All-Season Edie (13 page)

“How was it?” Mom asks as we wait together in the rec center lobby for Dexter's Advanced Ballet class to let out.

“Exceptional,” I say.

Mom looks at her watch and sighs. In theory our classes end at the same time, one of the reasons she's so pleased I'm enjoying myself—it makes the driving that much easier. But Dexter can't be rushed, particularly through the removal of her pink ballet shoes, with their long silk ribbons and stained points where her toes have bled.

When Dexter finally comes out, wearing a gray hooded track suit over her leotard, Mom says, “Where's Megan?” Usually we give Mean Megan a ride home on Saturdays, which is bad because it means spending time with Mean Megan, but good because it guarantees me the front seat so the older girls can whisper and giggle together in the back.

“She doesn't take ballet anymore,” Dex says. “She switched to jazz and hip-hop.” She says this so carefully, so neutrally, I know they must have had a raging argument about it and perhaps aren't even friends anymore.

At supper, I practice my steps under the table until Dexter kicks me to make me stop.

“Mom!” I say.

“Mom!” Dexter says.

The phone rings. Dad answers. He listens for a moment, starts to say something, then screws his eyes up tight and stays that way for three, four, five breaths. His shoulders shake once, and then he turns his back to us.

“Girls,” Mom says, “I want you to take your suppers and go finish in front of the
TV
.”

We do as we're told, chewing slowly and staring at the
TV
's dull black eye, which neither of us has made a move to turn on.

Grandpa's funeral is a week later. First will be the church service; then there will be an afternoon and evening at Grandma and Grandpa's house—now just Grandma's house—that Dad calls a “reception” and Mom calls a “wake.” They decide that Dexter and I can't come to either the church or the house because we're too young and will get too upset. The night Grandpa died, Dad went out and brought Grandma home with him so she wouldn't have to spend that first night alone. We cried with her then. The funeral and what comes after, Mom explains, are for people who knew Grandpa but weren't as close to him as his own two favorite girls. At the last minute, though, Dex throws a fit, crying and begging to go with them to say good-bye to Grandpa. I, who have cried so much in the past few days I feel scoured out, am unable to produce one tear more. I watch numbly while our parents struggle to calm the now near-hysterical Dex.

“Sweetie,” Mom says. “But your friend is here.” And that's true: Mean Megan has come over to keep Dex company this evening. I was allowed to invite my friend Sam, but at the last minute Sam's mom phoned to say Sam's little brother had come down with chicken pox and Sam was in quarantine. I don't really mind. I don't especially want to watch funny videos or play Boggle and pretend to have a good time. With Mean Megan taking care of Dex, I can just read or, more accurately, stare at the white space between the words while my mind roams far far away.

Mom is talking very softly to Dexter now, but I hear my own name in the flow of words. I understand she's telling Dex that I can't come along but I can't be left alone.

“That's okay, Mrs. Snow,” Mean Megan says suddenly. “I have my St. John's Ambulance.”

We look at her blankly.

“My babysitting certificate,” Mean Megan says. “I can do
CPR
.”

Then Dex is getting her good black shoes and her good black felt coat with the buckles and nobody is exactly telling her not to. I realize my sister was already wearing a dark skirt and sweater and has probably been planning this—grim determination collapsing into panic—since she got up this morning.

“Mommy,” I say, meaning to protest, but no one hears. Mom is now having a quiet word with Mean Megan, both of them glancing meaningfully at me from time to time.

“Daddy,” I say, but he only gives me a hug and says I'm his pumpkin and his princess and they'll all be home very, very soon, which I know—it's not even lunchtime yet—is not close to being true. Then they're gone, and the door is closed, and Mean Megan and I are left staring at each other in the front hall. I think I might have a few tears left after all.

I'm remembering everything I've ever tried to forget about Mean Megan, everything that's making me think this day can't get too much worse. Remembering, for instance, the time Mean Megan invited me to play hide-and-seek with her and Dexter and, while I hid, persuaded Dexter it was all right to abandon the game and go look at magazines in Dexter's room. They left me squooshed under the kitchen sink for close to half an hour, so that I couldn't stand straight and my foot felt like needles when Mom finally opened the cupboard door to throw away a handful of carrot scrapings, and I scared her Half Out Of Her Wits. Remembering, also, the time right after Mean Megan and Dexter became friends—this was a few years ago—when we were all in the same school together, and I was really quite small and didn't know any better and tried to say hi to Mean Megan in the hallway, and Mean Megan ignored me and walked on by. Reflecting, too, that Mean Megan is as proud of her own prettiness as Narcissus (I know about him from my book on the ancient Greeks) and once looked at Dexter's and my baby pictures on the windowsill in the living room and pointed out that I was not nearly as cute anymore and would only get uglier until the day I died.

“I'm really sorry about your grandpa,” Mean Megan says.

No! No! That's worse! Niceness is worse!

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I say as I run there and slam the door just the way Dexter is doing so often lately, so Mean Megan won't see me cry. I stay in the bathroom until the crying stops. It's interesting how my mind and my crying often seem to part ways. My eyes will be running and my nose sniffling and my shoulders shaking even after my mind has calmed down and is not feeling quite, quite so terribly bad and is even starting to think about other things. Hopefully by now Mean Megan will have gone to watch
TV
in the den.

I flush the toilet and wash my hands and brush my teeth, for no particular reason, and splash cold water on my eyes, pat them dry and open the door. Mean Megan is sitting on the floor opposite the bathroom door, leaning against the wall, finger-combing long strands of her straight black hair.

“Are you okay?” she says, flipping her hair back and looking closely at me.

“What's
CPR
?” I say.

“Say I make you lunch,” Mean Megan says. “Say you start to choke on your sandwich. I could save your life.”

I see her get dreamy and I know that in her mind she's saving my life and telling my parents all about it when they get home and getting a medal for bravery.

“I could save my own life,” I say. “I could spit the sandwich out, duh.”

“Say you were in a swimming pool,” Mean Megan says.

I can see where this conversation is going. I stomp past her down the hall to the kitchen. Mean Megan follows me.

“Say you swallowed some water and were choking,” she says. “Say you stopped breathing. I could give you artificial respiration and bring you back to life.”

“Stop it,” I say.

“I also know what to do about cuts, poison, dizziness, faintness, abrasions, fever, insect bites, allergic reactions and vomiting,” Mean Megan says. “I can apply a tourniquet. Want to play a game?”

“No!” I say. I get a plate and a glass down from the cupboard. After a second, I make myself say, “Do you want a sandwich?”

“What kind?”

I'm about to break one of Mom's food rules and can't say the word out loud. Instead, I go to the fridge, pull out the jar of chocolate spread and hold it up for Mean Megan to see. Mean Megan frowns and nods.

“You can't tell,” I say. Chocolate spread is strictly a Weekend Food.

“Neither can you,” Mean Megan says. “I'm not allowed to have chocolate.”

“What?” I say.

“Chocolate ruins the complexion, my mother says.”

I make two sandwiches bulging with glossy chocolate spread and slap the plates down on the table. I feel like the eighteenth-century gentleman from another of my books who slaps down his gloves when he's annoyed with someone, as a challenge. Throwing down the gauntlet this is called. A gauntlet is a glove.

Mean Megan eats her sandwich and says it's good.

“What kind of game?” I ask suspiciously.

“You lie down,” Mean Megan says, “and pretend to be choking. And I'll save your life.”

“No,” I say.

“I could do your hair.”

“No!” I say.

“Pretend you have a broken arm? Paint your nails?”

“Stop it!” I say.

“I know,” Mean Megan says. “I can teach you to dance.”

“This is ridiculous,” I say. “I know how to dance. I have my own class now.”

“Since when?” Mean Megan demands. “You suck at dance. I'm sorry, but this is true.”

This is the kind of “I'm sorry” that means its own opposite. “Dexter didn't tell you about my class?”

Mean Megan shakes her head. “Ever since I quit ballet, she won't talk to me anymore.”

“Is that why you're being nice to me?”

Mean Megan nods.

“She's not here,” I say. “She won't notice.” Which is true but pretty nasty. I feel bad as soon as I say it. So I add, “Dexter wouldn't care anyway if you were nice to me.”

“That's true,” Mean Megan says.

We go into the den and I turn on the
TV
. I flip the channels with the clicker until I get to the music video channel.

“Cool,” Mean Megan says.

I put the clicker down and climb up into the big recliner, the one Grandpa used to like to sit in when he came to visit. I wonder why I'm being nice to Mean Megan.

For a long time we don't talk. Mean Megan watches the
TV
with a kind of rapt earnest attention, mouthing the lyrics to the songs she knows and leaning forward to study the singing and the dancing and the clothes. She's as crazy as Dexter. I pick out an architecture magazine of Mom's from the pile next to the recliner and look at pictures of beautiful homes around the world. Mean Megan gets up and leaves the room. I hear her go down the hall to the bathroom and then come back via the kitchen. I hear the suck and sigh of the fridge door being opened and the heavy thump of the oven door. I hear the
beepa-beepa-beep
of the timer and I wonder what Mean Megan is doing.

“Your mom told me to put in the leftover lasagna at three-fifty for half an hour for dinner.” She sits down on the sofa again and speaks with her eyes riveted to the
TV
, where a young girl is singing with her head thrown back, at the top of her lungs, in a rainstorm. In the video her clothes are getting soaked, and every time she flicks her hair, droplets fling away like sparks. “I love lasagna,” Mean Megan says, watching the girl intently. “I only get it when I come to your house. We don't eat cheese at home.”

“That is insane,” I say. I've been staring for a long time at a picture of an underground house built into the side of a hill. The house itself is practically invisible, except for the front door.

“My dad is lactose intolerant,” Mean Megan says.

We eat our lasagna in front of the
tv
. Dusty wanders through the room and I instinctively reach to scoop her up but Mean Megan gets there first and holds Dusty in her lap, cooing and petting until Dusty is purring like a vacuum cleaner. “I love your cat, he's so cute,” Mean Megan says, finally letting Dusty spill to the ground so she can keep eating her lasagna.

I think my eyes will fall out of my head and roll away across the floor like marbles. “Aren't you allergic?”

“I love cats,” Mean Megan says. “They just make me a little sneezy. Or if I, like, forget to wash my hands and touch my eye, my eye will water a little. It's not so bad.”

When
Eighties Hour
comes on, Mean Megan asks politely if I would mind if she flipped around, and I politely say she should go ahead. She's given me a particularly cheesy, crusty portion of lasagna, and I'm starting to feel mellow. Eventually she settles on a teen movie about a girl who really, really, really wants to be a ballet dancer even though everyone tells her she's too big and tall. She starts to go on diets until everyone tells her she's too thin, and then she goes to the school doctor and switches to choreography. She starts eating again and gets a date with the school quarterback and is named Prom Queen and makes a courageous teary speech about loving yourself.

“That's your sister,” Mean Megan says. “Except her body is perfect just the way it is. She's the best dancer in her class. She wins everything. It's all she ever thinks about, ballet, ballet, ballet.”

“I'm Dexter,” I say, jumping up from my chair and going
en pointe
, which means on my tippy-toes. “May I have some more lasagna, please?” I ask in a fluting voice with a vague English accent. I do a pirouette. Mean Megan laughs and says, in a pretty good imitation of Dexter's voice, “You're doing that
wrong
. I'll show you. Watch me. I can do it perfectly. You can't. Nobody is perfect but me.”

I don't laugh. I'm watching Mean Megan's face.

“It's true,” Mean Megan says, back in her own voice again, shrugging. “She
is
perfect. She's so, so good and I'm just not. I got so sick of it. I just wanted to try something else for a change, something I could do better than her.”

“Jazz,” I say.

“Hip-hop.” Mean Megan flips back to the music video channel and says, “Perfect.” A young man is half singing, half talking his way through a song while some pretty girls chirp along in the background. The young man looks annoyed and makes a lot of rapid hand gestures. Mean Megan begins to dance in a loose, relaxed way that I know instantly is very, very cool. When she's finished, I clap.