Five Minutes More (5 page)

I keep my head inside my locker, moving books around so I don't have to talk.

She snaps one purple fingernail with the other. “D'Arcy, you'd call me if you wanted to talk, right?”

“Sure,” I mumble.

“Even if it's the middle of the night, you can call me.”

I turn to look at her. “Yeah, I know.”

“You can tell me anything,” she says.

What is the matter with her? She has this look on her face like she's wearing a thong that's too small. This is what I didn't want: people acting all weird. I slam my locker door and snap the lock.

We head down the hall to homeroom. Marissa's walking backward. “Hey,” she says, “do you remember the time your dad came back from Mexico, and he got us out of study hall and we went out and had burritos? He had that big sombrero on and it was sticking out of the sunroof.” She laughs. “Your dad was so cool.”

I nod. I remember. I just don't want to.

Before we go into class, Marissa grabs my arm. “Listen. If you just can't stand sitting in there, pull on your hair or something. I can still do the cough, and it's like I'm gonna pass out.” She snaps her fingers. “And just like that we're off to the nurse's office.”

“That's so sneaky,” I say.

“But effective.” She grins, and I almost manage a grin back.

It's getting dark when I get home. That's the thing I hate most about this time of year, more than the cold. I feel as though all my life outside of school is happening in the dark.

There aren't any lights on in the house. “Mom?” I call.

No answer. The car's in the driveway. Where is she? I feel that stomach-falling, top-of-the-roller-coaster sensation inside.

“Mom?”

Nothing.

Some sense, some kind of radar maybe, makes me turn toward the living room. She's there, standing by the window in the almost darkness, as if she and the room were in another place. I touch her arm. “Mom?”

“Beautiful, isn't it, D'Arcy,” she says, staring out the window.

“What?”

“The sunset. It was your father's favorite time of day. You know that.”

I don't know that. I hear it again, just like this morning when the phone rang so early: my own heartbeat pounding in my ears. I wait until I realize she isn't going to say any more. She just stands there looking out into the night. The first stars are winking on.

“C'mon, Mom,” I say at last. “Let's get some supper.”

She looks at me. For a moment, less than that really, it seems as though there's no one behind her eyes, just blankness. Then it passes. “Supper? I didn't even think about supper. How about spaghetti?”

“Sounds great,” I say.

Brendan puts his arm around me, tucks my body close against his. “I'm glad we came,” he says, leaning close to my face.

“Yeah,” I say, nodding in case he didn't hear me over the music and the people.

We're at the South End Street Fair, which isn't actually on the street at all. It's in an old warehouse close to the water-front. There are dozens of things to do and see and hear. Lots of sound and color and light and people. It's almost impossible to talk or even think, which is good because I don't want to do either one. It's taken so much energy all week just to act normal. I haven't told Brendan or Marissa or anyone that my dad might have...because we don't know yet. We don't.

“What do you want to do first?” Brendan's breath is warm on my ear.

“I don't care.” I have to shout for him to hear me as we get swallowed into the action.

I let him pull me from booth to booth, past painted silk scarves, fat teddy bears in lace collars, and the softest angora sweaters made with the fur of real angora goats—which are also for sale at the same stall. We stop for a while to watch two mimes and again to listen to a couple of musicians, one with a flute and the other on guitar. The tune is fast, happy like laughter, the flute and guitar notes chasing each other.

I try on a beaded denim jacket at one stall. “D'Arcy! Hi.” Someone grabs my arm. Marissa. She's wearing a psychedelic
bodysuit, all swirling green and orange, with her black leather jacket.

“That looks great on you,” she says, looking at the jacket. I flip the tag so she can see the price. “Wow! Are they kidding?”

“I don't think so,” I say. I put the jacket back on its hanger.

“I like that one,” Marissa says, pointing to a design done with lots of dark beads. “I can just see my dad if I spent that much money for a jacket. He'd start squeezing the sides of his head between his thumb and fingers, and he'd say, ‘What does a stroke feel like?'”

She half turns and smiles at the very tall guy behind her, who smiles at me. He has long blond hair in a ponytail and tiny black-framed glasses. “D'Arcy, this is Zack.”

“Hi, Zack,” I say. Did Marissa tell me about Zack? I don't remember.

“Hi, D'Arcy.”

I like his smile and the way all the lines in his face go up.

“Did you try any of the food yet?” Marissa asks.

“We haven't been here that long.”

“You have to try the smoked sausage. It's in this big bun with tons of onions and stuff.” She looks around and then confides, “I ate a huge one.”

Behind her, Zack holds up two fingers.

“And there's this place with apple fritters. Yum.” She squeezes her eyes shut with pleasure, then opens them, shaking her head. “God, I'm a pig. I'm so fat.”

She slaps her thighs with her palms. Nothing moves. She isn't fat anywhere.

People are pushing past, bumping into us. “We've gotta keep moving,” Marissa says. “Some people are so ignorant. See ya.”

Zack smiles at me as she pulls him away.

Maybe I'm trying too hard. Maybe it's enough if I just show up and try to look normal.

Brendan comes up behind me and slips his arms around mine. “I'm starved. Wanna eat?”

“Umm, okay.”

We make a circuit of all the food stands. I get spring rolls from Betty Fong's, and Brendan decides on the smoked sausage Marissa was going on about, piled high with onions and sauerkraut.

“I'm not sitting next to you and that,” I tell him as we snag an empty table. I pull my chair around so we're opposite each other.

“C'mon. How about a little kiss?” he teases, leaning across the table. “You're not afraid of a little puppy breath, are you?”

I bop him on the nose with one of my spring rolls. “No dog with half a nose would go near that thing.”

Brendan drops back into his seat laughing. “You know the first time I ever ate one of these? It was the first time I was ever here. Me and you, your mom and dad. Your father said, ‘You like sauerkraut?' I said, ‘Sure.' I wasn't even sure what sauerkraut was.”

He takes another huge bite and starts talking again before he's swallowed it all. “Your dad could eat anything. Remember when we went to Spruce Point? He ate all those corn dogs, and then he got on The Plume and it didn't bother him a bit.”

“I remember.” I put down my half-finished roll. I'm not as hungry as I thought I was.

“We were all green, holding our stomachs and he goes and gets—”

“I remember.” I fling out my arms. “I remember. Okay?”

“What's your problem?”

“I don't have a problem. You have a problem.” I pull strings of cabbage out of my spring roll. “You don't listen. I told you I remember and you just go on talking.”

Brendan jams the end of his sandwich into his mouth, chews it maybe twice and swallows. “What? Is it that time of the month already?” he asks.

I jump up. My chair tips over, hitting the concrete floor with a bang that gets swallowed by the crowd noise. “Shut up,” I yell at him. I shove my way through the crowd until I can't see the table anymore. Both of my hands are twisted into fists. If I had any fingernails, they would have poked right into my palms. All of a sudden I want to go home. There's too much noise; too much everything.

Off to one side, people are laughing, pointing. I see a juggler on a unicycle, weaving around the tables and the people. As he gets closer, I see that it's apples he's juggling, circling so fast I can't count how many there really are.

How does he do that?

The juggler stops right in front of me. He is young and thin, with white face paint and shaggy reddish hair. His feet rock on the pedals and somehow he stays upright and in place. I'm mesmerized by all that motion. I think maybe it's what the inside of my head is like. The juggler grins at me. Suddenly his hand goes up, and he flips his top hat into the moving circle and back onto his head again. Then he twists his wrist somehow, and all at once I'm holding a shiny red apple.

We've drawn a crowd. They clap and laugh. The juggler tips his head at the applause and gives me a sideways wink before he moves away.

I get a shivery feeling like someone ran a finger up the back of my neck. I turn around and there is Seth Thomas, just a few feet away, still and quiet as people push by him. When he sees me looking at him, he walks over.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi.”

“Did you get caught up on all that math okay?”

“Yeah.”

We stare at the people swirling all around us. I don't have anything else to say, and I guess neither does he.

“He's pretty good,” Seth says then.

“What?” I say.

He gestures at the apple I'm still holding on to. “The guy who was juggling and riding the unicycle.”

“I couldn't do it, that's for sure.”

“You could juggle. That's easy.”

I shake my head. “I don't think so. He must have had five apples going around. I think about trying to do that... no way.”

“So maybe you couldn't do five, but you could keep, say, three balls going.” Seth pushes the hair back from his face. I notice he has very long fingers.

“You can juggle?” I say.

“Uh-huh. My...” He stops for a second. “I haven't been doing it that long,” he says. He runs his thumb back and forth over the ends of his fingers. “You don't think about it. You just
kinda shut off your mind and do it.” He shrugs. “I could show you how sometime.”

I wonder if he could show me how to shut my mind off, but I don't say it.

Seth looks at me and I get that shivery feeling again, as if somehow he knows how much work it is to act normal. But how could he? “So, I'll see you,” he says.

I nod.

I watch him walk away and wonder why it seems he knows things about me that there's no way he can know.

“Mmmm. It smells good in here,” Mom says as she comes through the door.

“Baked potatoes, hamburger casserole and string beans,” I tell her, waving my oven mitts at the stove with a flourish. The kind of meal a real family would eat. We can be a family. A normal family, just the two of us. We can do this.

“I don't believe you did all this. I couldn't even remember whether I'd taken anything out of the freezer or not.”