“You do not,” she says.
“Yes, you do,” I say.
“That doesn’t make any sense at all, Antonia. Why would anyone want it then?” Kate says, her hands on her hips. Her chin poked out.
“Antonia Jane MacPherson, you’re grounded! You come in here right this minute!” My mother’s head bobs out the front door.
“Oh, man! She’s home already?”
Kate nods. Her small face is very serious.
“I better go home,” Harrison says. He scratches his neck under the collar of his T-shirt and takes a giant step backward. His arm is swinging back and forth, back and forth. He doesn’t like being around my mom when she’s mad at me, which is most of the time.
“Wait,” I say to Harrison, grabbing his bony arm.
“Kate, will you walk Pistachio?” I ask.
“How much?”
I reach in my pocket to see what I have. “Eleven cents.”
“Five dollars,” Kate says.
“Are you nuts?” I sigh and look at Harrison, then I pull my ear twice. This is our secret sign. It means go around the back way. Harrison looks uncomfortable, as if he wishes I hadn’t done that.
“Antonia,” my mother yells. “I said right now. Harrison, you’ll have to go home.”
“Rats, Harrison!” I say, loud enough for my mom to hear. “You have to go home.”
“Okay, I guess I’ll go home now,” Harrison says in a really fake voice. This is one problem with Harrison. He is a lousy liar.
Once I get to my room, Harrison will climb the trellis in the backyard and come in the second-floor hall window. Harrison is good at getting in places. That’s because his dad is always locking them out and sending Harrison in through the window to unlock the door.
“Bye, Harrison,” Kate says. Kate kind of likes Harrison, though she would never admit it because Your Highness Elizabeth thinks Harrison is gross. He smells like a salami sandwich, Elizabeth always says.
Harrison smiles. Harrison likes everybody, whether they like him or not. He is even nice to people who make fun of him. This makes me sick. I think it’s a basic rule of life never to be nice to people who make fun of you.
“Pistachio puked in your room,” Kate says after Harrison disappears behind the Deetermans’ garage. “It’s yellow and it stinks worse than you know what.”
“Better watch out, I’ll tell Mom you said a nasty,” I whisper.
“I did not! But even if I did, she’d never believe you, anyway. She never believes anything you say,” Kate says. She seems proud of this.
I snort.
“Get a move on, Antonia,” my mother bellows from the front door. “You go right up to your room and you stay there. You are not to leave this house, even to walk Pistachio.”
“You always do that. It’s not fair. Why should he get punished? What did he do?”
“Don’t start with me, young lady. I have had it up to here with you.” She touches her forehead, as if the floodwater has reached that high. “I don’t want to hear one more word out of you,” she says, then she goes back inside.
“$4.75 to walk him and that’s my final offer,” Kate whispers. Kate gets all her cash off me. She can never squeeze money out of Elizabeth because Elizabeth never gets in trouble. Maybe Kate will be a bail bondsman when she grows up. She would be good at that, too.
“I don’t have $4.75.”
“Yes, you do,” Kate says. “It’s in your bottom drawer.”
“God, do you search my room, too?” I shove her out of the way so I can shortcut through the kitchen and score a handful of cookies without her telling my mother. It works. She stops to record my bad behavior in her spiral notebook. I make off with an entire package of Oreos and hurry up the stairs to my room.
My room is tiny. It was supposed to be the laundry room, but Elizabeth convinced my mom she’d get head lice from rooming with me, so they put the washer and dryer in the garage and I got my own room. The only problem is my room doesn’t have a window, but it has a sink and that’s almost as good.
“Hey, Tashi, hey, little guy,” I say to my brown scruffy-haired dog, who is curled up asleep in my pajamas. Pistachio is tiny. He looks like a pointy-eared guinea pig who had a bad hair day, but he is a dog. He is old and he smells ripe.
Pistachio gets up when he sees me and twists his little body back and forth. He used to wait for me downstairs, then leap up and paw wildly at the air when I came home. But now, it’s hard for him to stand up. He walks as if his legs don’t bend, and his fur used to be white around his face, but now it’s yellow. No matter how hard I scrub, I can’t get it clean.
He makes my room stink, too. Especially if he has puked. Today I smell the nasty stink of food that’s come back up. I look for puke puddles. There are two on my bedspread and one on the rug. Yuck. I carry Pistachio to the laundry basket and get him settled in a nest of dirty socks. Then I strip my bed and go downstairs for new sheets and rug cleaner. My mother is in the kitchen, but I know she won’t yell at me for this. As far as she is concerned, even mass murderers should be allowed to clean their rooms.
I go straight for the cleaning cupboard so she’ll know what I am doing, and I keep quiet. My mom and I get along fine when I keep my mouth shut, but the second I say so much as “Hello” I get in trouble. If I were a mute, it would be much better.
“I’m going to pick up Elizabeth at ballet class. If Kate tells me you’ve been out of this house”—my mother drums her fingers on the counter—“Pistachio will sleep outside.”
I look down at my mom’s ankle. If I were a dog, I’d bite her. I smile to myself, thinking about this.
By the time I get back to my room, Harrison is there, balancing an Oreo on his nose. We listen while the garage door goes up, tchinka-tchinka-tchinka squeareak. It sounds as if it won’t make it up or down again, which is the way this whole house is. It’s painted this weird color on the outside—like when you mess up in art class and your paints run together in one greenish brownish mess. And nothing inside the house works very well. The washing machine overflows, the cupboard doors are always falling off, and the garbage disposal sounds like it’s grinding up body parts.
This is a temporary house. “A rental,” my mom calls it. The garage is filled with boxes my mother won’t unpack until we “get a place of our own.” My parents have never bought a house, but that is always the plan once we get settled. The thing is we never do get settled. We always just move again. I have moved thirteen times in my life. This is actually the longest we’ve ever lived anywhere. We’ve been in the house just off the road Sarah’s Road in the town of Sarah’s Road for two years. I plan on staying here forever, too, because I like Sarah’s Road, even if it is a silly name for a city. And because this is where Harrison lives.
I look at Harrison scooping the white center out of the Oreo with his crooked front teeth and I feel happy. Before Harrison, I had people I called friends, but they were just kids to eat lunch with. That’s way different.
Harrison shakes his head and looks up at me through his wild hair. “Your dad home?”
I shake my head. “Friday.”
“How come he’s gone so much, anyway?”
“He’s in charge of a bunch of sales offices and he has to visit them. And sometimes he opens new ones and hires people and trains them and stuff.”
Harrison scratches his head all over, like he’s shampooing his hair. “I don’t want a job like that. Think I could find a job drawing chickens?”
“Maybe, you know, the ones on the packages in the grocery store.”
“Yuck.” Harrison’s face scrunches up. “Those are dead chickens. I don’t want to draw dead chickens!” He shakes his head and looks at me as if I’ve just licked dirt.
“I’m sorry.” I hand him the package of Oreos. He takes three. “I know what we can do. I’ll get a job and then I’ll buy all your chicken drawings. Every single one of them.”
Harrison smiles. “Okay,” he says. He carves the white out
of another cookie. “That reminds me, are we going to do that report card thing again this semester?”
Last year Harrison and I switched report cards. Harrison cut the names off the top with a razor blade and a ruler. Then, I took home his report card, which was full of C’s and D’s and one A+ in art. And he took home my report card, which had all A’s and B’s except for one D- in Citizenship—up from an F in the fall.
“I dunno. You want to?” I ask.
“I still can’t believe no one figured it out. Ours were a half inch shorter than everyone else’s.” He measures out a half inch with his thumb and forefinger and stares at it.
“I know, plus the signatures were wrong.” I shake my head. “No one writes clearer than my mom. How could Cave Man have missed my mom’s signature on your report card?”
“Do you think they’ll be that stupid again?” Harrison is looking down now, picking the nubs off my blanket and putting them in a pile.
“Why not?”
Harrison’s curly hair hangs in his eyes. He flicks the nub pile with his finger and it topples over. “Yeah, but I don’t see what you get out of it. Are you sure your mom didn’t get mad when she saw my grades?”
I shrug. “She’s used to it. Besides, it makes your dad happy. Maybe he’ll take us out for ice cream again. That was fun.”
Harrison pulls the pills off the blanket and rolls them in his hand. He’s forming some kind of blanket-lint creature. Harrison can make something out of anything. He shrugs. “Okay,” he says.
“Good. Now let’s get out of here.” I pocket a few Oreos, grab Pistachio, and we sneak down the trellis to take him for a walk.
When we get to the sidewalk, I put Pistachio down, but he doesn’t move. I hate when he gets stuck like this. “Come on, Tashi,” I say, grabbing a leaf for him to sniff.
He sniffs a little, then takes a step forward. Once he gets started, he seems okay, like he remembers what he’s supposed to do. He walks stiff legged over to the bushes and begins sniffing around. After a minute, he tries to lift his leg, but he wobbles so much on three legs, it looks as if he’ll topple over. I want to tell him to pee another way.
“Guess what?” Harrison says as I hand him another Oreo. “I found out where Just Carol lives.”
“Just Carol. Who cares about her? She’s a worm. You can’t trust her. I told you what she did. I still can’t believe she told my mom and Mr. Borgdorf. …” I am just getting warmed up with my story when Harrison presses his hands over his ears. “Harrison? What?” I ask.
“Just Carol is not a worm. Just Carol is perfect.”
“God, Harrison, whose side are you on, anyway?”
Harrison has his hands covering his ears again.
“Harrison?” I try to peel his fingers away from his head.
“I’m on your side. But don’t be ugly about Just Carol.”
“Okay, okay, I won’t say anything bad about her. Man.” I glare at him. I would get madder, but he looks as if he might cry. I hate when Harrison cries.
“Come on,” I say, scooping up Pistachio. “Let’s go to the yellow house.”
The yellow house is on a street where the houses are all old-fashioned. Two German shepherds and one black Lab live there. I like the dogs and their pretty house with the swing on the porch and the kind of white arch people get married under. This is the type of house my real parents would live in.
I change my mind about who my real parents are at least once a week. I have a book where I write down my notes about this. There are a lot of names in it, but they are mostly crossed out. I keep it in a hole in the lining of my raincoat, along with another book that has photos of me and things I’ve written and pictures I’ve drawn and stuff. The second book is for my real parents. It will help them know about the parts of my life they haven’t been here to see.
We are at the yellow house now, so I put Pistachio down. Right away his stubby tail goes straight in the air and he begins barking his ferocious bark. Pistachio weighs six pounds, but something in his brain tells him he is a 150-pound killer dog. Nothing perks him up like picking a fight with a dog ten times his size. Harrison’s father says some wires in his brain are crossed and he thinks he is a tiger.
As soon as he starts barking, the German shepherds come running to the chain-link fence. They stand on their hind legs and try to get at Pistachio. The fence shakes. Their lips curl back. The German shepherds are barking so loud, it hurts my ears. They look mean, but not the Lab. She gets scared and lies on her back with her legs straight up.
“One down, Pistachio! Good dog,” I say. This seems to please him and he takes a rest. The German shepherds get tired of barking, too, and all the dogs sit down.
Harrison takes out his chicken drawing, which I know he has been dying to finish. He rummages through his pockets looking for a pencil. Harrison has ten or twelve pockets in his pants, so looking for a pencil can take a long time. I watch while he goes through pocket by pocket. He finally finds a No. 2 in his zipper pocket. It’s a little stub with bite marks all around. Harrison likes his pencils already broken in.
We sit down with our backs against the chain link and Harrison starts drawing. I like to watch him draw. He is so patient about it, as if he knows exactly where he’s going and how to get there. He doesn’t get frustrated the way I do. I’ve never seen him scrunch his paper up and toss it on the floor.
He doesn’t get very far today, though, before we hear the beep-beep of Harrison’s father’s bakery truck. The truck is an old-fashioned van that looks like a cartoon car. Harrison’s father owns a bakery and this is one of the delivery trucks.
“Well, hello, fancy meeting you here,” Harrison’s father says. Harrison and his dad never have a set meeting time or place. His dad just drives around Sarah’s Road until he finds Harrison. Only a dad would do that. Moms would make sure you have a time and a place to meet. But Harrison doesn’t have a mom. She died when he was four. He never talks about her, either, and the way he steers way around the subject, I know better than to ask. Once, Mr. Emerson told me Mrs. Emerson was an artist. That is all I know about her.
“Hi, Dad,” Harrison says.
“Hello, Harrison, hello, Ant. How are you and that ferocious tiger dog doing?”
This makes me smile, even though he says it almost every time he sees me.
“Hey, Dad,” Harrison says. “Could Ant spend the night tonight?”
“That okay with your mom, Ant?” Mr. Emerson asks. He has the same goofy smile Harrison does. And the same wildly curly hair, though he is losing some of his on top.
I always plan to lie to this question, but when it comes time, I never can. I have the feeling that no matter how many times I lie to Mr. Emerson, he’ll still believe me. And because of this, I have trouble telling him anything but the truth. My mom is just the opposite. She never believes me, so it doesn’t matter what I tell her. I grab a dandelion and flick it with my thumb. “No,” I say.
My mom has forbidden me from ever going to Harrison’s house. This is because last month my mother picked me up there and she saw Harrison’s chicken walk in using the doggy door. “What kind of people have chicken droppings in their house?” she said. I tried to tell her they only let the chicken in the kitchen. Plus, Harrison trained him to use a kitty litter box, which the vet said was impossible, but Harrison did it anyway. But none of this matters to my mom.
Harrison’s father makes a sound as if he’s sorry. “Oh, well, Ant, my girl. Maybe the weekend.” He pats my head awkwardly. “Okay, son, time to pack up and go. I’ve got 800 pounds of flour and sugar coming crack of dawn tomorrow and still no space for it. So you say good-bye to Ant here and we’ll be on our way.”
“Bye, Harrison,” I say as he jumps into the cab of the old van.
Harrison smiles at me. One side of his mouth curls up more than the other and he has a dimple in his left cheek. I love this about him.
I stand and watch them drive past the bank of mailboxes, across the bridge, and around
the corner onto Sarah’s Road. I watch until I can’t see them anymore. Then I pick up Pistachio and walk home.
My mom is in the living room when I get there. I see her curly blond hair through the window. She is sitting on the couch watching Elizabeth show Kate the steps she learned in ballet class. I wonder if Kate has noticed I am gone. I wonder if my mom has looked to see if I am in my room. The way they are acting, I don’t think they have. I should be happy about this, but I am sad.
3
LITTLE BROWN ACORN
Today is the big day. My dad’s coming home from Atlanta. He’s been there for six weeks. My sisters and my mom are locked in the bathroom getting ready for him. When they come out, Your Highness Elizabeth and Kate are wearing matching tutus with sparkles glued to the bushy ends and sequined tiaras. My mother has made up Elizabeth’s and Kate’s faces so they look like plastic dolls. They are planning to perform a show for my dad. They always do this. They set up the living room to look like a theater, with big boxes of popcorn and a cardboard marquee. Then they hide behind the living-room drapes and my mom pulls the cord and they do a ballet dance. When they are done, they say, “Ta-da,” and my father and mother give them a standing ovation.
When I was little, I used to do this, too. That was when I went to ballet class with Your Highness Elizabeth. But now I won’t because it’s stupid and I would rather be outside with Harrison and Pistachio. My mother says I am a quitter. But I’m not a quitter, I just don’t feel like spending the day in front of a mirror worrying about whether my butt is sticking out.
Kate is taking ballet classes now, too. She is as good as Elizabeth. “It runs in the family,” Miss Marion Margo, the dance teacher, says, forgetting all about me. Or maybe she hasn’t forgotten. Maybe even strangers can tell that I am a part of another family entirely. Probably no one will be surprised when my real parents sweep into the picture. My real mother will be wearing a flowered dress and no shoes. And my real father will have on jeans and chaps. My real father is very smart. He knows how to get water from a cactus when you are in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Plus, he is a cowboy, and cowboys never get a job somewhere else. They have to stay home and take care of their cattle. Maybe they go to a different range, but that is it.