On Saturday morning—well, what’s left of Saturday morning (the clock on the microwave reads 11:40)—I’m in the kitchen, chatting with Mom at the table, and Hunter has just staggered downstairs—bare-chested, pj bottoms, hair looking like he mussed it on purpose to look more like a wannabe rock star, which maybe he did.
I’ve been up since seven-thirty. Mom says it’s bad for your circadian rhythms—that’s what she calls them—to sleep more than an hour later on the weekends than you do during the week. I’m a morning person anyway, so I’ve already showered, made French toast for me and our parents (it’s the only thing I can cook, but it’s delicious), knocked off a pre-algebra problem set, worked on my personal essay about Hunter, and helped Dad rake leaves.
Okay, I admit it, I’m feeling smug, and even smugger now that Hunter has appeared half-asleep with nothing to show for his Saturday morning. Like the “Goofus and Gallant” comics I still read for old times’ sake in the Highlights magazines at Dad’s office. Goofus always does the bad thing, like leaving his dirty dishes on the table, and Gallant always does the good thing, like carrying his dirty dishes to the sink. The comic has the least subtle moral of anything in the world, but maybe I like it for that reason. With “Goofus and Gallant,” you always know exactly how you’re supposed to be.
Be like Gallant.
Don’t be like Goofus.
In my house, though our parents would never come right out and say this, I’m clearly the family’s Gallant and Hunter is the family’s Goofus.
Be like Autumn.
Don’t be like Hunter.
Even back in the Mrs. Whistlepuff days, I remember how Mom’s forehead would furrow when Hunter would bring home his Friday folder and she’d see work that was unfinished or sloppy, with comments like “Hunter needs to check his work more carefully,” “Hunter needs to learn to follow rules,” and “Hunter needs to stay on task.”
Our parents, being our parents, had him tested. But I never heard anybody say he has attention-deficit disorder (ADD) or any other official thing that has a bunch of initials ending in a “D.” He was just the kind of kid who couldn’t sit still, who had to be drumming on the table or sassing a teacher because he thought up something super funny to say. I know our parents hoped that he’d “grow out of it.” I heard Mom tell Dad once that Hunter was a “late bloomer,” as if that was a fine thing to be. Daffodils bloom in the spring. Chrysanthemums bloom in the fall. It’s not a bad thing to be a chrysanthemum.
I know they had hoped the blooming would start by the time he got to high school, but I didn’t notice a whole lot of blooming going on last year. And this year—well, this year so far is a hundred times worse.
Because here’s the thing about Hunter: however bad his Friday folder was, however worried Mom looked on parent-teacher-conference night, he was always nice to us. He had this great grin he’d flash after Mom or Dad yelled at him, a grin that was like, Say whatever you want, but I know you love me anyway.
That’s what’s different now.
Without even a flicker of acknowledgment, Hunter opens the fridge, grabs the carton of orange juice, and takes a swig.
“Hunter,” Mom says, the scolding tone on automatic pilot, without any real energy in it.
“What?” Hunter asks, as if she hasn’t told him ten thousand times to use a glass.
I see Mom’s eyes roam over to the microwave clock. “You didn’t use to sleep till noon. What’s going on? I heard you come in at eleven”—that’s Hunter’s curfew on weekends, which is plenty late if you ask me—“so I know you weren’t out until all hours. Did you stay up late on the computer?”
Hunter puts a piece of bread in the toaster, which surprises me. He isn’t usually willing to go to that much trouble. Given the hour, maybe the piece of toast is his brunch.
“Hunter, I’m talking to you.”
As if he could think she was talking to me.
“Are you having trouble sleeping?” Her tone is softer now.
I know she wishes that Hunter’s new awfulness—what she likes to call his moodiness—has a simple biological explanation. It’s not that Hunter has turned nasty and mean; it’s that he’s sleep-deprived, poor thing. Sometimes I’ve heard her say “Hormones” to Dad when Hunter slams a door. She says the same thing when I get extra crabby, or tear up over a B− on a paper for multicultural history. (Mr. Morton loves to give even his top students little “wake-up calls” when he thinks we’re not doing our best work.)
Hunter still makes no reply.
His toast pops up.
Without even buttering it, not to mention putting it on an actual plate, he starts to walk back upstairs, toast in hand.
“Hunter James Granger!”
Don’t parents know how clichéd it is to call your kids by all three names when you’re extra irritated with them?
Hunter does turn around, his mouth conveniently full of toast. So maybe the three-name thing survives as part of the parenting script because it works.
“Hunter,” Mom says tentatively. “Do any of the guys in the band use drugs? I know that musicians, well, sometimes they walk on the wild side … and the other band members, they’re older—”
Hunter bursts out laughing. The crumbs of toast spraying out of his mouth do nothing to make his shirtless, mussed-hair, vacant-eyed look any more attractive.
“I know pot—weed—is legal in Colorado now,” Mom says, unwilling to back down, “but it’s not legal for anyone under twenty-one, and just as with alcohol, there are reasons why certain substances are not available to minors, whose brains and bodies are still growing and developing.”
“Pot?” Hunter asks. “Weed?”
“Marijuana,” she explains.
I know Hunter knows what pot and weed are; it’s just so weird to hear Mom say the words, as if she’s showing off how hip and cool she is.
For a second Hunter catches my eye and comes close to grinning at me. I almost expect him to say Mo-o-o-m! like when we were younger and she’d snap her fingers to music on the car radio as if that were a cool instead of pathetically uncool thing to do.
His grin vanishes before it has a chance to happen.
“Mom, I’m not using drugs. None of my friends are using drugs. Because I sleep late on a Saturday does not mean I’m using drugs. Because I’m in a rock band does not mean I’m using drugs. Because you’re not in love with my grades doesn’t mean I’m using drugs.”
“But … if you were … I wouldn’t be angry, I promise I wouldn’t. I’d want you to be able to tell me, so I could get you help.”
Hunter stares at her. I know he’s thinking: In what universe does a fifteen-year-old tell his mom he’s smoked a few joints or had a couple of beers so she can get him help?
“Don’t worry,” Hunter says, his eyes narrowing with what looks less like anger than hatred. Anger is hot; the look on his face is icy, as if any love he ever had for any of us is frozen solid beneath the groaning weight of an Ice Age glacier. “When I need your help, I’ll let you know.”
He heads back upstairs, turning away before he can see Mom’s face crumple into tears.
“Mom, don’t,” I say.
She wipes her hand across her eyes.
“I can’t help remembering,” she says in a voice so low I can hardly hear it, “how I’d drop him off at preschool—how he’d cry and cling to my leg and say, ‘Mom, don’t go.’”
What am I supposed to say?
“Well, teens are supposed to grow away from their parents,” I try. “Like that pamphlet you brought home?” Yes, I read “Surviving the Teen Years: A Guide for Parents,” too. I’ll read anything if it’s lying around and there’s no other reading material handy. “And you know, hormones…”
“I just remember,” she says, as if I hadn’t spoken, “how he used to like me.”
* * *
I was having a good day until Hunter made his brunch appearance, and now I’m having a bad day. That look of hatred was directed not just at my mother but at me, too. Sometimes I think he hates me most of all, even though all I’ve ever done to him—truly all I’ve ever done—is to get better grades than he does and do the things our parents want us to do, like playing the flute or sticking with ballet. I can’t help that I like playing the flute. I can’t help that I like—well, don’t really mind—doing ballet.
Dr. Jackson, my principal back in elementary school, used to say the same thing every single day at the end of morning announcements: “Have a good day—or not. The choice is yours.”
Dr. Jackson obviously didn’t have Hunter as her brother.
Still, I’m not going to let Hunter ruin a perfect October Saturday any more than he has already.
I text Kylee: Bike ride by the reservoir?
She texts back: Can’t. Knitting. Come over here?
Now I have to decide if I want to spend a crisp, cool, cloudless autumn day watching someone else knit dog sweaters. I decide I don’t. Kylee hasn’t put down her needles since she got that folder of patterns and bag of yarn at the animal shelter. I’ve created a knitting monster.
Brianna is away visiting her grandparents, and Isabelle has some kind of maybe-flu thing I don’t want to catch. So I’ll just curl up and be a writing monster. I’m not going to write any more poetry until I hear from The New Yorker, so I go back to my novel. I need to get rid of the finding-the-amulet scene in the Tatiana and Ingvar book and launch Tatiana on her next harrowing adventure.
Dad comes into the kitchen before I can make my getaway. One look at Mom’s blotchy face, and the muscles in his jaw twitch. Dad can handle just about anything Hunter and I do so long as we’re not mean to Mom.
“What did he say this time, Suzanne?” Dad asks.
“Oh, nothing really,” Mom replies. “The usual.”
“The usual,” Dad repeats. I know it makes things worse that how Hunter acts isn’t even surprising anymore, just how he is. Dad forces a smile. “Autumn, do your mother and me a favor and always stay as sweet a kid as you are today.”
I don’t think of myself as particularly sweet, but maybe on a sweetness scale of 1 to 10, a kid who makes French toast for her parents and helps her dad rake leaves without being asked would score at least an 8.
“What do we have going on this afternoon?” Dad asks Mom.
“I promised Hunter I’d take him out driving.”
Dad shakes his head, not overruling her, but more like he’s perplexed by the whole Hunter situation. “Maybe someone needs to learn that ‘the usual’ isn’t the way you earn time behind the wheel.”
“Things will be better when he gets his license,” she says.
Why on earth would Mom think that?
“If he has more independence, more autonomy, maybe he won’t need to say and do things that are … you know … so hurtful. Anyway, I promised, and I like to keep my promises if possible, and he really wasn’t that rude or disrespectful.”
Dad cocks his eyebrow the way he does when Mom goes into her protective Mama Bear routine.
She continues, “And tomorrow he’s practicing with the band for most of the day at Timber’s. They have a gig in two weeks!”
Now Dad really looks bewildered. I don’t think he had thought of Hunter’s band as a real band, the kind of band that real people would ask to play in real places. It’s the first I’ve heard about the gig, too.
“Where?” is all he says, but I can hear that he wants to say On what planet?
“The Spotted Cow coffee shop in the strip mall where the Chinese restaurant is,” she says. “I don’t think they’ve been hired, exactly. It’s more the kind of thing where you just show up and play.”
“Okay,” Dad says. “That makes more sense.”
I feel a twinge of pity for Hunter. What Dad said was hardly terrible, but it’s clear from what he didn’t say that he thinks the band—which is the only thing in the world Hunter seems to care about right now—is a hopeless cause.
Even though Hunter has been nonstop mean to me for weeks now, I’m glad the band has a gig. I really am.