EVERY FOURTH SATURDAY OF THE month, my mom hosts a party for local children’s book illustrators and writers.
Which means every fourth Saturday of the month, my house is flooded with cheese, cut fruit, and wines, all to be consumed by writers and illustrators, in scarves and big necklaces and dresses with loud patterns. My mom never cooks for this event but always wears an apron.
It also means that every fourth Saturday of the month, my dad goes out with his friends to play or watch a sport and, at some point in the day, Mark and I are kicked out of the house or “sent to the store,” to buy some weird party thing, like toothpicks or paper straws or butter, which is really about my mom needing space before she goes into social mode.
“I can go by myself,” I told my mom, when she came downstairs and accosted me on the couch.
“Go with your brother,” she shouted, as she strode out of the room in her preparty silk slip and yoga shirt, rejuvenating goop on her face.
Mark stood in the door, resigned. “Come on, G.”
The whole way there, Mark keeps his earbuds in and I do, too. His hair is getting shaggy. Pompadour voluminous even. I think he puts gel in it sometimes.
Walking next to my brother reminds me of how ginormous he is, which he suddenly became when he was like twelve and now every year he gets a little more physically intimidating. I think he is mostly protein at this point. Meat and eggs and fruit, which he has pointed out to me is not protein. Although it seems like maybe beets SHOULD be protein.
I wonder if when people see Mark they think he’s a bully because he’s so big. Of course he’s not.
I feel like lately my mom is paranoid that Mark and I don’t like each other anymore, because we’re not curled up on the couch in our pajamas playing video games on Saturday mornings or conspiring to get my mom to buy sugary cereal at the grocery store.
Because we’re not little kids.
The thing is, I don’t think Mark and I have to be friends. Like, why is that a requirement? Just because you’ve written it into a million kids’ books, doesn’t mean it’s true.
Mark is my brother and I have a strong suspicion that if I ever needed his help, he’d grudgingly be there for me—like if I was hanging off a cliff, you know, I think he would pull me up.
Mark is the only person I never have to explain my weird life to. That’s enough for me.
I do sometimes think it would be fun to ask him to punch a rock because I saw some guy do it on a YouTube video once and it looked really cool.
It’s only when we get into the store and in front of the rows and rows of crackers that Mark pulls out his buds and looks at me. “Wait, what are we getting?”
“Gluten-free crackers,” I say, pulling a box of nutty looking things off the shelf and inspecting the label.
“That stuff is all crap,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “That gluten-free thing. It’s all crap.”
Mark hates “crap” food. It’s like a personal insult to him. Its existence.
“Well, that’s what we’re doing.” I place the box back on the shelf. “Some people get sick from eating gluten.”
“They get sick from eating crap,” Mark scoffs.
“Okay, thanks mister in-no-way-helpful guy.”
Mark eats BOILED chicken. So he is no help looking for a tasty cracker.
I’m scanning a box of rice crackers when I look up and spot Shirley Mason.
Or I spot Shirley Mason spotting me.
If our parents were with us, we’d have to say hello. If our parents recognized each other or if we were wearing our school uniforms, each of us would get poked in the back, followed by a “Say hello.”
I am expecting a stiff, frozen-pizza smile from Shirley. I am expecting a swishy walk, brisk and chilly, noting my existence with a sniff, and then a brush past. Maybe a barely perceptible eye roll because I’m dressed in leggings and a giant sweatshirt. And my puffy coat. Which makes me look like a plum with legs.
Which I KNOW.
I’m expecting this because that is what Shirley Mason does. Has done. For as long as I’ve known her.
I notice Shirley’s hair is not its usually fluffy blond perfection. It’s slicked back, which may or may not mean it’s dirty, pulled into a feeble looking ponytail. Shirley is holding a bag of oranges, dangling by her side in that thin eco-friendly plastic bag they give you for produce here. Her coat is open and underneath it looks like she’s wearing a yellow sweater.
“Just grab whatever,” Mark says, looking at his phone.
Down the aisle, Shirley squints at me. Is she squinting or sneering? Whatever it is, it’s followed by an abrupt, almost nervous-looking twist and a quick walk in the opposite direction.
All the air has been sucked out of the aisle. I grab a box of the rice crackers, which I’m pretty sure don’t have gluten.
“Let’s go,” I say, walking toward the checkout.
I walk relatively fast, ahead of Mark, pausing in the junk-food aisle, which Shirley would never dare to enter.
Did I mention Shirley Mason once yelled at me in gym that I had monkey legs?
Garbagia and the Monkey Legs. Not a children’s book because no one would read that.
You have to LIVE it.
At the checkout counter, Mark’s phone starts pinging every six seconds. He walks over to the sliding doors before I finish paying. He’s outside, still texting when I walk over, swinging the paper bag with the crackers in it on my finger.
“Uh,” he says, not looking up from his phone, “Trevor’s gonna meet me here. So, just tell Mom, if she asks, uh, I’m at Trevor’s. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say, handing him the apple he wanted to buy. “Here.”
“Cool,” he says, looking at it. “So, uh, is that, you know, that girl by the crackers who was looking at you? Is she, like, a friend?”
I give Mark bug eyes. “My FRIEND?! That was SHIRLEY MASON.”
I want him to share my contempt. Not that he will. Why would he? Boys don’t care about this shit. Boys care about bananas and the size of their feet or something.
“So what?” Mark takes a giant man-size bite of his apple. “Does she, like, go to your school?”
“Yes, obviously, where else do I meet anyone?” I sigh. “Also. She’s a bitch.”
“Oh,” Mark says, looking at his phone. “Okay. Too bad.”
“Are you like offended or something?” I snort. “Are you opposed to sexist slurs?”
“No.” Mark rolls his eyes.
“If I hate her, you sort of have to hate her, too, by nature of our blood bond,” I say, now testing my hanging-on-a-cliff theory.
Mark rolls his eyes. “Fine. Okay. I hate her. I hate a stranger.”
I swing my bag some more and watch the shoppers darting out through the thin veil of snow to their cars, bloated bags in tow. “You know,” I say, “you’re lucky you’re a guy and you don’t have to deal with girl bullshit. You couldn’t hack it.”
“Well, lucky me, I guess.” Mark tosses his apple core into the slush with a fastball pitch.
“So,” I say, judging this to be the right moment, “this Todd kid. Who was murdered? Was he your friend?”
Mark frowns, fruitlessly digging the toe of his sneaker under a tiny lip of ice. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” I say, “like was he a friend of yours? He was in your grade so—”
“No,” Mark cuts in, rubbing his apple-sticky fingers on his coat. He looks down at his phone, which is glowing again. “He wasn’t.”
“But you knew him?”
Mark frowns. “Georgia. He went to the same school as me, and we’re in the same grade. It doesn’t mean I knew him. Do you know everyone in your grade?”
“By name or—”
Just then a horn blows, from what feels like inches away. I look over and see Trevor, idling. Staring at us through the window.
“Okay,” I say, taking a step backward. “Well, I’ll see you.”
“Yeah.” Mark shoves his phone into his pocket. “Okay. Bye.”
On my way home, I get a text from Carrie.
Carrie: If you had to choose between watching a Jane Austen movie or a James Cameron movie which would you watch?
Me: What will you be eating?
Carrie: Fish sticks.
Me: Austen.
Me: Hey so I just saw Shirley Mason at the Safeway and she looked like
Text silence. For four minutes.
Was I being weird? Is she still friends with her? She’s not, right?
Carrie: Maybe she’s on a diet.
Me: Enjoy your fish sticks.
A couple of hours later, as the party rages on, I am downstairs watching a reality TV show about famous people who are looking for love in all the wrong places and looking through my old school yearbooks, which are normally kept with my mom’s books. Solid, leather-bound tomes of child torture shelved next to glittery rainbow books of youthful joy, including her most famous, You Are Little, I Am Big.
I have no idea why my yearbooks are down here in the first place, and Mark’s yearbooks are in his room.
Maybe mine are still material.
In grade six, the theme of my St. Mildred’s yearbook was Friends Forever. The picture on the cover is a photo of three girls playing jump rope, a brick wall behind them, the west wall of the middle school.
It is a sunny day on the cover, but all our class photos are grim black-and-white. They look like prison photos of girls in uniform, stacked in rows, glaring at the camera.
I flip through, landing on my class photo. Homeroom 6D.
In every grade from five to ten, I was in the same homeroom as Carrie and Shirley, who, in this photo, sit in the front row, next to each other. Center front. Where you would seemingly put the two most important people. Their knees are pointed toward each other. Their hands rest in their laps. They smile the same knowing smile.
I am in the far-right top corner of this grainy black-and-white class photo, taken in the school gym, in front of a screen covered with an ivy print. I am looking down. I look like my whole head is hair.
Upstairs, I can hear my mom laughing. I slam the yearbook shut.
Time for a snack!
The kitchen smells like wine and slowly warming dairy. Drunken children’s literary figures with jangling bracelets and surprisingly fluffy beards (or both) drift in and out as I peck on bits of cheddar and little baked goods from fancy bakeries still displayed in pink boxes with slightly wilted white paper doilies.
I’m in the process of pushing an éclair into my mouth when I spot the newspaper on the kitchen table, a paper my dad still insists on getting because he thinks the internet is robbing a generation of the ability to read, a paper neither Mark nor I have ever read in the ten years it’s been coming to our house. Not that my dad would know this, because he’s never around.
The paper is mostly buried in party clutter: a paper plate smeared with what looks like guacamole covers most of the bottom of the front page, a balled-up napkin smeared with lipstick, a few sticky-looking cheese knives, and a half glass of red wine on the corner, but the photo looking out under the headline, “POLICE CONTINUE SEARCH FOR LOCAL BOY’S KILLER,” is clearly visible.
The photo is of a boy with black hair, longish in the front. He has dark eyebrows, big eyebrows, like, too big maybe. His face is thin, sharp-edged. He is looking up, from the paper, from my kitchen table, with deep dark eyes.
The boy in it looks nothing like the boy smiling goofy in the photo of Todd Mayer I saw on the news and the internet. This kid is different.
I know this kid.
I fucking saw this kid.
Here.
He was standing on my front step. A month ago? Before winter break? Maybe just after Halloween. He rang the doorbell, which is maybe why I remember it. Because who rings a fucking doorbell these days? He was wearing this weird long scarf. I remember thinking, Dude, who just comes by someone’s house?
He had a deep voice. Like adult deep. And he asked for Mark just as Mark reached past me and shoved me into the coats, pulling the boy in by his arm.
I never knew his name.
It’s Todd, clearly. Todd Mayer, who is now dead.
What was once a perfectly delicious éclair sticks in my throat like a punch.
Behind me the music switches again to some thumping ’80s noise. A sharp voice screams out, “PARTY’S JUST GETTING STARTED!”