Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters
I was mad at her. Because I used to be Bibi’s best friend. Until the Great Striptease.
Last year for the big spring musical our school did Guys and Dolls. Bibi got a great part—Miss Adelaide, the head chorus girl. I didn’t get a part. I sing like a donkey. So I was on the stage crew.
On opening night, the play was going great. Bibi and the other chorus girls took the stage for their big number, “Take Back Your Mink.” Where they do a kind of fake striptease. I don’t know what came over me, but I was seized with the need to get on that stage. So I jumped onstage and stripped too. Only I wasn’t wearing a special body stocking and corset like the other girls. I really stripped. It got a big cheer before I was hauled off the stage.
You’d think I would have been suspended for that, but I wasn’t. Not that Bibi and her parents didn’t try real hard to get me more than just detention for ruining Bibi’s big number. They said the only reason I wasn’t expelled was because Almighty has so much pull. They were probably right.
I didn’t mean to hurt Bibi. I just saw an opportunity and couldn’t resist. To make it up to her and show her I was sorry, I baked her some cookies and delivered them to her house before the show the next night. She ate the cookies. They had pine nuts in them. It turns out Bibi is allergic to pine nuts. I didn’t know that. Nobody knew it, because she had never eaten pine nuts before.
Well, now we know.
Her face turned red and she was covered with hives. She couldn’t go onstage. Her understudy had to play Miss Adelaide.
The show only played for two nights, and I’d ruined both of them for her. I never meant to. But I can see how she would be mad.
After that, she stopped being my friend. Tasha stepped in as New Best Friend. Bibi’s parents won’t even let me inside their house. They think I’m out to get their daughter. They think I’m evil.
And maybe I am. I come from an evil family, after all.
I didn’t used to be an outcast. I used to be popular. But after the whole Bibi debacle, I was exiled. The only person who was willing to be friends with me was Bridget. I didn’t care that much because I always had my brothers and sisters. But Sully’s in college and St. John lives in New York, and Norrie is all preoccupied with her love life and Sassy is going through some kind of crazy existential crisis. That leaves Takey, but he doesn’t really like me and keeps trying to shoot me.
The Bibi feud isn’t the only evil thing I’ve done. I’m a very bad person. I’m selfish, and I’ll do anything for attention, and I’m naturally mean to people. I use a fair amount of bad language. I don’t try as hard as I could in school. I don’t respect my parents as much as I should. I should probably be telling all this to a priest but I’m too lazy to say a bunch of Hail Marys. Besides, I don’t believe in that.
I’ve got lots of other faults too, I’m just too sleepy to think of them now. But I will say, in my defense and in the spirit of Truth, that I’m fiercely loyal to the people I love (even if it doesn’t seem that way) and I’ll defend them to the death. So I do have at least one good quality.
And so, in the spirit of Christmas: If I hurt you or caused you any trouble, I beg your forgiveness. That goes for everyone, even you, Almighty.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
JANE OUT
COMMENTS:
bridget2nowhere: Merry Xmas to you too, bitch.
The next morning, I took a shower and scrubbed my neck extra hard. Then I checked the back of my neck with a hand mirror.
The skull-and-crossbones tattoo was gone. Finally.
Weird.
There it is, Almighty. The most contrite confession I could muster. If you read my last blog entry, you’ll see I confessed before you even asked me to. And I mean every word of it.
Your move.
With love and reluctant admiration,
your granddaughter (and a Sullivan to the core),
Jane Dorsey Sullivan
PART THREE:
SASSY
The Winter’s Tale
* * *
Dear Almighty,
I, Saskia Wells Sullivan, hereby confess to murder.
I killed Wallace. I didn’t mean to, but still his death was my fault. I admit it.
I don’t want to go to jail, but I will if I have to. It’s up to you.
I will accept any punishment you think is fair, but please spare the rest of the family. They don’t deserve to lose their inheritance. Only I do.
I don’t expect you to forgive the unforgivable. I only hope that by telling my story I can be redeemed.
So here it is: my honest, sincere, true, sad, heartbroken confession.
* * *
ONE
MY LUCK CHANGED IN EARLY SEPTEMBER.
My friend Lula was showing me and Aisha her new house in Owings Mills. Her parents built it from scratch, which fascinated me since the only house I’ve ever lived in is our house, which is just there and has been there forever, take it or leave it. But Lula actually got to tell the architect what kind of room she wanted, which way the windows should face and what the closets should look like and where the reading nook should be. The house wasn’t quite finished so the contractors were still puttering around in their muddy boots, their tools clanking against their belts.
We were wandering around the second floor. Lula had just showed us her parents’ bedroom suite. I was opening doors and peeking into places while Lula and Aisha discussed the possible uses of her mother’s dressing room. Scattered through the house were odd nooks for all kinds of strange purposes like laundry-folding and wine storage and scrapbooking.
I opened a door at the end of the hall and stared into total darkness. “What’s in here?” I asked, and felt along the wall for a light switch. I couldn’t find one, so I took a step into the room…but my foot never touched the floor. It landed on nothing, just air, and I fell into the darkness. It was the scariest thing that had ever happened to me…up till then. A lot of scarier things have happened since.
For one endless second I wondered how far I would fall—I had no idea—and what it would feel like when I landed. What would I land on? Would it hurt? Would I break all my bones? Be impaled on a spike?
I seemed to be falling forever, into a bottomless pit.
And then I landed on my back, on something scratchy but cushiony. I took a moment to catch my breath. Lula was screaming. I could see her about ten feet above me, framed in the light from the doorway. Wherever I was, it was dark.
“I’m okay!” I called up without thinking. I wasn’t sure I was okay, but I didn’t feel any pain. I was lying on some prickly stuff. I felt my way to my feet. What was around me? Were there more holes in the floor to watch out for? I didn’t want to fall again. I’d been lucky to have landed on whatever that prickly stuff was.
“Oh my God, Sassy!” Lula cried. “Can you get out of there?”
I reached for the door overhead but it was too high. I was stuck at the bottom of some kind of weird room, ten feet below the door. I wasn’t hurt, except for the little prickly things stuck in my skin. “What is this stuff?” I asked. I felt disoriented and confused.
Aisha screamed for help. A worker appeared beside her. “What happened?” he said. “Someone fell down there?”
Lula pointed down at me hysterically. “Did you break anything?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Is there a light?”
“It hasn’t been hooked up yet,” the worker said. “I’ll get a ladder. Be right back.”
“What is this place?” I asked Lula.
“I don’t know,” Lula said. “But I don’t like having it in my house. It’s like a horror pit or something.”
The worker returned. “Step back,” he said. He set a ladder down on the floor and held it steady. “Climb on out of there.”
I clutched the ladder and climbed out of the dark pit. Lula grabbed me. “Oh my God, Sassy, are you okay? What’s this pink stuff stuck to your clothes?”
“We stored the extra fibergl
ass down there,” the worker said. “Lucky for you.” That’s what had cushioned my fall. “How’d you manage to get stuck down there?”
“I opened the door and reached in to turn on the light,” I explained. “And there was no floor!”
The worker laughed as if this were the craziest thing he’d ever heard. “Do you always walk into strange rooms without checking to see if there’s a floor first?”
“Do you always build rooms with no floors in them?” I shot back. Who expects a room to have no floor in it? I felt outraged by his laughter. What I had done wasn’t so foolish. In all my fifteen years I had never come across a floorless room before.
“You should put a warning sign on that door,” Lula said. “It’s dangerous.”
“You’re right,” the worker said. “I’m sorry. We weren’t expecting visitors today.” But even though he said that, he didn’t seem sorry. He seemed like he thought I was some kind of idiot. “Are you hurt, miss? Check all your bones. Any bruises? Do you need to go to the emergency room?”
I shook out my hands, my arms, my legs, but everything was fine, except for the prickly fiberglass in my skin and a quarter-sized bruise on my thigh. But that might have been there before; I couldn’t remember. “No, I’m okay.”
“Lucky girl.”
He’s right: I was lucky. That was the beginning of my strange period of luck. It lasted until it ran out.
“I still don’t get it,” Jane said. “Why didn’t the room have a floor in it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Do I look different?”
We were camped on Norrie’s bed, up in the Tower Room. I stretched out my neck to give them a clearer view of my face so they could tell me if they’d noticed any changes.
“No,” Jane said. “You look dorky as ever.”
“You’ve still got a little fiberglass in your hair.” Norrie plucked at me like a mother chimp picking nits off her baby. “Why would you look different?”
“I feel different,” I said. “Like something happened to me. Like maybe I fell through a hole in the space-time continuum or something.”
They both laughed. I should have known they would. But I really did feel like something about me had changed. I had a rubbery, invincible feeling. Strong, like nothing could hurt me.
“Now that you say that, I do see something different about you,” Jane said. “Your eyes are all crossed funny…and your ears are growing…your giant nostrils are getting bigger…Sassy, you’re turning into a monster!”
“Ha-ha, so hilarious,” I said. I’m self-conscious about my giant flaring nostrils. Once, Sully said if I flapped them hard enough, I could use them to fly.
We heard a thumping up the stairs and paused to see who dared to come up and spy on us. Ginger hardly ever bothers, but sometimes Miss Maura or Daddy-o tries to eavesdrop on us.
“Bare feet,” Norrie said, cocking her ear. “It’s only Takey.” A few seconds later Takey’s chubby shadow darkened her doorway. He pointed his Super Soaker at us.
“All right, you girls,” he said in a low threatening voice. “Everybody come downstairs with me. Do as I say and no one gets hurt.”
“Why should we?” Jane asked.
“Because if you don’t, I’ll blow you to kingdom come,” he said, still using his mean gangster voice.
“Bubbles has a new trick and he wants us to see it,” I translated.
“We’ve been practicing,” Takey said. “Come downstairs.”
We marched at squirt-gunpoint down to Takey’s room where his goldfish, Bubbles, lived in a big tank. Takey loved Bubbles. Last year for his birthday I bought him a fish-training kit. It came with a set of tiny hoops and poles and a little plastic basketball and basketball net, and some fish flakes and frozen bloodworms as treats. Takey taught Bubbles to swim through the hoops and long tubes, to limbo under a pole, to zigzag through an obstacle course, and push a basketball into a basket with his nose. Our big goal was to get him to jump through a hoop in the air, like a dolphin. Takey was hoping to show everyone this big trick at the Christmas Eve party.
I never realized before how smart fish are. Bubbles was just like a dog. He wanted food, and if you dangled food in front of him, he’d do anything within the power of his little fish body. It was fun to watch, but it made me sad too. There he was, trapped in his tank, with nothing better to do than entertain us in exchange for fish flakes. It was not much of a life.
“Let’s see this miracle,” Jane said.
Takey dropped his squirt gun and took a bow, like a magician. “For his first trick, Bubbles shoots a basketball.”
“We’ve already seen that one,” Jane said.
Norrie elbowed her in the ribs. “But we’d love to watch it again.”
“Yes, we’d love to watch it again,” Jane said.
The tiny basketball net was set up at one end of the tank. Takey held a bit of fish food on a stick at the surface of the water. Bubbles swam up and nibbled the food. Then Takey dropped the little plastic basketball into the water. Bubbles nosed the basketball down the tank toward the net. At the net, Takey waggled another bit of food at him and Bubbles pushed the ball into the basket.
“He shoots, he scores!” Takey cried. We clapped. He fed Bubbles more food as a reward.
“And now, for the most death-defying trick ever performed by a goldfish,” Takey said. “The amazing Ring of Fire!”
We clapped again. Takey held up a small hoop decorated with plastic flames taken from Jane’s old Hot Wheels set. Using clear nylon fishing line, he tied the hoop so it dangled just above the water in the middle of Bubbles’s tank. He prepped the stick with plenty of food.
“Drumroll, please.”
I rapped out a drumroll on the table. Takey held out some food, and Bubbles jumped out of the water to snatch it off the stick. Then Takey reloaded the food stick and held it through the hoop. Bubbles jumped up and, following the food, dove through the hoop. Norrie gasped and we all applauded vigorously.
“Ta-da!” Takey took a low bow. I squeezed him and gave him a kiss.
“You did it!”
“Thank you. Thank you.” He solemnly fed Bubbles his reward.
“That fish is going to get fat,” Jane said.
That night in bed I lay on my back and blinked in the darkness. A streetlight glowed through the crack in my curtains. The house made a low hum, the sound of its guts working—water running through the pipes as someone brushed her teeth or flushed the toilet, the purr of the dishwasher, the clicking of clocks. Outside in the yard, the last crickets of summer sang good-bye, good-bye. A car drove slowly down the street, its headlights bleaching the wall of my room.
Just beyond our little domain I could hear the traffic, the cars rushing down busier streets, zooming along the expressway toward the gigantic hive of the city—the buzzing, screaming, screeching, squalling city.
Then I heard sirens in the distance and a rumble in the sky, the city moving toward me, getting closer and louder, heading straight for my room. The rumble passed right over our roof, the chop chop chop sound of a helicopter grating through the air. I peeked through the curtain and saw a searchlight scour the yards and alleys behind the houses on our street. The noise faded and got loud again, circling the neighborhood. A police chopper. The sirens screamed up Charles Street, then disappeared. More sirens followed it. Chop chop chop overhead.
Our neighborhood was patrolled by police choppers all summer long, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. Sometimes I think they’re spying on us. But there seemed to be more sirens than usual, and that night I closed my eyes and wondered What’s going on out there? just before I fell asleep.
TWO
WHEN I WENT DOWN TO THE KITCHEN FOR BREAKFAST THE next morning, Miss Maura sat riveted to a breaking news story on TV while Takey calmly slurped a bowl of Cheerios and looked at a Casper comic book. I fixed myself a plate of eggs from the pan warming on the stove and sat next to Miss Maura.
“What’s going on? I heard sirens last
night.”
“Some nutjob’s holding a bunch of people hostage at the 7-Eleven on York Road,” Miss Maura reported. “He’s been in a standoff with the police all night. They don’t know how many people he’s got in there with him. The whole street’s closed off.” She shook her head, clucked, and sipped her coffee. “Imagine being stuck in a 7-Eleven with a crazed killer all night.”
“Morning, all.” Daddy-o came in dressed for work in a striped suit with a pale blue shirt and a bow tie. He poured himself some coffee before he noticed me and Miss Maura glued to the TV. “What’s all the fuss?”
“Hostage situation,” Miss Maura said. “7-Eleven. York Road.”
We ride our bikes to the York Road 7-Eleven to get Slurpees in the summer. Takey likes that old sign for the Swallow at the Hollow, the one with the bird wearing a straw hat and a bow tie and drinking a beer. He thinks the bird looks like Daddy-o.
“Oh my.” Daddy-o leaned over to watch the news. “Everything bad happens on poor old York Road.”
“The hostages have been trapped inside the storage room in back of this 7-Eleven for almost ten hours now,” the TV reporter told us. “Police say—wait—”