking down the ocean but no one sees and if they do, they don't care. And the thought stays with her, how much better the phone call in her head is than the phone call in real life, how much better make believe is.

If Gitt does anything, it will be tonight with a small group of friends, Bev and Adrianna and maybe Julio. But she'll tell him to count his sick sometimes girlfriend out. Besides, Gitt wants to eat comfort food like meatloaf and smashed sweet potatoes and find her make believe family in old movies. She doesn't do leftover Jell-O.

At 7:00 am when Gitt's alarm goes off, she hits the snooze button. She dreams it is the weekend and her mom makes Jell-O for breakfast. It is just the two of them. They have a good time. Gitt has something big she wants to ask her mom. She feels her mouth move and she knows if she asks the question her mom will tell her. The question is right there, she can see the letters of it creeping out one by one like she and her mom are in some kind of weird comic strip and speech bubbles attach to both of their mouths. And Gitt thinks, "This is it, I'm finally going to know." The nameless freshman from her last party crashes through the French doors that open into their kitchen. His whole body is covered in blue Jell-O and he has a broken nose.

"Come on, the way you get that nose, it's great!" She dials all her friends. She pulls out the Twister mat and the Jell-O. She says one word, "Party." And she reaches for one of her mom's crystal bowls and mixes. The kid slips and falls hard enough on his face to break his nose and crack a tooth. Blood gushes everywhere.

"Man down!"

Gitt rushes in like she is some kind of Dr. Oz, she moves out of the triangle like pose she has maneuvered into playing Twister and ices the poor kid's jaw, cradling his busted up face to her Denman high t-shirt as if he is her sweetheart. It makes everyone love her more and rally around her and the nameless freshman.

Everyone looks like dots, smaller than the ones on the Twister mat, and they get smaller and tinier the higher up Gitt flies until she is so high she barely sees any of them at all, she is in the clouds with her mother. And she is a g-d. She can do brave things. Gitt does the bravest thing. She calls the kid's mom.

"Hi, Mrs. Mother of the Coolest Freshman in the Universe, we were playing Twister, and your son fell and broke his tooth."

She doesn't tell anyone how her mom had been good in a crisis (at least the memory of her mom was). The shadows in the house come into focus and whisper words like tonight when the freshman broke his nose, those visions are some version of real mixed with make believe. But does it matter how they come? And because Gitt turns into some kind of teenage Oz-Pocahontas, the kid doesn't spill one word about what happened on the mat, about the games Gitt likes to play, and how he thinks Gitt's living room is like a giant ocean. (Everyone heard "I'm gonna catch that wave," before he dumped out the Jell-O on the mat and attempted to body surf and surf he did straight onto his face.)

The freshman's mom is clueless. Even though you can almost believe you are at the beach at Gitt's house, feel the breeze and see the water, there is the smell of vomit that can't be covered up by a few wimpy squirts of Lysol and blood that hasn't been wiped up very well. These things should tip the freshman's mom off to ask to see the adult in charge.

Gitt is smooth, though. She walks the mom in and treats her like a special guest and shows her around as if there are no bad odors in the house, no strangeness at all. Gitt leans on the graceful architectural lines of high archways and expansive and cavernous spaces all the way to her father's study and a good, handsome leather sofa where Gitt encourages the mom to hang out with the nameless freshman while she gets him another ice pack and she brings the mom some punch, plain punch, no umbrellas added. The freshman looks at Gitt as if she is a goddess and he knows a secret about her (even if he broke his nose and busted his tooth twice). And this dumb mom coos, "Isn't she the most responsible girl?"

Gitt blames the blood as the reason none of her gang is at her ancient front door (the one her dad shipped all the way from some Eastern European country) when the kid and his mom leave. No one slaps her shoulders and tells her, "You were awesome." (Maybe she won't invite them to eat meatloaf with her later on.)

The whole crowd of dots mostly hangs back. And it seems everyone wears blank expressions, maybe because Gitt is so far away, so high up from everyone. Can they even see the blood on her shirt? There is blood on the Twister mat. Maybe the freshman's face freaked everyone out. And it must be all those people at the party respect her because of what she's done.

She never knows if any of the people friend and follow her because of her house with the vampire door, this place they get lost in with all its fancy furniture, gadgets, and her closet upstairs. Would any of these friends be nice to her without all this? The new girl, Kimmie, the one Julio invited made Gitt screw up two boxes of Jell-O listening to Adrianna complain about her boyfriend's extra friendliness to other girls. And Gitt is an AP, Honor Society student. She doesn't get stuff wrong. Ever. What is it about Kimmie? Is she different?

Are You My Mother?

"I kept cutting my aunt's tree. I was trying to find her hiding place." My mouth runs on about the mango and avocado trees in my aunt's backyard. "There was this snicker. It was everywhere, all over the yard."

I don't tell Steeple Hands much about Big Sister. He smells too much like Grizzly, like cheap aftershave and smoke whenever she stays gone from my aunt's house for whole days sometimes. (I want to ask him where she goes...where he goes...where they all go.)

I see my Aunt Ally's confused glare, the street traffic on Miracle Mile and become part of the stream of big and little thighs (though I do not consider long where my sunburned hips and her tanned ones fit). It is as if she knows I am thinking about her size and she can read minds. Your muscles do not glisten the way superstars do in magazines. Work harder. Her stare slaps me in the face.

"Who were you trying to find?" Steeple Hands asks. But I shake my head. His eyes stay cool and calm, focused behind silver spectacles. He stares through me until I spill about what happened in the yard.

"I thought she hid my wig. She never agreed with it."

I put my hand up as if he should understand what I told him about my wig explains everything and there will be no more questions.

"Why do you think she'd do this?" He asks.

"You're free right?"

"I'm not your mother," Steeple Hands says. "Let's go back to the part about your hair. How come you thought she hid your hair?"

I rummage through my purse for candy and find an old lollipop. "Even if you offer me trips to Jupiter for a year and breakfast and dinner with the fairy girls, Big Sister is my secret." I roll my eyes and crunch down on the old candy. Steeple Hands seems smug. He puts his hands in front of his face as if he's trying to hide a smile, but it isn't a smile it's evil. And I want to ask him why he got into this business of helping people anyway. And he says, "Big Sister? Are you in some kind of gang?"

I remember all those questions Mickey asked that first day we met – all the ones I didn't answer. _Who are you?_ _What do you have?_ _What do you want?_ – Questions everyone asks and when they don't get an answer they fill it in with a lie.

"The rumor is I have cancer and I'm a Wave girl too."

This time Steeple Hands puts his hand up and he spins towards my aunt. "I understand after- school schedules and other kids." He asks me to leave so he can ask my aunt the same questions about the branches I butchered, my cherry pink wig and what she thinks I'm into. But when the door closes, I don't hear the whispered words I usually get. The ones Grizzly calls made up circus-sounds, a language only clowns understand. Grizzly told my Ocala aunt she wanted to take me to a psychic. (And I always wondered if the psychic would see Big Sister - the way her skin glows when she drops into wherever I am, how she's glossy (when she wants) as if she popped out of a magazine with shinier blonde hair and flawless wide blue eyes. She straddles the line between a ghost and an imaginary friend; she says _if you jump on any trains, you really are Bozo's twin._

"What a troll," Ally says. She escorts me back to the car, but we are both lost. I do not ask my aunt how she liked the hard couch or his ridiculous question, "Why is she here?" And an answer I don't have, but one that almost always begins with some version of "Emily's problem" or "Emily's challenge." Ally said, "Our problem." And I follow her back to the parking lot without much fuss, but I don't ask her where she learned about trolls or why she decided to call Steeple Hands a troll even if I agree with her.

My clothes stink of the cigarette smoke in Steeple Hands' office, those bitter smells make me remember other smells, better ones like the cinnamon rolls Grizzly used to make on Saturdays with a pound of butter and real cream.

"I could talk to Steeple Hands for hours about those rolls of Grizzly's and their power to turn you into a fatso," I say. "Didn't she used to make them for you?"

"But Grizzly isn't here," Ally says. "Is she ever?"

"Boys who come over for sit down dinner, pop in the oven biscuits. Can't I have that?"

"I'm sorry we are all such shit," Ally says.

And I almost reach out towards her - but my arms stay still and limp. They might break off and disintegrate into crumbs, like the collection underneath Thom's chair. When I disappear inside her car, I'd swear everything from the traffic to the big and little thighs swarming around us becomes like one giant whirling bath that moves along in glossy ripples. I am burning candles, buffing my sorry nails, and eating hard candy in a dream inside my mind. I close my eyes and let the sunshine bake my arms real.

"I don't have to be a Bozo," I say. I lean over and squeeze her hand. My aunt doesn't say anything. She stares down at shiny, perfectly polished fingertips and nods her head as if she gets me. I nibble my nails. (It doesn't matter if she understands. We're good.) But Big Sister isn't.

No more Bozo. Ever.

The First Steeple Hands

Big Sister's giggling has stopped but she isn't gone, or maybe she is gone and off to someplace better and it's just me here alone out in her backyard. Steeple Hands said I should look at the damage. I search for the wig that fell off during the cutting and hasn't found it's way back into my room.

"The impression you give isn't the same as when Julio says he's Tommy Hilfiger. Kimmie isn't anyone special," Big Sister says.

I let her thoughts sink in a little while and see what grows. But I don't ask where she hid my hair. And I search for other things to get into as if being Kimmie isn't any big deal.

"Do you think Mickey thinks I'm really a Wave girl?" I ask.

"You could have tried, 'I'm Grizelda's girl.'" The way Big Sister says it, it is as if being Grizzly's daughter is the answer to every silly or stupid thing I've ever done.

"Why do I ask you anything," I say.

"You might have told him another truth, about how you'd like to be a Wave girl," Big Sister says.

"Don't you get how this is better than lying?"

I look at Ally's poor fruit trees and stumble back inside.

Grizeldasgirl: r u my boyfriend?

TommyHilfiger: y

Grizeldasgirl: r u Adrianna's?

TommyHilfiger: y u wanna know

Grizeldasgirl: r u my boyfriend?

TommyHilfiger: i don't know

Lady Steeple Hands

There is another Steeple Hands, a lady Steeple Hands. She wears fat pearl earrings and a long, silk scarf and pleated pants like Aunt Ally does sometimes. But it isn't scary they dress like BFF's. Lady Steeple Hands and I chat about milkshakes and which flavor goes with a first date best and what it means to eat big food, and whether or not a guy will still like you if you order two burgers just for you and extra large fries and a giant milkshake too.

"The guy may not care," Lady Steeple Hands says. "But your stomach will hate you."

Ally likes the way this Steeple Hands talks. They not only dress alike, they speak the same language about big food. They both look as if they eat reduced fat everything. And I expect at any moment they will start sharing like BFF's on the best places around town to shop for clothes and that nude shade of lipstick I noticed both of them like to wear.

"Try making breakfast shakes," Lady Steeple Hands says.

_Ice cream shakes_. Big Sister whispers.

"If either of you actually eats ice cream, it's wrapped in lettuce," I say. Only Big Sister laughs.

"You can make them with ice cream," Lady Steeple Hands says. "But if you make them with yogurt, there's more room for big food later." Big Sister goes on about how smart Lady Steeple Hands is and if I listened to her, maybe a guy like Mickey would ask me out. This time I remember where I am and I don't tell Big Sister to shut up. After I drink the shakes for a few weeks, the wig stops itching. Ally makes me those shakes, but she makes them Lady Steeple Hands' way - with skim milk and Greek yogurt and tons of ice. Don drives me to school and Ally picks me up most days and I remember all the places outside of class, the places I used to find Julio or Mickey and their friends. Either they avoid me or I avoid them or its some cosmic combination of both of these. Even the imaginaries stop speaking - Big Sister, G.D., and the fairies too.

Grizzly starts saving boxes and everything changes. I dump out my breakfast shakes, even when they're chocolate.

Back to Contents

**Chapter VII**

Wanna?

"What are you doing here baby?"

I move along down the hall as if I don't hear the question and if I keep wandering, everything will be okay. The crowd thins as I go and I get lost and wonder where Gitt buys her clothes and how I might look dressed up tonight all designer. The group of girls I join barely registers I am even there. I move in closer. A couple of them laugh whether it's at me, my boldness for pushing my way into their click for a moment or if it's something else - my hair, my outfit, my heavy perfume. Maybe their laughter is directed at the girl in front of me, she sips a beer and studies a picture of Gitt as if it is a work of art. Their snickers have nothing to do with me. And they let me in and don't tell their queen.

"You seen Gitt?" Someone asks.

"She's somewhere out there." My eyes and theirs snap to the crowd and then to where she is at the far end of a deep and endless space. Her sandals sparkle like rubies; and a crowd feathers around her feet and bobs their heads in rhythm to whatever she says. They look like pigeons (all dressed in muted colors) waiting for her long fingers to scatter the promised feed on the floor. They bend and dip in time with the music and whatever she coos. How changed Gitt looks tonight from the smiling girl I passed in the hallway - this giant photograph of Gitt in pigtail braids.

"She's with Soccer Boy right?" One of the girls says.

"Have you seen him?" I ask.

The same girl looks me over. "Take a number."

"I thought you were afraid of Soccer Boy." I move away from the cluster of girls. A journey farther down the long hallway looks like the perfect way to hide from a voice I recognize. Julio spins me around before I get the chance to slip away. I swat at his hands. "There are a lot of rumors going around about Soccer Boy. Why haven't you answered any of my texts?"

"You're not really my boyfriend."

He shrugs as if it isn't a big deal to play two girls and I get he doesn't care if he blabs about the stuff I've told him either - none of it, my wig, my other name and the other big lie I told my first day about being scary sick, none of it matters. If you've ever seen Julio's back, you get his numbness to most things.

"Friends?" And then he says, "Come on, the real party is this way."

I gaze back at the dark corridor by the staircase and the unexpected shadows. No one is going upstairs, but I heard about Gitt's room, her amazing closet and I think about the kinds of stuff she keeps up there. And I follow him into another room that captures moonlight but so far none of my secrets.

Almost everything in the kitchen is white. There's a floating island as dark as outer space, appliances baked into the walls. Other teens drift in and out and head for the snacks and soda on the counter or the Lifesaver candies in the sparkly bowl. He hands me a beer.

"Someone should take care of these. Wanna?" Julio opens up his palm.

"Friends?" I ask. I'm not sure whether I ask Julio or the tiny rocket ships he's got in his hands.

"Better than friends." I take a long sip of the beer and imagine what he's got can fix my life, or at least help me see it from the stars. It's easy to imagine he's my boyfriend and I am cured of cancer.

Sparkly Shoes

Julio glances around checking to see if it is just the two of us in Gitt's gigantic hallway. And I am not so gone I don't understand he's watching out for _her_. But neither of us sees Adrianna and for the moment it is nothing we worry about enough to stop the movement of his hands on my hips. (We _looked_ for Adrianna is perhaps the only redeeming thing about us.) Somewhere in the fog of where we are, we can do better. We cannot do this at all. Still I slip behind Julio into the darkness and let him tell me about what Gitt keeps upstairs.

"Her closet is like another world. I'd spend hours in there playing inside the fashion houses she could care less about except maybe for how good she looks." He rattles off a bunch of names, they sound like Greek to me, except for Guess and Hilfiger. But then he talks about her parties.

"Two seniors, last year," he says. "Couldn't handle the trip."

And he makes those people sound like something out of Denman high legend. They had nicknames after old cartoon characters, Pebbles and Bam Bam. They've even turned into ghosts.

"I don't believe you. Gitt's too cool, too together."

And this makes Julio laugh.

"These are parties I haven't even been invited to," he says.

"But you're one of her friends, don't you give her fashion advice?" And he looks at me as if I'm either crazy or some kind of super genius.

"I tell her about the kind of red that looks best on her, but it's not the same thing."

The haze surrounding me clears and for a moment I understand what Big Sister knows, what she's been trying to tell me this whole time about being messed up and other people's soles.

Surfaces I

"Shush, or I'll smash the phone," Julio says. "And then we'll see sparkles girl."

"We're seahorses, being wild," I say. "Don't go." The sea creatures on the walls around Gitt's giant guest bathroom laugh and slap each other silly with their shiny tails as if what I've said is the biggest joke in the world.

The fairy girl is at least a full foot off the ground, though I don't see her wings. And she looks at the seahorses too and I wonder what she'll do. Then she turns into someone I know and she says a ton of things.

Those sea creatures on the walls around the room are ridiculous.

Julio left. Why are you still here, Kimmie?

What about Adrianna?

Are you mad?

Bev's voice sounds like one big whirring noise, almost the way fairies talk (you get ideas in your head.) I get those stupid seahorses giggled at me; I am the big joke. But it can't be the fairy girl is Bev!

"You look like Julio's cheerleader friend," I say. "Her whole body is streamlined for splits and cartwheels." She speaks to me in a whispery voice and tells me she knows the girl I mean.

"You have the most natural blond hair. It's like true fairy girl hair," I say. And it is the stuff of tales. Fine, long, and sparkling, and under the white light it reminds me of my Aunt Kelley's. She complained about having to sit in the salon every six weeks for two whole hours to maintain that kind of hair (Aunt Kelley is a brunette).

"No mousy roots, what's your secret?" But the fairy girl never answers my question. She hovers over me in the palatial bathroom and protects me from hundreds of small, spitting sea animals. And her bravery makes me listen to her story about the queen of this castle and answer any questions about what I was doing with Adrianna's boyfriend. "The seahorses drown out g-d like thinking," I say.

"Do you think you are g-d?" She asks.

"Of course I'm not g-d, I have been to Mars."

She offers me some of her peppermints and talks about mad shoes and clothes and says, "Can't you see how messed up this is?"

The stuff she says drags me down to a giant dumpster at Gitt's where I imagine all of the party garbage magically disappears.

The hardness of each fancy, cold tile presses into the skin of my back, Ally's skinny dress hangs off my arms like a dirty rag, and this heaviness still lingers from Julio's hands and weighs on my bones. And I call Bev or the fairy girl or whoever she is the worst kind of names.

"Are you even a fairy at all?" I ask.

I show her my arms after my trip with Julio to the moon and Mars, a kind of hell and heaven where we kissed and played on the floor and rolled over glittering tile sea animals and made each other scream. "Don't you see?" She shakes her head. "Julio has soft fingertips."

One of the sea beasts says my underwear is ugly. I point to her cell phone that hovers above me. Her pretty skirt fans out all over the tiles, all over the queen of Denman high's floor. I start to ask her about where she buys her under things, but she starts talking phones.

"Even fairy girls get cool cell phones and this one's got a great camera," she says. "About the lingerie, the same place Gitt buys hers."

Before I can say another word, she's gone. The seahorses stop their laughing and tapping, the bathroom is as silent as I imagine it must be on Mars.

Surfaces II

"You call me names, bad ones, then I'm a fairy girl. This sounds kind of nice, like being magical, then I'm back to being boring old Bev."

"It's not like what you might think..."

I wave my phone around. You are caught up in the movement of the phone, whatever I said about Gitt and Adrianna, the stuff would make any other girl bleed, it took you the rest of the way home, it took you to Mars and made you show all your skin. "You look better in sweat pants with the messed up sneakers."

"You look like you put Gitt's heels on."

"And Julio wants to break my phone."

I tell you about what I did before, in Gitt's closet. You talk to me about my phone and how you can still see it fluttering like some kind of fantasy insect.

"So many heels," I say. But I don't get into it with you about those spaces in between the shoes where the mad won't squeeze.

"You've been upstairs?"

"Yes, but maybe not the way you mean." And I whisper about Gitt.

"The shoes are like boys and girls she's liked since second grade."

"Like crushes?"

I roll my eyes at your big strap sandals that look like you stole them from your mom's closet. "Harder questions match the quality of the powder on the vanity, the stuff that looks like it took you some distance, it took you to Mars and brought you in here with Adrianna's boyfriend."

"She's like those shoes of hers?"

"She's like any of us."

Sparkly Everything

"I'd like to slink upstairs right now."

"Do better than you did crashing this party?" Julio asks. "What did Bev say to you?"

"Something about being mad?"

"Are you?"

"Gitt serves beer and spiked punch, big deal. This was fun." I don't finish the thought, this is the same kind of fun as when Grizzly tells me we're going to a family gathering and no one talks to us or some friend of this relative we hardly know gets Grizzly drunk or tries to pinch my butt.

"You can try to go into her closet. You might discover the places she goes, but nothingness after. I'll bring you flowers," Julio says.

"You're wrong about Gitt. Her grades are too good and she's too put together." But he doesn't hear. Mickey and every boy in the room are fixated on her, and for a few minutes I pretend all her Wave girl moves are mine. I act as if I am able to saunter like she does, as if the world has an appointment with me, and it's running late (like with Grizzly for a mother I'm still ahead, way ahead) – even though I wobble in Aunt Ally's shoes.

"Don't you know how to walk?" Julio asks.

I glance over at him, but he's already looking at Gitt. "There's no way she does any of that."

"Shush," he says. "We've been gone long enough."

Back to Contents
**Chapter VII** I

Ghost Girl

The girl from the stands is here, the girl I met only a couple of times. She is more sparkling in this moment than any girl. And it's as if she knows the answers to those questions I asked the world about whether I should even be at this party at all.

If I ask her to dance, maybe she'll be the one to tell me why I'm scared and maybe I'll learn the secret to incredible timing. "It's me you're afraid of," she'll say, or "It's Gitt, she broke up with you," or "You're freaked out by girls."

" _This pressure to be cool, I didn't think I cared_." Maybe this ghost girl is part of the fear.

But of all the people in the room, of all of the girls in this small world, she seems the least scary. She dances with another guy, and her eyes meet mine. This is a different kind of high.

"Wanna dance?"

It feels like the first time I asked a girl anything.

Mickey and Emily

Was Kimmie one of the try-outs that didn't make it, Gitt? She comes all dressed up in what looks like a flag core uniform but she sits in the bleachers during practice while the rest of us spin our flags.

The Wave girls call Kimmie the Wave girl ghost and make up stories about why she hovers in the stands each week haunting us. And I tell them about the night of my blue Jell-O party.

"Julio hung out with her, except she looked less like a ghost. She wore fake looking hair - a bad imitation of one of Katy Perry's pink looks. "I'm from California, Kimmie said, as if this would impress me. It didn't." The other Wave girls laugh.

"But this ghost Kimmie didn't say anything besides she wanted to be a Wave girl. So I handed her my homemade Jell-O for her disease."

"That's why she keeps coming around," one of the Wave girls says. "It's your Jell-O, Gitt." At this, everyone laughs.

But here's what I don't tell the Wave girls. I would trade those tasteless lettuce wraps for Kimmie's loaded cheeseburgers anytime. And most of what I know about her, I hear second hand from Adrianna or sometimes I hear Kimmie at lunch when she brags about a big sister Emily who twirls batons as if the metal is on fire. "Emily could be a Wave girl, she could be Gitt, no big deal." Kimmie acts as if I'm not there when she says this stuff in a whisper to Julio and sometimes in a cheerleader's growl to the whole lunchroom.

But most times she makes me laugh like when she said, "I know basketball." And I asked, "Don't you know Converse? New Converse?" Her sorry ripped sneakers tell me she'll never be my kind, even on those days she drinks SoBe water and pretends lettuce wraps fill her up.

My Wave girls have found partners; they bounce around on the floor. The sparkles on my dress want to go dancing too - a mutiny onto some other girl's dress. I gaze around at the clusters of my friends and the leftover guys at this party. And Kimmie, this ghost stumbles on the patio. She tosses her head back and shakes her too skinny hips like she's calling all the guys in the room to come and dance with her. She moves with a couple of guys at one time and for a few moments, I groove with them too, but at a distance. Then she shoots straight past my glittery outfit.

"Where are you going so fast?" I ask. My hands reach out but they're too late. And she doesn't stop or even bother with hello. The way she moves makes me think about my dead boyfriend and the night he took off with another girl, the girl looked a lot like her. _Wanna dance?_ The question grows louder in my head than the blasted music.

I gaze around the room for Bev, she chats it up with Julio and Soccer Boy. They gawk at Kimmie too and at the strange way she's dancing as if she's not alone. Bev whispers in my ear, "You've got to see this."

I saunter in time to the beat and nudge Bev with my curves as we shuffle off to hide and admire what we've captured - dirty pictures of Julio and Kimmie and something else, a haze on the dance floor snuggled up next to Kimmie, her hands slip all the way through it and it moves with her, whatever it is.

Wanna? II

"You didn't answer my question about a dance." Mickey whispers in my ear, my skin tingles. And I choke on each syllable of my answer. I play a game. I divine his feelings from the way the light dances on each tiny shimmering dot - so much light makes me close my eyes and look away. And when he touches my arm and pulls at my dress, I forget about Julio, I forget I told some girl at this party Soccer Boy is my boyfriend, I even forget my name.

A fast song plays in the background and I stagger around, my eyes stare at the floor and I try not to trip over the heels I stole from Ally's closet. "You okay?" Mickey asks. My head swims with images from moments before. I talked to a fairy girl? I was with Julio in the kitchen, did we drink beer? And what happened? Bev laughed at my underwear. Now why would she do that?

Could Mickey see what happened like a movie in my eyes? Even Big Sister tells me he can't.

He doesn't know about the way you pulled up Julio's shirt or what the fairy girl said.

"I am the wildest thing she ever saw."

From across the room, Julio points me out to a guy next to Gitt. Big Sister whispers in my ear about what they're saying.

She wears hot pink hearts underneath that silver dress.

"I thought Adrianna called my underwear ugly, but maybe it was Bev."

This is a different kind of whispering, Big Sister says. This is almost like the meanness of what's on Julio's back.

Julio has angry scars - they look like burns, like the skin melted down and they are scary enough to make you cringe and turn your head away.

Would I ever tell about the way he re-arranges my closet and lines up all my shirts by color? And once when I asked him why he does it he said, "I don't like making my parents angry."

I bury my face in Mickey's neck and hide. His fingers rest on my shoulders and pull me close. I hide from all of them, from anything, even from the music.

"Stay away from the punch," Mickey says. "Spiked always. Come on, you should eat something."

And we start to head towards the kitchen. Gitt pays attention to some built guy, the same guy Julio talked to earlier, he looks like Soccer Boy. But then I stumble. Big. I slam right into Goo-Goo eyes and her full-up punch cup spills all over her. "What the hell!" She says. And Gitt, Bev, Adrianna, and Soccer Boy all turn to look at me, but it's not looking, it's gawking. Julio's eyes thin into narrow slits. His hands are cupped to his lips. "I'm sorry," isn't in his expression when I stare back.

I glance up at Mickey, "Want to get out of here?"

Typical Girl

"Ever dropped it during a performance?" Mickey asks.

The diner is packed. Music blasts and for a few moments Mickey's lips move but the only thing I hear is the roar from the front by the bar. And I think G.D. is somewhere watching the game and I wonder if the Lakers are playing. From all the noise I bet the Heat is one of the teams. Maybe I think of everything else to avoid Mickey's question about the baton. I don't answer. And then I remember I've been clumsy with my best distraction so far, but this is Mickey and he isn't asking about the way I sometimes orbit the universe and how I contact my imaginary friends. I look towards the direction of the playoff game. "Yes, I fumbled big time," I say.

And then I tell Mickey how I've seen him around school. I avoid bringing up "the cancer."

"The field seems like the ocean sometimes." But I don't add that I was glad for a long time about the constant drift at Denman that kept us apart.

"Is that from a poem? Shame we didn't take English together." And we both laugh. I remember him in Geometry sometimes, and I almost start to ask him a question about the homework and what he thinks about the teacher but then I stop. I attempt to be just Emily tonight, the way I might be if my dad was still alive and Grizzly didn't move across the country and bounce us from relative to relative (another kind of drift). I am typical, ordinary even. I am out on a date with a normal guy. Maybe if I keep repeating the words inside, I'll believe.

We lean in towards the middle of a greasy table at South Side Burger, the kind of place that reminds me of the restaurants I used to go to with my dad, not much on the atmosphere, the whole place looks like a rectangle stuffed on the sides with big cushion vinyl booths I imagine wiped down thousands of times with soapy rags. I can still feel the moisture from the last cleaning on the backs of my thighs. When Mickey suggests I order a milkshake, I don't even blink and ask for chocolate.

I ask him about the scar on his face and he asks, "How's the shake? It looks too thick to drink."

"You should get one too. I'm going to pretend I won't gain an ounce."

"About the scar, I don't know. I am not pretty, but you could see my teeth when I wasn't smiling."

And I tell him about my big fumble. "This boy at my old school stepped on my foot, and I dropped the baton in front of everyone." But I cross into new territory. Mickey isn't like the others even though he believes a pretty Wave girl sits next to him now. I glance around at the other patrons in the restaurant without seeing them and it's as if I'm asking for validation for the lies I tell tonight. People nod and smile and I whisper another lie about a real baton twirler who screwed up at the pep rally.

When Mickey laughs, I blink my eyes and grin wide like I imagine how a Wave girl does, and I'm at peace with every sip of the milkshake. The door of the diner opens and closes almost as a confirmation of the way I tell another girl's story. And this peace starts getting less comfortable (I am an amalgam made up of other people's lives) and I want to tell him all of my secrets. But I don't say once during a practice I followed his eyes and the way he looked at Gitt and how she danced with the Wave and how I turned my head away. "I can twirl the way Gitt does," I say. And tonight we both laugh.

But I don't add that some nights I move my baton as fine as any of those Wave girls and even better than Gitt, that I can lead them all. After studying videos online and even after attending practice, I am back in the stands each week wearing stretchy blue athletic tape, sometimes it's orange, or neon green. I am good at wrapping my ankle from tripping over it so many times trying to catch the baton that never lands in my hands.

And while all this is going on inside of my head, the waitress asks, "Did you save room for dessert?"

I don't say anything real this entire time except the part about the field being like our school and not getting fat. I think about the way the bleachers stick to my thighs on hot afternoons and how I remain through the entire practice. I think about how I sweat and stick to the vinyl booth seat. But how I would sit here for two more hours and do the date all over again, if he asked. And I remember I didn't tell Mickey about big food.

"We could order dessert."

"A waitress did me a huge favor once."

My cheeks flush and I laugh and tell the waitress, "This is what it means to be typical, you go out on a date, and a waitress does you a favor."

"Just the check then?" The waitress asks.

And then I'm at home way too fast and back to conversations with imaginary friends and we go over my date with Mickey. _What did it mean when he didn't want to stay for dessert?_ But Big Sister wants no part in any of this talk.

"Remember how good feels," the fairy girls say.

I make up a ton of excuses as to why they're right. But I remember the real milkshake, the burger and ketchup all over my mouth and how I made Mickey laugh, even if I told him a bunch of other people's mistakes. And how I want to try a story of my own and hear him laugh at a typical Emily mess. How would that feel?

The whispers from the imaginaries are softer now. I shut the door and pretend I don't hear them at all. Is this what it means to like someone else in Normal? Is this silence part of the place? It's like the noise only louder now when I'm alone, a space in between our togetherness, this time when he is gone.

Back to Contents

**Chapter IX**

Shot Clock

"Who is that boy?" Grizzly asks.

Grizzly stumbles inside Emily's room. Maybe it's the way she is wired now after Eddie. And the beer she just drank relaxes her enough to get into things. "He'll only leave you," Grizzly says.

Grizzly's comment beads off Emily like the girl's brain is coated with suntan oil. And Grizzly can still hear Eddie, "One quarter Hopi, on my mother's side," and it's like yesterday, the first conversation that started everything.

"What's _that_ smell?" Grizzly's dad asked.

"Coconut oil, we sell sugared ice. We're making money." Her hair had been thick and long, a black shiny mass that hadn't needed anything, coloring or special conditioning. But this was before Emily, when life felt new. And the right decision at twenty-one was to get married.

She is Grizelda. When she and Eddie dreamed together and planned their future, she is still Grizelda.

"Can you see them too?" Emily asks.

Grizzly thinks about this for a second and crosses her arms as if this small movement will help her answer Emily's question, and she wonders how much to tell about her visions.

"Who do you mean? That boy that just left?" Grizzly's brows knit together.

"No, the fairies. They're real. They have wings. They whisper about the universe and boys."

Grizzly flops down on Emily's bed as if it is her own. The sheets are white with small, delicate purple and blue flowers that coordinate with the lavender color on the walls.

"Stay in school," Grizzly's parents said. "Find direction." She says the same words to Emily and remembers how the idea of striking out on her own, on their own still sounds better, even after Emily arrived and everything was as fragile as ever with wiry and breakable hair and saggy breasts. But then the girls Eddie hired to do her job wore the bikinis while she looked on and over an infant and then a toddler and then a girl. And one day he stopped calling her the fairytale name.

"Did Ally pick the paint color too?" Grizzly asks.

Emily tells her Thom did and Grizzly stares up at her daughter, at the nearly grown woman-child that stands in the space between the bedroom and the bath. And she looks into her daughter's face and remembers the parties at her sister's house back in California when someone would slip up and call her by that long ago name, "Grizelda?" She never anticipated hearing her own name would cut like beach glass buried in the sand. She stares hard into Emily's face now and says, "I don't believe in that magical crap."

"You're lying, you believe in lucky cards and lucky chips. You said some guy there looks like him."

Grizzly shrugs as if they are discussing what Ally is fixing for dinner, and Grizzly isn't hungry.

"You see them too."

"What I bet is those fairy friends of yours are planning how to tear you to pieces," Grizzly says. "And you'll leave all this." Grizzly points to the pillows, the matching curtains, and the pretty throw rug covered in a mess of flowers print.

Emily pulls the towel tight around her body. "Leave."

And Grizzly imagines Emily's friends vanish like mist and she wishes they were some kind of brilliant dream. But she is clueless how to wake her daughter up to reality and stumbles instead back to the kitchen for another beer.

Her eyes glaze over at the face of the refrigerator, the pictures and dittos mostly from Thom's school. He helped Emily pick out colors for her room and made it pretty like one of those gay decorators on television. And she thinks how Thom isn't good at sports and how Ally and Don tried almost all of the little league soccer, football, and softball teams and now they're on basketball because of his size (Frank was tall).

The top edge of Emily's Denman high schedule struggles under the weight of Thom's frog project. Large green frog arms cover up Emily's classes. And one of Grizzly's fairies' whispers, _you want Ally's kid to screw up at basketball too._

"Do you think I'm a lousy mother?" Grizzly asks the frog. She swings the door open and the refrigerator seems to moan agreement. She dares a glance at the frog's sharp teeth, and this startles her. Frog's don't have teeth. Thom's frog growls and sticks out its aluminum foil tongue. And Grizzly panics. She whips her head back and drops her drink. When she dares to look into the frog's mouth again, the teeth are gone and all she sees is green.

Double Dribbling

"And here's the bottle, and you can hold the diaper bag." Aunt Kelley said all of this in her mom's voice, a sweet, cuddly voice she used to coo at the baby. I tell Mickey Grizzly's days and mine in her house were numbered.

A big glob of mustard squeezes out of the side of my sandwich and plops on the counter and distracts me for a moment from the words I want to say. Sunshine streams into Aunt Ally's kitchen like thousands of arrows from a ghost Indian tribe. And I slide my sunglasses down to finish making sandwiches for Mickey and me. At least this becomes another possibility for the afternoon than what happens. Some things I say in my head and some things come out of my mouth. I am not sure if it is what Mickey asks or what happens later with Julio or maybe both of these things combine, but I feel black and white and not sure of anything except my hunger to be a typical girl.

I wipe up the mustard so I don't stain one of my few good shirts. The pink wig is off. But everyone including Mickey thinks my blond hair isn't real either.

"My plan was a rainbow on my entire head. At first I thought of spray paint." Grizzly didn't understand. And Mickey gets what "Ask Aunt Kelley" means.

Big Sister pushes her face into our conversation. "Are you blind? At nine I figured out your mother has problems. Your boyfriend isn't so brilliant."

I turn away from Big Sister. "The baby," I say. "He is the excuse for my Aunt Kelley's blindness."

"How did you get your pink wig?" Mickey asks.

"It's funny about my hair. I think about what you want to hear. But there is the memory of what happened mixed with how I wished everything would have turned out."

"He isn't eating his sandwich." Big Sister says.

I glance up at Mickey. He leans in as if he knows, as if he can see what's in my head. My mind becomes a TV we both watch.

My aunt and her clingy exercise shorts pushes the stroller towards the exit sign.

"How long do I stand there in the aisle and stare at monster masks and wigs in almost every color before she realizes I am not following behind?" It stings to see my aunt's frustrated and bloodshot eyes, to remember I am one more of her problems, a talking one.

"Aunt Kelley hands me fifty dollars." And she tells me to 'Be outside in five minutes.' The pink wig stood out."

"She sounds like a real pain," Mickey says. "I hope you spent all her money."

"Every dime."

"Want to go to the prom with me?"

"Yes," Big Sister says. "I would love to go to the prom with you." And she loops her arms through Mickey's and points to another mustard mess on the counter.

"I saw him first." It comes out like a hiss.

"You're already going?" Mickey asks. "With who?"

"That came out all wrong. I want to go with you."

"I saw him first?" Big Sister asks. I almost tell her that she didn't, and it is as if we are all best buddies. Mickey asked me to prom.

"Where you go I wish I knew and wish I could go with you sometime." I wave both Mickey and Big Sister good-bye.

They become part of the imaginaries now along with G.D. and the fairies too. And all the other stuff about the prom Mickey said, the place, the time, the questions about after, float around and entertain me for a while and I chase each thought expecting an answer.

Did he say the Hilton on the beach or the one in downtown?

What time does it start? 7pm? or 8pm?

What time did he say he was picking me up?

Prom dresses sparkle in my Aunt Ally's kitchen. They twirl around where the pots should be. And multi-colored wigs dance on Styrofoam heads. I can still be Katy Perry if I want. But the pink wig can be made straight and almost long with a flat iron and it feels more real to me than my own hair. I race upstairs, the ends of the wig stick out from beneath a pillow, and when I smooth out the fluff, the girl on the wrong side of things disappears. And she keeps disappearing until I forget all of her mistakes and even who she is.

I message "Y" to Julio and we text late at night after everyone goes to bed. I smell his cigarettes.

TommyHilfiger: U prom?

Grizeldasgirl: Y.

TommyHilfiger: Sneak.

But I don't know if Julio means he's happy for me about the prom, and I don't tell him Mickey asked me.

Open Your Eyes

I hear the crunch of each shiny foil being pressed by the stylist's long, blue fingernails into my head and when I crack my eyelids, I am back at the house getting ready again, re-reading Adrianna's text message.

Meet us at Panic. Sat 12.

Don's dry cleaning hangs in the hall, his dark sport coats, white dress shirts, and pants. I think of pressed uniforms.

I peek in the mirror at the stylist's fingers. They look like toy soldiers - all those fast moving nails march on my dumb deck of a head. Maybe one of them will save me from this fate and the commander will bark, "Put her blonde instead."

I discover sitting here being scared takes more than I ever expect, and when the stylist asks me if I want anything to drink I ask, "Have you got any donuts covered in crystal meth?"

Bev, Gitt, and Adrianna don't laugh at what I said. They seem too quiet in their chairs.

They know all of it.

And what they know about the woods and Soccer Boy, the wig and my cancer echoes across the salon and bounces off the crinkling foils. It rustles each coloring cape, even worse than mean words ever could, and it comes to land on my stylist's quick moving fingers. She brushes more goop on my hair. And she senses the strange calm in the room too and her fingers fly. This whole coloring process becomes the loudest and most penetrating sound in the world.

"Meet us," sinks into my wet head, like a blast of cold from the air conditioner vent above and yet no one says anything at all. And when you read those words, they sound like they come from friends but now sitting here feels worse than all of the lies I ever told. I imagine all the protein molecules in my hair being broken down and destroyed to apply a screaming color I thought I would enjoy; but instead it calls out every bad choice I've ever made (and without a mom, a dad, or even an imaginary friend here to tell me, "We love you anyway.")

Peals of laughter pierce the quiet foil bubble around my head.

"You're gonna love this." Adrianna says.

"This is the easy part," Bev says.

"Would you two shut-up?" Gitt asks. She smiles at me but I do not smile back and I keep all of my movie star teeth covered.

When I have been shampooed, cut, and dried, I imagine hair the color of wheat in the summer sun.

"I don't want Katy Perry's hair."

Gitt laughs first and then Bev, and Adrianna joins in too. I squeeze my eyes shut overstuffed of this reality and wish I could disappear into a new one.

"Want to open your eyes?" The stylist asks.

"Like it, Kimmie?" Gitt says. "I took a picture and sent it to Soccer Boy. But it isn't as good as the one of you dancing at my party with Julio and there's that other image, you and Smoke. At this all of them giggle and my brain attempts to soften their sounds. I pretend I am in a foreign land. I stare in the mirror and then at the other girls, and I do not understand what I see or what they say.

Are you afraid of ghosts?

Is Casper why you lied about having cancer?

So what's your real name?

"Stupid." I show all of my crooked teeth. And I wonder how long it will take them to bring up

Mickey. (They must know we are friends even if they don't know he asked me to prom.)

My hair looks like it is highlighted with fruit punch and not the diluted kind Ally likes to make for Thom, but full strength, a deep, dark pink. And while Adrianna pulls off the color and becomes a wild thing, next to the lighter shades of honey, my head looks like a messed up candy cane. Perfect for the biggest date of my life.

"You're still wild," Big Sister says. "Just don't tell these girls you're sorry."

If I pretend each cherry pink strand doesn't feel like a big, ugly bruise, maybe my hair, my day, and my whole ruined existence will change back to the beginning of fourth grade; I am a best friend and I have the best dad.

It's hair Em. That pink goes good with the red on the Clipper's jersey.

Pad Thai

"Prom is just a dance. Does it really matter?" Big Sister asks. "Besides, Mickey isn't your boyfriend."

"Hey Kiddo. Are you joining us for dinner? Pad Thai?" Don asks as if his offer of big food is enough to get me talking about what happened to my hair.

His overly golden curls are damp and matted; his cheeks are pink from steam, the smell of fried noodles takes over the entire kitchen. My dad is in my head, and then he's in the kitchen. He's got nothing in his hands, no fancy Thai dinner. He hangs out. He hovers and floats around the steam and the copper pots where the prom dresses dangled a few hours ago. He swirls through Ally's cookware, his shorts drag on the pans and make them move centimeters. No one but me pays attention to his workout. He does pull-ups from the place where the pans hang and his face turns the color of the fish sauce. Even with all his exertion, not one pot falls to the floor and his fingertips don't budge even a speck of dust from the big pot Ally and Don never use.

I like that silver dress, the one in Ally's closet. It brings out your eyes.

And I tell him all about prom and what happened at Panic and Big Sister disappears.

When Don shuffles over to the table with a steaming Pad Thai, we all forget our fighting roles - the parts we are destined to play. I stop my conversations with ghosts. We're caught up in sweet noodles and tender shrimp. Don's sugary sauce on angel hair pasta acts as a kind of surrogate father for the moment. I try hard not to remember the extra seat someone pushed up to the table next to Thom's spot or the shiny white plate that materialized as well. And I gobble up Don's dinner and forget fish sauce gives me headaches, bad ones.

Thom hands me a napkin, but keeps his six-year old elbows to himself. And I start thinking about this summer. I think about what Julio said about the old supermarket and the train that passes behind it.

"Don't you ever wonder how far you can go?" Julio asked.

"Anyplace else," I said. "But you mean L.A." And I remember thinking how the idea of speeding away sounded cool.

I saunter over to the pantry and free six, fat Oreos and plop them down on Thom's plate.

"For that spelling test," I say.

Ally's and Don's stares combine like one giant "parental" plasma ray. They burn through my shirt to the angry red mark left by Julio on my chest from Gitt's party. I am glad for once Grizzly gambles.

It is so quiet I hear the heartbeats of my friends when they stop by to listen to my aunt and Don upstairs about what to do with Grizzly's girl.

Did you see her hair?

_She seemed upset. She said something about prom, she got asked, this guy named Mickey_.

You might wonder how imaginary heartbeats sound. It's like a signature file — unique and something you don't pay attention to unless you decide to and like signature files, they can change. Tonight Big Sister's sounds like the slap of high fives at a game. Sometimes hers get loud, but so far, Ally and Don never complain about the racket in the kitchen or my room so I'm guessing they are either wiped out from their day or I'm the only one that hears the sounds.

I text Julio and ask whether he likes Double Stuf too and whether he's going to prom. But he doesn't text back.

Back to Contents
Chapter X

At Night with Father Beni

You wanted that sofa. "It looks like something out of a magazine, a queen might even sit on it." Elegant. Lean. It should be behind museum glass. And you didn't care about comfort or if the pieces surrounding it matched. All you saw was royal highnesses. (They were in the news, you couldn't remember which country, did it matter? A couch or something like the one you wanted was in all the happy pictures.)

"The walnut coffee table looks real; no one will know if it's pressed wood." And who would care? Or pay attention to anything with your white whale in the room?

People came over. Friends. Family. Lattes spilled and splashed all over your best piece and stained it forever. Your husband felt a pang in his chest. "Remember how much we paid for that?" You remember. You passed up two weeks in London during the summer. You felt a pang too. And you don't believe the doctors in the emergency room are as cute as they make them out to be on television.

So after your baby gets clean, it languished in the formal room off to one side, looking beautiful, untouchable, and gathering dust. You wished you were more practical, you wished for something more comfortable and relaxed so you wouldn't reach for the Alka-Seltzer so much after your mommy friends stopped by or anyone else you felt inclined to invite inside and serve beverages). And this is the reason when junior cruised with jellied hands toward the whale, the creature that said, "Baby, you arrived," you told junior daddy was home early (even when he wasn't) and covered every inch of whiteness with plastic polka dots.

The little ones touched and drooled all over the couch and you with their crumb covered peanut butter fingers; and you stuck to the most expensive thing you owned besides your house and your car - and not one of your mommy buddies said a word about the peanut butter stains on your butt. (Your husband pointed them out and made bathroom jokes.)

You remember the room the way she looked with the gorgeous white beast before jelly and juice and the big bad slipcover. The place before practical thinking set in. And you miss the boyfriend that used to stammer and blush and said (before the honeymoon) "Something's on your shorts, sweetie." But you know you can't go back. Styles change and she changed too. (You'll both be older and more worn, you both went through your share of slipcovers.) You accept the excitement you once felt when you picked her out from the catalog is a nice memory.

You could re-decorate (Thom is older, well past Sippy cup stage and he never uses this room, in your new house, he's moved up to the pool, bikes, and anywhere you can't see him. And you wish you never cared about drinking your coffee in your first house when the whale looked like something out of a magazine. You've graduated from plastic bright cherry dots to cotton soft lazy beige. And this white sofa you bought ages ago, the one that didn't work out seems to work out now. Emily told you it smelled like her home in California; it is her favorite place to hang out and be quiet and she sleeps there sometimes. You miss what other things she said (about prom, about some Jessica McClintock dress, about your silver dress, about her hair and whether she should bleach the pink out). And you miss all the things the sofa will never be again. You wished this could be enough to make you wholly good for buying the whale and covering her up.

Let us pray, together.

Flickers

"Want anything to drink?" I ask.

You look down at your polished black dress shoes and say nothing. This black satin makes me itch. You are too serious in your pressed suit, and I'd like to slide my feet into your shoes and make you laugh.

You talk. Your voice startles me and I lurch forward in the heels Ally bought me. "Sure, Coke, for the dead man." I look down at my feet and back at you with a shaky grin.

"I know what you mean. I practiced for an hour walking in these monsters. And I'm counting the minutes until we're eating with your friends at that Chinese place."

You are nervous too, but your smile looks almost pasted on. My lip gloss cracks at the corners of my mouth and the rest of my made up face feels like I'm wearing a kind of mask and will peel off at any second and roll on to the floor. And we'll both be stuck staring at the Maybelline version of me on the cold, white tile. My heels will break, my dress will split open, but maybe all of it will be worth it.

"Don't I get a corsage or something?" I ask. You don't get my joke, but I act as if you did. I pour our cokes into Ally's nicest crystal glasses and hand one to you. You glance up with that serious expression and I get something bad happened. You're back staring at your shoes as if you aren't sure your feet are real. And we perform a kind of dance. When you look up, I look down.

"We're like silly puppets."

This makes you laugh.

"Nice tux. Take a selfie with me?" I stand next to you and hold up my phone, but you don't say much, you don't even smile when I take our picture. And I giggle and launch into a whole conversation about why Ally and Don aren't swarming us with both of their phones. "My cousin has a show at school tonight, but I need to be home by eleven thirty. I hope that's okay."

You don't say anything for what seems a great long while and then you tell me you're sorry again and it's as if there is some kind of terrible news but you don't want to tell me and I imagine other things than the video of Julio and me at Gitt's.

"Maybe his grandpa is sick," Big Sister says.

I start to ask whether this is about Grizzly and her gambling or even what I said about my Ocala Aunt but you blurt out, "No, I can't take you to prom."

My mind slows and replays every word you said. And I look everywhere else but at you as if what you told me came from some other prom date in the room.

You and I are still going to that dance. You didn't cancel the plans. But I don't ask why you can't go or the reason you decided not to text or call yesterday or the day before or even four hours ago. The most my paralyzed mind can manage is, "Is it the curfew? There isn't much open after 11 anyway."

"I'm sorry, Kimmie."

How long I stare at you standing by the fence after you go, I'm not sure.

"Is it the curfew?" I ask Big Sister. "Or the heels and the way I stumble around in them? Or this messed up hair? I don't think it looks so bad in a bun." I kick off the shoes, pull all the bobby pins out, and squeeze out of the Jessica dress.

A fairy girl stands behind Big Sister. "Take another, honey. Then you can have the prom here if you want."

"Do not listen to fairy girls." Big Sister says. She points at me as if Mickey's leaving is my fault. "You know why he left."

G.D. strolls into the kitchen and pulls a seat up to the table. He eyes the steaming leftovers I start pulling out of the microwave.

"Would you two stop fighting?" G.D. asks. "Come on, let's eat."

And even Big Sister sits down at the kitchen table along with the fairy girls and G.D. And we get all hopped up on day old Chinese food - the take-out from last night. My friends have all the answers. I nibble a mushy egg roll and ask them what to do. They all say the same thing.

_Just go to the dance_.

Crashing Prom (First Kiss)

"It's only hair, only little lies I told everyone, everybody does that, screws up their hair and screws up their lives a little bit."

But the seconds the words are out of my mouth, I'm wondering if I made a mistake. Mickey isn't saying anything.

"The other lie, the bigger one about being sick, am I right?"

We're the only other people at the prom. I tell Mickey my real name is Emily and I tell him I don't have cancer.

"That's good." But Mickey seems as if he's some place else as if he's half in this ballroom decked out with purple and silver and half out of it (like he grabbed one of the balloons and took off a while ago to a place none of us have ever been and he teeters between this world and that world and he's not quite sure, he's not ready to make up his mind about anything I'm saying.

And I think how he must have seen the video of Julio and me and it messed him up and I say,

"At Gitt's the other night, I didn't know what I was doing."

"How did you get here?"

"Would you believe a waitress did me a favor?"

Mickey laughs but I can't. "Why didn't you want to take me to the prom?"

"This is a good song, let's dance."

My lips move so fast my voice cracks. I grab his hand. He seems as nervous as I am and what Mickey thinks and what he says becomes my universe. I forget almost everything from before. And when I dare a glance at Mickey and at his lips they look dry and unwelcoming and I have trouble imagining them making any space for mine.

But of all the people I ever kissed, he looks the most uncomfortable. I must look that way to Mickey too. I keep looking down from my heels searching for the floor. Maybe if I lean in?

Mickey seems to get the message. And everything in the solar system that bothers me disappears. I do not pay attention to anything but the way his lips move on mine and my fingers pull him even further into that perfect place that only fairies and imaginaries know about. If only we stayed there.

And then someone taps me on the shoulder. "What are you doing here?" Gitt asks.

I glance up at Mickey. "She doesn't see me, you're the only one."

And what he says makes a kind of strange sense about everything bad that happened tonight I blamed Ally's curfew, my hair, and even how I wobbled in my shoes and then went deeper to get mad at little lies and then the big lie and the video. When would it ever be enough? There would always be bad things – but would I, could I ever be good enough? If Mickey didn't want to take me to the prom, he would never have asked.

Mickey's tuxedo beneath my fingertips disappears and I get what he means.

"I didn't make you up."

I turn towards Gitt and expect a Wave girl crowd and more teasing about Smoke. How much comes out of my mouth and leaks out through my eyes I don't know. My cheeks wet, eyeliner mixes with mascara; it makes a mess on the back of my hands.

"I guess he's gone." I wait for the laughter, the jokes about my shoes, my dress, and my hair. Gitt reaches inside a tiny glittering bag and pulls out her cell phone. I put my hands in front of my face, but she hands me the phone. "Is there someone you can call for a ride home?"

Floating Glittering

"I hate you!" I scream. But I don't know who I hate or who I imagine is listening to me besides G.D. and Big Sister and the fairies in my dreams.

"I am made this way," Flipper says. I pretend I didn't hear his last words. I fist my hand around his safe world and shake until his perfect land flies out of my hands and crashes into the wall and all the glitter in his kingdom explodes, everywhere.

Flipper layers defeated, he looks dead. His fins are stuck to a tiny broken diving board, but he still wears his stupid smile. He's like the trees in Ally's yard. He laughs at me too.

I snatch plaster fingers from the shelf and launch them too like I did Flipper. The impression of Thom's hand from Kindergarten breaks apart. A halo of dust surrounds his plaster digits. My old trophies come next. The plastic ones with fake marble bottoms look as if they can rip into a wall. There are five in all, dance, flag football, soccer, and two for basketball. I used to be the best at that. I hurtle them one right after the other to the spot where Flipper met his end and Thom's baby hand disintegrated into bits. Dance goes first and basketball last (G.D. couldn't talk me out of any of it).

The purple paint on the wall comes off and gashes form a half-moon. It looks like the wall has many eyes. They all wink at me, some seem ready to cry, some do cry. I cry too.

"What the hell is going on? Open this door," Ally says.

I imagine I am strong enough to lift the door off of its hinges and toss it high into the air as if it is as light as a basketball.

I back away when my aunt asks Don for a screwdriver. When she pushes into my room, I glare at her from my bed. "All of this is your fault," I say.

She doesn't say anything for what seems like a long time. Her silence seems ridiculous and so I tell her about the prom and what happened. But I don't apologize for what I did to the room.

"I told you, my date disappeared." I twirl the baton for effect, but I am no better than Thom is; the baton spins clumsily between my fingers before I throw it on the floor.

"You're not really one of those Wave girls are you?" I could tell her I am on drugs or I met a boy who doesn't exist. I could say both of these. Instead I say, "Changed your meds?"

"What do you know about my meds?" The way she says it, she doesn't hide any of her teeth. My fingers squeeze the fluffy comforter on my bed until the veins in my hands jump out of my skin and strangle my aunt. I stare at her very pressed shorts until I'm brave enough to look her in the eyes again. "How come you don't send my clothes to the dry cleaners too?" I ask.

"Why are you pissing me off?"

I get into her face and say, "I wouldn't want you to wrinkle your uniform."

I expect a slap or worse. But she totally backs off. "Sit down," she says, "We need to talk about your dad."

What I Never Told You: There is something about your moves.

I like the way you pretend to be a Wave girl. I like your voice, how you lied about learning moves when I saw you on the bleachers that time and tried to ask you out. But when we went out, you told me more lies. And I couldn't keep you straight, the girl across from me spinning on and on about the twists and turns on the field with the other girl I sensed.

"You're great, Kimmie." But the first time I said this, I meant for the guy sitting at the table next to ours at Julio sister's Quince, the guy that kept checking you out as he ate burned pig. He wore a diamond earring and sported clothes that looked like they came from a salvation store but they must have been expensive, the holes in his jeans looked a little too perfect, the elbows in his almost matching denim jacket were worn the same way on both sides. (I studied him hard wondering how much you liked a guy like that and wondered if I'd get to use my karate skills.) I didn't, but you get the point. And the other guy strolled in the front door. The three of you danced with your eyes like I wasn't even there at all, and now I get why that happened. I'm here, but not in the way that matters.

You cooed at my compliments and momentarily turned your head my way but then you went back to making doll eyes at Diamond Earring and Doorman. Did you have to stand on the table? I started thinking about taking two at one time. Diamond Earring and Doorman seemed to look at me almost as if they waited to see what I was going to do. I imagined leaving with you and going to Starbucks, to another fancy restaurant, or even back to your house. But you spoiled the Quince. Everyone almost forgot about your cancer. "She's messed up." But I know, nobody heard me. You probably don't remember, we never talked about it after, but Julio's dad drove you home after cake and candles, after you threw up in the parking lot.

I'm not sure why I'm still here, why I'm stuck and why I wait for you to change back into the leader of all the Wave girls you imagine. I wish you wouldn't lie so much and yet I think it's cool the way you lie.

Back to Contents

**Chapter XI**

Easier

"Don gave you a ride home last night. Want to talk about what happened?" Ally asks.

"No." I don't know how to tell her my prom date wasn't real (the picture I took of the two of us only has me in it.) He's like another imaginary friend, like Big Sister or the fairy girls.

It takes me a few minutes to catch up, she starts talking to me about my grandfather, a man I never met. "My dad took me to a ton of places until your mom didn't want to go anymore. And he liked Eddie, Grizzly knows that."

I tell Ally I still search for my dad even in the gray fabric in the lining above my head inside our car and how I run my fingertips along the material and pretend he's puffing his cheeks out in the old fabric and getting comfortable watching over Grizzly and me. "Ghosts can do all kinds of stuff like that."

"I'm sorry," Ally says. The sound of her voice scares me. I scan her face for a reaction. I examine each laugh line and crease in her forehead. Why _does she narrow her eyes? Is she just thinking hard?_ _Are we going back to another Steeple Hands?_

"I'm sorry about the mess in here." I point to the broken dolphin and Thom's shattered Kindergarten keepsake, the gouges in the wall.

She massages her temples with her hands. "I'm mad about the mess. And I wish you would tell me what really happened last night and why you called Don."

"Nothing happened." I pick up the Jessica dress off the floor and hand her the pretty shoes I borrowed. "I tried really hard to fit in, but it didn't work out."

Maybe I am looking at her too hard, and she starts saying things about my dad without me asking but this is the part I understand.

He disappeared. Your mom thought her story would be easier.

In those seconds I imagine a thousand things, the whole house burning down, me orbiting Jupiter, shooting hoops in Antarctica at midnight and then seeing my dad, Mickey's waving at me on the icy bleachers and eating a plate of steaming cheese fries. They call out for me to join them in the feast. In one crazy moment fixing my messed up hair will fix my mind. And I want to steal some of Ally's whipped styling goop to do something with the candy cane color. I close my eyes so I don't look at my aunt's smooth, perfectly colored frizz free hair, I move away from the memory of normal.

"Never be glossy," Big Sister says. "It's why your prom date disappeared." She whispers in my ear, "But didn't your aunt say your dad isn't dead?"

My dad took a break from planet family for a while?

"Where's he living now?" I ask. But she doesn't answer me. She's _too_ normal. And we've passed into conversation that isn't about the mall or what to wear or what she's going to fix Thom for lunch.

She makes you think she cooks the turkey and all of those sides on Thanksgiving; but Grizzly told me once when we were eating moon pies for our feast how Ally orchestrates the whole thing. "Like in those commercials on TV," Grizzly said, and half of the folks she doesn't know. The best part of the meal is the wine. Dry, like the rest of it."

And if what Grizzly says is true, I don't want to discover why Don doesn't cook on Thanksgiving even when he cooks best and why my aunt doesn't have real friends or maybe she does, they're just all drunks. I don't want to listen to what she says about my dad. But in my head something else happens, we chat about fathers, what happened to mine, what she remembers about hers.

"You've got it all wrong, my dad never left me. He left her."

I race into Ally's bathroom and she doesn't stop me. If she cared, she would make me listen, I'd hear more lies about my dad but it would be better than this quiet conversation that continues.

Fairies Riding Thunder

Maybe it's Big Sister that says it first, or one of the fairies whispers it, or maybe it is G.D. that says some of it too. Most likely all of them together tell me what happened and this is what they say. They tell me he had been frightened like I am today to face a tough thing and he ran away, he disappeared like Mickey did at prom.

"I'm sorry," Ally says. "Nobody knows where your dad went."

"I don't believe you."

And Ally's words like Mickey's not being real or being like whatever it is the fairies are and Big Sister is and my whole ruined life remind me of the things I reach for inside the cabinet, in the land of the tipped over's.

When my aunt leaves it is as hot as ever in my room and I dream of all my ancestors huddled in here, watching, waiting to see what I will do.

"What happened to you?" They ask. "Why did you get into a fight with your boyfriend over your hair?"

The room stays hot. "He vanished," I say.

Big Sister stands by the door surveying all of us. "None of us are real?" She asks.

I don't say anything to this and it's harder than all of the ancestors knowing everything (which I imagine they do on some days and other days I think they know only of their pasts and how to float). And it would be easier if Big Sister and I got into what I did to Flipper for starters (how this gets me and Grizzly (all of us) kicked out from good places like Aunt Ally's). But the ancestors bring up what happened at prom and they say Flipper, Mickey, all of it is my fault. I don't talk about what the popular girls did to my hair before any of that at the salon, and I don't bring up the strange and almost nice thing Gitt did at the prom when she handed me her phone so I could call home. Girls like Gitt always seem to play by different rules.

I study the tiny crack in the ceiling searching for G.D. "You didn't leave us, right?" But even he stays silent. I hear a train, it runs through my head and sounds like fairies riding thunder.

"Come with us." Big Sister warns me, as always, not to go.

Her voice breaks and this reminds me of the way Mickey's voice sounded at the dance.

"You're disgusted with me too." But there's something else, something I don't hear often from Big Sister. We both sound weary. And I see her hands are shaking.

"I'm sorry." My voice breaks this time. "It's too late to change my mind."

And I'm way past wherever it is that Big Sister exists (if she even does) and way past caring about what happened at Panic and the prom and what my aunt said about my dad and what any of it means.

Outta My Room

"We can hang out in my room, listen to music?" This is the first thing I say after Mickey walks in. After I act as if it isn't strange that he's here. Are you a ghost? An imaginary friend? I want to ask. But neither of these things I say out loud. I talk so fast it seems as if I said 'Outta of my room' like I told him to get out and listen to music someplace else. He doesn't seem to hear it like this. He seems as nervous as I am. And when he turns around it is like he understands what I meant.

I swallow hard. I don't get into where Grizzly is or even remind him that I live with my aunt, "Don doesn't come home until after six." All of this seems so typical and when he leans down and kisses me it feels like it did at prom. Everything except the kiss melts away and I am more alive than I have ever been before.

"You must be real."

My baseball cap falls to the floor and my fingers latch around his neck and pull him in to our perfect place on Aunt Ally's couch where we linger for what seems like a beautiful forever until he pushes me back.

"No offense. But you looked better before." He points at my head. He isn't kidding.

"You're serious?" I look down at the cap and think how things were starting to work out like I imagine they do for other girls my age – a boy comes over to share his playlist. We skip the music and kiss instead. He isn't supposed to tell me my hair looks bad and disappear. I don't guess the boys ever tell Gitt that. She knows the kinds of steps that bring boys forward, the same kind of steps that bring boys back.

And I tell myself it doesn't matter. I am well past normal – past the perfect universe. I'm up as high as I choose to go – the music screams and then gets quiet – but in this place there will never be enough air. I forget everything Ally told me about my dad, everything horrible that happened at prom and after, and all the bad beginnings from every year.

_If only I could be more like the Wave girl on the field that everybody watches_ , _everything would be different and there would be possibilities the same as there are butterflies everywhere when you think about them, butterflies outside sitting on flowers, or on t-shirts people happen to be wearing, or at the store, mammoth sized wings on cake. Thank g-d Aunt Ally froze the leftovers._

Bleaching Out

"Your hair mishap happened because you allowed it, you agreed," Ally says.

Ally is a Talbot's and all her friends are Talbot's too (she says that's why she and Marianne Martin didn't work out, how Marianne's style isn't anything and how she can't bring herself to even think the word trendsetter. She thinks this is my problem too.

"You don't understand," I say. "Those girls planned the highlights. They were being mean."

"Did you ever think your style is the reason? You seem to wear whatever is clean and whatever fits, barely. You would be a new person in Express."

"Are you joking? Skinny jeans? No way."

"What about the pants I bought you with the jersey you like so much. When you wear that, you look normal, honey. Do you prefer looking like you shop for your clothes in a dumpster?"

But I still won't tell my aunt what happened at prom. She'll think Mickey ditched me at the dance because he hated my hair. (And what I should do now is fix the hair and the clothes but not for the silly boy but for me to feel better.)

Ally orders what sounds like enough Chinese food to feed an entire village in some far off land, the kind of place Ally will never set foot in.

"Maybe you're an Abercrombie," Ally says. "All those double and triple shirts would look good on you."

"I hate you."

"And I should drag you to the mall. We could get your hair done."

But I don't care about the mall and I bet Ally wishes one of those detergent packs would magically find their way into the washing machine down the hall and wash the throw rug with glitter stains all over it.

A new catalog catches my aunt's eye; the outfit on the cover draws her attention. She's about to start flipping through it. I'm not sure what she likes. Is it the skinny suit jacket, the pleated shorts, or the silky looking sleeveless shirt with glitter at the neckline the model wears that captures my aunt so thoroughly? And I wonder how my mom would look wearing something elegant. "Do you think my dad remembers us?" I ask.

"Of course." She tosses the catalog aside as if it is covered in peanut butter and jelly and adds, "I don't know."

I ask and keep on asking in different ways until the take-out arrives whether it is okay to lie to make life better. "Your dad did," Ally says. She tells me she is angry with my dad too.

"If Uncle Frank were here he'd say, "Stop, Ally. And he might buy all the ugly jackets on the floor for you. And he'd tell you how you look amazing." I pick up the catalog and see it's from some place I've never heard of. "Wait, if you get this jacket, you wouldn't be totally Talbot's anymore and with you it's a kind of thing to get all your clothes from the same place the way some people only get their clothes by dumpster diving."

My Uncle Frank lounges with us in the living room and he whispers in my aunt's ear like he used to do. He talks to her about me, "Why doesn't she go back to being blonde?" And this my Aunt Ally agrees with and she asks the question out loud.

Bleaching Out II

Thinking about the past and about Frank and about Eddie and her fight with Emily is before the bleach happened, as ordering take-out and flipping through mail is before the bleach, as thinking about tuna fish sandwiches for lunch tomorrow and if they would even get eaten is all before the bleach too.

And the bleach is something Ally wishes happened like tornadoes happen or earthquakes or even cancer, a thing beyond control.

"Mom, Emily's sick again." She doesn't believe Thom at first. And when she enters the laundry room she thinks briefly about calling the counselor. Ditto for the psychiatrist. She tells Thom to go to his room.

Bleach pools all over the floor and all over Emily like the girl poured all three bottles of buy two get one free bleach on top of her pink head. And Emily smiles and shows all of her bad teeth. Ally stumbles backward whether from the strong odor of the bleach or from the sick grin on her niece's face she is not sure.

And she yells for Don and transforms into another Ally, the Ally she's met only a couple of times before, once when Frank died and again when she moved across the country. This other Ally isn't Talbot's Ally. This Ally doesn't care where she shops or what she looks like. It's all about getting through whatever "it" is. This Ally is imageless and imageless Ally barks, "Dial poison control, now."

"Get her to throw-up," Don says.

And after a few seconds, he says. "Wait, she needs to drink milk."

Imageless Ally swings into action. Milk is poured. Both Imageless Ally and Talbot's Ally growl at Emily.

Talbot's Ally wants to be back in tuna fish or peanut butter and take-out. In this craziness over bleach on hair and bleach in her niece's stomach, in the seconds of waiting and watching the progress of one glass of milk, and whether the milk will make it into Emily, Ally begins to smell the inside of a department store all around them. She believes Father Beni would say this is an omen from g-d and she should listen. A new outfit for Emily flashes in her mind, the khaki pants (the ones Emily refuses to wear) pair with double shirts, maybe a contrasting pattern on top she thinks, but she can't decide. G-d tells her Emily needs new shoes too and pretty strap sandals appear in her mind along with painted toes, a shimmery polish, something in red with flecks of gold.

Ally starts hyperventilating, but she recovers, she can still smell department store air. She hears Talbot's Ally's breathy whine, "Drink the milk, honey, and I'll take you shopping." Imageless Ally lunges towards the girl and the glass.

Drink the milk, or else.

The Crumb Universe

"There are several pretzel universes under here. You really should check them out."

Mickey stares out of my bedroom window but says nothing. It's easier to study the collection of objects on the floor rather than crane my neck to look up at him and try to get him to talk or smile back at me. Besides, I've found hair elastics, (a slap on watch Ally bought me) and a novel I checked out months ago from the school library. The crumbs down here orbit around all this forgotten junk. And the crumbs look a lot like stars except no one has bothered to name them.

"Do you think there's a pattern to all this?" I ask.

"Food draws ants Einstein," Big Sister says. "And ants change the position of crumb constellations."

"Don't you think we're missing out on the universe right underneath our feet? I can see it being formed."

Big Sister sits down next to me and tilts her head. She seems to study the way the crumbs are scattered around the sea of stuff. I think she gets everything I've said and we're okay and she says, "Do you know you're lying in a puddle of Clorox?"

I study the constellation more and look for signs maybe she's right. I blow at the ant food and watch it float around my head. If I ignore Big Sister long enough she usually goes away and maybe what she said about the Clorox isn't really true and it will go away too. I focus on how the constellation of old pita chips sparkle.

"What happened between listening to music together and kissing on the couch?" I ask. Mickey still doesn't say anything and he looks almost two dimensional, like he's a shadow.

"Your boyfriend isn't here," Big Sister says.

This time I have to work harder to ignore her and so I imagine Mickey and I become the size of ants, and I show him the universe that exists in the grout between the big white tiles.

"Fairies ride a little rough this last time?" Big Sister asks.

Her voice booms in my ant sized ears.

"Why don't you find your own boyfriend?"

I try to forget Big Sister is even there and it's quiet. But my head screams.

When my bedroom door opens and soft fingertips touch my face, I lean into those fingers. "I'm not an ant anymore," I say. "I'm sorry about the fairies and the boys and I'll try hard to be the best girl ever." And I reach up and grasp fine strands of hair that pull away as fast as my fingers latch on. I hear a shriek.

"Mom!" Thom yells. "Emily's sick again."

I remember what happened at prom and the surprise when Mickey stopped by after and all the things Aunt Ally said about my dad as if this could make everything better.

"Got any fairy dust to lift me up off this floor?"

"There's only you," Big Sister says.

My aunt pushes a cold glass of milk into my hands and she stares at that milk as if her eyes have the power to make me guzzle all of it down. "I'll buy you new clothes with as many holes as you want," she says. But I am already gone. I am back at South Side sitting across from Mickey.

"What's wrong with it?" He asks.

"This isn't sweet, but it's cold."

"Are you hot?"

I nod.

"Then drink up," he says.

Back to Contents
Chapter XII

Fairies Riding Thunder II

Big Sister takes up three-quarters of my queen-sized bed when she wants to (these are the mornings I wake up sleeping on the floor). She keeps gathering her friends here, wherever we are. Now she stands by the door, and she surveys her handiwork.

"It would be easier if we got into what I did to Flipper and how this gets all of us kicked out from good places like Aunt Ally's - a good room for a sixteen-year old girl, it even has its own bathroom, and I already mentioned about the bed."

"Not some stinking hard twin mattress and Ally splurged on one of those new soft pillow top kinds," Big Sister says. "We're lucky Flipper's dolphin guts didn't bleed out all over the new bed and his glittering water didn't mess up her pretty floral sheet set too or we would be out of there. I hope this is temporary."

I study the tiny cracks in the ceiling searching for G.D., but he stays silent, a fitting punishment since I'd ask him for one of his fries. And tonight a train runs through my head and sounds like fairies riding thunder (am I dead)? But it feels like a miracle to be traveling again and I ask Big Sister to come along.

"There isn't enough room. Don't you get it, this is a twin size mattress, not like at your aunt's."

"This is one of your fantastic lies. You've got superpowers, you can make yourself big or small depending on your mood. Once you even transformed into a paperclip."

She torments me the entire day like this, even at school. (I don't realize what's she's up to sometimes until she morphs into a pen or a clip and she's on my desk making fun of all my wrong answers in math or in history, and in English too. (I don't tell her if I will make room for any of her friends on the train.)

"Why did you invite _them_ in here?" I ask. "And did you have to invite so many?"

Her friends are everywhere, they fill up what looks like a living room and I get squeezed out. "Can't I go back to my room?" I ask. "There's a train coming soon, I've got to pack or I'm going to miss it." I say other things too.

And even though Big Sister pouts and transforms into a child, and into an older sister that makes demands, when we get back into my room she tells me, "You shouldn't have told them about the train or your imaginary boyfriend."

We don't discuss whether I will make room for any of _her_ friends when the train comes.

"Move over," she says. "It's a twin, remember?" I roll over and fall on the floor and stare up at the ceiling.

"Are you going with me?" I ask.

This time G.D. nods his head.

I close my eyes through the deafening roar and the powerful electrical show. I wrap my arms around my rescuers; their bodies soft, like goose down. They cushion the fall from pillow top heights. "That's the mattress at your aunt's, this one's like the back seat of Grizzly's car." And I hear Grizzly's voice, "Just say dad left, you don't have imaginary friends or you won't have a brain and all you'll see is ancestors."

She's right. You don't really see me kid.

Of all the voices, Big Sister's is softer than a few months ago and we are both less sure of what this means. I wait for more insults from her but they never come. She doesn't even tell me to finish my breakfast drink. (Grizzly does that or maybe Aunt Ally does.) Aunt Ally's shakes tasted better than what they serve here, she uses real fruit. This drink looks fake, a mixture of berries and bananas grown in a lab out back.

My hands shake, I don't try to guess what kind of cocktail I'm on. All the whispers followed Big Sister and her guests, they're all gone. And everything is strangely quiet, except for one voice.

Emily's Room

I can't understand most of what these books of hers say. It's all a jumble, one big puzzle of black ink and red, pink, and purple hearts. Worst of all, there's no glossy pictures of cars or trains. I crash land the baton on the books but they don't disappear. But her cell phone rings. Now these are words I get. A frown face pops up:

TommyHilfiger: :-(

This must be another one of Emily's games.

I launch on the bed and throw her flower pillows around and electronic dance music keeps playing. One of the pillows knocks into her phone and it crashes to the floor; I hop down to grab the phone and a million text message blobs explode.

TommyHilfiger: R U THERE?

But how does Tommy know I'm in Emily's room? She must really not want me here. She had her friend ask. Uh-oh. She has something hidden in here only a big kid is allowed like a giant straw basket filled with chocolate, chewy candies she eats when her door is closed (which happens a lot). The house stops here, outside Emily's room, she exists in another world, one that looks sweeter than mine.

I wander into a quiet space and imagine my hands filled with sugar. I wonder how taffy and marshmallow bunnies might taste together and how I'll tell all my friends that I invaded a teenager's room and played in a teenager's bathroom, a girl teenager - it doesn't look different from mine except for the colors.

She has a big box of powers, brushes and pencils on her counter. It looks like art supplies. I borrow a couple of her fat glitter pencils to make a picture in my room later and I draw the blob from my nightmare all over her mirror. Electronic dance music rings in my head. My time is running out. She'll be back soon. I press my hands over my ears and ask Tommy a question.

Grizeldasgirl: who r u

And I turn her phone off and the letters WHAT and many frown faces disappear.

I discover a snack bag of tiny mints on her floor. The big basket can't be far.

Bad Company

"That kid looks like one of us."

Adrianna looks at me the way she does sometimes with her face harder than usual, her eyes focus like laser beams and I feel the heat of her annoyance.

"You think so Julio?"

"I'm telling you, he's spaced out."

She stares me into the sofa, she's trying to figure out if I am playing her. Sometimes I do, play her, but not this time. "Look at him. His eyes are like a fish that's just been caught."

"He looks fine. What about fishing?"

"My dad. When I was little."

I saunter over to where he sits, his back is up against the wall and I wave my hand in front of his face.

"Who am I?" I ask.

But he gazes back at Adrianna and sometimes at me with glassy eyes like he is trying to decide something.

"Shouldn't you be in school today?" I ask.

At the mention of school, he still doesn't say anything and he mutters, "Thom is cold."

"Something else?" I ask. He wears pajamas, the long sleeved kind with superheroes all over them, the kind mother's pick out. "Are you trying to be like one of those guys?" I point at the center of his chest. He looks around like he is trying to find an answer to my question, he's gone from here, and what's leftover of him needs help with basics like that. I know the place. You don't care about anything else except staying in that vanishing space and even this slips away too quickly.

He shows me the cold medicine in the bathroom and points to the small plastic cup on the counter and the schedule of times. "Noon," he says. It's like I am the big brother I always wanted.

I pour the pink liquid into the cup to the teaspoon line. "Maybe this will help with that virus thing."

"Better," he says.

"You don't look like a complete fish anymore." He gazes up at me like I'm his new best friend and I glance over at Adrianna and point to him, and I almost say, 'See? I'm not as bad as you think.' But she's pissed.

"Want what's in here?" I wave my garbage in front of her face. "It's almost lunch time."

She grabs me, the way she likes to sometimes and starts kissing me. I don't remember much after, and the day ends, and I wake up the next morning in my same clothes, the smell of the day before, of Adrianna and of Emily's couch, and the sound of my step-mom's voice.

"Is everything okay?"

My dad's wife talks at me and I keep my answers short, they are even shorter today like I start not answering at all and I pretend she is asking a question without really expecting an answer, she is being that fancy pants word in English class, "rhetorical."

"You're someplace else, maybe you and your father need to talk."

My back starts to itch.

Where is my candy? Maybe under the sheets or the blankets, or caught between the mattress and the wall? Step-mom gets up and her fingertips brush something. She holds a baggie out to me as if it's trash from the street.

"What's this?"

At first I think she's found it. She waves the baggie underneath my nose. She turns it upside down and nothing falls out. Did that sweet bitterness get lost somewhere when I stepped out of my jeans or took off my favorite jacket? And I glance at the floor for the clothes and don't see them anywhere.

"Did dad do the laundry?"

But she doesn't answer me about the laundry. "Do you want ants crawling on you. Throw this old bag out." She slaps my face and adds, "I won't tell your father, this time."

"Sorry about leaving a mess." If I don't move, she'll go.

As soon as she leaves I ransack my room like a maniac hunting for the other one, the one filled with all of that deliciousness that makes me believe I own a fashion house but Tommy and I are still best buds. But when my frantic search ends, my hands are empty, I figure I left my candy at Emily's, downstairs in her living room and just like I knew that kid brother of hers was hopped up on cold medicine, I imagine he will find them.

Back to Contents
Chapter XIII

Grizzly's Time Travel

Emily teased her once when she started gambling again, saying Miccosukee originated from the words "dirty" and "monkey" and Grizzly was as intelligent as a chimp going there. The next time Emily started in, Grizzly told her, "And you're dumb, like those explorers that said that about the Miccosukee, fat too." The girl huffed off and slammed her bedroom door. Nothing new. Grizzly left even earlier to gamble the next day and sat in her car and stared at the entrance and the giant Indian statue outside as if it was an oracle. Her oracle. "Everything you need is right here. Believe me."

"Why do you lie?" Grizzly asked.

But the great Indian didn't answer.

Back home Ally points to the pile of bottles in the recycling bin next to a fancy stainless steel garbage can and she scolds her like a child that ate all the leftover Halloween chocolate. "I bought the beer yesterday. Don't you care about what you're doing to yourself?"

Grizzly shrugs and looks away from the bin. "At least I recycled them."

She eyes the can and wonders if her sister would be less mad if she didn't see all those bottles. And those bottles in the bin scream at Grizzly and become another kind of oracle (a less kind one than the Indian). Grizzly wishes they were cold and full of beer again. She reaches for the handle on the refrigerator.

"You're giving up?" Ally asks.

Grizzly winks at her sister. She brushes past her and takes a beer out of the fridge and pops the top.

"Really?" Ally says.

"Ask us to leave. It's happened like this at other places we've stayed."

And it had. They wore out their welcome by needs, their "dirty monkeys." _Why do you drink? Why do you gamble? Why do you forget your daughter's punk rock hair day (when you've got nothing else going on)?_

"I don't get willful drowning," Ally says.

"You don't understand." But Grizzly doesn't even try to explain a win is coming. And she never understood what happened to Eddie and every time she goes to places like Miccosukee, there is someone who reminds her of him. If she keeps going, she'll bring Eddie home.

And Grizzly let Ally talk about change and what it means to make a plan to change your life and Grizzly makes a plan to hide the empty bottles in her car next time so Ally won't even see them in the recycling bin.

Grizzly stares hard at her sister's upscale freezer on the bottom refrigerator as if this will help her figure out the rest - how to get Ally less mad about the missing beer. And as she looks at the gleaming fridge for answers she's back to the day she and Emily arrived, the day Ally went on and on about her glorious new house and the fridge. "Go ahead, Zel, pretend it's a man and touch all over. You won't see any fingerprints." Grizzly imagines how it would feel to slip out, to disappear through the back door and into wherever she wanted, the same way Eddie did.

And she thinks about starting over from say sixteen but not from dumb sixteen, but from smart sixteen, a sixteen where she knows all the answers to make the best choices so she can have the fingerprint-free freezer on the bottom, the walk-in-closet, and the fifty different pairs of sandals like her sister does. Will she still do it? Will she still hook up with Eddie?

Grizzly wanders back through time and Ally is there too. Why they are both together in her fantasy she doesn't understand, even in the dream, she feels five years older and not wiser or stronger, and she wants Ally out. Maybe if she had paid for the beer her sister wouldn't be crashing her daydreams too.

She watches the easy way sixteen-year old Ally moves through this age, how she studies for math tests, makes straight A's except for one B in band. And this is because Ally is not a fan of the music for the spring concert and she refuses to audition for the flute part. Ally excels at everything except boys. Eddie wears a loose and baggy smile but this time Grizzly ignores him. She tries on Ally's band uniform instead and presses the flute up to her lips and thinks it can't be much different than kissing.

"Your sounds are all wrong," Ally says.

"The boys never told me that." Grizzly grunts and blows harder into the flute.

"Try to purse your lips."

Grizzly pretends the flute is a boy she doesn't want to kiss and at first there is not enough air and as she tries harder there is too much and after many tries she makes it all right, the perfect boy. And unlike Ally, the spring selections are fine, wonderful even to her ears and any flute part will do - even through her brain reminds her she went to school here years ago and graduated, married, and has a child.

"I'd like to try out," Grizzly says.

She puts her hand up high and waives. She wants all the shoes in her sister's closet. But this is silly. Ally's hand goes up before she finishes the thought. And when Eddie slides up next to her and tells her, "You're gorgeous," Grizzly forgets all about flute parts and leans in.

Mine and Mine

I never heard where you went. I imagine the most amazing and horrible things for you. Maybe I search for wherever you are.

"Sure your dad's not coming home early?" Julio asks. He lazes around on the bed and flips through a magazine and makes comments about the models in the pictures and whether or not he thinks I look good wearing the mini-skirt or the skin tight jeans or the gym shorts. I pretend karate and pull the magazine out of his hands and whack him over the head.

"What did you do that for?" Julio says.

"I already told you, my dad works late tonight."

"Cleaning offices?" He asks.

I whack him over the head again. It is the middle of the afternoon and I'm not worried. My dad stopped noticing around the time my mother left I even exist. I am still waiting for the lesson on how to cook eggs in the microwave. (I learned on YouTube.)

Julio pouts and I start tearing out perfume ads. I flip to an ad with a model that looks like Kimmie and kisses a bottle of sunless tanning spray. She lost her dad when she was young too and I understand this ghost. The video of her and Julio in the bathroom and the picture of her and the mist we all call Smoke makes it easier to insult her. "So your dad died, so what. Maybe that was him at the party haunting you." I told her this the other day when Julio and I were supposed to be making plans of our own.

We sank into wide cushions on this boat of a couch in her aunt's place, a place that begs to be messed up from the creamy walls all the way down to the crystal that settles on the edges of everything. I thought the aunt would have a decorator help her with something as basic as that. Aren't your guests supposed to be comfortable? We weren't.

Kimmie shrugged her delicate, skinny shoulders, as we talked about our favorite pop stars which ones had overdosed and when you hear their music or watch them on television you think, "senseless how they're gone," and maybe you feel a twinge of something and maybe you cry a little and wonder what the hell happened but after, not much right? But a dad should be different. If someone insulted my dad, I wouldn't be soft. My face would be in their face.

Kimmie said, "You're right. He's been dead a while." And she looked down at her faded screwed up sneakers like she had been whipped.

I suppose she retaliated. She blinked back a few tears and when she got up from the couch that swallowed her, she made a colossal sub sandwich, a foot-long thing she stuffed with roast beef and cheese. She didn't share, only nibbled a bit. And when I asked for some, she said, "Big Sister's hungry, better not." There is something sacred about dead people. You don't tell their living people they don't matter. So I guess I deserved her answer.

"We had a good laugh about you," I said. "About how scared you were of Soccer Boy you wore a pink wig for half the year."

But she didn't say much to that.

"Kimmie knows," Julio says. "She's going with us."

"I was there." But I don't tell him I pack my dad's high school ring, the one he gave my mom and Bev's old dress where I've stored my cash. So I'm stuck with this lying girl, this sticky rice side, and a boyfriend who won't make up his mind. Maybe if I cook microwave eggs I'd have more sense and turn us all around instead of being scrambled and believing sizzling super boys are on the other side of where we're going.

Is this what happened mom?

I ask, but she doesn't answer.

Julio reaches for the pizza. "What you don't know about stealing."

The last slice disappears from his hands.

"Kimmie didn't invite you to her block party," Julio says. He tells me this like he is trying to get even with me for licking up even the crumbs. (Or maybe he's just sore because of all those black and blue blooms on his back.) Of the three of us, he needs to find a better home.

Concessions of a Monster Bride

"What did you bring, Marianne?" One of the men circling Marianne asks.

"Pineapple cake. I thought of you the whole time I was making it."

The way Marianne Martin tips her head back and sucks down beer, all the lines and wrinkles from her face disappear for a moment, whatever stress she has is forgotten and it's all about beer now.

"That looks like it tastes smooth going down. Cool too." And Ally wonders if she drank a couple, if it might make her less cruel. But would she still have an excuse for all this trash talk about Marianne? They stand across the yard from Marianne and the boys and their feast of Bud and greasy food. Ally turns up her nose.

Aren't pixie cuts for little girls?

But she sure doesn't drink like a two- year old, how many do you guess she's had?

Those guys don't mind. Which one of them will drive her home?

The women surrounding Ally snicker, it's a nervous sound. At least two in their group also sport hair even shorter than Marianne's and a few of them drink Bud like her too. When Ally points, "And what about that monster tattoo?" an uncomfortable silence follows.

Ally whispers to the women about the bugs gathering around Marianne's dessert but none of the women seem to laugh or smile. Instead they look on as Marianne enjoys the block party the best of almost anyone. She guzzles two beers and stuffs chips, fruit, and cheese cubes into her way too wide glossy red mouth. Then she rubs her belly and burps. Ally waits to find out if Marianne elbows the twenty-something who pats her on the back.

"Did you guys just see that?"

"They look like they're having a good time," one of the women standing around Ally says. And she adds, "I need a refill. Why don't we go over there?" She tilts her head in Marianne's direction.

Ally claps her hands together like she hit upon something miraculous, she is a super comedic genius, and this is the stand-up routine everyone will be talking about for years. She points out Marianne's tattoo again and zeroes in on its size. "Freakish thing, how long did she sit for that? I can't believe those guys think that's so pretty." The tattoo becomes alive on Marianne's arm, a writhing, wing-flapping insect ready to take flight and entertain Ally and her guests or eat them alive or maybe just Ally for the mean things Ally said.

Ally becomes so engrossed in staring at the butterfly on Marianne's arm she trips over the feet of the woman standing next to her and falls down on her knees.

"Sweetie, you've had too much." And the rest of the women tell her the same thing too. She shoos away outstretched hands as if they are flies. She dusts off as if it is part of the act.

And when she gets up, she looks away from them and from Marianne too and chatters about Don's dinner as if nothing happened. Ally goes on about Don's chili like the birth of a royal child or the naming of a pope.

"Cowbell," Ally says. "Dinner's on." She doesn't recognize her voice. It sounds too high pitched. She thinks it must be nerves. And when she dares to make eye contact with the women, she discovers they wandered off.

From across the yard her nemesis says, "Let's eat." She hates that voice. It isn't a joke, and it embraces everyone.

Ally drifts away from the food and people to the place where Marianne and the boys played in the horseshoe of land, in the spot that seemed shadier than where she and the other women had hung out. She is grateful she bought a brand new tube of waterproof mascara. And here she dips her hand into Marianne's cooler and touches that woman's frosty beer. The one Ally picks is as cool to the touch as she imagined, and when she presses it to her lips she feels dirtier than ever, like she just kissed one of Marianne's men. It is almost as if Marianne's butterfly is alive and whispers in her ear, "You're not too old for pixie cuts and tattoos."

Ally glances over to where Marianne winks and dazzles everyone and Ally is sure now the butterfly will gossip how she stole one of Marianne's beers. She polishes off the bottle and stares at Marianne and the men in line.

She remembers when she had attitude too, young attitude, when it was the four of them, her and Frank and Eddie and Grizelda. They were the twenty-something somebodies until the day she and Frank got married and Grizelda called, early.

"What happened?" Ally asked.

Grizelda wasn't coming. She wouldn't say why.

"It's Eddie," Frank said.

"Because of my dress?"

It took fifteen bridal stores to find it. Grizelda went to all of them.

"Are you sure one of these dresses isn't good enough?" Grizelda asked.

None of them were the dress in the catalog. "Everyone wants _that_ dress," the manager in the fifteenth bridal store said. "This is the closest thing I've got." Grizelda called her stupid, "Trust me, no one but you will be paying that much attention to what you're wearing."

It rains on the block party as Ally sips Marianne's beer and hides out underneath a giant Ficus. The water runs like fingers and spills over the plants and makes giant pools on the ground. The rain has a mind like a child's (a mind like her sister's). And the rain wants her to play outside. _Go on get outta here and make a mud pie._

She looks at her dress, a pink floral sundress with way too many flowers (she thinks after the third beer). How much would it have cost if I cancelled the wedding and did it on a day when my sister would show? Why do I care what she did umpteen years ago or what she does today or what anybody thinks? The water looks like it is having the best time of all.

"Better than you are." Ally toasts the group around Marianne who are all huddled on her front porch waiting for the rain to pass. Eddie's voice is in her head, "Pull off your grandma's pink dress and party."

Ally dances in a river of collected thoughts and mucks around with Frank and Eddie in the flood in her mind. Isn't that what Marianne does? And what Grizzly does too? And always did? Ally doesn't need anyone's permission to play today. She turns away from the party and the specks of dirt on her new dress. The mud dries up and soon she is dry too. Her biggest concern - what to tell everyone about Grizzly. She ignores what Marianne's butterfly says.

_People say things_ , when they should say nothing at all.

"Eddie's working" or "Eddie's at a Lakers' game." It wasn't true, especially the games, he could never afford those tickets, but he always bluffed as if he did. His absence was expected.

Grizelda's was not. Everyone assumed she knew about Eddie. And it was better she wasn't there. She would have suffered the talk.

Things have not changed. Ally would rather face Marianne's nasty tattoo than listen to the other garbage people said about her sister and Emily and now her.

That girl's extracurricular activities aren't normal, and the mom is gone.

Gone where? Out.

_Go for the hotdogs. Marianne brought the beer_.

Ally hears her twenty-something self ask Frank, "What was it about the beer?"

"It tasted like piss," Frank said.

"Did you tell Eddie we had the same beer last week and he said he loved it?"

"I gave him a look."

And Ally knows the way Frank could look when he was unhappy about something, the way he could make you feel like a dog - the way a dog gets when you yell at it and it dips its head and sinks all the way to the floor. She has a hard time seeing Eddie cower, but if anyone ever brought Eddie to that point, it was Frank. And she remembers the other things long ago Frank said, how Eddie got close to saying he was having trouble with Grizzly without saying Grizzly's name, and what it was like after they gossiped to curl her fingers in her husband's hand and believe she would never be like her sister. She would never stand soaking wet under some stinking Ficus and wait alone while everyone else seemed paired up, grouped up, or in some way on top of things and having a good time, not dogs at all but butterflies. In that moment even Grizzly flies with broken wings and this she knows cannot be true. Her sister chats it up with an Eddie look a like and Ally imagines it is the two of them, Eddie and Grizelda together again and they join with everyone else at the block party. They laugh at her too. It must be the beer. She's had way too much. But, she reaches for another.

It slides down smooth and she's cool all over, cooler than anything and anyone. Her eyes drift up into the bright evening. If she could transport up to the creamy depths of the giant moon and slip away for a little while longer, everything might be perfect like it used to be. She closes her eyes and she is with Frank in the sky.

"Mom, you need to see something," Thom says.

"What's wrong?" The rain stops, the evening feels more than tipsy. And Ally would like to do nothing more than hide out under the tree and wait for her head to clear. But Thom pulls her arm, "Just come on."

Frank? Do you know what's happened? Is the chili hot where you are? Do they put extra cayenne into the pot the way we used to make it? Are you always at the front of the line? Are there any lines?

Thom's plastic water bottle sweats in Ally's hands and she looks over towards the place where Marianne stands and licks her lips.

Back to Contents

**Chapter XIV**

Don't Go: Minus Signs Flash Everywhere

Adrianna and Julio stand at my door; she stares at my hair. "What did you do?" She asks.

"My aunt didn't like the candy cane highlights. But I think she hates the bleached blonde."

"We don't care how you look or what you want to call yourself." Julio says. Adrianna doesn't say anything when he tells me this, but at least they showed up and asked where I was. And for a little while, I feel better than how it's been like I am the trash at the base of some giant garbage mountain where everybody throws banana peels and rotten grapes.

"I don't care what you call me, as long as I can go with you guys."

"She's already in the ozone layer," Adrianna says. "Time to hike back."

"Isn't your block party tonight?" Julio asks.

"In a few hours. Aren't you coming?"

And everything is brightness and light. I run towards the bathroom in search of the yellow bottle with the pink top. The vapors burn. Negative. I wonder how much I need to fix a bad pedicure, to balance bad nail polish?

I open the lemony colored bottle and pour a mess of the stuff on to cotton balls and try to clean up the chipped black polish on my toes. I gag until there's nothing negative left, until the glitter black is mostly scrubbed off and new glitter blue and glitter silver are lacquered on. My cheek presses against the hardness of the bathroom tile as I wait for positive signs, as I wait for my toes to dry, as I wait for magical happiness?

But I haven't really eaten in many days and I reach for the snack in my jeans' pocket. This tiny fairy food morphs into a dinner plate surrounded by neighbors and laughter, the smell of beer. There are chips and chili and some guy behind me asks, "What's taking so long?"

Mickey is on the opposite side of the chili that looks almost all gone. "We're not staying," Julio says. He struts off. Thom tugs on my arm and I remember what I'm doing here.

"I'm helping my cousin with his plate, can you wait?" I ask.

Julio turns and glares at me, "You should skip dinner, it isn't very good." He holds up his plate stuffed with nothing but dessert.

He saunters off as if he's sure I'll be right behind him. Minus signs are everywhere - empty chili, Don's favorite country music playlist seems louder in the last few seconds, and this angry person behind me has gotten louder too, "Look, we're hungry, are you filling your plate or not?"

Mickey walks over to where Thom and I are standing. He doesn't say a word to me, but he says to Thom, "I'm faster than Emily."

Am I hallucinating this whole thing? Is Mickey really there at the block party or is some other guy in the line helping Thom with his plate? But it's nice to imagine Thom sees Mickey too and Mickey's at the party, he's come to make up for being a ghost, or my illusion, or a handsome puff of smoke. I mumble "thanks" and take off to find Julio and Adrianna and to wish them good luck.

When I catch up to Julio and his plate of desserts I tell him, "There are too many minus signs." We are still hanging out by the beer when Aunt Ally kicks us out.

She talks radio announcer loud in front of all of our neighbors as they hang out in groups on the lawn eating cake and pie, sipping coffee, or drinking beer. And everyone stops when the fight between the sisters starts. Everyone stares at my mom and Aunt Ally and a few people pull out their phones and hold them up as if they're witnessing some kind of major news event, and as soon as the fight is over they'll upload the video to the Internet and from there it will go viral. CNN, FOX, and even BBC will be talking about what happened at Aunt Ally's house in the front yard.

"Pack up now," Ally says.

She waves something that looks like an old snack bag in front of Grizzly's face. Ally sounds like thunder and I panic.

I grab on to Julio's hand. "Let's get out of here."

All the Things

I wish Mickey said the night of the block party.

1. The stuff Julio says about the train is bull.

2. It won't really take you out of here.

3. It can't travel as fast as you want it to.

4. It will never take you as far as you want to go.

5. You will still see yourself in the morning wherever it is you end up.

6. Only superstars are re-born in places like California.

7. Don't give up on your mom.

8. You will look for your lost self every day until you find her. And you will always be missed.

9. Stay.

10. Don't go.

And later that night I hear a train. Where does she come from? It is almost as if she passed through many cold places before coming here – her graffiti eyes freeze everything out, but it doesn't matter I get on. All I see as she takes off is Grizzly standing silent on Aunt Ally's front lawn surrounded by the dirty looks of Ally's friends and neighbors (these people don't really know my aunt or have any idea of her life, our life.) I think about what went wrong this time, but only for a moment.

Marianne's Pineapple Upside Down Cake

1 can crushed pineapple (20 ounces)

1 can fruit pie filling (cherry or other 20 ounces)

1 box yellow cake mix

½ cup margarine, sliced

2 tablespoons brown sugar

Preheat the oven according to cake mix directions.

Grease the pan.

Dump the pineapple in the pan. Spread evenly.

Dump the cake mix in the pan. Spread evenly.

On top of the cake mix, place the slices of margarine.

Sprinkle the top with brown sugar.

Bake according to cake box directions.

The Don

"Any idea where she went?" Ally asks.

To Tanzania Don wishes. But he keeps his mouth closed as if he's in deep thought. People don't wear real clothes in Bora-Bora. He almost smiles.

Don listens to the clicking of Ally's heels as they track back and forth over the unforgiving tile. The sound is hypnotic erasing for the moment all thoughts of Ally's niece and her predicament. Didn't thousands of kids run away? Emily would be fine.

"Maybe she'll learn something," he says.

Don sinks into the cushions on Emily's couch and starts dreaming about Paula, the pretty blonde that works at his favorite sandwich shop. He imagines Sheila, his new boss, not blonde, but not brown either. She has the kind of blonde-brown thing going with her hair, something he noticed women did these days but being Don he is loathe to try and figure out why. Attractive. Sheila and Paula. And travel, he thinks of this too. Someplace exotic. Jamaica? No. A guy at work had been, a family vacation. Aruba. He always wanted to go.

When Ally clicks back into his space, he plasters on a worried expression. He can't think of the hotel, it's the one the busty brunette on T.V. mentioned, the resort serves up drinks by the ocean and provides beach towels, umbrellas, and sunscreen for free.

"Do you think Emily heard what I said to Grizzly?" Ally asks.

Don puts his fingertips to his lips, the simple act reminds him to shut up.

"Don? Earth to Don?"

He wonders if it's okay to hunt down a late night snack, a sandwich, for instance. And he thinks about the kind Paula makes for him on two thick pieces of Texas style toast with thin roast beef instead of ham or turkey (and both of these meats he only eats during the holidays, Thanksgiving leftovers give him his fill for an entire year, though he thinks he might try them with roast beef some time) and the white American cheese tastes good with everything and is so fresh he almost believes the cow where it comes from must live somewhere out back in the parking lot behind the store. Paula would do the three meats kind of thing if he asks and only charge for the beef.

"The police aren't doing anything," Ally says. "They probably think we're drug addicts - everyone else in the neighborhood does." Don doesn't tell Ally the snack bag looked suspicious and Grizzly drinks a lot and gambles. But they got lucky no drugs were in the bag and Thom told them. He is very happy about that.

Don's gaze momentarily collides with Ally's and for a split second he thinks, "Damn, she knows."

If Ally read his mind she'd discover (after all the drama about Emily and Grizzly) it's all about beef and cheese now and not much else.

Ally asks him if he remembers Emily talking to a boy from the neighborhood, "He's stopped by a couple of times."

"Julio Dennis?" He asks. "The boy Emily tore up the yard for?"

"This is a different kid. Did you see him?" Ally asks. But he doesn't tell Ally he had been daydreaming about the dessert goddess and her pineapple cake and how he told her, "That tattoo of yours looks like it has teeth. Perfect teeth." And she cut him an extra-large piece of cake.

The only boy he remembers at the party wore the same sore expression as Emily did most days, like they ate bad sandwiches. He did that before. Rotten meat. It made you hospital sick. The kids looked miserable, food poisoned, but it couldn't have anything to do with his chili.

(Someone pulled the plug on the hot plate, and a blue ribbon dinner turned out lukewarm. It was still good; he had seconds.)

And he couldn't imagine what made the kid upset. Emily's hair? Those strange pink highlights. Her new shade made him think of dollops of real whipped cream. He'd almost scored a second helping of the goddess' cake when Ally whispered, "We couldn't keep the bugs off that."

If Don says anything to Ally about Julio and the way he kept going after the cake at the party, there is only more talking. Once she sees this sandwich, she'll want some too, and he doesn't want to share with anybody, and not this sandwich. Not after Julio took the biggest piece of cake and Ally ruined seconds on dessert. Grizzly bullied him too, bits of chili stuck between her two front teeth as she announced in front of all their neighbors, "Great idea, Don, an Encephalitis block party!" He scratches several large mosquito bites clustered on his ankle and considers Grizzly isn't entirely wrong.

But Grizzly is something else, an alcoholic and a gambler who was some kind of champion volleyball player, in high school. And she isn't aware her own child is missing. And she got in a fight with Ally during their block party. Ally could handle the fallout from all of that. Thank you. He saw enough of the woman's incisors and the meat particles lodged there to last him his whole life. But he asks Ally anyway, "Why doesn't Grizzly help you find Emily?"

"Grizzly split."

Ally starts to ramble about the night and what happened. All this stuff he's heard. He pauses when she says, "We're lucky we found out about that bag from Thom's new friend – even if it was nothing but a bunch of old mints." He nods his head and stops.

"What friend?" He asks.

"Thom said his name is Mickey, he's one of Emily's friends."

He's back from Bora-Bora; the beef and cheese masterpiece forgotten. He remembers all their late night conversations about Emily since she came here. _What was it about Mickey and something to do with the prom?_

"I thought we figured out that kid wasn't real."

You're not on a Train

I don't understand how Julio sleeps on this bumpy, noisy ride. I don't know where this train is going or what I'm really doing here. Even the imaginaries refuse to join me (but whether this is because of the speed of the train, the quality of the ride, or the smell – or all of these combined, they wouldn't say). I begin to panic they won't find me again. But Big Sister shows up.

"Will the rest of them stay with Ally and Don?" I ask. Big Sister shakes her head.

"The fairies and me, we like your aunt's."

"Ally's place is cooler than this beat up train car and way more comfortable too." And as soon as the words are out of my mouth, her clothes change from the Lakers' jersey and running shorts into baggy pajamas and bunny slippers. She huffs and sits down next to me and looks as if she's settling in for a long trip. And she doesn't start bragging like she does about how G.D. is taking her to a game. "It's not like I have a lot of options," I say. "You remember Ally kicked us out."

"If you call those options." She points to Julio and Adrianna. Julio's head rests on Adrianna's shoulder. "Maybe you're not brave enough to care about the pee, but I wish you did. I wish you cared about having your own sofa like you do at your aunt's."

"We're on a freight train, what did you expect? It's the same with all the trains, too late to turn back."

"You think we're on a train?" Big Sister asks.

I shrug. We keep going back and forth like this inside my head. And I get what she means about being brave enough to want something better than the stink in here. I think about my couch and how its heavy with vanilla from the candles Ally burns but also thick with other scents from long ago, hamburgers, beer, coconut, (those parties at her house in California.)

"Remember how you and I met, the presentation on poisonous animals?" Big Sister asks.

I nod my head.

"This is part of why we're here. A part of you hasn't left, you're still there."

"In fourth grade?" I ask.

"You're still looking for the place where Blotch doesn't kill my dog and your dad doesn't leave."

"Maybe your dog was just old."

And we get quiet for a while. Big Sister's outfit changes from the pajamas back into the Lakers' jersey and running shorts.

"Are you going some place?" I ask.

Adrianna and Julio don't see Big Sister. They can't appreciate her wardrobe transformations and they don't hear the splitting going on inside me Big Sister and I hear this whole time, it sounds like a massive storm and presses us to finish our conversation.

"Why did you give me your caramel crunch?" I ask.

"I was trying to rot your teeth. 'I'm messed up gorgeous' you said. I didn't understand what you meant. It sounded cool the way you told everyone what your dad said about your teeth at a Lakers game. But then you started to tell me things about your mom like how she was never home."

I fess up about her necklace. "I told you I would be back after that last day."

"Messed up gorgeous never returned. And I got in a whole lot of trouble about the necklace," Big Sister says.

I tell Big Sister she is my best friend. And I forget we speak inside my head. The storm is so loud I talk over it. "Can you hear the whoosh and the crackle of the high fives?"

"I smell popcorn and fries. G.D.'s coming," she says. "It's time."

Julio wakes up for a second and curls up next to Adrianna, his knees press into her side but she doesn't seem to mind. I wish she could see how he looks like the boyfriend I hear her talking about (the super boy that's hers alone).

"Where are you planning to go?" Big Sister asks.

"Back to happening boyfriends and those cool parents you remember. You're right. They always liked me when I was just Emily."

"What did you say?" Adrianna asks.

And Big Sister is gone. The storm inside my head is silent. Everything Adrianna ever told me about mothers is there and the talk begins in my head and then I start to say it out loud. It starts with where we are.

"We're not on a train."

Adrianna shrugs as if she isn't sure or she doesn't care. And we sit in silence for a while. "I don't want to run away anymore."

"Julio's cousin told him to take the bus."

"Julio has a cousin." It's the first time I hear of him, and I get Adrianna isn't excited by the addition of this extra person into our plan of running away. It's the way she says the word 'cousin,' how cousin doesn't get a name that makes me sense the possibility she may be as uncertain about this journey as I am. And I ask, "Why are you really leaving town?"

She begins several times to say what running away will mean, but she parrots most of what Julio has told us for months now, and it's about what he knows and neither of us figured out yet.

"I hate my father," she says. "When other kids leave they have a path like college or some kind of big European trip. They get a degree or they learn a new language. But I'm not doing anything."

I tell her how I don't have a place anymore. "And Julio's got this cousin. I've been fatherless for a very long time, motherless too." I get up and gather my things.

"I'm coming with you," she says.

"What about Julio?"

"Julio will be fine. His cousin studies fashion design in San Diego. I'm not worried about Julio."

"I'm scared to go alone," Julio says. He grabs on to Adrianna's arm.

"You have people," she says. "You're going to be great."

I don't think I've ever seen Julio look more upset. It's as if he's got a giant ketchup stain on his brand new, bleached out jeans. He gives me stink eyes and tells me, "I blame you for this."

"Don't," Adrianna says. "There isn't a big apartment with extra room for either of us. Is your uncle a good man?"

He nods and wraps his arms around both of us.

Adrianna hits him over the head with her magazine. Two frenemies feel more like friends than ever. The tension between the three of us is gone. Maybe I imagine this a little and maybe it has something to do with what I start to hear.

I'm messed up gorgeous.

The Face You Never Forget

"Where are we? I ask. My aunt's boyfriend can give us a ride back home."

Adrianna tells me we're not far from the old Flagler train station, but I don't know where that is, we might as well be in another state. It's the same for the courthouse, where we agree to meet Don.

"Haven't you ever been downtown?" Adrianna asks. And then she says, "Did he ask about Julio?"

"No and no."

"Your aunt will probably ask when you get home, Delucca will have called her."

"I'm in enough trouble." And I hear the voice again.

He stands the same way I remember. His hands are on his hips and he's looking around at the buses and the cars outside. He looks a little thinner and for a split second I think it's not him. Any thoughts about what to say about Julio have scattered like pieces of trash on the street. My mom said my dad was dead, even if my aunt told me something different. Dead was easier except it isn't. G.D., the fairies, Big Sister – an entourage in my head to make up for Grizzly's lie.

He turns around and smiles. And he waves at me and I wave back.

"Do you see that guy over there?" I ask. "That's my dad. I'm sure of it." I point to the man I see outside standing next to a pile of bags.

"Who?" What man? I see a lot of people out there."

And it's like he never left. My feet feel as if they do not touch the floor. I see the familiar Lakers colors, the faded number one. He starts to walk away. Maybe I've got this wrong? But that can't be. This guy is my dad. He must not recognize me as a teenager with my hair bleached white blonde. And I run after him across the street.

I hear another voice but it's softer – this voice sat across from me and laughed at made up stories at South Side, it said drink the milk when Aunt Ally wouldn't shut up, and now it says,

_This isn't your dad_.

But I cling to everything I remember, and this man at the bus station becomes my father. And every story I ever heard from dad's ancestors and how you could know someone is in a room or in a place without anyone telling you anything, almost like you have a kind of psychic sense makes the idea even stronger.

"You're wrong. He isn't dead." And I fly across the street as if I am a fairy girl.

"Dad. It's me. Emily."

Back to Contents

**Chapter XV**

Confrontations

It takes a second to understand the kid at the door. Ally grunts and clears her throat. "I remember you," she says. You look different. You got a tan?"

She slurs her words like a drunk. She remembers the last time she had a beer, it was at the block party and she hasn't had a drink or even a cigarette since. (Don threw out the good drugs in the house and left only herbal tea). But sometimes she paces at night. She pays attention to the scar above the boy's lip and it becomes a kind of focus. "How'd you get that mark on your face?" She asks. Why she dislikes him more because of the thin, jagged line she isn't sure.

"I don't know," he says. But Ally's anger has an appetite and while he stands waiting she imagines for news about Emily, his fissure tells many things.

"How old were you?" She says. She points at the scar. But she isn't really interested in his answer.

The more she thinks about it, the more convinced she is this boy caused the misery in her life and is the one responsible for what happened to Emily and why she ran away. This boy with his evil face is to blame. She barely hears him ask about Emily.

"Emily doesn't know I kicked her out, she didn't hear what I said at the party," Ally says. She feels a strange need to confess and she'd like to talk about the other things that happened that night too. But her mouth is dry and she needs a sip of something strong before she can speak again.

Thom passes by on his way to the kitchen, "Hi Mickey," he says. She is not so far gone, and she feels this weird hope this is all a nightmare for a reason. It sounds normal Emily's friend being there, she only has to wake up to right things. But it is the name, "Mickey," that makes her pause.

"You're the kid that asked Emily to the prom?"

He seems upset. His proud looking head dips, his gaze drops and for a moment it is like they both study her Welcome mat together, the bold letters starting to fade. They stand the way people do, almost frozen in a state of stillness, when they want answers nobody knows.

And when he raises his eyes to meet hers, she can almost see the kid he once was. And she gets Emily sees things but he isn't something she made up.

"Has there been any change," he asks again.

"I don't have a good answer for you," she says. And she speaks to him the same way she does to Father Beni sometimes. "She was having problems and growing up without a dad is hard, but I never expected, never thought on her good days when she ate dinner with us she was sinking."

"Is there anything I can do?" He asks.

"I didn't believe it at first when I saw her room and how she packed up. She left the jeans I bought her the day she told me she became one of those Wave girls." She'd like to say more, but if she starts talking about the other truths, the ones about Thom and the drugs that turned out to be Tic Tacs and how Emily heard the stuff she said on the lawn to Grizzly and ran away and what happened because of all that, she won't be standing. "Some guy wasn't paying attention and slammed into her with his car. But you already know all about Emily," she says. "You know better than the rest of us."

And when Mickey says, "I'm sorry," the way people do when they do not know what else to say, she touches the door like it is the first time she notices it, and it becomes both an anchor and an object in her way. She looks all over the yard and, anyplace else but not at his scarred face.

She wants to ask what happened to him and whether Emily is coming home but the words stay stuck in her throat. And instead she says, "It isn't what I did at the party. I gave her and her mom a good home." (At this point she isn't sure what he is. Are you an angel, a ghost? She almost asks. And she feels cold even though the temperature is eighty-five degrees outside.)

And when he tells her goodbye and turns away, she pretends not to recognize how he changes - the way his hair goes from long and shaggy to short and clean cut almost in an instant and how she could swear he wore a wrinkled oxford shirt with pushed up sleeves. He looked sloppy not preppy solid. She follows his pressed polo down the street. After a few minutes she doesn't remember if he wore a blue shirt or a gray one. After a few more minutes, she believes Emily returned hours ago and the house is quieter now. Emily's door is closed, she stops blasting music and isn't this what always happens? Ally rebounds to the sound of Don and Thom together in the kitchen, preparing a mid-afternoon snack. Life is still good. Everything will be good again.

You should eat too, Ally.

The Lifting Part

The lifting part, the part where I separate from my body and go right out through the tops of my hair, this should scare me, or at least surprise me. But it doesn't. It is what I discover after the lifting that makes me want to open my eyes.

I have done all of this before, I have traveled up and out of my head hundreds of times and floated above and looked down on everything. Thom's tub of match box cars shoved in the corner of his room along with the carpet square with the road on it. (Don bought the road for his sixth birthday this past April.)

Thom still talks about the model train set at the hobby store. Those trains occupy the length of Ally's buffet table. And they go around and around.

"Who are you?"

"Are you talking to me?" I ask. He wears a faded Lakers jersey with a number one on the front. But he isn't my dad. He seems sad, and even more upset than the way my mom looks some days after she's been out drinking.

"They keep going," he says. "Sorry about the noise."

The whistle startles me even though the man told me about it, and it seems louder than I remember in the hobby store when I went with Aunt Ally and Thom before Wave girl practice.

I try not to think about where I am or wonder about the grim expression on the man's face or ask him whether I'm dying or if I am dead. The train needs to stop. "I was running away, but something happened. Do you know how I can get home?"

I hear a voice whisper from the top of my head.

There's a switch.

It sounds like Gitt.

Back to Contents
Chapter XVI

What Happened Girlfriend

_How about something to help you calm down?_ This voice reminds me of the relaxers I plan to take before the graduation speech and also of the index cards I need to organize so I can give any kind of speech at all.

"Are you suggesting I practice, Mom?" I ask. But there's no one in my room. There are only whispers that get stronger when I hover around all of my shoes as if I'm deciding which pair to wear. And this special pair knows all the words to my speech. My mind wanders everywhere as I stare inside my closet at the rows and rows of shoes. I think about relaxers, index cards, and the new car in the drive (a shiny RAV4 Dad bought me, it isn't a Highlander). Did Emily see her father? _And what would I do if you suddenly appeared?_ _Would I run in front of a bus?_

"If I wear these loafers, I might sprint in front of a really big bus. Why did I buy these? They are so not college."

Those faded red shoes are perfect for Adrianna. Does she fit into the graduation speech?

She'll do it for the shoes.

My audience is you, the shadows that have never left here, and the rest of the shoes. I hope the graduation class is as quiet.

I try on a pantsuit, but the jacket looks frumpy underneath the graduation gown and I go with a classy white dress shirt and long skinny skirt and slip my feet into the reddest high-heeled shoes of the bunch. And I remember the girl we all made fun of who had the worst shoes around, those dirty basketball shoes seem cool after what happened – why did she really run in front of that bus?

Why didn't someone from school ask your dad tough questions? You brought in that pie to Mr. Morris without a note.

"I did stuff like that before. But I hear you. How hard is it for a teacher or the principal to tell Dad, "Your daughter skipped class nine times?"

_But maybe no one looked past skinny jeans, fancy shoes, and top grades_. _Was the pie that good?_

"Maybe Emily showed up enough and no one saw what was happening to her either. Maybe they figured she really was a Wave girl or cancer girl, or that new girl from Avocado Grove, and Soccer Boy lived there and he is our football hero, so she's okay."

The shoes are silent, but I hear applause.

I look down at all the styles and remember the fun I had in every pair.

I'll tell everyone about the party, how life is one big party.

Graduation Day

I think you skipped class seniors. You didn't? Are we dressed in our best for graduation? (And for the parties later on?) Life is a party. You get to choose the place, the music, the food, and the people too – your close people. You invite a whole crowd to come hang out and share in your celebration. And your crowd invites you back, and you share in their party too. And you are all getting some if you're smart. (And you're all smart, right seniors?) You're here at graduation. You stayed in school. You give to get. You understand what happens. You do that math. It's a celebration.

I lounge in Denman colors listening to speaker after speaker drone on about this "sparkling group of seniors." Everyone claps loudest for my ex-almost, the valedictorian, Gitt Roberts. The band plays, all I think about is that afternoon at Emily's. The humidity acts like another skin, like a water vapor spirit on top of my graduation uniform. The white dress shirt sticks to my chest despite the undershirt, the black dress pants cling to my thighs, and the purple tie feels like warm fingers around my neck. It isn't noon and even as a ghost, I'm sweating. I dissipate and become one with the thickness of the air all around and float like only air molecules can, and away from these smiling, righteous faces to where Emily is.

These are perfect teenagers in the audience and up on stage; they would swear they never went to one of Gitt's parties or something like them. They would swear too they are all Emily's best friends. I turn my lips up in a half smile, careful not to show any teeth, careful not to join them. But I wasn't ever really Emily's friend either.

I eat an entire pan of dopey brownies and move on to steal a piece of the giant cake in the corner of the auditorium. I'm back at prom and Emily is there too and she's shimmering again and I am spinning my hands in her hair and my fingertips pull off all the sparkles from her dress (she still shines).

Did Gitt just say, "Get some?" Gitt's graduation speech makes me think about the sandwich Emily made for me in her aunt's kitchen and the ton of mustard that squirted out of the sides, it makes me want to put on shades sometimes when I look at her and also right now that she isn't here to complain about the sparkles on her dress, the way she said that night her voice all scratchy from a cold, "I want to run back to California." I wish I said, "Take me with you."

Why did I go to any of Gitt's parties? Was it the proving thing that happens to people? "What do you have Mickey?" It seems like everyone asks this question.

"My freaking awesomeness."

"You got to give to Gitt, man." If I had been thinking the night of Gitt's party last year, I might still be here. (And I might have figured out some things about Emily. But maybe it comes down to Gitt is not Emily. And Emily is not like anybody else.)

Gitt is saying something about suffering and the world and starving. I am tangled in images, a mess of a car wreck, the pictures in my mind as if it were some kind of movie, the images of the party at Gitt's last year and the girl that looked like Emily and all of the things we did that night and how quickly it was over. Now I am the one suffering and starving and Gitt is saying something about putting Emily's name on a plaque next to mine.

Gitt bows her head at the podium. A strange quiet settles inside the auditorium. The air-conditioning blows. It feels chilly. And when many of us whisper Emily's name, it is as if we are all thanking our stars it wasn't one of us that got struck down. Gitt says bus and other things – they sound strange and too pumped up for a memorial about a girl in the school. She blinks back tears when Mr. Morris gently takes over the re-telling of what happened, he calls it tragic, "The driver didn't know she was there." And we're all in our moment of stillness asking g-d or what it is we believe in or don't believe in to keep us safe for a very long time and to remember us wherever we are.

And the moment of silence is done. We're young, it won't happen to us.

Pursue your dreams Denman graduates; get some all the way.

The caps fly high into the air. I think of Emily's couch, the one we slipped and slid all over sinking into smoke and Oreos. My head pounds like an after party. And when I can take no more staring at all the people laughing and eating the cake in the corner and watching the way it never gets gobbled up, I tear a piece off the bluest part and it transforms into wings. And I fly over brilliant fields that turn into yards that turn into thousands upon thousands of subdivisions. I slip my headphones into Emily's ears and she's right beside me. We pass through endless butterflies straight on to home.

What Happened Girlfriend II

"The gossip going around the Grove is you died," Gitt says. "Why are you here?"

"I got the 'you can go home now' feeling after I said hello to g-d. She wasn't rude but she didn't gush, "Please come back soon and bring your mom over. She said 'You've got work to do, Emily.' But you know why I'm here."

Gitt stands in front of her house as if she could care less, which is probably true. "You're not really here," she says. "You're still back in ICU."

I almost make up a lie about how I'm haunting her, but I don't. Even that creeps me out. "I don't need to hide behind Halloween hair or a borrowed name. And I don't need to pretend I am going out with Soccer Boy to get inside this time. This is all in my mind."

"Okay," Gitt says. "There seems to be this idea going around that the adults in your house haven't been doing their jobs."

I point to the monster gates outside her house left wide open.

"Are you having another party?" I ask. "The rumors about your real parties, the real Gitt Roberts are they true?"

Soccer Boy comes outside and swallows me up with big eyes that remind me of everything that happened the first day he and I met. I bet my eyelids twitch and the blood pressure monitor beeps.

"Who are you talking to, Gitt?" Soccer Boy asks.

I imagine Gitt says the very worst things about me to everyone. And Soccer Boy and I take another tour through my aunt's neighborhood but this time we don't go into woods behind the church. "I guess you told her about the first time," I say.

But Soccer Boy doesn't brag.

"She's like that kid from last year," Gitt says. "Remember the guy I dated. He got high at one of my parties, totaled a cheerleader's car."

Neither of them say what happened to Gitt's boyfriend or the cheerleader. They talk as if this boyfriend is still part of their click, and I expect at any moment he will join them at Gitt's.

Gitt says something about a plaque and my name. She whispers to Soccer Boy about the girl, the one who died, it sounds like Cindy, Sandy, or Sherrie. I grab the plaque out of her hands but I can't read any names.

"Next to Mickey Moreno." She squeezes my hand and disappears behind her vampire door before I get a chance to ask her questions about what happened to her boyfriend, before I get who Mickey is.

And it's like the first day at Denman high. There are all those eyes again. I hear the questions. Who are you? What do you have? What do you want? I whisper my answers. The vampire door opens.

Back to Contents
Chapter XVII

Dear God: Delucca Calls

Delucca is frantic about some video she opened in her e-mail. And this isn't a cool movie, and it isn't something you joke about like those scam spam messages from some Nigerian prince.

"Emily's naked, and there is more. Have you seen it?"

I tell her I have seen it but I don't feel like talking. The Redlands even in June (wherever I am) feels like winter in the coldest place on the earth. I can't get warm, even when I heat blankets up, and even when I get heated blankets at the hospital, nothing seems to help. I am sinking doing Grizzly's job too answering all the questions about Emily and what happened. The only upside is the sex video of Emily takes away questions Delucca and other neighbors would be asking about why I kicked Grizzly out. Most of them know, or they heard me on the lawn at the block party and the gossip spread all over town, but they want to hear you say it, and they want to judge.

"What's wrong with you?" Delucca asks. (As if it isn't obvious.) "Julio's father is really upset. He thinks that video is going to hurt Julio's chances at this big design school in California." When I don't say anything for a few moments she adds, "By the way how is Emily?"

"No change, I'm sorry about your son."

Then she mentions Marianne Martin and the cake. And I'm numb. There is total silence on the line, the kind that must make her wonder whether or not I hung up (I almost wish I did). She brings up the whole pineapple upside down cake and what happened with Don.

"Marianne's a big flirt."

"The whole neighborhood thinks we're addicts, Emily ran away and got hit by a car, and now she's in a coma. I'd like to forget the evening thank you. I don't want Marianne's recipe."

"She left a recipe? For all of that?"

"Don't be cute. Does she think I am ever going to make her cake?"

"Don hasn't been much help?"

Except for one night of searching for Emily, but I don't say this to Delucca. And I don't tell her how Don is almost glad Emily isn't around much now. I stay on the phone and my silence and her silence are uneasy as if memories are caught in both of our throats. Did Roberto tell her what I said about her dogs? Is that why she brought up Marianne? I don't whisper about her son and those marks on his back. Since we're getting so personal I ask and she says, "It happened when he was little, an accident at an amusement park, a bad ride, and sometimes the kid just plays rough." And I consider as far as we've come, it's the girl everyone remembers. Emily shirtless.

Whether or not any of what Delucca says about Julio is true, we see what we want. The neighbors remember the way I yelled at Grizzly and blamed her for everything. They remember the Ziploc bag I held up and waved around, they see it filled with any number of drugs they hear about. Angel dust, PCP, crystal meth. They will never see Tic Tacs.

It happened when he was little, an accident at an amusement park, a bad ride.

He plays rough like he's mad about it.

It's from karate.

I don't know if I believe what Delucca said about Julio's back. But after what the neighbors said about Don and me, I guess I have to try.

"Call if you want to talk about your daughter."

"She's not my daughter," I answer.

But Delucca already hung up the phone.

At least she called.

Father Beni says write daily to give myself perspective, a feeling of "doing." When I wake up I won't be blaming anyone. I haven't figured out what he means, but the journals keep my hands off the bottle of sleeping pills I hid from Don. I don't imagine all those pills would solve anything or bring Emily back the same as she was. And she will need me, need us on the normal side, at least five steps back from the edge of messed up.

What Happened Girlfriend III

"Aren't you going to ask me to dance?" I ask.

And you morph into the guy that (sits in front of me in math class and then into my aunt from Ocala and then you are the freshman with the broken nose from Gitt's Jell-O party. How you change into all of these people I don't know, but you tell me all of the easy going souls got bored and wandered off but you stayed here.

And for a while it is enough for us to dance a whole song. You are the Mickey I know – the one I remember from Denman high and all of the questions in my head about what happened at prom - how you found out you were a ghost and why we're here have floated up and out.

The song goes on for as long as we want. I don't follow your changing shapes through the crowd or hear the flat line at the end of the song, and I try to ignore even the stuff you tell me about the freshman with the broken nose. "We're the same," You say. "We're all the same. Be nice to me, him, when you see him around Denman next year."

I hallucinate you aren't a ghost anymore.

The vampire door opens and closes. Smoke and noise pour out of it and pour out everywhere.

Dear reader,

I hope you enjoyed The Avocado Grove: Emily. Please tell me what you think either at your favorite bookstore or on my blog at <http://theavocadogrove.blogspot.com/>.

Thanks,

L.A. Wolfe

About L.A. Wolfe

I am writer currently living in the Charlotte metro area. My two great passions are writing and cooking. I started writing as soon as I could pick up a pen. Cooking came later. When I discovered the cold, wet weather living in the Northeast, suddenly pots of soup started appearing on my stove. Even with a move down south, I am still trying to get warm, though North Carolina is almost tropical compared to Maryland!

The Avocado Grove: Emily is a collection of short fiction available on Smashwords. I am currently working on the next collection of stories set in The Avocado Grove.

Excerpts from The Avocado Grove: Vanessa

8/01/2015

Dear Ally,

This is about the end of the Summer block party. I can't do it. Vanessa, my step-daughter is coming home. I don't know for how long.

We haven't talked in a while. But I remember when I moved here and you told me about the neighborhood. We met for coffee, we had a good time.

You know so many people. Is there anyone I might ask to host the party?

Thanks,

Marianne

Sent via iPhone

December 10 4 p.m. Mr.'s class the week before winter break. Anxious. Beast sightings - 0

Mr. is one of those teachers that likes to celebrate the completion of a book with some kind of party. No one seemed sure how to do this with a book like _Lord of the Flies_ , but Mr. challenged us to use our imaginations. The laser like glow from Mr.'s eyes focused on me as if he expected me to answer his next question. But I kept staring at his feet. You would think Mega-Hero-Muscle-Death-Creator wore something besides cheap looking plain sneakers.

I didn't listen to the rumors about Mr. being an ex-wrestler until he said his wrestling name to one of the other teachers and he said the whole name, slowly. "I am Mega-Hero-Muscle-Death-Creator and I never lost a match." And there was other talk from Fanta.

"He's been holding up the world this whole time, and teaching is a kind of break," Fanta said.

"Be prepared," Mr. said. "Your food or drink must be relevant to the story." He got push back. (Most of us hugged the Cliff notes through the whole book.) Sis's boyfriend Jeremy cited winter break as an excuse to skip the assignment. And everyone looked at him as some kind of superhero for opening his mouth.

"This is easy people," Mr. said. He gave us the weekend.

Compared to the essays outlined in Mr.'s syllabus, the party didn't seem hard, but my brain never spits out what teachers like Mr. want. And when I think about a food or drink to represent a story I didn't read, all I think about is bringing in a bucket of sand.

Sis and Jeremy are exclusive now, they worked on their project together. They started planning at the kitchen table.

"I hope your project sucks."

Fifteen minutes later I knocked on Sis's door, "Wanna brainstorm about what to bring?"

"Shut up, Vanessa," Sis said.

Fanta appeared in Mom's kitchen and opened the fridge and studied the stuff inside. He pulled out the juice and chugged. "You forgot about Piggy," he said.

I remembered the paper Jeremy helped me write about the conch smashing. But bringing in a food item related to Piggy seemed creepy.

"You realize Piggy died."

Fanta nodded.

"Why are you drinking orange juice?"

He didn't answer but I started thinking about breakfast and boyfriends and how Sis's boyfriend was real while my boyfriend materialized out of a book. The orange juice was almost all gone. "Don't your Olympus friends have any other suggestions for me?"

But Fanta only chuckled. "Want me to describe the ships again, how I landed on the beach, the sunrise on the morning I separated from my Cyclops' brothers?"

These are the moments when I imagine kissing my make believe boyfriend would make me forget real boyfriends and school.

"This beach is gigantic," Fanta said. It stretches for miles. I haven't been able to walk the whole thing. And I've been here one week waiting." He studied what else Mom had to eat in the fridge and this is trouble. I kept talking to _him_. (He might as well be Beast.) A made up boy versus a real one – what's the difference?

"Are you practicing your lines, they're in the reader?" But as soon as I said the words I figured out what Fanta tried to say and I didn't care if he dumped the rest of the juice all over my head. "Those boys were rescued, right?"

December 12 8 p.m. Sad. Tired. Can't believe what happened at Mr.'s party. Beast.

Sis was bolder than bold today. I should have guessed by the dots on her ruffled Target t-shirt, not like the kind you get at rock concerts or ones with cartoon characters. The polkas on her shirt are pools of red. Wishful thinking on my part: _she is having a bad period._ But maybe I am jealous - she plastered her arms all over Jeremy in class as if they lounged at a real party. And they brought their together chips - Mr. even considered theirs a group project (they scored extra points for working together.)

Here's what they brought:

Mayo

Pickles

Chips

They didn't bring real chips. I almost raised my hand, but my dad's voice said, "Vese, knock it off."

I am Not a connoisseur of British food, but Baked Lays? Other kids got away with easy stuff too like paper plates and napkins to signify "city" instead of things running wild on an island. A few people carted in food like barbecue to symbolize the meat the boys went out to hunt.

I raised my hand to make a comment about the distinction between the pulled pork and the wild pig the lost boys ate; this would establish my brilliance. _Sis is history._ "They didn't have sugar on the island to make the sweet sauce," I said. Another kid made a similar remark but said, "smothered in the stuff," to describe the thickness of the dressing on the sandwiches and Mr. thinks this kid is brilliant.

Sis and the polka dots on her shirt and her great, glittering brain snuggled up next to Jeremy, her desk angled so their elbows touched. Mr. didn't say anything about the touching. Was this because he praised her in front of the class?

Sis and Jeremy's elbows got closer. They became one elbow and pretty soon they held hands too. But Mr. crunched low calorie fake chips and he licked the sauce off his fingers from the pork sandwiches. He didn't pay attention to my texting or anything else. (Yes, you can text imaginary boyfriends and they do text back.)

Vese: not real chips

Fanta: look real

Vese: googled fish and chips. pics of steak fries

Fanta: stop aren't u next?

Jeremy played with the fitness watch on Sis's wrist (it doesn't do much, tells the time and the number of steps Sis walks) and when he moved to the rings on her fingers, I imagined he was bored. He played games with her hands, finding her life line. I didn't want to listen to how many wonderful years she was going to live and how many top colleges she was going to get into and about how someone she didn't expect was going to ask her to the prom.

But I wanted discover if his great grandmother was really a palm reader and had a shop in some far away city I cannot pronounce the name of like he told her and what the numbers he whispered meant. He said seventy-four and eighty-six, or eighty-three? I liked the lower number best. Did Jeremy tell her the score on her next essay, the number of schools in the world that would accept her, or the shoes she would try on before finding the right pair for the prom? I became so distracted I asked Fanta, "What do think seventy-four means?"

"Quit, Vanessa," Fanta said. "Maybe the numbers added together mean the amount of times you bother me in one class." This is a great thing about imaginary boyfriends, they save you sometimes. I turned my attention to Mom's pitcher and all the red Sunrise drink inside and vowed not to ask my imaginary boyfriend anything for the next five minutes.

I remembered the cherry Kool-Aid mix, the extra cup of sugar I added in, the seltzer and ice blended together. Fanta said the drink tasted like the Slurpee's at the 7-Eleven. Another thing about imaginary boyfriends, when they tell you good stuff or good enough stuff, you believe them. (This is Not so different from real boyfriends.) Mr.'s voice rang out, "Vanessa, you're up."

A bell like the kind that dings at a boxing or wrestling match signaled me to stand. (I don't know about Sumo, and whether or not a bell means anything.) I turned my phone off and stepped in front of the class. Who am I fighting?

Every single word about homecoming and rescue drifted out of my head. And the dots on Sis's shirt turned into faces like the ones I'm supposed to record every day for a long time. The feelings are angry, frustrated, or tired. They define my whole life.

I rattled off ingredients in the pitcher and tried not to look at Sis's shirt or at Jeremy. But the chorus from Sis's corner of the room screeched, "You suck, "You're dumb," "Be finished." And my mouth moved so fast through the rest of my presentation, words got stuck, and I don't remember most of what I said until the end.

I swept a hand toward the punch. "Red is a good color, don't you think?" But I forgot why, the reason I made the Slurpee drink, even the name of the book, and a hush came over Mr.'s class. No one said anything for several seconds until Sis raised her hand.

Symbolize is her big new word.

Beast was back. His hair looked blonder than I remember and I kept thinking this couldn't be him, sitting alone, away from the rest of the class - Beast _never_ did that.

Sis's hand slid through Jeremy's. My hand grabbed the punch.

"Thank you," Mr. said. "You all did a fine job."

Mr. must read minds. One minute I stood in front of the class ready to hurdle a great Slurpee mess in Sis's direction and next I studied Mr.'s plain shoes again and the industrial terrazzo under my desk. In that moment I accepted all the superhero stuff about Mr. The other rumors, the wrestling ones, even his long Mega Hero name turned into make believe.

"Olympus magic," Fanta said.

"About Beast?" (My imaginary boyfriend, a character from a book, didn't understand. Beast and magic did not go together.)

In the Mr. didn't say anything reality, my hand held on to the pitcher and turned it upside down on Sis. Red punch spilled everywhere. It formed a giant puddle under her desk and stained the index cards she and Jeremy used for their presentation, and best of all it made the faces on her polka dotted shirt look gross.

She blamed me for the mess all over her clothes and said, "You are so history when we get home." I mumbled something about bad PMS. Mr. did nothing.

Back in the reality where Mr. is Atlas:

Everyone, including Sis and Jeremy ate the food from the presentation. Jeremy even sipped some of the drink I made and swatted me on the back, "Not bad, tastes almost like the Slurpee's from the 7-Eleven."

"Why can't they be the same?" Fanta asked. "Mr. and Mega Hero?"

But he stopped saying anything when Sis spit her Slurpee back out, and I turned my phone off and stopped texting Fanta about everything they did.

"Is Beast still here?" I asked.

But Fanta wouldn't answer. He wanted to text Sis and said he had more gossip about Mr. and more to tell me about being a Cyclops.

"If you read, you'll see how you can..."

He pointed to the clock on the wall and said something about stopping time. I tried to follow along but my iPad died in the middle of the conversation. I didn't know if Mr. was Atlas or Mega Hero or if Fanta could stop time like he said; but it gave me something to think about as I waited for class to be over and tried not to look towards the corner of the room where Beast sat.

This turned into the first official fight with my imaginary boyfriend.

**More** :

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