I got home late and found Ted sitting on the floor of the kitchen, eating handfuls of cereal out of the box. A dusting of broken flakes covered his baggy sweatshirt. Not exactly a fashion statement.
He was smarter than he looked, though. Lately he’d been proofreading my homework for me. On Ms. Samuels’ advice, I’d asked him to circle any errors in pencil, but not correct them. Then I would go through and fix everything, erasing his pencil marks as I went. For a grade nine kid, he had pretty good spelling.
From his slouch on the floor, he motioned me to silence and pointed to the vent above him. We could hear voices echoing down from the upstairs bedroom. I sank down beside him and helped myself to a handful of his cereal.
“That’s pure stupidity,” came my mom’s muffled shout.
“I simply assumed,” my dad said.
That’s how my mom and dad fought. Mom yelled and Dad answered in his I’m-so-much-more-reasonable-than-you voice. A voice that obviously made Mom even more angry.
“Well, you can unassume. You’re an unmotivated lump. You can barely pay for their food, let alone their education. I can’t believe you would even consider…”
“What are they talking about?” I whispered to Ted.
“Us.”
“What?”
“They’re talking about which one gets to keep us,” he mumbled.
“I thought we were staying here!” I said, forgetting to whisper for a minute.
Ted put a finger to his lips. “So did I. So did everyone except Mom, apparently. She says she has an extra bedroom in her apartment for us.”
“There is no way I’m sharing a bedroom with you,” I told him.
“It’s not like I want your putrid perfume in my bedroom,” he said, “but no one’s asking us.”
“We’ll see about that.” Leaving him cramming more cereal into his mouth, I stomped my way upstairs. I tried to make extra noise to warn them, but when I got to the hallway I could still hear them yelling at each other. I swung open their bedroom door without knocking.
“What do you call having the same job for ten years?” my mom was yelling. “That warehouse is going to kill you one of these days.”
“Hello? Earth to alien parents? I thought that since you’re involving the whole neighborhood in this fight, you might want to consult your kids.”
They barely looked at me. “Go to your room,” my mom said.
“Ted and I aren’t moving.”
This time my mom took a step toward me. “Mind your own business,” she said.
“That makes no sense. How can you even say this isn’t my business?”
I could see her gritting her teeth. For a minute I thought she was going to scream at me. Instead she held her voice to a hiss. “Go to your room, shut the door and stay there until someone asks for your opinion. Which they probably won’t.”
I left then, slamming the door behind me. Then I went to my room and slammed that door, too. “Bitch,” I said aloud to the empty room. I wasn’t sure who I was madder at — my mom for being so mean, or my dad for not defending me. If he wasn’t such a wimp, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.
My mom and dad had been having the exact same fight about twice a year since I could remember. Probably since before I was born. My dad was on his twentieth year in shipping and receiving. He liked it. He said he was good at it.
The fight went like this: Mom would see another job in a newspaper ad and cut it out for my dad. Dad would ignore it. Mom would tell him to apply. Dad wouldn’t. Mom would say he had no interest in providing for his family. Dad would say he provided just fine and not to worry so much.
My mom’s idea of providing and my dad’s idea of providing were two different things. Maybe because of all those home décor magazines my mom read. A couple of years ago, I guess she gave up on him. She got her real estate license and started selling houses. She was good at it, too. Better than she was at ironing and making lunches. She was never exactly Betty Crocker material.
There was a soft knock at my door and Ted poked his head in.
“Nice going,” he said softly.
“Yeah. Thanks a lot.”
“So I guess we’re moving?”
“Dad’s never won a fight in his life. What do you think?”
In the morning, I woke up aching to see Mel — someone who knew me so well that I could completely relax. Suddenly all the reasons I hadn’t called her seemed trivial. It wasn’t like she was going to interrogate me about my new classes. I didn’t have to tell her about Ms. Samuels and remedial reading. Unless I wanted to.
I called her before I left the house, and she agreed to meet for coffee after school. Of course, everything went wrong from the start. For instance, I couldn’t stop at my locker without bumping into Amanda, and I couldn’t bump into Amanda without inviting her along.
I knew they wouldn’t like each other. The minute I introduced them I could see Mel taking in Amanda’s black eyeliner and chunky earrings. I held my breath, waiting for Amanda to make some snide comment about Mel’s brand-name jeans. She didn’t, though. Instead she tagged along quietly until we reached the door to the coffee shop.
“Coffee’s so boring. Let’s go somewhere interesting. Come on.”
Before Mel could protest, the two of us were in tow down the block, then into a back alley. I was about to ask where we were going when Amanda ducked into a doorway. A vivid hand-painted sign on the wall above read “Tally’s Tattoo Parlor.”
“She can’t be serious,” Mel said, stopping dead.
I grinned at her. “We might as well look. They can’t force-tattoo us or anything.”
Inside, a hulking guy with his arms covered in tattoos and his hair dyed purple leaned across the counter. I assumed that this was Tally.
“You lookin’ at your options again?” he asked Amanda.
Ignoring him, Amanda waved us over to the sample designs on the wall. “This is the one I’m getting. It’s going to take three visits — one for the black outline, one for the purple scales and one for the orange. It’s going to stretch from my shoulder blade to just below my waist.” She pointed to a winged dragon with stylized black flames issuing from its jaws.
“Lovely,” was all that Mel said.
“I need almost three hundred bucks just to get it started,” Amanda mourned.
Grinning, I offered the fifty-dollar bill still in my wallet.
“Where did you get that?” she gaped.
“Courtesy of my mom’s dresser. Which isn’t actually her dresser anymore, since she’s moving out.”
Now it was Mel’s turn to gape. “Your mom’s moving out?”
I could tell she was mad that I hadn’t told her. Luckily I was saved by Tally the tattoo man leaning even farther over the counter. “Fifty bucks will get you a nice belly button ring,” he said, raising one pierced eyebrow for emphasis.
“Hah!” Mel said, like it was the most ridiculous idea in the world.
That’s what made me do it, I think. Ten minutes later I was lying on a raised cot, with the bottom of my shirt rolled up and the top of my pants rolled down. Tattoo man swabbed my belly button with alcohol, pinched it a few times and then raised what looked like a giant darning needle.
Both Amanda and Mel sucked in their breath. I closed my eyes.
The needle felt like an icicle going through my skin, but it was over surprisingly quickly. Within five minutes I was standing at the counter, listening to instructions about rubbing alcohol.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Mel and Amanda said at the same time as the door to the tattoo parlor banged shut behind us. Mel looked entirely shocked. Amanda looked impressed. I thought both reactions were equally enjoyable.