But it’s for a good cause. Anyway, Roger is an excellent driver and follows all the traffic laws, and he’s such a giant that anyone seeing him would assume he’s eighteen at least.
He gives me his jacket to wear, which swallows me. His spare helmet creeps down over my eyes, but I can see well enough. I feel the wind on my face. I breathe in the detergent-y smell of Roger’s flannel shirt and fantasize about owning my own motorcycle one day. A sweet little cruiser, just my size.
When we reach Virginia Highlands, I try to give Roger his jacket.
“Keep it,” he says, and the way he looks at me makes me feel like maybe I look kind of cute in his enormous jacket. “You’ll need it for the ride back.” He asks if I want company as I shop, and I tell him no. We arrange to meet at Paulo’s Gelato, and I go off to explore the boutiques.
I’m looking for something for Anna. A just-because present . . . which in this case is really a just-because-I-was-a-jerk present. Many things tempt me: a custom perfume from Blend, a coolio necklace that I could make for her myself at Atlanta Beads, a set of awesome Hello Kitty stationery from DabberDoo. But all these things are more “me” than Anna. The perfume could possibly work . . . Anna likes perfume. But perfume is pretty personal, and what smells good to me might smell gross to her, like that Shalimar perfume of Mom’s that to me smells cloyingly sweet, but which Anna loves.
I end up at Mooncake, which reminds me of a giant dollhouse. It’s decorated with old-fashioned hatboxes and shiny ribbons and big bunches of flowers. There’s a whole lot of pink. Described in those words, it sounds unappealing, like a grandmother’s overstuffed chintz sofa. But it’s not like that. It’s quirky, like all the stores in Virginia Highlands. Mooncake’s take on “quirky” just happens to be especially feminine. And . . . pink.
I pick out a pair of dangly earrings with twinkly crystals at the bottom. They’re gorgeous. I put them back and buy a simple pair of seed-pearl earrings that don’t dangle at all. They’re cute, they’re classy, they’re totally Anna.
At home, I find her in the TV room curled up on the sofa. She’s watching yet another episode of The Hills. I start to say something sarcastic, but show great restraint and don’t.
“Hey,” I say from the doorway. I’ve got the earrings in a small, gold bag in my pocket.
She gives me a cursory glance, then blows a bubble with her gum. She pulls it back into her mouth and pops it. “Did you walk home?” she asks, as if to have done so would have been incredibly lame.
“Roger gave me a ride on his motorcycle. He dropped me off a couple houses down so Mom wouldn’t see.”
“Oooo,” she says. “Such a rebel.”
I exhale. She looks ugly with her eyebrows all scowly and her mouth in a frown.
“What’s your damage?” I ask.
She snorts. “What’s your ‘damage’? Omigod, do you have any idea how stupid you sound?”
“Do you have any idea how bitchy you sound?”
The word bitchy makes my face flush, because despite it all, I’m a Holy Roller. Holy Rollers don’t use words like bitchy.
“Well, maybe I wouldn’t be such a bitch if you were the slightest bit nice to me,” Anna says, which is ludicrous, because I am nice to her almost all the time.
My jaw tightens and I’m probably going to get a migraine and it’s all her fault. I pull the gold bag out of my pocket and hurl it at her. “I got these for you. Hope you like them.”
The bag lands in her lap. Her hand goes instinctively to it, as does her gaze. When she lifts her head, her expression is scared.
Good, I think. Jerk. Loser. Bitch.
Of course it’s my eyes that well with tears. I turn on my heel and stride away before she can see.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DUCKY-WUCKY
Ten minutes later comes the knock on my door.
“Come in,” I say from my bed, where I’ve been staring at the ceiling and telling myself that I am always right and Anna is always wrong. And maybe that’s not true, but this time it is.
Anna opens the door. “You busy?”
“No,” I say. “Just staring at the ceiling, wondering why you’ve been acting like such a brat recently.”
The tension in the room intensifies. I can feel it. It’s so strange how you can feel things like that.
“I love my earrings,” she says with a decent amount of control. “They’re beautiful.”
I swivel my head. She’s got the earrings on, and yeah, they look good.
“I got them to say sorry for making fun of Dr. Smiley yesterday,” I say.
She hesitates, then sits on the edge of my bed. “You didn’t make fun of Dr. Smiley. You made fun of me.”
Same difference, I want to say. But I don’t, because it’s not. I sigh and let my eyes go back to the ceiling cracks. “Anna . . .”
“What?”
I don’t like the way I feel inside. I don’t like the messiness of having to work things out. “I can’t believe we’re having a fight about teeth.”
“I can’t, either,” she says, and not in a let’s-giggle-and-make-nice way. The implication is more, Yeah, it’s ridiculous, and I personally think you’re ridiculous.
“Well, I’m sorry,” I say. “You could have just told me you were upset, though.”
She makes a sarcastic pfff. “Yeah, we’re real good at that.”
We’re quiet.
She sits. I try to find a place inside of me that’s free of coiled-up resistance.
“But come on,” I finally say. I try to take the accusation out of my tone. “Don’t you think it’s silly to stay mad at me for that one remark?”
“You didn’t just make fun of my teeth. You made fun of my makeup and my clothes, too.” She plays with a strand of her hair. “That’s not why I was mad today, though. Not the only reason.”
“Then why did you bite my head off when I came to say hi and give you a present?”
She looks at me from under her lashes.
I raise my eyebrows.
“Some guy called me a whale,” she says in a low voice.
“What?! That’s absurd. Who?”
“Tony D’Abrezzio. In math.”
“Well, he’s an idiot,” I say. “You’re not a whale, Anna.”
“He was sitting behind me. Jake Knudson was next to him, and Tony goes, ‘Hey, Knudson, check out Lauderdale’s butt. Whale tail.” The “whale tail” part she stretches out in a bitter singsong.
“Anna—”
“Why does everyone care about my body so much? Why do they think they can say anything they want about it?”
“He wasn’t calling you a whale,” I tell her.
“Uh, yeah, he was. If my butt’s a whale tail, then I’m the whale.”
“Were you wearing a thong?”
“Maybe,” she says defensively. “So?”
So thongs are dumb, I think. Thongs are butt floss. But she already knows my opinion on thongs—an opinion Mom and I share, which means that Anna’s been going off on her own to buy sexy underwear. This alone freaks me out, but I’ve got bigger fish to fry.
“Visualize with me, please. If you were sitting in your chair, and Tony was behind you, and your thong was showing above your jeans . . .”
Comprehension fails to dawn on her face.
“Muffin tops?” I try. “Whale tails? Camel toes?”
Her brown eyes stay confused. How do I know these terms and she doesn’t, when she’s the one wearing size 36-C bras and thongs?
“All right, sister-to-sister time,” I say. “A muffin top is that bit of belly that ploofs out over your jeans.”
Anna sits forward and looks down at the overflow of flab formed by her waistband.
“Ugh,” she says, sitting back and covering her stomach with her hands.
“Camel toes: when a girl wears her jeans too tight and they go up too high in the front. Um, in her delicate feminine area.”
I let her envision it. When she does, she goes, “Ew!?
??
“I’ve never seen you with camel toes, so don’t worry,” I say.
“Wouldn’t that hurt?”
“I’d sure think so. But I think that about thongs, too.”
She turns her imagination skills to thongs. I see her processing the way a plainly visible thong would make a Y above the waist of too-low jeans.
“Ohhhh,” she says. “So a whale tail . . .”
“ . . . has nothing to do with being fat,” I finish.
“Ew,” she says again.
The mood in the room is lighter than it was five minutes ago. It’s amazing. We twist to our sides so we’re facing each other on my bed.
“You’re not fat, Anna. You should, however, stop wearing thongs.”
“Yeah, only you don’t get to tell me that.”
“I do, too, because I’m your big sister and that’s my job. I have to shower you with sisterly love, which sometimes means telling you the hard truth about things.” I poke her. “Because you’re my ducky-wucky.”
“Please don’t call me that.”
“I have to. It would be so sad if I didn’t.”
“Sad for who?”
I pause. Are we still happy, or are we tumbling back down the hill? I swear, it used to be so easy with Anna. These days, I never know what to expect.
“Sad for me,” I say carefully. “But sad for you, too”—I make my voice poor-little-me-ish—“because don’t you want to be my ducky-wucky?”
“No,” she says.
I find her toes with mine so that we’re touching. I have the slippery sense of losing something. “Why not?”
“Would you want to be called ducky-wucky?”
“Sure, why not? It’s cute. It’s . . . ducky-ish.”
“Which is great, only I don’t want to be ducky-ish.”
“Anna,” I say. “Nicknames mean you love somebody. Do you not . . . am I not allowed to love you anymore?”
“Carly . . .”
“You’re my little sister,” I say. To my horror, my voice wavers.
“I have a whole life you don’t know about,” she says.
“I’m not saying I own you. I’m just saying you’re my little sister.”
“I wish you’d stop calling me that, too. ‘Little’ sister. I’m bigger than you, Carly.”
“Oh, sure, rub it in.”
She maintains a level gaze.
“Fine. Younger sister—can you live with that?”
She exhales as if I’m exasperating her, which in turn exasperates me.
“Listen, Anna, I am older than you,” I state. “That’s just the way it is. I’m older than you, and I’ll always be older than you.” I pause. “Unless I die. Then you’d be older.”
“Not till fourteen months after,” she says. “I’d have to catch up with you before I could pass you.”
“Okay, you’re missing a key point here: I’d be dead.”
Grudgingly, she laughs. “But, Carly . . .” Our toes are still touching. “Yes, I’m your sister. But I don’t want that to be all I am.”
“It’s not all you are. It never has been.”
“Sometimes it feels like it.”
I swallow.
“So will you quit calling me ducky-wucky?”
Stop looking at me like that, I think. I feel as if I’m drowning—or if not drowning, then as if I’m keeping my head above water, but just barely. Which is silly. Nothing bad is happening here. Anna is safe. I’m safe. We’ll always be sisters.
“I’ll try,” I say. “But I might forget sometimes. Okay, ducky-wucky?”
Her smile is sad. It tells me I’ve disappointed her. She sits up, and my toes miss her toes.
She slides off the bed. “I’m going to go finish my show.”
“Wait.” I push myself up, and the sleeve of my dashiki gets caught under my butt. I tug it free. “Are we good, you and me?”
She smiles, but it’s woven through with a thread of lonely. “Thanks for the earrings. I love them.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SOUP CANS AND STOCKINGS
Rumor has it that at public schools—insert exaggerated shivers of horror—students aren’t allowed to have Secret Santas. Or sing Christmas carols, or deck the halls with boughs of holly, or do anything Christmas-y at all, since Christmas is a Christian holiday and public schools aren’t allowed to have religion. My cousin Frances, who lives in South Carolina and goes to public school, says that instead of Christmas break, they have winter break, and instead of Christmas parties, they have “holiday” parties.
Although she says they still make those candy-cane reindeers, and what’s up with that? As any good Holy Roller can tell you, candy canes represent shepherds’ staffs, as in the shepherds who followed the star to see Jesus. And, sorry, but that’s Christmas all the way, baby.
At Holy Redeemer, we most certainly do have Secret Santas and Christmas carols and boughs of holly, and I love it. I love it all. Yes, the world is filled with sadness, and yes, Holy Redeemer is whacked-out in oh-so-many ways. But Christmas—the real Christmas, what it’s supposed to be—is an example of what I feel when I think about God. Christmas is a time to believe that, deep down, people are good.
Trista Van Houser, for example, is being very good. She’s making a Service Council announcement during homeroom, because Trista is big into community service. I grudgingly admire her for it, because Trista is super-rich even by Holy Redeemer standards, and she doesn’t have to do community service at all. She could float around a pool all day in a five-star Hawaiian resort. Or jet off to New York and shop at Barneys, just for the heck of it. Every fall she does exactly that when her daddy takes her shopping for a new school wardrobe.
Today Trista is wearing a cream-colored silk shirt tucked into a short suede skirt. As she talks, she alternates between playing with her gold charm bracelet and finger-combing her streaky blond hair. She’s here to remind us to make Christmas stockings for needy families.
“I mean, y’all,” she entreats, “this is serious. I could just cry when I think how I’d feel if I woke up Christmas morning and didn’t have any presents to open.”
I’m a little surprised she cares. Guess it’s a reminder that I’m not as good a judge of character as I like to think I am.
“We all need to bring in one stocking apiece, and it needs to be full,” she continues. “Just put in some soup cans or something, that’s what I’m telling all the homerooms.”
Then again, yes I am.
That doesn’t mean that Christmas equals hypocrisy, though. It is complicated living in my head, because it’s so easy to make fun of Christianity (and Christian fluff-fluff heads like Trista), and yet I do believe in something bigger. I do, I do.
Trista runs her tongue over her teeth. “Now, today is Tuesday, and the deadline is this Friday. You can bring in more stockings after that, but they won’t count for class-spirit points, and we’ve just got to beat the juniors. So don’t forget, ’kay?” She waves as she leaves the room. “Y’all have a good one!”
Oh, Trista, I think. She’s not a bad person. She just lives in her own little world, where soup equals good Christmas fun for needy children.
In my head, I play a movie of Trista on Christmas morning. She trots downstairs in her BCBG pajamas, peers beneath the branches of her fourteen-foot Christmas tree, and exclaims in delight when she spots a can of Campbell’s cream of asparagus tied with a bright red bow.
During my free period, I see that Trista has set up a Service Council table in the foyer of Butler Hall. Chatting with Trista, his thumbs hooked through his belt loops, is Cole. His shirt is gray with black letters, and it says I LIVE IN MY OWN LITTLE WORLD. BUT IT’S OKAY, THEY KNOW ME HERE.
Now, that’s just plain weird, I think, stopping short.
Peyton rams into me. “Ow,” she says, even though it’s my heel that gets stepped on. Then Lydia rams into Peyton. She says “ow,” too.
“Sorry,” I say. The weirdness isn’t that Cole is talking to
Trista (though he should STOP RIGHT NOW). The weirdness is that just this morning I was thinking about how Trista lives in her own little world—and now here Cole is, proclaiming the same sentiment on his T-shirt. But he’s being ironic, of course. Even if he wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter, because Cole living in his own world is a whole different ball of wax from Trista living in her own world. Trista’s world is shallow. Cole’s world is sexy and deep and full of texture.
Cole and I have developed a . . . thing over the last month, which makes it painful to see him chatting up Trista. Admittedly, what Cole and I have isn’t a thing thing. It’s more of a riff thing. It started out with quizzing each other on old song lyrics, and it grew into goofy exchanges of sixties speak. Far out. What a trip. Neato. Keen.
I think Cole is keen. I also think that a riff thing is better than nothing. A riff thing could, one day, turn into a thing thing.
“Stop drooling,” Peyton says. Peyton thinks the odds of our riff thing turning into a thing thing are low to the point of zilch.
I blush.
“Yeah,” Lydia says, prodding my back with her knuckles. “I’m in the middle of a story.”
I feel like a mule being herded along. I also wonder why, if Peyton and Lydia are my friends, I don’t always like the way I feel when I’m with them.
We reach a bench and sit down.
“I think he’s sexually starved,” Lydia says, referring to her math teacher, Mr. Owens. “Because why just the girls and not the boys, huh? Somebody could sue him for discrimination. Somebody should sue him for discrimination!”
“Is there another way for the guys to earn points?” Peyton asks.
I listen, but my attention is on Cole, who’s still talking to Trista.
“No,” Lydia says. “He was just, ‘If you get your picture taken with Santa, I’ll give you extra credit. But you have to be sitting in his lap.’”
“Then he didn’t say the guys couldn’t do it,” Peyton says.
Lydia makes an offended sound. “Oh, right, like some guy is going to plop down in Santa’s lap.”
Usually I’m entertained by stories about Mr. Owens—and Lydia has a lot of them—but Cole is now laughing at something Trista said. I wish Trista wasn’t so pretty. I wish somebody would go over there and remind Cole that prettiness isn’t everything, and that girls who are quirky and smart and appreciate good music are ultimately far more appealing.