Spiral (4 page)

Leroy, blessed Leroy, finally interjects, but on no one’s behalf. “Did you know that vegans make up about 1.3% of the population?”

Everyone looks at him for a moment of silence.

Cherie, possibly unaware of how mean she truly sounds, whispers with fascination, “It speaks.”

Claudia is frustrated, but she takes it out on the wrong person. “Seriously, Leroy? Don’t you have anything normal to say?”

I try to jump in again, but Chloe beats me to it and throws her napkin down dramatically. “I’m not sitting at this table of freaks.” She gets up and storms upstairs.

Aunt Darla is mortified. “Chloe! Oh, my!”

“Good! We don’t want to sit with you either!” Cherie stands abruptly, and Danika follows as she storms away from the table to the dining room. I hear the sounds from the adult room promptly cease.

“Angel, what’s wrong?” Cherie’s father, Mark, calls as he rushes to her side.

“I’m leaving, Daddy!” she sniffs. “I’ll have Fernando come back for you.”

“But, Cherie darling, you promised – ” he tries to say, but she won’t have any of his coaxing and shakes her head.

“No, I promised you I would try, but they’re impossible. I just can’t take another minute! Chloe and Claudia are being rude as always, and then there’s a kid saying weird stuff…”

As she whines on, I lower my head and shake it with a sigh. Everything she is complaining about is sort of true, and she’s not exactly exaggerating, which is the saddest part. I hear her patient father trying to soothe and calm her, but she bulldozes through him and the front door.

“See, Leroy? I told you that people don’t like to hear all those facts!” Aunt Darla scolds. She chases after her. “Wait! Cherie! ”

Brenton glares at Claudia. “Look at what you did! You chased her away!”

I clear my throat and give a low warning, “Brenton, let it go.” I’ve got to try to keep some order around here. I may not have power over what the girls do, but I can prevent my little brother from continuing the fight.

My tone falls on deaf ears as Claudia scoffs, “She was totally mean to you, Brenton! Why do you even care?” I kind of have to agree with her there, but my brother doesn’t care.

“Brenton.” My eyes dart to him to stay quiet.

Brenton, however, is indignant. “That doesn’t matter! You’re just jealous of her!” I kind of agree with him, too. I’m feeling helpless, a mere spectator to this catastrophic game of nasty ping pong.

But I try anyway. “Stop –”

Claudia throws her napkin at him and shouts, “Go play with your imaginary friend!” It misses him and whizzes right past my nose.

“Hey!” I cry out as I watch it slap against Leroy’s face.

Brenton gets up, punching the table with both fists. “I will! At least I’m not a Miley Cyrus wanna be!” He throws a bread roll that almost clocks Britney in the head.

“Cut it out!” I bellow, leaning in front of my little sister and blocking the roll.

“She started it!”

“No, you did!”

I jump up and yell, “I said cut it out!”

And that’s when they, the suspicious adults who are suddenly attuned to the commotion, fill the doorway of the family room. That moment, which should end up on the cutting room floor, is all they see. They’re all there: Jim, Mom, Grandma, Jim’s mother and father, and Cherie’s parents. The adults see me, and only me, on my feet and red with anger, yelling, as the table clears in a heartbeat. Brenton stampedes up to his room. Britney whimpers beside me. Claudia lets out a scream-growl and storms away in the opposite direction.

I only care about my little sister right now. “I’m sorry, Brat,” I murmur softly, sitting down to comfort her.

But she pulls away. “I’m not eating with these freaks!” She scampers off before anyone can catch her. I am left alone at the table with Leroy.

“Claud, what’s going on?” Jim calls after her.

“I’m not hungry!” Claudia cries out. A door slams. The adults, minus Darla, look at me as if I’m somehow responsible for what has happened. Cherie’s parents, Mark and Camille, shake their heads at me. Leroy is reading again as if none of this has happened in front of him. He might as well be putting a finger to his nose and shouting,
“Not it!”

My mom is afraid to say my name. Or too angry to say it. “J – boys, what happened here?”

I feel a thousand times worse than she does, but there’s no way to convince her it wasn’t my fault.

“They were all just…just… being mean, Mom,” I sort of whine. I didn’t know what to say without going through every detail. Jim looks at me sternly and shakes his head. I have to hold back the glower I want to give him. He doesn’t know how cruel and inhuman his daughters are, he only knows about my violent past, so I’m immediately the problem.

Still, I can’t shake the guilt that somehow I am actually responsible for this debacle. One look at my mom’s disappointed frown tells me that I’m accurate in my assessment.

My mom and Jim march up the stairs, and the other adults return to the main dining room in muted mumbles, leaving me alone with Leroy.

“Well, that’s one way to clear a table,” Leroy nervously jokes as the room clears. “I guess that means more food for us.”

I do everything I can to control my anger, concentrating it all into my tightening hand until I crunch my empty soda can. Leroy keeps his eyes forward, and I can tell he’s afraid he’ll be next.

I mutter, “Those girls ruin everything. I can’t take them anymore! Look at me – I’m so angry, I’m sweating like a pig!”

Leroy closes his book slowly. “Many teenage boys suffer from night sweats.”

I turn in my chair to look at him, and he flinches. I clench my jaw, hating that my whole family still perceives me as some kind of loose cannon. “Relax, I’m not going to hit you, Leroy. Can you just not do the fact thing right now?”

Leroy relaxes a little and shrugs. “Well, I could say what I really think.”

I cock an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

He serves himself food as he speaks. “That you’re sweating because you were nervous around Cherie.”

“Are you kidding? I wanted to strangle her!” I guffaw.

Leroy laughs at me. “Could’ve fooled me. It’s okay; she is a pretty girl.” He passes the tray of turkey meat. “I think you’ve been asking for this.”

I take the platter, but I set it to the side. “Hold on a sec –you were reading. You don’t even know what just took place here.”

He smirks at me and shakes his head. “I notice a lot more than you think, Jack.”

I feel my cheeks grow hot, and I force myself to take a deep breath. “Well, you noticed wrong.”

Leroy and I spend the next twenty minutes in silence. He eats and reads. I eat a little here and there; I’m only human. There was no way I’d sit at that table for all that time without touching any of the amazing food I’d been lusting after all day.

A soundtrack of clinking glasses and forks scraping plays in the other room, accompanied by belly laughter and cheer. How do adults manage to go a whole night without arguing over anything? Well, these adults at least. Mom never had that kind of luck with my dad.

Still, Mom and Dad got to choose to live together. Dad got to choose when he’d had enough of living together. Dad didn’t just get up from the table when he needed a way out; he left the house. No one lumped Mom and Dad and their relatives into one home and said,
“Here, deal with it.”

“Wanna go for a drive?” I ask, suddenly claustrophobic and anxious for fresh air. I love my car. It’s my space, the one place where I have total control, and no one else gets to share it unless I ask them to jump in. Right now, I just want to get in and drive.

Leroy seems game, and we are about to leave the table when Aunt Darla, Mom and Jim come down the stairs with the rest of the brood, marching each of my siblings back to the kid table with resignation.

“Where do you think you’re going?” my mom asks me, perturbed.

I look back at Leroy. “We were going for a drive. We finished eating.”

She shakes her head. “Oh, no, mister, this holiday dinner is happening. Sit down. Besides, it’s snowing, and the roads are bad.”

I sit down with a heavy sigh, looking at the disgruntled faces around me. No one looks happy to be at this table. I think of how hard my mom worked to make this dinner for them, and I feel like none of them deserves to be here.

Not even me.

“Where’s Cherie?” Brenton asks.

“She went back to her hotel,” Aunt Darla says softly, patting his shoulder when his face drops. “Her driver will come back for Aunt Camille and Uncle Mark later.”

The table is full of scowls and folded arms and upturned noses.

“Look guys, I know not everybody gets along,” Jim begins, and I watch his eyes rest on me.
What did I do
? “But if you can just try – at least for tonight, for our sake – we really would appreciate it. Look, it’s snowing outside, how many times is there a true white Christmas? And look at this table – we can’t let all this good food go to waste! Besides, you may actually have a good time tonight if we just forgive each other for our differences for a few hours. Whaddya say?”

The twins shrug. Brenton pouts and sighs dramatically, and Britney holds up her half-eaten cookie to me.

“No, thanks.” Jim shoots me a look, and I have to recover quickly. “I was talking to Britney. She tried to give me a cookie.”
But also no to your whole
“we can be a cookie-cutter family, too”
speech
, I grumble inside my head.

“I know you kids will make the best of it,” Mom says at last, putting her hand over Jim’s. “As for Cherie, well, we will just have to talk about how to treat guests at another time. As a
family
.” She lets those last syllables hang in the air for a moment.

Jim’s father, Elliot, comes to the door and announces it’s time to light the menorah. Claudia and Chloe rise dutifully from their chairs and walk to the dining room.

Brenton turns to Leroy, oblivious. “So what else do you know about chocolate, Leroy?” Leroy and Brenton begin to talk chocolate, and I have to nudge them while simultaneously taking Britney’s hand.

“C’mon guys,” I say half-heartedly. “We have to do this, too.”

I lead all three of them toward the adult table, where the others are crowded around a half-lit menorah. It may be Christmas Eve, but it is also the fifth night of Hanukkah. As we stand in the room and listen to the prayers being sung by only six adults in the room, I realize that this, too, is a visual metaphor for my life. A hodgepodge of people, all clustered together, the adults trying to harmonize in a sacred song, the kids refusing to participate, and I’m supposed to set the example when I don’t know the words.

T
here’s a certain feeling everyone wakes up with on Christmas morning, and it’s never dread. Usually, you tingle with anticipation, as if the gift you were hoping for will be sitting at the foot of your tree, or, as you get older, outside in the garage. For some people, it’s the serenity of quiet, because lush snow is falling and the house is still, and no one else is up yet. For me, it’s usually the grumble of my stomach because Christmas morning means tons of food, both fresh and leftover, and Mom’s amazing hot chocolate.

But I wake up to the sounds of muffled sobs, not my growling insides. I look down, and Britney is curled in her usual spot between my chest and my arm. Maybe she was talking in her sleep…

I hear the heavy, near hysterical whimpering again, and this time it’s farther away. I look at the clock; 3:30 AM. Did Brenton finally discover that Santa doesn’t exist? Did one the twins tell him just to be mean?

Oh, someone please shoot me.

I look down at Britney again; she’s still asleep. I don’t want to wake her. I pull my arm out from under her head with well-practiced, ninja-like skill. Britney doesn’t stir, so I slide carefully out from beneath the sheets and fumble in the dark to find my t-shirt.

Footsteps pad softly past my door, and the crying sounds like it’s coming from downstairs now. There are voices, too. I soundlessly turn the knob of my door. I look back at Britney and feel bad leaving her. I know if she wakes up in the dark of my room, alone, she’ll freak out, but waking her is much more deterring.

In the hall, I pull the shirt on and listen intently. The voices are muffled, interrupted by sobs and cries that are muffled, too. It sounds like a lot of voices. They’re coming from the family room. I find my way down the steps, each one becoming clearer as the light from downstairs pours through the railing. I know Aunt Darla and Leroy were staying in the guest room in the basement. Could everybody be awake right now?

I pause at the bottom step and find that yes, everyone is up, and there are police officers in the house, dressed in black uniforms, looking somber. Everyone turns to look at me, and I take a step forward.

“Mom?”

“Oh! Jack, honey!” my mom bursts, her face red and swollen, but she’s trying to hide it. “I’m sorry if we woke you!” She hurries to me and hugs me so tight I can barely breathe. I haven’t seen her look like this in a long time, and my guard goes up immediately.

My eyes find Jim. “What’s happening?” I demand, wide awake and anxious.

For the first time since I’ve known him, Jim looks like an old, broken man. His hair looks more white than gray, as does his skin, and the tears he must have already shed are no match for what he starts to release when he says, “There’s been an accident…”

I shrink into myself a little as I watch Jim crumple, and I grab my mother’s arms gently, looking to her for some sort of answer.

“Mom, please…” I can only think of my brother. My pulse builds in speed and force.

“It’s, um, Mark and Camille, sweetie,” she says finally, dabbing at her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt. It takes me a moment to place faces with the names, but when I do, I’m floored.

“Cherie’s parents? What happened?” I repeat.

“They – there was ice on the road, and, I don’t know. They say the car skidded, and slipped, and it went over the guard rail.” She has that look on her face, the look that says she blames herself.
For what
? I wonder.
She feels guilty for having Christmas Eve dinner on Christmas Eve? It’s not her fault it snowed!