100 Days of Cake (15 page)

An upgraded six-panel door slams.

Pickles looks at me with his eyestalks.

“What? She said she wanted people to pay attention to her problems.”

Pickles doesn't have to say that's not what V meant.

When I get up to pee for the third time that night—all that water we're drinking in the heat—there's a noise coming from behind the door to Mom's room. She must have the TV on. Just like me, she loves old sitcoms. (V gets our mom's looks, and I get her penchant for laugh tracks. How's that
fair?) I remember the old house, watching reruns with Mom in her sagging-in-the-center bed, V complaining that the shows were so old and silly, but sometimes climbing into that center sag with us. All of us joking about how ridiculous it was that all six of the
Brady Bunch
children could be sooooo well adjusted, or admitting that we were totally crushing on Michael J. Fox's overachieving character on
Family Ties
. It felt safe. Like nothing bad could ever happen while we were in that bed.

I miss all that stuff. Even if I know I'm way too old for it now.

Still, I make my way right up to Mom's door, thinking I should apologize for earlier, maybe see if she wants company. But when I get closer, I realize it's not the TV at all. The sound isn't canned laughter but crying. My chirpy beautiful Mom crying; so much worse than her being annoyingly perfect.

And then I feel terrible for not eating the baked Alaska and for selling out my sister.

Back down the hall, I knock lightly on V's door. “It's me. Can I come in?”

“I think we've done more than enough bonding for one night, thanks,” she hisses. “Go away.”

So I do.

F
ishTopia is closing.

Forty-five minutes ago Charlie came in while Alex and I were sitting on the counter watching
Golden Girls
and eating Wang's Palace lo mein instead of cleaning or checking the supplies or basically doing anything related to our actual jobs, but Charlie didn't say anything about that. He just called us into his office in the back room and told us that he's selling the store to a couple from Kansas who want to open a country diner.

“I'm sorry. I know this place means a lot to you guys,” Charlie said. He's this huge Paul Bunyan kind of guy, who always seems to be staring off above your head when he's talking to you, but he seemed genuinely broken up. I still wanted to slap him silly, especially when he added, “We'll stay open for the next seven weeks, so the summer will be
almost over by then, and I know you guys have to go back to school anyway.”

He told us that we were both really good employees and he would be happy to give us references. “The new owners are probably going to need servers, and with tips, you'd make way more money than I can pay you anyway.”

I was too numb and shocked to say anything before he went to go pick up Babe the Blue Ox, or whatever it is that Charlie does all day. But now it's just Alex and me, and I'm on a roll, all lathered up. The more I think about it, the angrier I become.

“What's going to happen to our regulars?” I demand, and Alex tilts his head.

We do have
some
frequent fliers. Not a lot, but there's Toupee Thom, who keeps a seventy-five-gallon tank in his office to calm his divorce clients. Then there's a sweet old couple who come in every six weeks to stock up on fish food and show off pictures of their grandkids in Baltimore. And one creepy dude, who looks like the mad scientist from an old black-and-white horror movie, is in here at least twice a month buying bulk quantities of firefish that he's probably using in some plot for world domination. Alex and I joke that he feeds the fish to the sharks that swim beneath his lair.

“All of their fish could starve without us,” I say.

“I'm sure they'll just order stuff online or drive to Petco.”

“And how is Creepy Dude going to take over the universe if he can't get fish here?”

“Molly—”

“Seriously, a country diner?” I say. “It's a hundred and five degrees. Who wants chicken and waffles? Like, if they wanted to open a sushi joint, maybe.”

“That would certainly solve the problem of liquidating our inventory,” Alex says, and I can't believe that he's making jokes about this. This is FishTopia!

“How are you not more upset about this?” I demand.

“I don't know, Mol.” He shrugs. “This was a part-time gig to save up for school. I wasn't planning on making a career of it. Were you?”

What's wrong with wanting some stuff to stay the same? Why am I the only person in all of Coral Cove who isn't psyched to have everything be different?

“What about JoJo?” I ask.

“It sucks. But I'm sure she'll find something. Chuck is right; she'd make more money as a server.”

“I just don't understand why—”

“Look, Charlie had to be losing money on this place forever. You can't really blame the guy. He's a businessman.”

“But . . . but . . .” I'm so upset, I can't find the words. I'm furious that Charlie can shut us down, like the store doesn't matter, like we never mattered. He's never even here. What can he possibly know about it? I'm steamed at
Alex for being A-okay with it, because apparently this was just some stupid way for him to waste time until his real life begins after graduation. Even though she doesn't even work here, I'm mad at Elle for wanting to go to school in New York. It's like no one in the world cares about any of this stuff. Maybe most of all, I'm just angry with myself for being the way I am and not rolling along with changes the way everyone else does. Angry that I let my guard down and allowed myself to be a little bit happy here.

“But what, Mol?” Alex asks.

“This is, like, the only good, safe place, and now it's going away,” I say, and then I'm even madder at myself for saying something so stupid. Alex must think I'm an idiot. Grabbing Pickles's crabitat, I race for the door.

Pickles crawls back into his shell in confirmation.
What's
the point of all of this?
he seems to be saying.

“Molly, wai—” Alex reaches for my arm, but I storm past him and out the door. I jump on Old Montee and put Pickles in the basket.

No idea where I'm going, but I pedal so fast to get there that it hurts.

A
t three in the morning I have to pee (all that water), but on my way back I realize that Pickles isn't making all the usual noises he does at night, scratching the sides of his crabitat.

When I open up the tank, he's just lying there in the corner, kind of half in and half out of his shell. He's all curled up and dry, like the hands of an arthritic old man. Even before I reach in and put him into my palm, I know that he's dead.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

Little Pickles with the bright green shell and cute claws is dead. He led a modest life in his tiny tank, playing with his rocks and the dollhouse couch, crawling around in my hand, eating his pellet food and occasional fruit treats. He liked broccoli; he liked apples. He didn't have grand
aspirations of leaving Coral Cove or going to the right college or getting on an upwardly mobile career track where he could “get serious about the biz.” Once he spent an entire afternoon trying to flip over a pebble. His world was small, but he didn't realize it, he didn't know that he was utterly insignificant. None of that mattered; he died anyway.

Pickles clutched to my chest, I sink to the floor, boneless. I'm not sure when I start crying or how long that lasts. It feels like hours. Eventually I simply run out of tears, out of any emotion, really. I'm completely deflated, the defeated, shrunken skin of a popped balloon.

My whole universe becomes the cool hardwood of my bedroom floor, this dead hermit crab in my hand. Beyond my bedroom there are other alien worlds. Through the window it gets lighter and lighter, even with the blinds drawn. There are sounds in these worlds: V getting ready for a shift at Jaclyn's Attic. Shower running, doors opening and closing. Mom's voice and the cheery anchors from the
Today
show. “Good morning. I'm Matt Lauer, and this is
Today
!” Cars and birds and dogs whooshing and chirping and barking.

None of it affects me. All that stuff might as well be in a book or in some movie playing at the multiplex. It isn't a part of my world.

One of those otherworldly sounds—knocking. It takes a few seconds for me to realize it's someone at my bedroom door.

“Sweetie? Are you okay?” my mom asks. “I just wanted to make sure that you were ready for your appointment with Mrs. Peck at four.”

And I remember that in one of those other, outside realms, I was supposed to have picked out my five dream colleges for my meeting with the counselor from Admissions Ace! today.

When I don't say anything, Mom hesitantly turns the knob and peeks in.

Seeing me on the floor, the
D
-word panic washes over her, and she rushes to my side, gets down on her hands and knees, and presses me against her amazing rack in a hug that is so tight, it's actually painful.

“Sweetie? What is it? What's wrong? Are you okay?”

“Pickles is dead.” Even in my own ears, my voice sounds flat and detached and weird.

“Who?” Mom loosens her grip a little and holds my shoulders.

Opening my palm, I show her Pickles's shriveled little body.

“Oh no, your little pet lobster?” Relief practically floods her face, and that makes me angry. Pickles wasn't a person or even a dog or a cat who could love you back, but he was mine and he was important to me. Not just some lobster. He made me happy.

“He was a hermit crab.”

“Oh, sweetie, I'm so sorry. What can I do?”

I shrug and say nothing, so my mom uses that smush-smush voice. “Let's get you a new crab. We can go today after work. Or maybe a gerbil like the ones you and Veronica used to have in grade school? That might be nice—”

“No, Mom, you can't just replace him with a freaking gerbil.”

“You're right, sweetie.” Mom is back to holding me too tightly. “He was very special.”

I may be depressed, but I'm not an idiot. I know that to my mom (and, well, everyone), Pickles was a weird, creepy little thing she thought was a lobster. Mom didn't believe that Pickles was special, and she's only saying that to pacify me, and that's somehow worse than suggesting we get a gerbil. It's like she read all this in some “how to handle your depressed kid” book, which I'm sure she did. But it doesn't matter. Nothing matters.

“What's the point?” I say, but I'm not really talking to my mom. I'm not really sure who I'm talking to. “Everything good goes away, no matter what you do.”

Mom is saying something about how that's not true, and her face is contorted with worry again like it was before she realized that Pickles was only a crab. But I can't really hear her. It's like she's back in that other world again—the one that's like a movie, or some book I read.