Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters

  Or maybe I did, but I didn’t want to.

  I paused at the threshold of the station to catch my breath. The cold air burned my throat.

  Robbie stood by the Christmas tree, just as I’d imagined. His face lit up when he saw me. He held out his arms. I ran to him.

  All explanations would come later. The train arrived, we boarded it, and rode out of town through the night.

  That’s the whole story.

  I’m sorry I embarrassed you and Daddy-o and everyone. But I must confess: Those three days in New York were so wonderful, I can’t bear to think I might have missed them. Don’t punish everyone else for my crimes. Please, please forgive me. And please don’t cut us out of the will. I don’t care about the money so much for myself, but Ginger and Daddy-o won’t know how to get by. And what kind of life will poor Takey have?

  I’m asking your understanding…and once you understand, I know you’ll forgive me.

  Sincerely and dutifully,

  your granddaughter,

  Louisa Norris Sullivan

  PART TWO:

  JANE

  My Evil Family

  * * *

  Dear Almighty,

  You want a confession? Here you go:

  www.myevilfamily.com

  There you’ll find all the evidence you need, complete and unedited. I left everything in. You’re not going to like a lot of it, but that’s the way the tea biscuit crumbles. This is a confession, so I have to be honest no matter who it hurts—right?

  You’ve already read most of the blog entries, I hear. I’m attaching some explanation so you’ll understand what was going through my mind when I wrote them. If that makes it easier for you to forgive me, great. If not, I guess we Sullivans will have to go on welfare or something. That ought to make you proud.

  * * *

  ONE

  myevilfamily.com

  My Family Is Evil

  Welcome to myevilfamily.com, a blog written by me, Jane Sullivan, to expose the sins of my family. We have committed a lot of sins over the centuries, so I’ll start at the beginning and work my way up to now. Once I’ve covered everything my family has done wrong, maybe I’ll move on to the crimes of other evil families I know.

  On this blog, You, the World at Large, will learn the truth about the great and storied Sullivan family of Baltimore, Maryland. Maybe you’ve heard of my grandmother, Arden Louisa Norris Sullivan Weems Maguire Hightower Beckendorf, better known as “Almighty Lou.” Why does she have so many names? Because she’s been married five times. She’s never been divorced—she’s a heavy-duty Catholic, so the very idea of divorce makes her shudder. No, her first four husbands died. Four of them. Died. Does this make anyone suspicious? Am I the only one asking questions here?

  Almighty gives lots of money to the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Peabody Conservatory and lots of other schools and charities and foundations.

  Everybody says what a good person she is. I’m not saying she’s not a good person. All I’m saying is, once you know the truth you can decide for yourself. It’s easy to give money away when you have tons and tons of it.

  So if you’re curious to know the real story of the Sullivan family, read this blog.

  JANE OUT

  As you may or may not know, Almighty, I’m not the most popular girl at St. Maggie’s these days. Something in my personality rubs people the wrong way. And that’s okay with me.

  Little tricks like the one I played at Matt Bowie’s swim party in September don’t help. But who can resist? Bibi D’Alessandro is such a tempting target. You may think Brooks Overbeck should be elected Mullah of Roland Park, but I can’t stand the way everybody fawns over him—especially girls.

  So I borrowed Brooks’s phone and sent Bibi D’Alessandro a text from Brooks. Except Brooks didn’t know anything about it. He was swimming at the time. I wrote UR SO HOT BB. COME HERE & KISS ME RT NOW and pressed SEND. Then I tossed his phone back on his towel and closed my eyes and tried to look innocent.

  My friend Bridget giggled and said, “You are so evil.” (You remember Bridget, right? She came to my birthday party last summer. Choppy brown hair, freckles? You called her “Pig-nose”? Not to her piggy little face, of course.)

  “I am not evil,” I said without opening my eyes. “Bibi is.”

  Bridget and Sassy and I had tagged along with Norrie to Matt Bowie’s party. Not because I wanted to see these people but it was hot and I felt like a swim. I love swimming next to a cemetery—it helps remind me not to drown.

  Bibi was stretched out on Eliza Caton Bowie’s tomb when she got the text. The tomb is the best spot for sunning because it’s long and flat and the stone warms up in the sun. Most Hated Tasha Wallace lounged on the ground next to her like a good toady. I saw Bibi lift her phone and shade her eyes to read the screen. She passed the phone to Tasha. While Tasha deciphered the message, Bibi sat up and looked over toward the group of us on the pebbly shore of the reservoir.

  Brooks had just walked out of the water, dripping. He shook his hair and toweled off and sat down with his friends, laughing about how Ryan Gornick can spit water between his front teeth with pinpoint accuracy. Bibi stood up, adjusted her bikini, and swaggered toward us through the crumbling headstones. Tasha climbed onto Eliza Bowie’s tomb to watch.

  Brooks lay back on his towel and closed his eyes. It was too perfect, almost as if he were Snow White waiting for someone to come wake him with a kiss. And Bibi would be his Princess Charming, whether he liked it or not.

  “This is awesome,” Bridget whispered.

  Bibi stood over Brooks’s prone body, casting a shadow across his face, but he didn’t open his eyes. She straddled him, knelt, and planted her hands on either side of his shoulders. His eyes popped open. She bent down and kissed him very much à la française.

  Brooks jerked up, startled, and yelped, “Hey! What—?” It was an involuntary reaction. His forehead bumped Bibi’s nose, hard. Her nose started bleeding.

  Bibi jumped up, shaken, wiping her nose and staring at her bloody fingers in confusion. Ryan and the other guys whooped and laughed. Brooks rubbed his thin wet hair, a good-puppy look on his face. I don’t know what everybody sees in him, but Bibi’s nuts about him, and so is Norrie’s friend Claire and a million other girls. I sometimes wondered (used to wonder; we have our answer now) if Norrie liked him too, though she wouldn’t come out and say so. Even Bridget gets this goofy look on her face when he’s around. She tries to hide it from me but I SEE ALL.

  “Hey, Bibi, I’m sorry,” Brooks said. He offered her a corner of his towel to wipe off her nose and lip, but that just smeared the blood all over her face. “I didn’t know you were there. Uh, what were you doing on top of me like that anyway?”

  “When are you going to figure it out, Overbeck?” Ryan said. “Chicks dig you.”

  “She was seized by an irresistible urge to have your babies,” Davis said. “It’s simple biology.”

  “She walked over here in an Overbeck trance,” Ryan said. “Must have Overbeck babies…Must have Overbeck…”

  Bibi glared at them. “You texted me. You told me—” She saw the blank look on Brooks’s face and stopped. “What’s going on here? Is someone playing a trick on me?” Everybody laughed as she glanced from face to face, paranoid. Well, not paranoid, I guess, since she wasn’t imagining things. Someone was out to get her.

  “Bibi, don’t get upset,” Brooks said. “You can kiss me any old time.”

  Brooks was trying to help her joke her way out of it, but Bibi is humor impaired—which makes her more fun to tease—and didn’t see the exit he was pointing out to her. She ran back to Eliza Caton Bowie’s tomb to clean up her face.

  Brooks jumped to his feet and started over to help her. “Hey, look, I’m really sorry about your nose. Let me help you….”

  Norrie and Claire came out of the water in time to see Bibi running away and Brooks chasing after her, apologizing like crazy. “What was that all about?” Norrie asked.

/>   I shrugged, all innocent. “You know Bibi.” I twirled a finger next to my ear to indicate insanity.

  “Not really,” Norrie said. “She’s your friend.”

  “She was my friend,” I said.

  “Whatever.” Norrie settled down on her towel and closed her eyes. She was too busy with her very important senior year debutante stuff to care about the petty problems of little sisters like me.

  TWO

  myevilfamily.com

  Evil Comes to America

  My ancestor Francis Sullivan immigrated to Baltimore from County Meath, Ireland, in 1847, during the Great Famine. He was twenty-one and illiterate. Like many Irish immigrants, he found work on the B&O Railroad. Francis liked to drink a lot. So did most of the other railroad men. It was starting to become a problem—fights, broken marriages, the usual—so some women and priests started an abstinence movement called Society of the Divine Thirst. It was kind of like Prohibition in the 1930s, except drinking wasn’t outlawed, just severely frowned upon.

  Francis Sullivan and his drinking buddies were pressured by the Society of the Divine Thirst to stay out of the taverns and go to church instead. But the railroad workers really liked to drink. So Francis got an idea: Why slave away on the railroad when you could rake in the bucks quicker by opening a tavern? The problem was how to do it without pissing off all the wives and priests. So Francis opened a club in Fells Point. He called it the Circle of the Stout Heart and claimed it was a men’s-only abstinence society. But it was really a secret pub, and the men said Francis served the best pint of stout in the city. They told their wives they were going to an abstinence meeting—sorry, honey, members only—and then drank like pigs. Or fish. Whatever it is that drinks a lot. The Stout Heart was a big success. Soon the Society of the Divine Thirst gave up on abstinence as a lost cause. Francis died a prosperous man. A tavern keeper.

  That was the beginning of the Sullivan family fortune—a fortune built on lies and vice. Evil, if you will.

  Daniel Sullivan, unlike his father, Francis, went to school. He was no dummy. When he grew up, indoor plumbing was just developing. Daniel saw a way to get even richer. The newfangled toilets were always getting clogged up. So Daniel invented the toilet plunger. At least, he patented it. His former best friend, Patrick Heath, claimed that Daniel stole the idea from him.

  Whatever. Daniel got the patent, and Daniel got the money and to hell with his friend Patrick.

  Now the Sullivans were really rich. Then Daniel married the daughter of a rich tobacco farmer and got even richer.

  That’s right. Tobacco.

  It begins.

  JANE OUT

  Coming up: the Civil War. Wait till you read about the evil stuff my family did then!

  COMMENTS:

  bridget2nowhere: Um, I hate to point this out, Jane, but you smoke. So you really can’t dis your ancestors for growing tobacco.

  myevilfamily: Cloves! I smoke clove cigarettes.

  bridget2nowhere: They still have tobacco in them.

  myevilfamily: I never said I was perfect. Besides, I know it’s bad and I’m going to quit soon. Anyway, look, I can’t help it because obviously tobacco is in my genes.

  “No one’s going to read our blogs,” Bridget said. “How will anyone even find them?”

  Bridget and I were hanging in the second-floor bathroom, smoking clove cigarettes out the window. We were trying to turn it into a bad girls’ bathroom that nice girls would be afraid to use, but so far we kept getting interrupted by ninth graders whose idea of bad was chewing gum.

  “The truth always finds a way,” I said as three Trident chompers finally finished reapplying their baby-blue eye shadow and flounced out of the bathroom. “Eventually, word will spread, and we’ll be famous.”

  “Okay, but how long is that going to take?” Bridget can really be annoying. Whiny. And that turned-up nose of hers can look a little like a pig snout. I never said you were wrong about that, Almighty. “Maybe we should post on the school blog. That way everybody will see it.”

  I shook my head. Bridget never thinks things through. “That’s no good because then the nuns can shut us down. This way we have our own independent blogs and no one can stop us from saying anything we want. This is supposed to be a free country, once you get out of the nuns’ jurisdiction.”

  “You have so much more stuff to write about,” Bridget whined again. She’s my best friend kind of by default. Since the whole Bibi episode last year nobody else really wants to be friends with me. “Bootlegging and murders and feuds…My family’s big secret is that my mother had our cat put to sleep. She claimed Pawl had gum cancer but it was really just because he wouldn’t stop peeing on the living room rug.”

  “Tell it, sister!” I tried to encourage her.

  “It’s so lame.”

  “You’re not digging deep enough,” I said. “Your family has got to have better secrets than that. What about your dad’s business trips? Who knows, maybe he’s really visiting his secret other family.”

  She looked doubtful. “You think so?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  Bridget’s blog is called bridget2nowhere.com, which was starting to look like truth in advertising. I was determined that my blog would make a difference in the world. A big difference. Stamp out hypocrisy wherever you find it! That was my new motto. And guess what? I found out the biggest hypocrites live in big houses uptown. Which just happens to be where you live.

  “We need to band together,” I said. “To form an Anti-Popular Front. We will destroy everything.”

  “To the Anti-Popular Front!” Bridget shouted. We clashed our silver rings together. Mine has a skull and crossbones, and hers has a peace sign. We had already talked about things we could do to destroy everything—typical bullshit things like shaving our heads, getting nasty tattoos, piercing every pierce-able place on our bodies, running away to New York or Portland, Oregon, and living on the streets, or squatting in an abandoned warehouse downtown. But kids have been doing those things for years, and what does it accomplish? Nothing. We decided that the most destructive thing we could do—what would upset the adults in our world the most—would be to tell secrets. All the family secrets we knew. And show everyone that the upstanding citizens they admire so much are, at best, lazy sybarites and, at worst, criminals. Criminals who never get caught, and if they do, never go to jail. We would take down society through our blogs.

  So you see, it was nothing personal.

  Bibi and Tasha came in then. Tasha pinched her nose and Bibi tried to wave away the clove smoke. “Ugh, really, Jane,” Bibi said. “You can smell that all the way down the hall. Are you trying to get kicked out of school?”

  “She’ll never get kicked out,” Tasha said, rubbing her thumb and forefingers together in a way that suggested money.

  I knew what they were hinting: that I’m coddled at St. Maggie’s because you are one of the school’s most distinguished alumnae and largest donors. But if that’s true, why is Sister Mary Joseph clearly out to get me? Why was I given three weeks detention last year for protesting the school musical? Was jumping onstage and doing a striptease in the middle of Guys and Dolls really so terrible? True, I wasn’t technically in the play, but the girls who were in the play were stripping too. (They were chorus girls singing that “Take Back Your Mink” song.) Just because I actually made it all the way down to my underwear before being hauled offstage, I got punished. Which only underscores my point: The play is sexist and exploits women, and a girls’ school, of all places, shouldn’t condone it.

  But nobody got my message about sexism. All they cared about was that I took off my clothes.

  Bibi and Tasha each shut herself in a stall and started talking over the metal dividers as if that gave them some kind of Cone of Silence. “Anyway, tell everybody to come to my house at eight,” Bibi said. “And if they want anything to drink, they have to bring it, because my parents don’t have anything. And make sure they know I invited tons of
boys.”

  They flushed simultaneously and emerged to wash their hands. “Having a party, Beebs?” I asked.

  “What—did you hear that?” she said.

  I tossed my ciggie in the sink. “Just dry your hands and get out.” I tried to sound tough. “This is the bad girl bathroom.”

  Bibi and Tasha laughed as they left. No one was taking my bad girl bathroom idea seriously.

  “When’s her party?” I asked Bridget. “Have you heard anything?”

  “Saturday.”

  “Screw them. We’ll have our own bash at my house. Just the two of us. And it will be way cooler than some lame high school party.”

  “Yeah,” Bridget said. She always says that. She’s my yes-girl.

  A yes-girl comes in handy once in a while.

  THREE

  myevilfamily.com

  The Wrong Side of the Civil War—That Would Be the Evil Side