She did a shake-and-wiggle (no toilet paper) and yanked up her sweats.
“Okay, let’s go,” she said.
A moan came from the campsite. Cinnamon and I clutched each other, our fingers digging deep.
“What was that?” she said.
“I don’t know!” I replied.
The moan came again, guttural and thick. My heart pounded.
“Omigod, omigod, omigod,” Cinnamon babbled. “We’re going to die!”
This wasn’t a joke. This was real. My brain knew that something had to be done—we had to go to the campsite and help whoever was being hurt—but my body was frozen.
“Help!” I tried to say. It came out as a squeak. “Help!”
There was the ripping sound of a zipper being unzipped. “What’s going on?” Mr. Gibson demanded.
Then everything happened fast. Cinnamon and I ran toward Mr. Gibson, who’d trained his flashlight on Adam and Logan’s tent. Through the fabric, I made out a dark hunched figure. The moan came again, a violent retching sound.
“Charlie, get the ax!” Mrs. Gibson screeched, pushing out of her tent. She wore a short pink nightie, and her hair was in curlers. “The ax! The ax!” She ran to the makeshift kitchen area and rooted frantically through a bag of canned goods.
“Get out of here, you maniac!” she shrieked. She threw a can of corn at her sons’ tent, only her aim was terrible, and Mr. Gibson flung up his hands.
“Judy, watch it!” Mr. Gibson barked.
A growl came from the tent. A crazy escaped-convict’s growl.
Omigod, I thought. Somebody is going to die. I am standing right here, and somebody is going to die.
I spotted the ax by the pig stump. I grabbed it, stumbling forward and lifting it above my head.
“Winnie!” Cinnamon screamed.
I reached the tent just as Logan tumbled out. He was green—way greener than I’d been on the drive through the mountains. He doubled over, and an arc of vomit streamed through the air. There was splattering. It was bad.
I dropped the ax, which thudded to the ground. When I saw it there, its blade dense and sharp, I felt lightheaded.
“Winnie, are you okay?” Cinnamon asked, rushing to my side.
“Too…many…marshmallows,” Logan muttered. He swiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Then he threw up again.
“Eww!” Cinnamon said, jumping back.
Cinnamon’s mother emerged from her tent. “Oh, God,” she said, looking hung-over. “Is that vomit I smell?” She clapped her hand to her mouth.
Finally, out staggered Adam from the boys’ tent. His hair was disheveled. He took in the scene—his parents, the vomit, me. The ax. His bleary eyes met mine.
“Wow,” he said. “You private school girls are tough.”
The next morning we packed up camp and drove to a hotel. A lovely Holiday Inn, with running water and toilets and an absence of deranged lunatics. Well, except for us.
The grown-ups paid for three rooms: one for Mr. and Mrs. Gibson, one for Mary Beth, and one for the four kids.
“No hanky-panky,” Mrs. Gibson warned, which made us crack up.
“Yeah, right,” Cinnamon said under her breath. “Who exactly would we have hanky-panky with?”
Adam blushed and glanced at me. I liked it.
Logan spent most of the morning in the bathroom, and Cinnamon, Adam, and I watched Showtime and bounced on the beds. We joked about the Great Ax Incident. We rapped on the bathroom door and asked Logan if he wanted us to bring him more marshmallows.
At wine o’clock, Adam, Cinnamon, and I swam in the pool while the grown-ups sipped chardonnay at the outdoor bar. Cinnamon begged her mom to buy us virgin piña coladas, but Mary Beth waved her off.
“Go get some exercise,” she prodded.
“What about Logan?” Cinnamon said, gesturing at the chaise longue where Logan sprawled. “He’s not exercising.”
“Go exercise, Logan,” Mr. Gibson said. “Give us a couple hundred laps.”
Logan groaned.
Mrs. Gibson swatted her husband’s arm. “Don’t tease him. His tum-tum hurts.”
There was another family swimming in the pool along with us. A dad, a mom, and a whole bunch of pale, skinny kids. One of the girls wore a gymnastics leotard for a bathing suit.
“Listen up, you rats,” the dad bellowed. All his kids were in the shallow end. Two of them looked his way; the others kept listlessly splashing. The girl in the leotard bobbed in endless circles. “I’ll pay any one of you ten dollars to go down the slide headfirst.” He gestured toward the twisty slide in the deep end. “Headfirst, and on your back. Ten dollars. Any takers?”
The two paying attention shook their heads. The girl in the leotard wiped a slime booger from her nose.
“I’m talking ten big ones!” the dad tried again. “What’s wrong with you kids?”
His wife said, “Frank.”
“They’re a bunch of wussies,” he told her. He turned back to the pool. “You’re all a bunch of wussies!”
“Hey, mister!” Cinnamon called. She grabbed my hand and raised it. “She’ll do it!”
“What?” I yelped.
“If you can stand up to an ax-murderer, I think you can go headfirst down a slide,” she said.
“You do it,” I said.
“No way. It’s got to be you.”
“Oh, God,” Adam said, hiding his face.
“Well?” the man said.
I looked at him. I looked at his kids, who’d suddenly grown interested. I looked at the slide, which wasn’t that steep.
“Fine,” I said. I clambered out of the pool and marched to the slide. I climbed the ladder.
“On your back!” the man called. “Headfirst on your back!”
I rolled my eyes. He obviously didn’t know who he was dealing with. I turned down and squatted, clinging to the plastic edges. I scooched my rear end forward and stretched out on my back. The sky was a brilliant late-afternoon blue above me.
“Go, Winnie!” Cinnamon cried.
“Yeah!” Adam called.
I let go—and whoosh. Down I went, looping in swishy curves, water sluicing up and into my eyes. I torpedoed into the water and shot straight to the bottom. I came up spluttering.
“Yay, Winnie!” Cinnamon and Adam cheered. Cinnamon clapped madly.
“Yay!” the unitard girl said. Her booger, by now, floated somewhere in the pool.
“Here you go,” the man said, striding over and handing me a ten-dollar bill. He started off scowling, then broke into a belly laugh, which made me like him better. “You earned it.”
Adam regarded me with admiration.
“I could have done it, too, you know,” Cinnamon said.
“I know,” I said. But the fact was, I did it. Me. Sometimes I was surprised by my own identity, as if I were a puzzle and life kept giving me clues to who I was. The last two days had given me two new pieces: first, that boys—and not just Lars—could conceivably like me, and second, that I could be brave when I wanted to. That was a good thing to remember, since so often I felt un-brave.
“Come, my darlings,” I said to Cinnamon and Adam, holding the bill aloft as I dog-paddled to the side of the pool. “It’s piña colada o’clock.”
August
AUGUST WAS AS HOT AS SIN, and everyone on the planet was cranky. Well, everyone in the Northern Hemisphere, at least. Or whatever hemisphere we lived in. Except for maybe the people in Canada, because I think I’d heard Canada could be chilly? And Seattle. The people in Seattle might not be cranky, because in Seattle it was supposed to rain all the time. Although that much rain would be cranky-making on its own….
Forget hemispheres. Forget individual states, because for all I knew there could be a freak snowstorm in north Georgia—though I found that very unlikely. If there was a freak snowstorm in north Georgia, every single Atlantan would be booking it up there as fast as their SUVs would allow. And why? Because it was the hottest August in decades.
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It was so hot, my face slicked with sweat the moment I stepped outside. It was so hot, I swabbed on extra strokes of deodorant two or three times a day. My cat, Sweetie-Pie, took up permanent residence on top of the air conditioner vent, and even with the air conditioner on, the temperature in the house didn’t dip below eighty. With the outside temperature in the hundreds, Dad refused to push the thermostat lower. If I nudged it down myself, he slid it back and lectured me sternly about limited resources and astronomical electricity bills.
“It’s not eighty degrees in your office,” I replied once (and only once) after he spelled out why suffering was good and air-conditioning was evil.
“What was that you said?” he demanded. This exchange occurred at home, so he was as cranky as I was.
“Your office, it’s nice and cool there,” I muttered. When Mom, Ty, and I had stopped by earlier in the week to bring Dad some papers, it had been like stepping into the refrigerated aisle of the grocery store. Or Canada.
“Winnie, I get up at six A.M. every day to put food on the table for you and your brother and sister,” he said sharply. “You want to provide for the family? Go right ahead. As a matter of fact, we have a backlog of filing that needs to be done. Why don’t you come to work with me tomorrow and file papers all day?”
So, yeah, I stopped complaining about the lack of AC. Didn’t mean I stopped resenting it.
Ty got a heat rash, which Dad said was jock itch, which made me draw my eyebrows very dubiously together. This was Ty we were talking about! Sweet, innocent Ty. And maybe he wasn’t so sweet and innocent, but he was only six. He’d be seven in a week—his birthday came just in time for the school year cutoff—but even so. Should an almost-seven-year-old get jock itch? More to the point, should an almost-seven-year-old have a jock?
The humidity made Sandra’s blond hair puff into a fro, and she yelled at me for using the rest of her Frizz-Ease, which I hadn’t touched.
But Mom. Mom was the worst. Of course the hot days got to her; they got to us all. But she blamed it on us, which wasn’t fair. Last time I checked, I wasn’t God. (Neither were Sandra or Ty, thank heavens.) But Mom got irritated by everything, and she snapped at us over nothing. She plain old wasn’t fun anymore.
And then one blistering day—it was ninety-five in the shade; eighty-two in our infernally sweltering house—she lost it completely. She was fixing dinner. Her cheeks were flushed. Her hair didn’t look as smooth and shiny as it normally did, and chunks kept falling in her face.
“Ty!” Mom called. “I need you to set the table!”
“No thanks,” Ty yelled from the den.
I was reading a book at the granite island, and Mom looked at me irritably, as if Ty’s attitude was my fault. She put down the potholder and strode to the door of the kitchen. “Not an option, bud. Get in here—it’s your night!”
Ty didn’t respond.
A good mother would have marched to the den and grabbed him by the ear, but Mom? She just sighed.
“Winnie, would you do it?” she said.
“Mo-o-m!” I protested. My book was at a good part. Rachel had just discovered she had magical powers. Plus, it wasn’t my turn.
“Please,” she stated. It wasn’t a request; it was an order, and it made me grouchy, because I wasn’t the slacker here. Ty was. But I put down my book and did it, because that’s me.
While I put out five plates, Mom delivered a monologue about how glad she would be when school started next month. “I was crazy not to sign Ty up for day camp,” she said, closing the microwave on a dish of frozen peas and punching the ON button. “You kids are under my feet twenty-four-seven!”
“I’m not,” I said, bristling at the “you kids” designation. And did she consider Sandra one of the “you kids”? Sandra was seventeen, for heaven’s sake.
“It’s over a hundred degrees outside, so it’s not like I can send you out to play. I get that,” Mom went on. “But I’m losing my mind! I don’t think any of you understand what I go through to keep this family running!”
She checked on the tray of chicken fingers in the oven, then banged shut the door. Frozen chicken fingers out of a box, which required soooo much effort. Anyway, should a mother complain to her very own daughter about her terrible, beleaguered existence? I was hot and grumpy, too, but she didn’t hear me complaining.
“And the constant whining and bickering,” Mom said. “‘Ty did this,’ ‘Sandra did that.’ My god. If I could have just one day without the three of you getting all over each other…”
Okay, maybe I occasionally complained. But only over stuff that was justified, like Ty sticking his feet in my face and asking if they stunk, or Sandra hogging the TV.
I folded the napkins—folded, because I was going that extra step—and tucked them under the plates.
“Do you wish you never had us?” I asked.
“Winnie!” Mom exclaimed. A swatch of sweaty hair fell forward onto her face. “It’s hot. The house is a wreck. I haven’t had a moment to myself in centuries, and I no longer own a single pair of underwear where the elastic hasn’t popped out of the leg. But do I wish I never had you kids? Never.”
“Well, good,” I said. “Remember that.” I replayed her words, realizing a beat too late that she’d snuck in a Mom-inappropriateness. “And I’d appreciate it if you kept your underwear woes to yourself.”
She laughed. I felt a moment’s gratification.
Then she said, “I’ll tell you one thing, though. If your dad and I ever get divorced? He gets full custody.”
My hurt must have registered on my face, because she quickly said, “I’m kidding, Winnie. I’ve had a long day—that’s all. Your dad and I are never going to get divorced.”
“I know,” I muttered. I plunked down the knives, forks, and spoons without speaking, because it was the custody remark that upset me, not the bit about divorce.
Mom looked at me. I did not look at her.
“Will you call everyone to dinner, please?” she asked.
I gladly left the kitchen, because there was a stinging in my eyes that was dangerous.
“Dinner!” I yelled up the stairs to Sandra. I went to the den and poked my head in. “I set the table, so you have to clean up,” I said to Ty. “Now come eat.”
I found Dad in the sun porch reading the paper. “Dinner’s ready,” I told him.
He put down the paper and pushed up from his chair.
As we ate, Mom went over the next day’s schedule. Tomorrow was Saturday, which meant chore day—not that Mom appreciated our efforts. We should revolt. We could be so much worse than we already were.
“Sandra, I need you to go to the Farmer’s Market for me,” Mom said.
Sandra groaned. “The Farmer’s Market? It takes forty-five minutes to get there!”
“I’ve got a list. I’ll give it to you in the morning. And Joel, I need you to take Ty and Winnie to get haircuts.”
“I don’t need a haircut,” I said.
“Yes, you do,” Mom said. “You’re looking scraggly.”
“I’m not getting my hair cut,” I said. I was still growing it out for Locks of Love, which I might have explained if she wasn’t being so witchy.
“Fine,” she said, as if I were thwarting her on purpose. “Joel, please take Ty to Kool Kuts, and Winnie, you’re going, too.”
“But—”
“Get a haircut or don’t, I don’t care. You’re going.”
“No problem,” Dad said. He’d picked up on Mom’s foul temper—who hadn’t?—and was being Mister Super Jovial Man to balance it out. “We’ll have fun, won’t we, kids?”
“If Winnie doesn’t have to get a haircut, why do I?” Ty complained.
“Because you’re a boy,” Mom said. “Girls can wear their hair long. Boys keep theirs short.”
“That is so sexist,” Sandra said, taking a bite of her chicken finger, then grimacing and putting it down. “Boys can wear their hair long if they want.”
“Not when they’re six—”
“Seven in seven days!” Ty interjected.
“—and not when they’re living under my roof,” Mom said. She remembered the microwaved peas and stood up to get them.
“I don’t understand why Winnie can have long hair and not me,” Ty said.
“According to Mom, because you don’t have a vagina,” Sandra said.
“Sandra!” Mom snapped. She clonked the dish of peas on the table.
“I do so have a bagina,” Ty said. “It’s called a penis.”
“Va-gina,” Sandra said. “Va-gi-na.”
Ty rolled his eyes. “That’s what I said. Bagina.”
“No vaginas at the dinner table!” Dad said.
“I can’t take it,” Mom said to herself. She closed her eyes and put two closed fists to her forehead.
Ty noticed the chicken fingers, which were long and finger-y instead of chunky like the good ones from Whole Foods. “Yuck!” he said. “I hate these yucky chicken fingers!”
Mom slammed down her hands, opened her eyes, and screamed. It was fierce and raw and not for pretend.
Sandra and I froze. Ty burst into tears. Mom glared at him, which made me hate her, even through my shock and fear. She was being so awful.
“Ellen, it’s going to be okay,” Dad said soothingly, but also with an edge of, Okay, you’re really losing it, hon. “I’ll take the kids to Kool Kuts. You can have the whole morning to yourself.”
“I need to go for a walk,” Mom said.
“Absolutely,” Dad said.
“Right now, or I swear I’m going to have a breakdown.”
“Go. We’ll take care of everything here,” Dad said. “Right, kids?”
“I’m sorry,” Ty said, sniffling. “I do not hate them. I just don’t like them right now.”
“Ty, it’s not your fault,” I said in a steely voice. “Mom bought the wrong kind.”
Dad shot me a warning glance.
“Can I have some chocolate milk?” Ty asked.