The afternoon is sour as grapefruit, which no one really likes but everyone eats when they’re on a diet. Mom bangs cupboard doors shut and raises the cleaver high as she chops the heads off broccoli. “A phone call from the principal!” Whack! “The principal, Hailee!” Whack, whack! “Wait till your dad hears about this!” One final whack, then she pushes the severed broccoli heads into a pot of boiling water.
I plan to serve as my own lawyer. Though my mom has the position of mother behind her, I have the testimony of the principal. That, and the fact that Amanda admitted her knee didn’t even hurt. Just look at all the trouble I’ve gotten into over nothing.
Mom stops clanging around for a second. “Are you even listening to me? This is important.”
For Mom, school is almost as important as church. She barely graduated. Whenever she tried to read her textbooks, the letters would trick her and change places. So if she was trying to get through a sentence that read, Put nuts in the pan for a nice tang, my mom would see, Put stun in the nap for a nice gnat. That kind of reading put her in the lower classes, and even there she got bad grades. In math, too, because numbers know how to jump around just as well as letters do.
It wasn’t till after high school that she heard of dyslexia, which is the medical word for the way her brain mixes up the letters and numbers. By then, she was on her own and paying her rent by working as a waitress. That’s how she met my dad.
I flick a Cheerio across Libby’s tray and she chases it with her hand.
“Yes, I’m listening to you,” I say, making a Cheerio tower. Libby knocks it down and eats the pieces.
“You’ve got to take these things seriously.”
My honor roll ribbons flutter as Mom opens the refrigerator for ingredients. A handprint I painted in third grade is held to the freezer part with magnets. I used fluorescent paint and silver glitter and filled every square inch with color. Even though the corners are curling, Mom keeps it up there. She thinks it’s pretty.
“Mom?”
She lays down the cleaver. “Yes?”
“I need a new bike.” I push Libby’s Cheerios around so I don’t have to see Mom’s reaction.
At first, she doesn’t say a thing, just picks up the cleaver and starts chopping again. Then, in an even voice, she says, “We need a lot of things around here. Go upstairs and do your homework.”
I didn’t have my snack yet, but I know better than to argue with her after hearing that tone of voice.
My pale pink walls don’t cheer me up as much as they usually do. I toss my backpack to the floor and lie on my bed, staring at the popcorn ceiling and the one cobweb in the corner I keep forgetting to knock down. The more I don’t clean it up, the worse it gets. It’s grown an extra tentacle since the weekend.
Below it, my memo board is so loaded with pictures, you can’t even see the quilted purple fabric underneath. When I get new pictures, I stick them right over the old ones. Sometimes, I pick a spot and slide off the top picture, and then the next, and then the next one after that. It’s like going back through time. There’s even a picture of Amanda and me in diapers, playing together. I keep that one buried, but I know exactly where it is.
I hate being in fights with people. Today I’ve had three: Amanda, Mom, and you have to count my dad, too, because in about two hours, he’s going to hear all about it.
I roll onto my side. The swamp maple that’s as tall as our house waves its cheery red leaves at me. The branches stretch across my window, sometimes holding a squirrel or a bird for me to get a good, up-close look. People always talk about fall colors—that’s a northern idea. Sometimes, the truth of a thing depends on where you’re looking at it from. For instance, in Florida, red leaves pop from our maples around Valentine’s Day. I ask you, could that be any more perfect?
Also, birds don’t fly south for the winter; they fly north for the summer. This has nothing to do with my cheery maple, but I just thought I’d mention it.
* * *
Mom shouts from downstairs she’s taking Libby out in the stroller. Her voice has forgotten she was mad at me. Still, I answer back without opening my door.
I’ve finished my decimal multiplication homework. I read chapter twenty-three in social studies. I answered questions one through thirty (odd numbers only) in science. All that’s left is PE, which of course there’s no homework for; language arts; and Family Science, which is really home ec but they changed the name so it wouldn’t sound old-fashioned and so boys would take it.
As I wrangle with my backpack trying to fit everything back in, a shred of lined notebook paper floats out. I know what it is without looking, but I pick it up anyway. Amanda’s bubblegum print, fat and happy with hearts over the i’s. Can you still spend the night Friday? My mom will get doughnuts!
I’ve spent so many Friday nights at her house that I don’t remember which one this note is talking about, but when I read the words, I hear Amanda’s voice in my head. I would like to point out, before I go any further, that I had been thinking about Amanda earlier, so it wasn’t seeing the note that made me get the phone and punch in her number.
Her phone rings and rings and rings. I hang up and dial again. Then I hang up and block my number, but she still doesn’t answer. I hit redial. Hang up. Redial. Hang up. Redial. Hang—
“Hailee!” Irritation scratches across the air waves and into my ear. “What are you doing?”
“Why didn’t you answer?”
She huffs into the phone. “If you must know, I was in the bathroom.”
Hmm. Well, I guess certain things can take a while in the bathroom. “Okay,” I say.
She breathes into the phone, then asks, “Well?”
“Well, what?” I hadn’t prepared a speech.
“Well, why did you call?” she asks. “Hurry up, too, because I’ve only got a couple of bars.”
Liar. That’s what she tells her grandma when she doesn’t know what to say to her.
I look at the shred of notebook paper in my hand. “Are you still spending the night this Friday?”
Pause. “I didn’t know you invited me.”
“I just did.”
Silence crackles between us. I didn’t ask my mom about this, but I know she’ll say yes. She calls Amanda her adopted daughter.
Suddenly, my adopted sister erupts. “You ignored me! You heard me calling you—I take back my apology! I had the worst day today and it was all your fault!”
“My fault? You’re the one who left your skirt out for Megan to write all over, and you’re the one who didn’t notice the A when you put it back on.”
She’s quiet, so I keep going. “You got me sent to the principal! My mom’s mad at me, my dad’s going to lecture me, and I’ll never go to college now. So I think I’m the one with the worst day today, not you.”
“It was just so embarrassing,” she says. “All day long.”
“I know—I was the one wearing the skirt!”
“Witches with a B,” she says, and I know for a fact she’s shaking her head at the thought of them.
“Yeah,” I say, “witches with a B.”
We snicker into the phone. I feel the connection reaching for five bars.
After checking with her mom, she says she can’t spend the night because her aunt’s coming over for the weekend. I’m disappointed, but when we hang up, I feel better than I did before I called. At supper, Dad asks me about my visit to the principal’s as he passes the mashed potatoes. He puts on a stern face. Between you and me, I’m 100 percent positive Mom ordered him to lay down the law.
Dad listens to my side, says a few things that Mom nods her head to, then tells me to make sure it never happens again. He clears his plate. “I’m going out to cut back the vine,” he says. “It’s choking the gutter.”
“Can I help?” I ask.
“You can hold the ladder.”
Boring! I wanted to use the choppers. But I don’t want Dad to fall, so I spend the next hour with my palms pressed against the aluminum rails while thorny arms of green and pink bougainvillea fall around me. Dad talks to it, scolding it for scratching him and telling it to stay out of the gutter. Some people think talking to plants makes them grow better. If that’s true, Dad is only making his own life harder.
* * *
The next day at school, some girls come up to me and tell me how rotten I am for pushing Amanda into the car-pool lane, even though they can plainly see Amanda standing right next to me. I stick up for myself, but they turn their backs on me and cut into the stream of people rushing to class.
I don’t ask her, but Amanda says, “I didn’t know what to say.”
Friday and Saturday are boring without her. When I call Becca on Saturday, she’s not home, either. Becca sometimes eats lunch with us. She’s not my best friend, but she wears alien ears to school and can speak Klingon, which is a planet in the Star Trek series, so Amanda and I like her pretty much.
I get on my bike and think about the book I’ve been reading at night, Because of Winn-Dixie. Opal was lucky she found that dog at Winn-Dixie instead of say, Periodontics, which is some kind of dentist place. Of course, she probably would’ve shortened the name to Peri, so that wouldn’t have been a problem because it’s still cute.
I ride my bike up and down Crape Myrtle Road, trying to think of a gross business name that Winn-Dixie could have been stuck with. The notes of a flute drift from the second-story window of the DeCamps’ house. So pretty and light, the notes fall like the cottony feathers of a dandelion. If I were friends with Emily, I would ask to sit on her front porch and listen to her flute playing and the birds, who are calling back to her.
Boring Saturday finally comes to an end. My sheets are cool and my room is dark and it feels good to snuggle in, all nice and cozy. I rub my feet against each other to warm them up. Big elephant ears of sleep layer over me. I’m slipping into dreamville.
Screams from downstairs shatter my ears awake. Mom! I jolt up in bed—heart pounding, blood surging—then I flip down and squeeze my eyes shut because robbers won’t kill me if they think I’m sleeping, but Mom is still screaming and Dad is screaming and crying, and I say, “God!” because I’m too scared to say a longer prayer.
If I had my own phone, I could dial 911.
Tears slide down my face in torrents. My throat wells up in a painful ball. I lie there, crying and awaiting my fate until I hear my dad’s low-throated chuckle, which gives way to whooping and hollering and honest-to-God, he goes right back to screaming and crying again.
I shove off my covers and tiptoe past Libby’s room. She sleeps her baby sleep, oblivious to all the commotion below us. Annoyance creeps down the stairs with me as I make my way to the landing. Dad stands in front of the TV, dumbstruck, staring; Mom sits on the couch in her fuzzy green housecoat, rocking back and forth.
Their faces shine when they notice me. They glow like angels. Light pours out of their eyes and off their skin, and it scares me half to death.
I hear my voice tremble as I ask, “What’s wrong?”
Dad’s face screws up. He cries and grabs my hands. His mouth moves but no words come out.
“Hailee.” Mom’s voice is hoarse. Tears have wet her cheeks; crying has turned them red.
I’m afraid of whatever she’s going to say next.
“Hailee,” she croaks. “We just won the lottery!”