Only this time nothing was falling into place. It had been almost a month and things were just getting worse.
I was getting worse, too. I knew I was. I was meaner and angrier than I’d been in a long time.
Suddenly a small gust of wind came from nowhere and made me shiver. I pulled my knees up close to my body and buried my head in my arms.
Huddling close to the chimney, I tried to remember the last time I had felt peaceful inside, and happy. I’m eleven, and I couldn’t remember.
(six)
O
N THE way to school the next morning I was still upset.
“I can’t believe that little nerd told on me like that,” I growled as Martin and I stood on the corner waiting to cross the street. “Can you? Can you believe he squealed? What a jerk!”
But instead of answering, Martin just folded his arms and looked at me. It was the kind of look an adult gives you when you’re being a brat.
“Stop doing that,” I said, annoyed. “I hate it when you do that. You look like my father.”
Martin didn’t change his expression. “I just feel sort of sorry for the kid, that’s all. You probably scared the little dude out of his skin. I bet he didn’t even mean to get you in trouble. He just didn’t want some hand crawling out of the closet without its body.”
“Oh, great. That’s great, Martin,” I snapped. “Thanks for all the support.”
“Don’t get mad about it. I’m not saying I want him hanging around us all the time or anything. All I’m saying is you can’t really blame a little kid for being scared like that. After my sister Olivia saw Frankenstein for the first time, all you had to do was sneak up behind her and she’d wet her pants.”
“Yeah, I know, Martin. You’ve told me that before. You still make fun of her about it, too. That’s how understanding you are.”
Martin just shrugged in that cool way of his. “Olivia’s different. She isn’t human. Olivia is a creature that my mother and father created to destroy me.”
We stopped talking about it after that. That’s the good thing about Martin. He tells me I’m wrong and then he quits. He doesn’t keep lecturing the rest of the day like my mother usually does. In this case it didn’t really matter, though. The junk Martin had said stayed in my head anyway.
I thought about how Thomas was only five and how I had been treating him and how I was new to him, too. And about how I’d known all along I wasn’t being very fair to him. After all, it wasn’t his fault that my mother and Ben got married. Even if I’d really hated the kid, which I didn’t, I had to admit that much. Maybe not to Martin, but to myself at least.
I DECIDED to try. I’m not kidding. For the next few days I was so patient and understanding with Thomas that I almost got an ulcer from the stress. Like at breakfast, when I saw him digging his dirty little paws into the bottom of the cereal box to get the toy surprise, I hardly even groaned. And later in the week, when he got frustrated over making his bed, I helped him smooth out the lumps. All I did was take his teddy out from under the covers, but he still hugged me for it.
The thing that really got me in trouble, though, was letting him sit in the chair with me while we watched Wild Kingdom. It made him think we were buddies.
“Thanks, Charrulls!” he exclaimed when he got down. “Thanks for letting me sit with you. That was fun, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, sure,” I mumbled as I headed to my room.
“Hey! I got an idea!” he squealed, tagging along behind. “Want to play something? Want to play Let’s Pretend?”
Let’s Pretend was Thomas’s favorite game. It wasn’t really a game, though. Thomas would just make up a bunch of dumb stuff to act out and you’d do it. I’d seen Lydia play it with him once or twice when she was baby-sitting.
“Please, Charrulls? Please?” he begged.
I filled my cheeks with air and let it seep out. “Okay, Thomas,” I agreed reluctantly. “I’ll play. But only for a little while.”
It almost killed me to say it, but I did.
His eyes lit up like it was Christmas or something. “You mean it, Charrulls?”
“Don’t push it, okay?” I said. “Let’s just do this and get it over with.”
He thought for a second. “I know! I’ve got a great one!” he exclaimed. “Let’s pretend that I’m a magic guy and my name is Carl and then you come to my house and then I turn you into a horse.”
I gritted my teeth and sat down on my bed. “Okay, fine. I’m a horse. Now what?”
“No, Charrulls! That’s not how you play! You’ve got to do it! You’ve got to come to my house!”
Already I felt my eyes start to roll back in my head. “Where’s your house?”
Thomas hid behind the trash can.
“You have to knock,” he explained.
I knocked.
“Hello, boy,” he said in a deep voice. “My name is Carl. What’s yours?”
Before I could answer, he leaned into my ear. “Say your name is Wendell.”
I frowned. “Could we just get on with this, please?”
Thomas nodded. “Okay, okay. Pretend I get mad at you for knocking on my door and then I decide to change you into a horse.”
I looked at him strangely. “Heck of an idea, Carl.”
Thomas frowned and shook his head. “No, Charrulls. You have to beg me not to do it. You have to say, ‘Please, Carl. Please don’t change me into a horse!’ ”
He looked at me and waited.
I took another deep breath and looked around to make sure no one was listening.
“Please, Carl. Please don’t change me into a horse,” I said finally.
Thomas made his voice real deep. “Yes, Wendell. I must.”
Then he made a loud zapping noise.
“Okay, now pretend you’re a horse and your name is Jellybean.”
I covered my face with my hands. This was turning out to be even more humiliating than I had imagined. “I don’t want that name,” I told him.
“Yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “Your name is Jellybean and you’re a nice horse and you get down on your knees and ride me around the room.”
He stood there patiently waiting again.
I know it’s hard to believe, but I did it. I’m serious. I actually got down on my hands and knees and let Thomas get on my back. We circled the room two times.
“Whoa, Jellybean. Whoa, boy,” he said at last, pulling back on my hair.
“Okay,” he said as he got off. “Now pretend you get mad and you try to trample me and then I poke you with a stick.”
I probably don’t need to mention that this was something I really didn’t want to do.
Once again, Thomas waited.
I was still thinking it over when he poked me under the arm with his finger.
“Come on. Do it.”
A second later he poked me again. This time I knocked his hand away.
“Hey, Jellybean! Quit that!” he ordered.
It was degrading. It really was.
“I don’t think I want to play this anymore, Thomas,” I said. “Thanks a lot, though. It’s been fun.”
Thomas started to panic. “Yes, Charrulls! Yes! You have to!”
I just knelt there, looking at him. “Sorry, Carl. I just can’t,” I said quietly. Then I stood up and left the room.
Lydia was coming in the front door. Teenagers are always coming in from somewhere, but they never tell you where.
Upstairs, Thomas had started screaming, “Hey you! Come back here! Come back!”
As Lydia and I passed on the steps she stopped to listen. “What’s wrong with him?” she wanted to know.
“Nothing,” I muttered, continuing on my way.
She turned and followed me down to the living room. “Well, if nothing’s wrong, then why is he yelling?”
I picked up the remote control and flipped on the TV. “We were playing a game and I quit, that’s all,” I said, trying to be real casual about it.
Lydia s
tarted to grin. “Was it Let’s Pretend?” she asked.
Naturally I refused to admit it.
“Don’t tell me. He was making you be a horse. Am I right?” she questioned.
Geez! Had she been spying the whole time or what?
“Jellybean?” she persisted.
“Great!” I said finally, throwing my hands in the air. “That’s just great. You were listening.”
Lydia laughed out loud. “How could I have been listening? I wasn’t even here!”
“I don’t know. But Martin Oates says that girls are the snoopiest, sneakiest busybodies in the world.”
Lydia just kept grinning. “Get serious, Charles. I’ve been that stupid horse a million times myself. Every time I play with Thomas, he makes me be Jellybean.”
Hearing this made me feel a little better. I pointed to my head. “Yeah, well, guess what? I think the kid’s got a screw loose somewhere.”
Suddenly Lydia’s whole mood seemed to change. “He does not. He’s just a little boy, that’s all.”
I shrugged. “Whatever.”
I couldn’t tell if she was really mad or what. Sometimes Lydia was a real puzzle. Half the time she acted like Thomas was a pest, and the other half, she was real protective of him, like a mother would be. Once she held a Kleenex while he blew his nose. You’ve got to practically worship somebody to do that.
For a while we just sat there quietly staring at the TV. But I knew that neither one of us was paying any attention to it. Lydia still had something else to say. I could feel it building up in the silence.
“Thomas hasn’t had it that easy, you know,” she blurted out all at once. “You shouldn’t be so hard on him. His life has been hard enough.”
I squirmed in my chair. It was embarrassing, being yelled at like that.
“He never even knew our mother,” she went on. “Just think what that must be like for a minute.”
She paused, and her voice softened. “She was really cute, my mom was. She didn’t look like a grown-up woman, exactly. More like a kid. That’s where Thomas and I got our freckles. Daddy says she had one of those faces that never get old.”
She stopped again, as if she were remembering. “Thomas was only six weeks old when she, well, when she got sick. He looks at her pictures sometimes. He knows that it’s Mom. We’ve told him enough. But still, you can tell by his eyes that he’s looking at a stranger.”
I glanced over at her face. Her eyes were filling up with tears.
She wiped them and stared out into space.
“It’s really hard, you know?” she added almost in a whisper. “When I fill out forms at school, I write ‘deceased’ where Mom is supposed to go.”
Tears started to run down her cheeks. This time she stood up and hurried out of the room.
“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry.”
“No … it’s okay,” I called after her. “Really.”
I wished I could have told her that I understood. I didn’t, though. How could I? How could anyone understand something as sad as that?
(seven)
T
HE NEXT day things seemed to be back to normal. Lydia’s alarm went off at six A.M. Then, just like every other school morning, I heard her come padding down the hall in her fuzzy bunny slippers. The ones with the ears. Then the bathroom door closed and the sound of the lock echoed in the hallway.
That was that. Lydia wouldn’t come out again until her ride to school started honking the horn. Even if Thomas and I had to go really bad, she wouldn’t unlock the stupid door. The first week she moved in I made a wet spot on my Superman, Man of Steel pajamas. I’ll never really forgive Lydia for that.
The trouble was, even when I did get into the bathroom, it wasn’t the same as it used to be. Makeup and hair junk and perfume were crammed everywhere. Sometimes there was so much crap I couldn’t even find my toothbrush. Once when I picked it up, it had already been used. I still get queasy when I think about it.
Besides the bathroom mess, rubber bands with little hair balls in them could be found all over the house. Like suddenly, she would be walking through the house and get this uncontrollable urge to rip out her ponytail, hair and all. It was disgusting and scary at the same time.
There was one more thing, too. Lydia smelled. I’m not kidding. She would walk by, and suddenly this giant perfume cloud would fill the air and make you cough. It hung in the air for about twenty minutes. To breathe, you had to put a hanky over your nose.
I’m not exaggerating. One night at dinner Ben took a whiff of her and pretended to clear out his sinuses. Lydia got tears in her eyes and left the table.
She ran upstairs to take a bubble bath. She took at least two baths or showers a day. That’s twice as many as I took the entire time I was at camp.
“Great!” she shrieked from the top of the stairs. “Thomas used all my bubble bath again! There was almost half a bottle left last night and now it’s gone!”
Ben glanced at Thomas and frowned.
Thomas shrugged and shoved in another forkful of mashed potatoes.
“Did not,” he mumbled.
Lydia stormed back down to the kitchen and held the empty bottle upside down.
“Look at this! It’s totally gone! He must have had bubbles up to the ceiling!”
Thomas kept right on eating.
“Did not,” he repeated quietly. A kernel of corn fell out of his mouth onto the place mat.
“Yes, you did! You did too!”
This time Thomas looked up and smiled. “Not, not, not,” he said.
“Too! too! too! too! too! too! too!” shrieked Lydia.
I excused myself from the table. Fights at dinner cause indigestion. And besides, I had enough problems of my own without getting involved in this one.
But just in case anyone wants my opinion, if Lydia had wanted to keep her precious bubble bath to herself, she shouldn’t have put it right out on the tub in plain sight. It’s not like it had her name on it or anything. Who knew?
And anyway, if the stupid bubbles had lasted longer, I wouldn’t have needed so much.
UNFORTUNATELY, Lydia hogged more than just the bathroom. She was also a telephone hog. I’m not sure which was worse. When you think about it, the telephone and the toilet are a lot alike. You might not use them that often, but when you need them, you need them.
One night, because of Lydia’s blabbing, I had to walk home from Martin’s house in the pouring rain. I tried for an hour and a half to call my mother to come get me. That’s ninety straight minutes! And all I could get was a busy signal!
Getting a busy signal for an hour and a half makes a person crazy. I’m not kidding. I read about a guy who got so mad at a busy signal that he shot his telephone right in the receiver. He said it was self-defense. I can understand that now.
Anyway, it finally got to be dinnertime and I was forced to leave. Mrs. Oates invited me to stay, but she was having vegetable casserole. I had it once. It made me spit up.
By the time I walked the two blocks to my house that night, I was soaked and shivering. Also, my underwear was blue from my wet jeans.
Lydia was off the phone and back in the bathroom. Ben made her get out so I could take a hot bath. When she walked past, I gave her a dirty look.
“Thanks for staying on the phone all night,” I growled.
Lydia looked at me and gasped.
“Oh wow! That reminds me. I haven’t called Amanda back yet!”
I wore the underwear in the tub, but the blue never came out.
THE NEXT week I came down with the flu. I got it from the rain. My mother said you can’t catch the flu from the rain but I did.
Ben and Lydia caught it first. I don’t know where they got theirs, but they both got sick on Sunday. I didn’t get sick until Wednesday. By then, all of my mother’s sympathy had already been used up.
“You don’t have a temperature,” she informed me Wednesday morning when I said I didn’t feel good.
“I don’t car
e. I’m still sick,” I told her.
She checked the thermometer again. “Why don’t you go to school and give it a chance? See how you feel at lunchtime,” she suggested.
I shook my head. “I can’t. I’ll be dead by lunchtime.”
This time she frowned. “I want you to give it a try, Charlie. I’ve got to go into the office today and Ben’s got his hands full with Lydia. Two sickies is just about all this family can handle.”
“Oh, excuse me,” I snapped. “Next time I’ll wait my turn so I won’t inconvenience anyone.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Mom continued. “You know how you are. Sometimes after you get moving around a little bit, you start feeling better. If you don’t, you can call me at work. You know the number of the real estate office, right? If you call, I’ll come get you. I promise.”
There was no sense arguing. Her mind was made up. I was going to school and that was that.
It turned out just like I knew it would. By eleven o’clock my head was down on my desk. By eleven fifteen, I was scouting the room for emergency places to puke.
Suddenly I shot my hand into the air. My stomach told me to.
“I need to go to the nurse’s office!” I blurted out from the back of the room.
My teacher looked up from her desk.
“Now!” I added urgently.
Mrs. Berkie got the message. She sprang up from her seat, dashed down my aisle, and slapped a hall pass into my hand.
“Run like the wind,” she told me.
Out in the hall I could smell the food from the cafeteria. Beef and bean burritos. I put my hand over my mouth and started booking down the hall.
By the time I hit Nurse Cook’s office I was almost out of breath. I didn’t even wait for her to ask what was wrong. I just flopped down on her cot and rolled up into a little ball.
She stared at me a moment, but I can’t really say she looked surprised. I have a feeling that on beef and bean burrito day, scenes like this are pretty common.
She covered me with a blanket and put her hand on my forehead. “Not feeling too good, huh?” she asked.