MEG
MY BLUE POLKA-DOT SHIRT HAS ARMPIT STAINS. I’VE NEVER NOTICED THAT before. Are they recent, or have I accidentally worn it this way? I yank it off and toss it at the garbage can. It hits the rim and slides down to the floor.
I’ve had two whole weeks to figure out what to wear, but nothing says quite what I want it to, which is, “LumberLegs! See how hot and awesome I am? Now, ask me on a date.” And since LumberLegs announced he’s doing a whole Q & A and signing on Friday night to kick the convention off, and since Friday night is tomorrow, I need to conjure up a brilliant outfit stat.
As I stare into my stripped-bare closet, there’s a knock on the door. “Come in!” I shout.
The door creaks open, then immediately slams shut. “Meg!” Kat’s muffled voice floats in from behind it. “Put some clothes on! Honestly, I thought you said I could come in.”
I march over to the door and yank it open. “It’s not like I’m naked. I’m wearing underwear. Just pretend it’s a bathing suit and get in here. Can’t you see I’m in distress?”
Kat steps inside, not looking at me. She leans against the wall and surveys the heaps of clothes—on my bed, on my chair, on the floor. “Dude,” she says, “what’s wrong with what I told you to wear?”
“What did you tell me to wear?”
She steps over a pair of leopard-print tights and starts weeding through the pile on the bed, laying the odd item over her arm like a store clerk. When she finishes with the bed and starts searching the floor, I climb onto the bed and push the heap to the end to use as a pillow. Something sharp pokes my arm, and I pull out a belt and throw it on the floor.
Kat should be packing her bags too, to come with me, but if she can’t, she can’t. I don’t have it in me to fight it.
After an eternity, Kat hands me a small bundle. I spread the items across my lap, one by one. Short patterned skirt. My Pizza and Winglings T-shirt, with its cartoon of winglings sharing a pizza. Plain navy leggings. Sweater blazer.
“Geek chic,” she says.
“No leggings,” I say, tossing them on the floor. “I have to show off my legs. But yeah, it’s good otherwise. Thanks.” It’s perfect, really. Sexy in a commitment, long-term-relationship, I-want-to-play-LotS-with-this-girl kind of way.
She settles onto the bed beside me, close enough that her shoulder bumps into mine. Apparently, she’s gotten over the fact that I’m still not wearing any clothes. She takes the outfit from my lap and folds each piece neatly. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“Okay?” I stand up. “I’m amazing. Tomorrow I’m going to meet LumberLegs and he’s going to ask me on a date and then we’re going to live happily ever after.” I grab a random shirt from the floor and pull it over my head.
“Okay, but what if it doesn’t go that way?”
I grab a pair of jeans off the floor. “It has to. I have it all planned out. Right after the Q & A, he has an autograph signing. I’ll be one of the first ones to show up at his table, and I’ll remind him about the turtle email he sent me, and he’ll remember me, and when he does, we’ll chat for a bit, and then I’ll tell him that LotS joke I made up, the one about the wereboar, except I’ll stop just short of the punch line and he’ll be all like, ‘What? What did the wereboar say?’ and I’ll be like, ‘Call me later if you want to know,’ and then I’ll leave him my number and slip away, and the joke—and my charm and sexiness, of course—will play through his head all evening so he’ll have to come find me later, and I’ll tell him, and he’ll laugh really hard in that hyena way he does, and then we’ll leave together. Or something like that.”
“Good plan,” she says, then throws me a pair of socks. I wasn’t even going to bother with socks, except now that I’m holding them, my feet do feel a little cold. I start to pull them on. “Hey, you don’t actually—” Kat says, then breaks off, patting the neat pile of clothes in her lap a couple of times before continuing. “I mean, this is just like your LumberLegs wedding fantasy, right?”
I laugh. Turquoise dresses, beach in Maui, photos at sunset—it’s going to be amazing! “Exactly like that,” I say.
“Okay, just checking. Well, sounds romantic,” she says. She strides to the corner of the room and places the folded stack of clothes in the suitcase I’ve thrown open. Then she starts plucking a few other things off the floor—my favorite pair of jeans, a knit sweater, pajamas—and folds them into the suitcase. “Have you packed underwear?”
I yank open a drawer, grab a random handful of undies, and drop them into the suitcase. “Done. Now what poster should I take?”
“You’re taking a poster?”
“Yeah, for Legs to sign.”
“Won’t there be things there for him to sign? Like postcards and stuff?”
I shrug. “I’m not risking it. Besides, getting him to sign one of my posters is cooler. So which one?”
Kat looks around at my walls, then points to the one above my bed with Legs’s cartoony head and “BE AWESOME” in big bubble letters.
“That is the correct choice,” I say, then hop up onto my bed and pull it carefully off the wall.
“How are you going to pack it?” she asks.
Lizard balls. I didn’t think of that. “Maybe if I roll it . . .”
“Wait here.” Kat hops off the bed and disappears out the door. Her footsteps clomp down the stairs, fade away, then clomp back up again. When she returns, her hands are full of cardboard, probably from our recycling bin in the kitchen.
As I roll up the poster, Kat rolls up some cardboard. It takes a few tries to find a piece that’s rollable, but once she does and secures it with some tape, I hand the poster to her, and she slides it into the cardboard shell. “Perfect,” she says, handing it back to me.
“Awesome,” I say, then give the thing a quick hug before dropping it into my suitcase.
When I look up, Kat’s studying me. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asks.
She’s been asking that since the science fair. It’s starting to drive me bananas. I got another B on my last math test, the snow has melted enough that I can skateboard outside, Mom is so happy about my math marks and the A+ on our science project that she’s letting me miss an entire day of school to fly to LotSCON, and tomorrow I start dating LumberLegs. How could I be anything but okay?
I scrunch my face up at her.
“Okay, okay,” she says. “Sorry. I’ll stop asking. Just have fun tomorrow, okay?”
“Well, duh,” I say.
When Stephen comes to pick me up the next morning, I leave my suitcase on the porch for him to carry—screw feminism; he’s not getting away with less work—and climb into the backseat of his car. It smells like sweat and wood shavings, just like it always used to. I roll down the window and stick my nose out into the wet air.
Stephen lowers my suitcase into the trunk, then slams it shut. Mom doesn’t have to be at her office until eleven, so she’s on the sidewalk to see us off. She hands a folded sheet of paper to Stephen, which he sticks into the front pocket of his shorts, and then waves at me. I duck my head back into the car.
When Stephen climbs into the driver’s seat, I expect him to tell me to get into the empty front seat, but he doesn’t—just turns on the car and pulls out of the driveway. He doesn’t say anything at all, except, “Got your passport?” Which I do. Mom made me check before I went out the door.
He flicks on the radio to a station I wish I hated, and some mellow song, which I know all the words to but can’t remember who sings it, bursts out of the speakers behind my head. He taps his fingers on the steering wheel, not quite to the beat. His hairy dad-legs stick out from his khaki shorts. In this moment, I could almost forgive him.
“What did my mom give you?”
He turns the radio down. “What?”
“The paper. She handed you a paper.”
“Oh, just a consent form. To make sure you can travel with me.”
Right. Because he gave up all rights to me. “Turn the music back up, please,” I say. Then I don’t say a single word to him for the rest of the drive, the check-in at the airport, or the entire flight.
KAT
I WISH MEG WOULD TEXT ME, JUST ONCE, TO LET ME KNOW SHE’S OKAY. But of course, I don’t really want her to text me, because she’s on a plane and it’s possible cell phones really do interfere with the plane’s instruments, and when you’re defying gravity and sitting in a heap of metal thousands of feet above the earth, there are some things you don’t take chances on.
“Are you practicing to be in the Queen’s Guard?” Granddad’s question floats through the kitchen door behind me.
Then Mom’s: “Shouldn’t you be in school? I thought you didn’t get out until two on early-dismissal days.”
I’ve been standing, frozen, at the kitchen table, one hand resting on my math textbook, the other clenching my message-less phone, for I’m not sure how long. Five minutes? Ten?
I turn around. Mom and Granddad stare at me from the kitchen door. I didn’t even hear them come in. I swear Granddad used to be taller than Mom, but hunched over his cane, he’s more than a foot shorter. Behind him, Mom holds out one arm as if ready to catch him if he falls.
“English teacher didn’t show up for class,” I explain. “So I came home.”
Last time that happened, in Ontario, I sat in the empty classroom for the entire period, working on my homework and worrying about whether the teacher was in a car accident or had a heart attack or hit her head and was wandering around somewhere with amnesia. This time, I just got up and left with everyone else.
Granddad shuffles into the room. He has managed to get movement back in his left leg after the stroke, but the foot still drags a little, like it’s full of rocks nobody’s thought to remove.
“Well, that’s great,” Mom says. “You can watch your granddad while I go out and run a few errands.”
“I don’t need a babysitter,” he says as he inches across the room.
“I know, Dad. That’s not what I meant.” She picks up a huge stack of papers—a textbook proof, probably—from the kitchen counter. “I’ll be home in time for supper. Pizza okay?”
I nod, and Granddad just grunts, and then she’s gone.
Despite his foot full of rocks, Granddad has made it over to the kitchen table. He pulls out a chair and lowers himself into it. He sets his hands on the table, causing his bony shoulders to rise up as if his saggy-skinned turtle neck is receding back into its turtle shell.
“So, why the long face?” he asks.
“I don’t—”
“You look worried. Is it school? Math test? Boys?” He says all three with a straight face, though his eyes do twinkle just a little at the last one.
I unclench my fingers and set my phone down on the table. “It’s Meg, I guess.” I can’t think of any reason not to tell him.
“Your short, chatty friend?” he asks, as if I have oodles of friends over all the time and he can’t keep them straight, though of course, he knows exactly who she is. “She has spunk. I like her.”
I nod. Clench, then unclench my fists again.
“So, what’s the problem?” Granddad asks.
Where do I even start? How do I explain why it worries me that the science project made her so manic about school that she actually started passing? Or that she still hasn’t told me why she and Grayson broke up? Or that she hasn’t spoken to her ex-stepdad for months but went on a trip with him anyways? Or that sometimes, when she talks about dating LumberLegs, I think she might not be joking?
“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s like—it’s like she’s standing on the edge of a cliff, ready to leap and soar and show off her bright, feathery wings. Except she doesn’t have wings. She just has arms. And I can’t tell her that. How am I supposed to tell her she doesn’t have wings?”
Granddad nods his turtle head, as if my rambling actually makes sense. “But if you don’t tell her . . .”
“She plummets to her death.” I sigh and pull out a chair, leaning on the seat with one knee.
Granddad’s forehead creases. “This is just a metaphor, right? Meg’s not actually leaping? Or dying?”
“Right.”
“Great. I love metaphors.”
I straighten my phone and my textbook so they’re perfectly aligned. “So, what should I do?”
He taps the fingers of his good hand on the table. “Well, you’re going to have to tell her. About the wings, don’t you think? Or maybe not even about the wings. Just whatever she needs to hear to keep from jumping.”
I settle fully into the chair, slumping against its hard back. “That’s the problem. I think she already jumped.”
Granddad massages his deadened left hand with his right one. I wonder, if I took his left hand between my own, would he feel it? He says it’s getting better, but I’m not sure what that means. He looks up at me, straight on, his blue eyes shining.
“Well, then—can you catch her?”
Up in my room, I lean against the icy window, staring blankly out at the straggling piles of snow that just won’t go away. Granddad’s words echo in my ears, and ideas flutter through my head before realizing that they, too, lack wings and can only plummet and die.
Meg is the ideas person. The brainstormer. She is cantaloupe thrown from roofs and speed runs for science. I am questionnaires and control factors.
Maybe I can buy her a nice card. Or bake a cake. Maybe a sleepover when she gets back late Sunday night, even though it’ll be a school night?
I wander over to my bed and settle onto it. Pick up Meg’s purple button—the one from the hospital—off my nightstand and twirl it between my fingers. Run my thumb over its waxy smoothness. Clutch it tightly in my fist, the way I did when Meg shoved me through that hospital door. When I walked through that hospital door.
I bolt to my feet and down the stairs. “Granddad!” I shout. “Granddad!”
I know what I have to do.