Girl Unmoored (22 page)

“So. How do you
know
?” I
did
stare at Jenny Pratt a lot. She was the meanest girl in school, but she was also the prettiest.

Mike chuckled and shrugged, but when he saw my face he shook his head and got serious again. “Okay. Think of a boy and a girl in your class. Tell me their names.”

“Jenny,” I said. “And, yuck. No one.”

“Oh, come on. How are we going to find out then? Just name a boy, any boy.”

I looked over at Mike’s perfect profile.
Mike Weller
, I wanted to say. But I breathed in a mountain of air instead and turned back to the dashboard. “Seth Chambers.” I was done with Johnny Berman.

“Good.” He turned to me. “Now, if you had to, and I mean
had
to, like somebody said they would lock you in your room without food or water until you kissed one of them, Jenny or Seth, which one would you pick?”

I smiled at the world whizzing by outside my window and thought of kissing Seth Chambers right in front of Rennie and Jenny Pratt.

“Which one?” Mike asked again.

“Seth Chambers.”

“There. You’re not gay. Sorry.”

“Yay,” I said clapping like I just won something.

Mike didn’t say anything, but later, when we were turning down our dirt road, I realized that if I had won, that meant Mike had lost.

M was resting, my dad said, when Mike and I walked in quietly and startled him, sitting in his office with the door wide open. Mike had parked in Mrs. Weller’s driveway behind her love bug, then run in quickly to tell her he would be coming back in a minute, but needed to ask my dad something first.

“Hi, Mr. Bramhall,” Mike said from my dad’s doorway.

“Hi, Mike,” my dad said in a voice he used for his students, deep and full of facts. “How’s Millie?”

“She seems okay today, thanks.”

I waited for my dad to ask about Chad, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, “Where’ve you been, Apron?”

Right then I knew I was in trouble. My dad sat back with his arms crossed and stared at me.

“Getting The Boss out of here like you told me to. He’s up for adoption at Mike and Chad’s. I took the bus,” I told the floor.

Mike turned to me, then back to my dad. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bramhall. I should have made her call you. I had a bit of an emergency and by the time I got back—”

“Back?” my dad said, standing up.

“She wasn’t alone. I didn’t leave Apron by herself—”

I looked at Mike quicker than I should have. And then saw that my dad had watched me do that.

“Who’d you leave her
with
?” my dad asked.

“My friend, Chad,” Mike answered.

“Chad?” my dad repeated, walking around his desk, getting bigger right before our very eyes. “Your friend with AIDS?”

I turned to Mike. All this time I thought it was cancer, like my mom.

Mike looked at me, then back to my dad. “Yes,” he said.

“And you think
that’s
smart?” My dad stared at Mike without blinking.

“Okay,” Mike nodded, backing up. “Got it.”

“Wait!” I said.

My dad shushed me. “Margie’s
sleeping
.”

Mike turned and walked out the door.

“Dad,” I pleaded. “Can I work at Scent Appeal this summer? I’ll take the bus. I don’t need anyone to drive me or pick me up, and I’ll call you if I’m going to be late, I promise.” The words spilled out of my mouth faster than I could plan them. “Please?”

“A
job
?” my dad chuckled, next to me now. “Are you kidding, Apron? You have plenty of jobs to do right here.”

Something inside my chest snapped. There was no way I was going to be stuck with M ordering me around all summer. I grabbed a pile of paper from his desk and threw it on the ground. “You have
no idea
how much she hates me, Dad” I yelled. Then it hit me. “Actually, maybe you do, and you just don’t care.”

I spun away and started after Mike. But behind me, my dad said, “Hold it. You’re not going anywhere, young lady!” So I turned toward the stairs just as the screen door slammed.

M didn’t want a girl.

I knew because she leaned her bad mood into my lobster and told me. “It is why I am so sick, because she is the girl. If she were a boy, I would be better.” She said this while my dad was outside checking on a screen that was ripped.

I smiled
oh well
, and got up for some milk. I had already cleaned all the pans, even before serving the potatoes and hamburger meat I fried up. I told my dad I wasn’t going to be eating meat anymore, but my dad said, “Well, you can still cook it,” and left the package on the counter for me.

Then he said, because
that’s
what I was going to be doing this summer,
chores
. And then maybe, when M could walk again without having to clunk around in her wooden shoe—it took her a whole phrase on the
Wheel of Fortune
to get down the stairs for dinner—I
might
be able to start doing things like a regular kid again. That was when he went to look at the ripped screen and M leaned over into my lobster.

After Mike left, I hadn’t planned on coming out of my room, ever. But my dad knocked on my door and told me if I didn’t get downstairs and start helping with the dinner, he was going to make me clean out the entire garage. And
that
was just the beginning.

“At least she will not be lazy like you,” M said touching her bump.

I sat down with my milk and looked her straight in the eye, trying to find some nice words to kill her with, but before I could, my dad walked back inside slapping his neck. “Damn mosquitoes. That screen’s fine. I don’t know how they’re getting in.”

Neither of us had touched our dinners, but my dad didn’t notice until he sat down and picked up his fork.

“What’s going on? Apron? I asked you a question.”

“
Malus bonum ubi se simulat, tunc est pessimist
,” I told him. Then I snuck a look at my palm, where I had written it. “
Pessimus
,” I corrected myself. A bad man is worst of all when he pretends to be a good one.

My dad tightened his mouth. He glanced at M to see what her reaction was, but when he saw it was the same old blank one, he looked back at me. I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t too late. M could leave and take that little whatever with her, but I hadn’t looked that sentence up yet.

“
Vos have orator satis
,” he ordered me in a dark growl.

But he was wrong—I
hadn’t
said enough.

“Dad,” I said praying, my two hands smashed together in front of me. “Dad. You don’t
get
it. She doesn’t
want
a baby girl. She doesn’t want a
baby
. She hits it.”

M’s face went stark white and her eyes flickered back and forth so fast she looked like a TV channel that lost its picture. My dad shook his head at me, mad tucked into every wrinkle. “Apron. I don’t want to see you for the rest of the night. Go to your room.”

I stood. Yesterday, my
Save the Seals
pamphlets had finally arrived. The baby seal sprawled out next to its bloody stump of a mother on the cover had a better chance of surviving than me around here now.

I spun away, but before I walked out, I turned back and saw M’s face, still as white as a ghost.

When it got dark, I sat under my window and looked at the stars. Some of them were shiny, but most of them were dim: here one blink, gone another. I used to love looking at the stars, but now they looked old and used, like they should be swept up and thrown away.

Later, I tiptoed down the hall to the bathroom. My dad’s door was shut, but downstairs I heard him talking. At first I thought it was to M, probably eating a whole tub of ice cream while he rubbed her back, but then I heard him say, “You sure, Dr. Timmons? There’s no chance she can get it?”

In the morning, when I woke up for the hundredth time since I had first fallen asleep, it was finally seven o’clock.
All night long I had nightmares about M holding me down in murky water while my dad and Mike played four square outside on our newly paved driveway. And every time I woke up, dripping in sweat and lifting my head for air, I tried to keep myself awake so I wouldn’t have to go back to sleep and wake up again, remembering how my dad wouldn’t let me work at Scent Appeal.

But morning was here to stay, you could tell by the birds.

I walked over to the mirror and right when I lifted my pajama top up to check on my progress down there, the door opened and my dad stuck his head in.

I pulled my top down. My dad blinked and disappeared, shutting the door quickly. A few seconds later, he knocked.

“Come in,” I said trying to sound like he hadn’t just seen me naked.

“Apron,” my dad said sitting on my bed. He looked like he had been up all night. His hair was going this way and that, and he had on the same green pants and dark blue polo shirt he had been wearing yesterday.

“What?” I asked.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said wiggling his toes, cracking them around. “I’ve been thinking that maybe helping your friend Mike this summer would be a good idea.” He looked at me after he said it, but I clenched my teeth and told my heartbeat to knock it off, there were two sides to every story.

“Why? What does she need now, free flowers?”

My dad sighed, exhausted. Then he clasped his hands on the back of his neck and looked up. His elbows pointed at me. “Isn’t there any way we can all get along?”

I looked at the floor, at his toes that had jumped on rocks and kicked in the ocean when he was still that freckle-faced boy in Grandma Bramhall’s picture.

My dad stood.

“So. If you help around here before you leave in the morning, and help with dinner when you get back, well, we can try it. All right?”

I shrugged again. But secretly, every single amoeba sliding around in my stomach was blowing on party horns now. It might be an M-less summer after all.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

He put his hand on my doorknob. “And no sharing their cups or using their forks,” he said pointing at me with his other hand. “I don’t care what Dr. Timmons says. I mean it, Apron.”

Before he turned to walk out, I stepped forward. “Dad?” I asked quietly. “Does this mean Mike has it too?”

My dad shook his head and said, “I don’t know, Apron. It might.”

My heart dropped like an ice cube.

My dad started to leave but then stopped. “Did anyone take The Boss?”

“Not yet.”

“Great,” he said. “So you can still visit him then?”

I nodded.

“Great,” he said again and closed the door.

I dropped back down on my bed. Mike looked completely healthy, except for his crooked teeth. I thought about crawling under my sheets and pulling them over me for the rest of my life. But the truth was, it gets hot under there and I already knew that sooner or later you have to come up for air.

So I finished getting dressed. I had a job to get to.

On the way downstairs, I heard my dad mumbling something serious in his room. If he was talking to the doctor again, this time I wanted to hear it. I tiptoed closer, and peeked in, M was sitting on the bed with her back turned to him. He lifted his hand to her cheek, but she stiffened and turned farther away. Then my dad dropped his hand. Maybe I wasn’t the only one M hated around here now.

The Scent Appeal door was unlocked.
And when I opened it, Toby wheeled out from around the counter. He was dressed in all white again, with his knees still too close together.

“Hey, kid,” he said.

“Where are Mike and Chad?” The air seemed heavier than it should.

“Mexico.”

My chin dropped. “Mexico?”

“Oh hey,
little
Mexico.”

“Where’s that?”

“Down around there some place.” Toby waved his hand behind me, toward the street. “I don’t know exactly myself. They’ll be back by lunchtime and I’ll be here with you until then. Mike’s orders.”

“Okay,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed. Toby always made something in me hurt.

I walked up to The Boss. “Hey, little guy.” He smiled and twitched.

“I see we have a new friend,” Toby smiled. “Why are you getting rid of him if he doesn’t smell?”