Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks

  Well. I certainly want to be there for Cole if he’s in need.

  “Maybe,” I hear myself say, drawing the word out long.

  Peyton squeals and claps her hands.

  “But I’ll tell Cole and Roger,” I quickly add. My heart rate picks up—what have I done? “You can invite Lydia, but no one else. Got it?”

  She beams. “Oh my God, we’re going to have a blast. I’m getting extensions put in that afternoon—it takes, like, six hours—so I will be so ready to cut loose.” She pushes off the wall and heads back across the lawn. “Lydia’s going to be so psyched!”

  “Wait,” I say, wanting to stress how low-key this has to be. She turns around.

  Mom honks, and I glance at the car-pool line. Anna’s already walking toward her. I hold up a finger to say I’m coming, I’ll be right there. When I turn back to Peyton, she’s gone.

  On our way home, Mom stops by Whole Foods for a loaf of ciabatta. Anna and I elect to wait in the car, but as Mom moves to get out, Anna says, “Will you get some Marcona almonds, too?”

  Mom purses her lips. “We’ll see,” she says, and her tone tells me what she’s thinking. She’s thinking, Oh, Anna, those almonds are drenched in oil.

  Anna’s face goes flat, like it’s too much. Like everyone is riding her all the time, even her mother, and like she could be falling through the cracks, with just one Marcona almond standing between her and the Home for Unwed Mothers.

  I was planning on being annoyed with her for the Peyton thing, but I push it from my mind, deciding what’s done is done. Sisters should step up for each other and all that. I say, “Hey, Mom?”

  “Yes, Carly?”

  “Anna’s not chubby. They’re called breasts.”

  Both Anna and Mom are shocked. In the backseat, Anna crosses her arms over her chest.

  “Yes, Carly,” Mom says. “I realize that.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  Mom opens her mouth, then shuts it. She shifts her attention to Anna. “Anna, have I been making you . . . self-conscious about your body?”

  “You’ve been making me feel like crap,” Anna says. She blushes.

  “Oh,” Mom says. “Well.” She’s silent for a moment, and when she speaks again, her tone is melancholy. “You’re both growing up, I suppose.”

  “And that’s normal,” I point out.

  “You’re right. I know.” She pulls herself together. “I’ll try to watch what I say.”

  She closes the door and crosses the parking lot to Whole Foods. She returns bearing bread, mineral water, and Marcona almonds, and I remember how good it feels to help my sister.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  A TRUE SOUTHERN BELLE IS A BULLDOZER DISGUISED AS A POWDER PUFF

  Thursday is Anna’s learn-to-dive day. In the girls’ locker room after school, she changes into her red one-piece. The bottom is nubbly. I put on my boring blue number again, and Vonzelle puts on her same suit. We’re stepping back in time.

  “Carly,” Anna says. Her throat closes in the middle of it, strangling the last syllable.

  I put my arm around her. “Don’t talk.”

  “Don’t even think,” Vonzelle says.

  I squeeze her. “Just breathe.”

  In the echoey pool area, the lunch ladies and the custodians are in the shallow end having a grand old time. They’re in the water up to their waists, and I can’t help but think how cute they are. Wide bodies, skinny bodies, dark bodies, white bodies. Bazooms bigger than Bad Attitude Cindy’s. Chest hair as thick as Dr. al-Fulani’s.

  “Woo-eee,” one very plump woman says as the water laps her ribs. She rises on her toes and laughs.

  “Why do I like their class so much more than our PE class?” I ask Vonzelle. We haven’t gotten in; we’re standing at the edge of the deep end. Anna’s being wimpy behind us, and I’m giving her a few minutes of space before getting this show on the road.

  “Because they’re having fun?” Vonzelle suggests.

  “Hi, hon!” Vonzelle’s mom calls to Vonzelle, waving from beside Coach Boden. The flesh under her arm wiggles.

  “That’s exactly it,” I say. “I want to have fun one day. I want to wear a bathing suit with a skirt.”

  “You can wear a bathing suit with a skirt now,” Vonzelle says.

  “You are so right.” I contemplate, imagining myself in an old-lady skirt suit.

  “Or not,” Vonzelle says.

  “Or not.” I look over my shoulder. “Anna!”

  She trudges forward and sticks her hands under her armpits. “So . . . what do I do?”

  “Well, you have fun, first of all,” I say. “What’s the point of doing it if you don’t have fun?”

  She gazes at me like a lizard. “Did you have fun when you did it?”

  “Kind of,” I say. “Okay . . . no. But it was fun once I was done.”

  Anna jerks her chin at the ladder. “Go have some more fun. Show me how it’s done.”

  I shake my head, then turn it into a nod. “Fair enough. But come up with me.”

  She sighs as if she’s being led to the stake. When we get to the platform, she says, “I am really, really scared, in case you didn’t notice. What if I break my neck?”

  “You won’t break your neck.”

  “What if I go down so far that I hit the bottom of the pool? I could break my neck.”

  “Won’t happen. Water’s too deep. Coach Wanker’s a sadist, but he wouldn’t make us do something if there was truly a chance we could get hurt.”

  Anna is unconvinced. “The people who design roller coasters say that, too, and then the tracks break and the cars go flying off into infinity and people die.”

  “Luckily, no roller-coaster tracks here.” I take a breath. “Do you remember the steps?”

  I get the lizard gaze again, eyelids at half-mast and features blank.

  “Right,” I say. “Let’s have a refresher course.” I walk her through the steps, emphasizing the most important ones like not arching your spine and not freaking out in the middle and windmilling your limbs.

  “And yes, I’ll show you, because that’s how much I love you,” I say. Do I want to do another back dive off the high dive? No. But if I fall off that board like I own it, then Anna will assume I do . . . or something. And she’ll have the courage to do it, too.

  I don’t talk. I don’t think. I just breathe and walk to the end of the board. It bounces with far too much sway. I turn and edge out onto the end. I feel Vonzelle watching me from below, but this isn’t the time to look at her. I don’t look at Anna, either.

  I lift my hands into the air and clasp one over the other. I tilt my head and stare at my knuckles. A tremor runs through me . . . and I fall. I am sideways, I am upside down, I am plunging like an arrow.

  Splash.

  The night class cheers when I emerge. I grin.

  “Wh-hoo!” Vonzelle calls from the edge of the deep end.

  “Your turn!” I call up to Anna.

  Up on the platform, she does a funny, nervous, bendy thing with her hands, pressing one against the other. “I can’t.”

  “Anna, stop saying that. You can.” I swim to the middle of the deep end, a yard or two from where she should land. “I’ll be right here. Or I can come back up there if you’d rather.”

  “No,” she says. “Stay there.” She takes shallow breaths.

  “Okay, do it,” I say.

  She approaches the board.

  “You’re going to be fine,” Vonzelle says, using a matter-of-fact, not-overly-invested voice. She’s casual city, as if people do this every day.

  Anna steps onto the board and walks to the end. There’s a stillness in the shallow end that makes me suspect she’s got an audience, but I don’t turn around. Casual city, casual city. I focus all my positive energy and send it to Anna in a stream of light.

  “Now turn around,” I say. I make figure eights with my legs to stay afloat.

  Anna turns around. The board jostles, and
she drops and grabs it.

  “Nah,” I say. “Just stand back up.”

  “You can do it,” Vonzelle says.

  Anna stands. I continue feeding her strength and courage and faith.

  “Lift your arms,” I tell her. “You’re almost there.”

  She raises her hands above her head. She looks up at her knuckles, and this alone is much farther than she ever got with Coach Schranker, who said, Get off the board, Anna. You’re done. You fail.

  “All you have to do is let go,” Vonzelle says.

  “I’m scared,” Anna says.

  “I know,” I say. “And what do you do when you’re scared? You paddle harder. Even if you’re not in the water, even if you’re in the air, way up high on a diving board. You paddle harder, because the only other choice—”

  Oh my God. I don’t have to finish my cheesy sermon, because ANNA IS DOING IT! She’s falling, and she does not crumple, but sluices clean into the water: first hands, then head, then body, then toes.

  “Anna!” I scream when her head pops up. “You did it! You did it, you did it, you did it!”

  “Wow,” Anna says, seeming dazed. “I did, didn’t I?”

  The night class whoops and hollers, and Vonzelle looks proud as heck. Almost as proud as me.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  DON’T PAWN THE SILVER

  On Friday morning before Mom and Dad leave for New York, we have a family powwow during which they give us a printout of flight deets, hotel deets, and arrival-back-home deets.

  “No wild parties,” Dad says.

  “Ha ha,” I say. My stomach twinges just the tiniest amount. Anna is appropriately and convincingly eye-roll-y, though, because as far as she knows—and this is true for Vonzelle, as well—we’re still just having our slumber party. I haven’t gotten around to telling them the change in plans, exactly.

  “No pawning the silver,” Dad goes on.

  “Ha ha again.”

  “And Carly, I want that video off the Web before we get back.”

  I don’t answer.

  “We’ve left Tracy some money,” Mom says, intuiting that this is not a good time for tension. “You can order pizza if you want.”

  “Where’s Tracy going to sleep?” Anna asks, because even in our big house, there are only three bedrooms. There used to be a fourth, but Mom turned it into a room for storing her fancy wrapping paper and rolls upon rolls of French ribbon.

  “With you, of course,” Dad says, then chortles at Anna’s horror.

  But it’s an icky joke, because Anna agrees with me about the Tracy-being-strange thing. Tracy never graduated from high school, and she wears really tight jeans and really tight shirts. She’s got the roundest, bulgiest eyes I’ve ever in my life seen. They look like blue marbles lolling about in her eye sockets.

  “Tracy will sleep in our bed,” Mom says. “I’ve left out a clean set of sheets.”

  “And explicit instructions to change the sheets again before we get home,” Dad says, with more chortling. He’s not a big fan of Tracy himself. He thinks she’s shifty, not that he’s letting that get in the way of having her “babysit” us. Just last week, for example, Tracy asked for an advance on her salary. She said she needed it for a lawyer, because her cousin had gotten thrown in jail.

  “Apparently her cousin attempted to break into Circuit City,” Mom told us the night Tracy made her request. “He wanted woofers for his truck. I said, ‘Tracy, I don’t know what a woofer is,’ and Tracy said they make it so that he can play his music loud enough to make his truck shake.”

  Dad’s laughter started then.

  “I asked how he got caught,” Mom went on, “and Tracy said, ‘Well, he threw a brick at the window, only the window wasn’t made out of glass. It was that Plexi stuff, and the brick bounced back and hit him smack in the head. The cops found him knocked out cold on the sidewalk.’”

  Dad was wheezing by then. “They couldn’t arrest him just for lying there. How’d they know what the brick was for?”

  “Good point,” I said. “Maybe you should be his lawyer.”

  Dad about choked on his pork medallion.

  “Ted, stop laughing,” Mom scolded, though she was laughing, too.

  “Maureen, you better fire Tracy before she brings her cousin here for a sting,” Dad said, red-faced and guffawing.

  But Mom did not fire her. Instead, she said, “Hey, why don’t you come spend a weekend with my children?”

  “Tracy has our travel information,” Mom says now. “She’ll be here when you get home from school.”

  Mrs. Bucco, our three-houses-down neighbor, gives a polite tap on her horn from our driveway. She’s taking us to Holy Redeemer today, since Mom and Dad have to get to the airport.

  “You girls better get going,” Dad says. “Hold down the fort. We’ll see you on Sunday.”

  Mom gives us each a hug. Anna’s is full-on; mine is the sideways sort. “Have fun. Be safe. And no doing anything foolish, like trashing the house.”

  I groan. “Yes, Mom, you really needed to say that, because that’s exactly what we were planning to do. We just love trashing houses.”

  “And no wandering around the neighborhood late at night,” she says.

  “Yes, and again, thank you for planting that idea,” I say, looking at her as if she’s lost her mind.

  “I want you to be here when we return, that’s all.”

  “That’s so cool, because so do I.”

  Anna stifles a laugh.

  “Come on, Anna,” I say, grabbing my backpack. At the door, I pause and look back at Mom and Dad. “Have fun,” I tell them.

  “Bring us souvenirs,” Anna adds.

  Mom smiles. “Love you, girls.”

  “Love you, too,” we chorus.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  THREE HOT CHICKS

  Vonzelle’s mom drops her off at our house at four on Saturday. When I open the door to let her in, she says, “Why is there a box of ducks on your front step?”

  “What?!” I say.

  She gestures with the hand not holding her overnight bag. “Look.”

  My eyes fly to the beat-up cardboard box by the wall of the house. I’ve never seen this box in my life. It has no top, and when I walk over, I see that inside are three ducks. Three baby ducks, each the size of a cupcake.

  “Why is there a box of baby ducks outside my house?” I ask Vonzelle stupidly.

  She squats and peels a blue sticky note from the side of the box. “Three hot chicks for three hot chicks,” she reads aloud.

  One of the ducks quacks.

  “They’re not chicks,” I say. “They’re ducks.”

  A wolf whistle cuts through the air from the direction of the Millers’ house.

  “Oh, nuh-uh,” I say, putting my hands on my hips. I spot Gary peeking over the top of the wall. Or maybe Barry. I raise my voice. “Did you leave these ducks here? You better come get them!”

  Gary (or Barry) laughs and disappears.

  “Who’s the third hot chick?” Vonzelle asks. “Is it me?”

  “No,” I say, disgusted.

  She seems offended.

  “You are a hot chick,” I say, “but how would they know you were going to be here? I think they mean Tracy.”

  “Tracy, your babysitter?”

  “Please don’t call her that. But, yes.” Last night Tracy took a pizza box out to the trash, and when she didn’t come back in after several minutes, I went to check on her. She was chatting with all four Miller boys, whose heads were a row of bowling balls on the wall between our houses. She was wearing tight jeans and a fuzzy sweater, which she’d hiked up so they could see the star above her left hipbone.

  “Tracy!” I’d said.

  “What?” She smoothed down her sweater and sashayed past me. She winked and said, “Give ’em something to dream about.”

  “Is Tracy a hot chick?” Vonzelle asks.

  I look at her, unwilling to even go there.

  I tur
n back toward the Millers’ house and cup my hands around my mouth. “Get over here and get your ducks!”

  Laughter spills from behind the wall.

  “What’s going on?” Anna says, emerging from the house.

  Vonzelle hands Anna the note. “You got a delivery.”

  Anna skims it and looks down at the box. “They’re not chicks. They’re ducks.”

  Three heads appear over the wall, followed, after a scramble, by the fourth. All four boys grin. Barry, or maybe Gary, makes kissy sounds and calls, “Hi, Anna!”

  Gary, or maybe Barry, yells, “We love hot chicks!”

  “They’re not chicks!” Anna yells back. “They’re ducks!”

  Why don’t any of them say “Hi, Carly?” I wonder, then immediately hate myself for it.

  “Where’s your babysitter?” Larry asks, waggling his eyebrows. He’s twelve, and he’s waggling his eyebrows.

  That’s it. I squat, awkwardly grab the box of ducklings, and heave it up. The ducks flap their wings and make sounds of alarm. Two of them are yellow with white chests and tummies; the third has a pale yellow chest with black feathers everywhere else. Except they’re not really feathers. They’re more just . . . fuzzies. Maybe they turn into feathers later?

  “They’re so cute,” Vonzelle says.

  “And now they’re going bye-bye.” I march over to the wall. Barry smirks down at me. Or Gary. They all look the same, anyway.

  “Here are your ducks,” I say, lifting my offering. The ducks skitter and squawk, and I feel the soft weight of them hit the more tilted-down side of the box.

  “Not my ducks,” Gary says. “Yours.”

  “No, Gary, they’re not . . . and where did you get them, anyway?”

  “My name’s not Gary. It’s Barry.”

  “Yay for you. You didn’t steal them from the Duck Pond, did you?” The Duck Pond is over by Garden Hills swimming pool. It’s a twenty-minute walk from our house, and Anna and I used to go and feed the ducks stale bread. We used to do that a lot, actually, and then buy toffee crunch bars from the ice-cream truck that trolled the neighborhood. When did we stop going to the Duck Pond?

  “We liberated them,” Barry says.

  “It was easy,” Gary says—if he’s even Gary. Maybe there isn’t a Gary.