Surviving the Applewhites (6 page)

A
week later, Jake stood in the bathroom of Wisteria Cottage, humming abstractedly to himself as he gelled his hair into points. He frowned into the mirror. He’d taken on this look so long ago that he could hardly remember himself any other way. But the truth was he was getting tired of doing this every day. It was one thing to go to so much trouble when people took notice, when it got him something he wanted. But here it didn’t get him anything at all. Nobody cared. The only Applewhite who even noticed his hair anymore was
Destiny. And that had gotten to be a major pain.

The day with the wheat paste Destiny had absolutely insisted on letting his hair dry that way, though Jake and E.D. had kept him from painting it. Jake understood, now, why wheat paste was used to do papier-mâché. When it dried, it was like rock. Sybil Jameson had refused to take any motherly responsibility for the situation at all. “You’re the one who gave him the idea in the first place,” she told Jake. “You wash the stuff out.” Jake had never handled a screaming, flailing four-year-old before. It had taken an hour and a half of head soaking and hysteria to get all the wheat paste out, and by that time Jake had been as wet and exhausted as Destiny.

That had been only the beginning. The next day Destiny had painted his hair with green fingerpaint. The day after that he’d used colored markers to give it rainbow stripes. Luckily, they were watercolor ones. Destiny was so prone to coloring things that weren’t meant to be colored that permanent markers had been banned from the Applewhite household altogether.

Nobody minded the boy spending the day with vividly colored hair, but Sybil insisted the color be washed out before bed. Jake, of course, had to do it. And Destiny had turned it into a game to see how hard he could make it for Jake to get the job done. Very hard! The kid was incorrigible. What the
Applewhites ought to do, Jake thought, was shave Destiny’s head!

Jake stared at his own hair. It was getting too long for this. Besides, the dark brown roots were showing now in a way that was starting to look scruffy instead of intentional. Then there was the problem of his clothes. It was hot out. Sunny and hot and humid. Black clothes made it seem even hotter. And black clothes were the only clothes he owned. He’d worn the spiked collar only twice—it had made his neck sweat and then chafed it raw.

Jake was beginning to feel he was disappearing altogether. Nobody except E.D. and Destiny noticed when he swore. Destiny giggled and E.D. just sighed and shook her head. Nothing he’d done before to show people who he was and what he stood for worked here.

He couldn’t even chill out the way he used to. No TV to watch. His Walkman was useless without earphones. If he dared to smoke where he could be seen, somebody was sure to snatch away his cigarette. It wasn’t only Zedediah who did it. Archie had, and Lucille, too. Archie only snatched and stomped, but Lucille had delivered a ten-minute lecture—not on the dangers of cigarette smoking, which he’d heard about a zillion times before, but on the desecration of tobacco, which she said was sacred to American Indian spirituality. By the end of the lecture she’d
worked herself into tears about the “wanton destruction of native culture in the Americas.” Lucille Applewhite was such an incredibly cheerful person it was actually painful to see her in tears. It wasn’t the sort of feeling Jake was used to.

So he’d taken one of his last cigarettes out into the meadow three days ago to find a place to smoke it in peace. There’d been no place to sit in the meadow. He’d found a log by the edge of the pond and settled himself there. Winston had gone along with him, and Jake had no sooner lit his cigarette and taken a nice, long, relaxing drag than the dog got himself stuck in the mud by the cattails and started howling as if he were being murdered. When Jake went to pull him out, he got stuck, too. It was the smelliest, blackest, most disgusting mud he’d ever encountered, and it snatched one of his sneakers right off his foot. By the time he’d managed to crawl out, drag the dog free, and find his sneaker, he was muck from neck to toe.

Later, he’d found two ticks on the back of his neck, their heads buried in his skin, sucking his blood. Archie had pulled them off with tweezers and assured him that he wasn’t
likely
to get Rocky Mountain spotted fever, since the ticks hadn’t been on him long enough, but the ordeal had wrecked the whole idea of sneaking off for a relaxing smoke.

Apart from the pond incident, the dog was getting to be a real nuisance. Where Jake went, Winston
went. He had abandoned the main house altogether and taken up residence in Wisteria Cottage. More specifically in Jake’s room. Though Jake insisted the dog sleep on the lavender braided rug, when he woke in the morning at the horrible predawn hour when Archie ground his coffee before going out for his morning exercise, Winston was invariably lying alongside him, pinning him beneath the covers, snoring steadily and drooling on his pillow. He had to shove the dog off the bed if he had to get up to go to the bathroom.

Now Jake finished his hair, stepped back, and tripped over Winston, who was lying behind him. The dog yelped and leaped to his feet so that Jake stumbled over him again, cracking his elbow on the sink and his knee on the toilet before he got his balance. He swore. “What’s the matter with you, dog? Why can’t you just leave me alone?” Winston stared up at him with those sad, droopy eyes and wagged his tail. The overwhelming impulse to boot the dog out into the hall vanished. Jake reached down and rubbed the dog behind his ears.
There. That proved it.
The Jake he knew, the Jake he had always been, was disappearing. And there was nothing—nobody—to put in his place.

E
.D. was alone in the schoolroom, sitting at the computer with her hands pressed over her ears. Jake and his canine shadow, Winston, had gone into Traybridge with Archie to get some supplies for the wood shop, and Lucille had taken Destiny along to the library. Jeremy Bernstein was still staying in Dogwood Cottage. He had decided to write a book about what he insisted on calling the Applewhite Artistic Dynasty, and he had been practically monopolizing the schoolroom computer, working on the book and exchanging e-mails with his TV
friend, trying to arrange a documentary about them all, or a story on a magazine show at least. But he was out in the wood shop now. It was a chance to get online and do her math. Except that she couldn’t concentrate.

E.D. had always thought you could get used to sounds, the way you got used to smells after a while.
Sensory fatigue
, it was called. You would get so you didn’t notice anymore. Like Destiny’s nonstop chatter. She’d told Jake it was like getting used to a refrigerator motor. And she’d been right. Everybody got used to Destiny. You couldn’t survive in this family otherwise.

But this was different. This was worse. Much, much worse. This was torture. She’d heard somewhere that when the cops or the FBI or somebody had wanted to end a siege with a militant cult, they’d beamed rock and roll music at them from high-powered speakers. She could understand why it would work. Only they shouldn’t have used rock and roll. They should have used
The Sound of Music
. It would have been faster. After twenty-four hours the people in the cult would have laid down their guns and come out on their hands and knees, eyes as crazed as Wolfie’s, singing compulsively about female deer and kitten whiskers.

For five days now her father had been playing the CD of
The Sound of Music
all day, every day. He said he needed to totally immerse himself in the musical
ambiance of the show. So
everybody
was being totally immersed in the musical ambiance of the show. Her mother had begged him to use earphones, but he refused, of course. “They not only destroy your eardrums, they mess up your brain waves!” So the music blared out from the living room speakers, not just through the whole of the main house, but out the open windows and all over Wit’s End.

Upstairs Hal had gone almost silent for a while after the UPS man dropped off a roll of chicken wire and two gigantic bags of plaster. The sign on his door that had once read
HAL APPLEWHITE
,
PAINTER
now said
HAL APPLEWHITE
,
SCULPTOR
. But whatever he was sculpting with chicken wire and plaster, Hal had taken up hammering again. Purely, E.D. thought, in self-defense. Sybil had turned up the volume on the white noise machine in her office and had taken to wearing earmuffs in order to keep writing her Great American Novel.

Cordelia swore the sound carried out to the dance studio. Her ballet, she claimed, was changing from a discordant tragedy to something resembling a polka. Most days Lucille stayed in Wisteria Cottage with all the doors and windows closed and the curtains drawn. She said it was the only way she could write poetry that didn’t fall into rhymes like
thread
and
bread
,
mitten
and
kitten.
E.D. figured it was the music that had sent Jeremy Bernstein out to the wood shop.
He could do interviews with Zedediah and Archie out there, where the power tools overwhelmed any other sounds.

It wasn’t that E.D. didn’t like the music. She did. But the constant repetition had worn grooves in her brain. Even in those few blessed hours when Randolph took the CD and went off to Traybridge for what he called his “eternal, unending, utterly futile auditions,” there was no respite. The music kept playing over and over in her mind. She would catch herself humming it. Whistling it. It wasn’t just the hills that were alive with this music, it was the trees, the grass, the house, the universe! Even worse, Jake had taken to humming it as well, so that if she did manage to drive it out of her mind briefly, he might bring it rushing back at any moment.

Randolph Applewhite didn’t very often direct musicals, and when he did, he usually went somewhere else to do it. Some other city in some other state. If he ever got this show cast and if the family survived the rehearsal period, E.D. was going to suggest they make a family rule against his ever again directing a musical from home.

Partly to get away from the music and partly because it had become an obsession, E.D. had spent a good part of the week in the meadow, by the pond, in the pine grove, anywhere and everywhere on their sixteen acres—looking for a great spangled fritillary.
When she came back each day, the unused camera on its strap around her neck, her net empty, Jake’s smirk seemed to get bigger and broader. E.D. didn’t give up easily, but she was beginning to lose hope. September was the last month they were supposed to be out there, and they were listed as rare during the second half of the month. There were only six more days in September.

It was beginning to look likely that the Butterfly Project would end with a gaping hole in the chart. It drove her nuts. The great spangled fritillary was a
common
butterfly. The book said so. She should have found one weeks ago. It was just some nasty twist of fate that she hadn’t found one. It was like a curse. If Jake Semple hadn’t come into her life, she was absolutely certain she would have found one by now. But he had come, and then he’d challenged her. She’d told him that she
would
find one, and now if she didn’t, Jake Semple would win!

Everything else about the project was finished. The papier-mâché caterpillar and chrysalis were sitting on a shelf in the schoolroom, painted according to the pictures in her book, and she’d scheduled the Teaching Opportunity about metamorphosis for the first of next week. She was going to explain to Destiny how the caterpillar turned itself into the chrysalis and then she would cut the chrysalis open and explain how the monarch butterfly that she had a photograph
of on the chart had climbed out of it and flown away. The Teaching Opportunity and a paper describing the project and its results were what she called the Culminating Events. Her paper was almost done—it was just waiting for a paragraph on the great spangled fritillary or else the statement that she had had to give up on finding one. A statement of defeat she couldn’t bear to think about.

There were no official grades at the Creative Academy, but E.D. always graded herself on her projects. It gave her a sense of where she was, what she had done, and most of the time a comforting feeling of accomplishment. But without the great spangled fritillary, she was going to have to give herself a B in science for the first half of this term. She was not used to getting Bs. She worked and worked until she felt sure she had earned an A. This fritillary thing wasn’t something she could do by hard work. It was totally out of her control.

Worse, she’d been so determined to find one that she had fallen behind in every other subject. Including math. Her math tutor had sent her an e-mail asking if she was sick. She was doing her best to catch up now. But the more she tried to concentrate, the more she was aware of the voice singing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” It filled the house, urging her to climb mountains, ford streams, follow rainbows.

Suddenly a new voice joined the one pouring out of
the living room speakers. Jake burst into the schoolroom singing at the top of his lungs that she should keep climbing and fording and following. Mercifully, when the final chord had died away, the CD ended and the house was suddenly silent. Hal’s hammering stopped with the music. Jake stood there smirking, his hands behind his back. Winston had come in after him and now flopped at his feet. “The song’s right!” Jake said.

“About what?”

“About finding your dream if you look hard enough. Well, I wouldn’t call it a dream exactly—not mine anyway—and there weren’t any mountains involved. But I found it!” With that he brought out from behind his back a clear plastic box like the kind nuts and bolts come in. Lying in the box, its wings battered, its body shriveled, was a great spangled fritillary.

“You killed it!” she said.

“It was dead when I found it. Guess where!” When she didn’t guess, he told her anyway. “Stuck to the front of Archie’s truck. Inside the grille. It must have been there for days. Maybe even weeks.”

E.D. stared at the battered insect. There was no mistaking what it was.

She wanted to cry. This was almost as bad as ending with a hole on the chart. The Butterfly Project would get an A now. But it wouldn’t really be her A. It would belong to both of them.