Surviving the Applewhites (3 page)

W
hen she finished her breakfast, E.D. had gone out to the meadow with her butterfly net and camera. Winston had lumbered along with her. She was hoping to finish the collecting part of her butterfly project. It was the project she most hated to think of sharing with Jake Semple. First of all, she wouldn’t trust a kid like that with anything as beautiful and fragile as a butterfly. Second, it was her favorite project, and she was very, very nearly finished.

The project plan was to catch, photograph, and
catalog every butterfly in the book
Butterflies of the Carolinas
. She’d started in August and gone out every single day, starting in the meadow where there were usually at least a few, and then covering every square inch of Wit’s End. She’d found every one of them, from the tiny gray hairstreak to the big eastern tiger swallowtail, except one. If she could find that last one—the great spangled fritillary—now, today, she could close out the main part of the project and keep from having to let Jake loose on the world with a butterfly net.

She’d been out for two hours now, and the sun was getting hot. Sweat was dripping into her eyes and running down her back under her T-shirt. She’d been around the property once and was back in the meadow. No great spangled fritillaries. The only butterflies she had found were the ordinary little cabbage whites and sulphurs she had already caught millions of times. And two red-spotted purples. She couldn’t understand it. If she could find both the monarch
and
the viceroy, which looked almost exactly alike, and get photographs that showed how to tell them apart, why couldn’t she find a fritillary? Winston, his short legs and his chest all muddy from wading into the pond for a drink, was flopped in the shade of the honeysuckle by the fence. She was beginning to feel like flopping with him.

“E.D.! Wait for us.” Lucille was waving at her from the other side of the meadow. “We’re doing the grand tour.”
Jake Semple was with her, his scarlet hair flaming in the sun. E.D. sighed. Maybe she could just not mention the butterfly project. Maybe she could say she was studying the life cycle of slugs for natural history.

As Lucille and Jake tramped through the woods, crossed the creek, and skirted the pond, E.D. trailed behind them, with Winston trailing behind her. All the while, she kept her eyes peeled for a great spangled fritillary.

At Lucille’s vegetable garden, Winston flopped in the shade again while Lucille explained to Jake that nature spirits had told her to make the garden round instead of rectangular and that they came into her dreams sometimes to give her advice about planting and cultivating. Jake rolled his eyes several times during her explanation, and even groaned once or twice. E.D. was so used to her aunt’s weird notions that she’d forgotten how strangers tended to react. Jake was being disgustingly rude, but Lucille didn’t seem to notice.

At the goat pen Lucille made E.D. tell the story of the rescue of Wolfbane and Hazel because she said she got too choked up to tell it herself. As E.D. explained how the goats, abused, abandoned, and starving, had turned up in the Applewhites’ woods in the middle of the winter, Lucille’s eyes brimmed with tears. Jake, unmoved, leaned on the fence, his nose wrinkled against Wolfie’s ever-pungent odor. E.D. had read somewhere that future serial killers began by
abusing animals. She made a mental note to alert someone if he started hanging around the goat pen.

When Wolfie got that crazed look he sometimes got in his eyes and charged the fence, smacking into the fence post right where he was standing, Jake barely flinched. The kid was not normal, E.D. thought. Grown men had been known to flee in terror from Wolfie when he got that look. Just a week ago one of Hal’s UPS deliveries had been dumped on the driveway instead of brought up to the house because Wolfie had gotten out of the pen and terrorized the driver.

On the way to show Jake the wood shop, they passed Zedediah’s cottage, where Paulie stood on his t-perch in the shade of the narrow front porch. The parrot looked up from picking at one foot with his beak, raised his green, yellow, and red wings, and swore a long stream of colorful curses. Jake swore back. “Don’t encourage him,” E.D. said. Jake swore some more. Two of a kind, E.D. thought. Birdbrains, both of them.

In the wood shop Zedediah and Archie were both at work, Zedediah at the lathe turning spindles for one of his trademark rocking chairs and Archie carving a series of complicated lines and squiggles into the legs of a turtle-shaped object. “End table,” Archie said when E.D. asked. “One of the pieces for the gallery show.”

Zedediah turned off the lathe and took off his
safety glasses. “Lucille get you set up with a desk in the schoolroom yet?” he asked Jake.

Jake nodded.

“Good. Don’t think that just because there isn’t a teacher standing over you every minute, we don’t take education seriously. The most important thing you’re going to learn while you’re here is who you are and what you’re made of.” E.D. thought they were all likely to learn that about Jake. She was quite sure she didn’t want to know.

When they got to the cottage that was the dance and music studio, they didn’t go in. The strange, cacophonous music Cordelia had written and recorded for her ballet was blaring from inside. Lucille told Jake just to peek in the window so he could see the studio without disturbing Cordelia while she was rehearsing. He stood there with his nose pressed to the window glass a lot longer than he needed to just to see the floor-to-ceiling mirrors they’d put in, E.D. thought.

When they’d finished the tour, without E.D. seeing even a single butterfly, much less a fritillary, they went back to the schoolroom, where Winston collapsed under the computer desk and began, almost immediately, to snore. It occurred to E.D. that the dog didn’t get enough exercise.

“Why don’t you show Jake your curriculum notebook?” Lucille said. “He can see what interests him most and get started. I’m going to get rid of these poor
bouquets. They’re pulling down the energy of the whole room.”

E.D. wished she’d written up some bogus projects to send Jake off in completely different directions from her own—something like the history of the pickle industry, or the place of the preposition in English grammar. But it was too late. She got out her notebook and opened it on the top of what used to be Hal’s desk. Jake was leaning against the computer desk, his arms folded across his chest.

“Aren’t you going to look at it?”

“Why should I?”

“Well, duh! This is a school. We’re a class. And this is what we’re doing.” It occurred to E.D. that she was sounding as if she was in favor of this whole idea. “Suit yourself,” she said. She got out the Civil War novel she had started, settled at her desk, and pretended to read.

He began wandering around the room, picking things up and putting them down again. “Where’s your TV?” he asked after a while. She pretended to be too engrossed in her reading to hear. “I
said
where’s your TV?”

She sighed. “There’s one in Zedediah’s cottage.”

Jake swore. “You mean there isn’t one anywhere else in this whole place?”

“We don’t watch much television,” E.D. said. Sometimes, especially when her friend Melissa was
talking about the cable channels she watched all the time, E.D. wished they were like a normal family, with cable and a TV set in almost every room. But just at this moment, she was glad they weren’t. “We have better things to do with our time.”

Jake swore again. E.D. made an effort to focus on her book.

After a while she heard Jake slump into the seat at his desk. “I don’t see any math in here. Don’t you do math?”

She looked up. He had actually opened her curriculum notebook. “We do math online. You’ve already been signed up for the same course I’m doing, with the same tutor.”

“Could’ve saved themselves the trouble,” he said.

E.D. ignored him and went on reading. She’d actually managed to get engrossed in the story.

By the time Lucille had come back from disposing of the wildflowers, Jake had turned on the computer. “No games!” he said when she came in.

She smiled. “No games.” She clicked off the power on the power strip the computer was plugged into. “And no using the computer without signing up first.” Jake swore. Lucille took no notice. “Now then, you’ve seen the curriculum—what would you like to start with?”

Jake shrugged. “Who says I want to start?”

Lucille clapped a hand over her mouth. “How
thoughtless of me. Giving you an open-ended choice like that on your first day. It’s bound to take you a little time to get used to the way we do things.” She looked around the room, and her eyes lit on the Butterfly Project chart. “Butterflies!” she said. “Perfect! There’s an empty space on E.D.’s chart that needs filling. How about the two of you go out and see if you can find a—what is it?” She peered more closely at the chart. “A great spangled fritillary. That’ll get you back outdoors and it won’t seem so much like schoolwork.”

E.D. groaned. If Lucille was going to start deciding what they were supposed to work on when, why couldn’t she decide they should start with the Civil War or
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
?

“Get the net out again,” Lucille told E.D. She turned back to Jake. “You’ll settle in in no time. You’ll see. Human beings are almost infinitely adaptable. This is all going to work out brilliantly!”

A few minutes later E.D. and Jake were headed back out to the meadow with Winston tagging after them, huffing noisily as he waddled along. E.D. kept hold of the net. She caught a fiery skipper to show him, explaining carefully that she didn’t kill them and mount them, she only photographed them and let them go again. “This is one I already have,” she said as she opened the net and let it fly away. “You can read about them all in the book.” As she spoke, a black swallowtail fluttered over the honeysuckle and into
the meadow, the sun catching the spots of yellow against its black wings.

Jake snatched the net from her hand and went after it. He swept the net and missed, swept again, and the butterfly wavered up and over the fence, then disappeared into the branches of a sweet gum tree on the other side. Jake swore. “Stupid thing to do, catching butterflies.”

“So don’t! You can do something else for natural history.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t intend to be here long anyway.” Jake swung the net lightly across the tops of the grass and weeds, sending puffs of thistledown into the air.

Good
, E.D. thought. “Where do you intend to go?”

Jake shrugged and swept the butterfly net at a dragonfly that veered sharply, changed course, and sped away. “Back to Rhode Island.”

“Yeah? Dad says your social worker told him there aren’t any more foster families there who’ll take you. If you go back, they’re going to send you to Juvenile Hall. They must have some kind of school there. You’d probably like it better than this one. At least the other students would be more your type.”

Jake didn’t say anything. He just struck at the tall grass as if the net were a scythe—one way, then the other—scattering seed heads and blossoms of Queen Anne’s lace.

J
ake sat on the front porch steps of the main house, earphones in his ears, his Walkman radio clipped to his belt, picking at a bit of loose rubber on the sole of his shoe. He hadn’t been able to find the sort of station he wanted, so he’d had to settle for Top One Hundred hits. It was the first time he’d been alone all day. E.D. had gone off somewhere, and Lucille had told him he could do whatever he wanted till dinner.

She hadn’t said when dinner would be. Or what. He wondered what sort of food they served where his
parents were. Better, he bet! It was just possible, if the meals here were anything like lunch—Archie had fixed tofu burgers that Jake had found so completely inedible he’d fed his in bits to the fat old basset hound under the table—that the question of whether he would stay or not would be irrelevant. He’d starve to death.

He kept replaying in his mind what E.D. had said out there in that field full of weeds and bugs. That if he didn’t stay here there was no place to go except Juvenile Hall. That’s what his social worker had told him when she called to talk to him about the Creative Academy. “This is your last chance,” she’d said. But people had been saying stuff like that to him all his life. They hadn’t really meant it. Did they this time? Did he dare take the chance?

It had been easy to blow off Traybridge Middle School. Everybody—kids, teachers, even the principal—had been scared of the bad kid from the city.
Bad kid
. Living up to that label was what Jake did best. All during the Jake Semple Reign of Terror, he hadn’t really thought about what would happen next. Now he knew. This was what. Wit’s End and the Applewhites. But what about after this? Would they really send him to Juvie?

“The other students would be more your type,” E.D. had said. He thought about the guys at home who’d gone to Juvie. The druggies and the ones who bragged about the guns they could bring to school if they
wanted to. It was one thing to be
thought of
as the bad kid from the city. It was something else again to be locked up with real ones.

The dog was sitting a few feet away from him, staring at him with mournful, heavy-lidded eyes. Every so often it made a low sort of moaning sound he could hear over the music in his ears. “What do you want?” he asked. “I don’t have any more tofu burger, if that’s what you’re after.” The dog was as crazy as the rest of them, he thought. No normal carnivore would have gulped down tofu burger the way this one had.

“No food, see? Nothing.” He held up his empty hands toward it. “Go away!” But it didn’t go. It sighed a long, shuddery sigh and sank to the floor, its chin on its outstretched front paws, still staring at him. It was impossible to ignore the expression on its face—as if it had lost its last friend in the world. Jake patted the dog gingerly on the head. It licked his hand. He rubbed it a little behind one ear, and it flopped to its side and then rolled on its back, its stubby little legs in the air. He scratched its chest and it made such a satisfied sound that Jake had to laugh. It closed its eyes then, and after a moment was snoring peacefully, its legs twitching now and again.

Jake’s stomach rumbled as he thought over his alternatives. He thought of the banner in the schoolroom—“the ability to think things through.” Applewhites or Juvie. Applewhites or Juvie. It wasn’t hard to think
things through this time. The choice was clear. One way or another, he was going to have to make this work.

A car went by out on the road, and Jake looked at his watch. A little after five. This must be what passes for rush hour in the boonies. He sighed. There wasn’t anything to do here. He wasn’t about to go to the old man’s cottage and ask to watch TV. He’d gone to the schoolroom to do a little web surfing, but Cordelia had been doing her math on the computer. He’d hung around for a while, looking in the book about butterflies to see what kind he’d missed catching in the meadow, just to be near her, but she was so focused on what she was doing that she didn’t even seem to know he was there. And he certainly didn’t feel like going back to his lavender room.

Suddenly, a white-blond head popped up out of the bushes to his right. Jake was so startled that he jumped and woke the dog, who barked once before turning over and sinking back to sleep. Big round blue eyes gazed at him with fierce intensity.

He pushed back his earphones. “What do
you
want?” he asked Destiny.

The little boy whispered something he couldn’t hear.

“What?”

Destiny looked around, like a spy scanning for witnesses, and then scrambled up and sat next to Jake,
leaning against him to whisper in his ear. “Did you use matches?” He made a gesture like striking a match. “I’m not allowed to have ’em. Not ever. They say I’m too little. Am I too little, you think? I don’t think so. I’d be careful. I used to be little.” He held his hand an inch from the porch floor, as if to show a tiny person. “When I was this big, I couldn’t have matches. But I could have ’em now, don’t you think? Don’t you think?” the boy asked again. “You’re not that much bigger ’n me, are you? How old are you?”

This time he stopped long enough for Jake to answer. “Fifteen.”

“Are not. I know ’cuz Grandpa said you’re the same as E.D. That means you’re only twelve.”

“I’m thirteen,” Jake said. Destiny looked doubtful. “I am!”

“Well?” Destiny said. “Did you use matches?”

Jake told him he didn’t know what he was talking about. It wasn’t until Destiny yelped that he realized he’d used the F word.

“Momma says only Paulie’s allowed to say that word. It’s not a people word; it’s a parrot word. Paulie knows lots of parrot words.”

“It is too a people word,” Jake said.

“Is not!”

“Is too. She just thinks you’re too little to say it. Like you’re too little for matches. You aren’t, though. I used to say it all the time when I was your age.” Jake
said it three more times.

Destiny sat for a moment and then said it too. Slowly, as if he were tasting the sound as he said it. Then he nodded. And said it again. “I said it!” He giggled and said it again. “Just like Paulie.”

Jake nodded.

“Did you burn down your school?”

“That’s what they say.”

“With matches?”

“Nope. I used a lighter.” He pulled his lighter out of his pocket and showed it to the boy. “This one. And gasoline. In a bottle. It’s called a Molotov cocktail. The school went up like a torch. Like a bomb!” He was telling the
really
bad kid story. It wasn’t true, but it was no more of an exaggeration, he thought, than the story that everybody else told. Nobody had ever believed that it had all been an accident.

Destiny reached for the lighter, and Jake put it back in his pocket. “Oh no. Lighters aren’t for kids.”

“
You’re
a kid,” Destiny said.

“I’m a teenager,” Jake said.

As Destiny opened his mouth to answer, the screen door burst open behind them and Randolph Applewhite came out onto the porch, a portable CD player in one hand and a briefcase in the other. Cordelia, wearing an orange skirt over her purple leotard, was right behind him. “That show is dead boring!” she was saying.

Randolph stopped, and Cordelia collided with the
CD player as he swung around to answer her. “It’s the most saccharine, sentimental piece of tripe the two of them ever wrote. But it happens to be what the Traybridge Little Theatre has hired me to direct. It’s the sign of a great director to be able to raise the level of the material. I intend to find a way to give the piece a new edge. People won’t just be humming when they leave this production, they’ll be
thinking
! It’s the opportunity of a lifetime. Are you going to be part of a millennial version of a classic musical, or aren’t you?”

“Why’s this happening so fast? They just called you today. How come auditions are tonight?”

There was a moment of silence. When he spoke again, Randolph Applewhite’s voice was tight. “They made the mistake of asking one of their board members to direct it, and he’s been sent to Japan on some kind of an international currency crisis. Can you believe it? They had a
banker
directing a musical! They’re lucky I happened to be between gigs.”

“But what about my ballet?”

“This is a community theater production, for heaven’s sake. They only rehearse in the evenings. And there’s hardly any dancing in the show. It won’t take you any time at all to work out the choreography, and after that I’ll only need you from seven to ten
P.M
. You’ll have all day every day to work on your ballet.” He paused for a moment, frowning. “What ballet?”

Cordelia stamped her foot. “
Mine!
Where have you
been? You never listen to anybody. It’s my whole fall semester project.
The Death of Ophelia
. I’m composing, playing, choreographing, dancing—everything!”

“Well, then you’ll need dancers. Do this show for me and you’ll have a ready-made corps de ballet, people you’ve already worked with.”

“
I’m the dancer!
It’s a one-woman ballet!”

Randolph stepped over Winston and strode down the steps past Jake and Destiny as if they weren’t there. Jake had to duck to avoid being clipped in the head by the briefcase. “Just decide, Cordelia, and be quick about it. I need someone at tonight’s audition to see whether these people can dance at all. If you aren’t going to do it, I’ll find someone who understands the importance of this opportunity.”

“Oh, sure, you’ll find someone by tonight. One of the many choreographers in Traybridge!”

He checked his watch. “We begin at seven, so I’ll need you at the theater by six-thirty. You can take Father’s car. Or Archie’s truck. I’m having dinner first with that Montrose woman—the president of the board—to discuss the budget.”

“Budget?” Cordelia let go of the screen door, and it crashed shut behind her. “I’d get paid?”

“I told you, this is community theater. Only the director gets paid,” Randolph said as he put his briefcase and CD player into the backseat of the red Miata convertible parked in the drive.

Cordelia was left standing on the porch as the car sped down the drive, spraying gravel on the curve around the line of bushes and trees. She looked down at Jake and Destiny then, as if noticing them for the first time. She stepped over Winston and sat down on the edge of the porch, her ballet slipper–clad feet on the step next to Jake. She put her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. “How does he think he’s going to get an edge into
The Sound of Music
?”

Jake was very much aware of how close she was sitting.
Sound of Music
. He had seen the movie once on television, but he didn’t remember much about it. He remembered Julie Andrews singing in a meadow on top of a mountain. Lots of singing. And a bunch of little kids.

Destiny poked him in the ribs. “How’d you get your hair that color? And how do you make it stand up in points that way? I never saw anybody with hair that—”

Cordelia reached across in front of Jake and rapped her little brother on the head. “Don’t be rude,” she said.

“Ooooowww! I’m not rude. Mommy says if you want to know something you have to ask. So I asked. I don’t see why it’s rude to just—”

“I dyed it red,” Jake said. “Bleached it first—so it looked like yours—then dyed it. But it grows in points all by itself. I can’t help it. I just can’t make it do anything else.”

Cordelia laughed.

Destiny stuck out his lower lip. “Does not. Nobody’s hair grows like that.”

Before Jake could think of an answer, there was a squeal of tires from the road. The Miata careened back around the line of trees, scattering gravel in all directions. It skidded to a stop in front of the porch, and Randolph leaped out, leaving the engine running and the door open, and stormed up the front steps, forcing both Cordelia and the dog to scramble out of his way. He slammed through the screen door and was back out in less than a minute, holding a CD box over his head. “Forgot the music,” he said as he pounded back to the car, got in, and slammed the door.

Meantime Jake had heard the sound of another vehicle out on the road, slowing down and changing gears as it reached the driveway to Wit’s End. Randolph threw his car into reverse and backed around in front of the trees. Then he sped forward around the curve. Jake braced himself for the inevitable. There was a squeal of brakes, the sound of vehicles skidding on gravel, and then a sickening crash.

The crash was followed by a stream of curses.

“I told you that word was people talk,” Jake said to Destiny.

“Sounds as if there are survivors,” Cordelia said.