Mom calls over to Amanda’s as soon as we get inside.
“Hi, Amanda, it’s Karen’s mom. Is she there?”
Mom opens the drawer by the phone and pulls out a stack of menus from restaurants that deliver. “Donnie, pick something out.”
I lean against the counter and flip through the menus, stopping to watch Mom on the phone as she says, “Amanda, I don’t care if she doesn’t want to talk to me. Put her on the phone.” It’s weird to hear her use her mom voice on someone who’s not her own kid. The mom voice works.
“Karen, I want you home. Now.” Mom listens to Karen respond, and says, “Actually, Karen, I am the boss of you. Yes, really. Karen! If you think I am going to let you talk to me the way you did in the car tonight, you are sadly mistaken. Get home. Now.”
Mom makes me go upstairs when we see Karen stomping across the back porch toward the sliding glass door. I head for Karen’s room to look for the photos from the lake. She used to just keep them piled on her desk, but she hid them last week after she caught me flipping through them. She’d dragged me out of her room by my shirt and slammed the door in my face. I’m in most of those pictures, and the ones I’m not in are ones where I was taking the picture. She has no right to keep them from me, like it was just her summer and not mine. I’ve checked under her mattress already, but I realize now that I never checked the mattress of the rollaway bed that slides under her bed. I can hear Mom and Karen start in on each other downstairs, and I pull the out the rollaway bed. I slide my hand under its mattress and rip open my palm on a bedspring. I press my hand against my shirt to stop it from bleeding all over the rug, and reach in with my other hand, avoiding the spring. I pull out a spiral notebook. Ha! Her journal. Even better than pictures. I open it up, ready to read every secret she’d ever wanted to keep from me, everything she and Amanda would stop talking about when I walked into the room. The notebook is set up like a regular journal, with a date on every page, but instead of secrets there are lists of foods for every day since we came home from the lake. As the dates get more recent, the lists get shorter and shorter.
I hear Mom and Karen laughing downstairs. I bet they re hugging now. I put the notebook back under the mattress, and shove the rollaway bed back into place. When I get down to the kitchen, Karen eyes the Band-Aid on my palm for a second and then says, “Donnie, sorry I was such an A-hole in the car.”
I shrug. “It’s all right.”
Mom and I order Chinese food, but Karen says she had it for lunch so she makes herself a can of soup.
“Karen.” I’m surprised by the harshness of my whisper. I don’t want to wake up Mom.
“Karen!”
“What? Is it your hand?” she sits up in bed and puts a hand in front of her face to block the hall light. I step into her room and shut the door. We’re in the dark.
“I found your book tonight.”
“I know. You bled on it. Why do you think I asked about your hand?”
“What is it? What’s that book?”
I hear her lie back down in bed.
“It’s for home economics. It’s not what you think. We only have to keep track of certain foods, not everything we eat. We have to keep it all year and turn it in at the end. It’s a quarter of our grade.”
“Oh,” I say, and I think, Believe her believe her believe her.
“Don’t go through my stuff anymore, okay, Donnie?”
“Okay.”
I’m about to walk out of her room when she says, “Mom’s making me go to a counselor because she thinks there’s something wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with me, Donnie. You know that, right?”
“Sure. I know that.”