6
The next week went so fast. The time between Christmas and New Year’s was always so weird. The decorations are still up from Christmas, and the entire post basically shuts down for two weeks. I remembered feeling ready for the new year that year—I was so ready.
I was going to be seventeen in just a few days, and I already felt so much older. Meg had been spending more time with me, too, while she played sick to Mrs. King. Meg had me call her employer every morning since she’d seen Shia at the battalion’s Christmas party. Mrs. King was trying not to sound irritated over Meg’s illness, but I could hear it in her voice. I was always good at knowing what people were feeling, even when they wouldn’t say it. Especially then. Or so I thought I was.
“What time should I put the meatballs in the oven?” Meg asked Beth, who knew more about cooking than everyone else in the house combined.
“Around nine-thirty. So they are ready around ten when we will start the party.”
The kitchen was a mess, a tray of meatballs and three Crock-Pots covering the little counter space we had. On the small kitchen island were bags of chips, and one small bag of Bugles for me. They were my favorite food, and I could have lived off their salty goodness alone.
I grabbed the bag and popped it open. I ate a handful before I climbed onto the counter to get the bowls from the cabinet. Our family always did the same thing every year: we covered the kitchen with food and tried to stay awake until midnight. Amy usually didn’t make it past ten, but this was her year, she claimed.
“Beth, can you make me a cup of coffee?” Meg asked. “Not with mom’s coffee machine, with the pod thing. It’s only six and I’m already tired.”
Beth, of course, said she would, even though her hands were busy crushing crackers for her famous cheese ball. Since I was a vegetarian, Beth always made me my own small ball with no bacon and extra shaved almonds. I ate every bit of it.
“Look,” Amy said as I dumped a bag of chips into a big red bowl.
I looked at her and tried to see what she wanted me to look at, but she was just staring out the window in front of the sink. Her hair was in a tight bun, which I assumed Meg did for her.
Crumpling the bag and shoving it into the recycle bin, I walked over to the window and stood next to Amy.
I looked out the window and into the window of Old Mr. Laurence’s house. The boy Laurie was pacing in front of the window with a book in his hand.
“Do you think he’s being held captive there?” Amy’s eyes twinkled with the hope of something more interesting than a new neighbor.
I stared at him and watched as he set the book down, then took a seat at the grand piano directly in front of the window. I had looked at this scene—the window, the piano—so many times while helping Beth wash and dry dishes, but it looked so different now that a boy was inside. Usually, I just stared at the red curtains and wondered if Old Mr. Laurence had ever thought about redecorating since the 1930s.
“He looks lonely,” Meg added. She had moved behind me and was looking over my shoulder into the window at Laurie.
“Mom said he’s from Europe. He was living there for years.” Amy’s voice was full of childish wonder.
“I wonder if he has a secret. A tragic European secret,” I said, using a haughty but vague accent. When we were younger, my sisters and I would re-enact plays I wrote, and we would dress in our dad’s oversized clothes and use fake accents to go along with the characters I created. My favorite was a man named Jack Smead, whose voice ranged from Australian to Jamaican and back.
I continued to stare at Laurie. The bridge of his nose had a bump like it had been broken before, and his hands grabbed the book again and he took a heavy breath. I could see his chest move up and down from our kitchen. He was fascinating.
“Mom said he didn’t really have any upbringing. With his dad gone all the time and his mom an Italian artist or something,” Amy continued her gossip.
I suddenly felt that everyone around me seemed more interesting than me.
In the room across the yard, Laurie began moving his mouth, the book in his hand. I strained to figure out what he was saying, but I couldn’t read his lips. He stood up again, and the bottom of his white T-shirt caught on the corner of the piano, exposing the bottom of his stomach. There was a flash of black on him, but he shoved the fabric down so fast that I couldn’t make out what it was.
“He has good eyebrows,” Meg said.
I couldn’t look at his eyebrows. I was still thinking about his stomach.
“If I were a guy, I would want to look like him,” I said to my sisters. He looked like he knew the world, like maybe he owned part of it.
Amy went to say something to me, but she must have thought better of it because she closed her mouth and looked out the window again.
“Why do you think he’s here?” Beth asked.
I didn’t want to tell Beth and Amy what he’d told me the day of the Christmas party. For some reason I felt like that would be betraying him somehow, which was a ridiculous thought, since these were my sisters and he was a complete stranger.
“Imagine giving up Italy to come to the bottom of Louisiana,” I said, staring at his hands as he turned the pages of the book. I tried to look at the cover to see what he was reading, but I couldn’t make it out. “And with awful Old Mr. Laurence,” I groaned, watching Laurie sit back down, put the book aside, and spread his hands over the keys of the piano in front of him.
“Jo, don’t be mean. He’s not awful,” Beth told me.
He was awful, though; he always yelled at us for walking on his grass. Over the summer he’d told Meredith that I snuck out of the house and I got grounded for a month. On top of that, every time he saw us outside he was always yelling, “Those damned Spring Girls!” He acted as if I shattered the windshield of his car on purpose. I was just trying to learn a sport so my parents would feel like they had a normal child. My interest in softball only lasted a week.
“I would live in that big house with him whether he’s awful or not,” Meg said.
Beth joined us finally and leaned against the window, her other shoulder touching my own.
“They do have a beautiful piano,” she said with longing dripping from every word.
Laurie’s fingers moved so roughly over the keys that I swore I could almost hear the music from inside our kitchen.
“When I’m a successful writer, I’ll buy you the best piano ever created,” I promised my sister, and I meant it.
“Most writers can’t even pay their bills, let alone buy a piano, Beth. So, let’s say when I marry a rich man, you can come over and play mine,” Amy said.
Ugh, she sounded like Meg, always talking about getting married, but at least we knew Meg was actually old enough to be married.
Amy danced around the kitchen and stuck her hand into the bowl of chips, pulling out a handful of cheesy dusted fried potatoes cut into triangles. They were her favorite. Her orange fingers always grossed me out.
“And what if the man you love is poor, but a good man? Like Dad?” Beth asked Amy. Beth stuck a pod of coffee into the Keurig for Meg and pulled the handle down.
Laurie’s head began to bob along with the movement of his fingers. It was fascinating to watch. He was the opposite of Beth when she played, her calm fingers gliding over the keys, smooth as butter, and her eyes closed in the tranquil melody. Laurie’s fingers were violent to his keys, combatively smashing over the ivories, and his eyes were wide-open as he played.
My heart was beating from inside my chest to the backs of my ears as I watched him. I could barely hear what my sisters were saying.
“Well,” Amy said, “it’s not like being stuck with a big nose or something. I have a choice of who I love.”
“People aren’t stuck with big noses anymore anyway. You can get that fixed easier than you can get a boyfriend,” Meg replied.
My eyes were still on Laurie as he played. I had never seen anyone so oblivious of their surroundings as he was then. We were staring at him—well, at least I was—and he didn’t notice at all. He was too involved in whatever he was playing.
“What about you, Jo? Would you marry a poor man if he was nice?” Amy asked, her little body moving around the kitchen still. She had a can of orange soda in one hand and orange chips in the other.
I didn’t look away from the window. “I wouldn’t marry anyone for money. I don’t want anyone to have that type of control over me. And besides, I’m going to make enough money on my own.”
Amy snorted. “Sure, Jo.”
I couldn’t even gather enough anger toward her; I was too fascinated by the boy framed in the window.
“And what about you, Amy?” I said coldly. “You think you’re going to have a rich husband? I hate to break it to you, but—”
“Jo,” Beth’s voice broke off my sentence.
“Stop talking about boys anyway, Amy. You’re too young,” Meg said.
I didn’t mention that by seventh grade Meg had already kissed a handful of boys.
Amy took a swig of her orange soda, and it left a line of orange above her lip like a mustache. She quickly licked it away. “We’ll all grow up someday, Meg. We might as well know what we want.”
Laurie wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, and his blond hair moved, touching the tips of his shoulders. I tried to image what my husband would be like, but as usual, I couldn’t picture him.
I didn’t even know if I wanted a husband. They seemed like a lot of work, and I’d never met a boy who I could even consider letting take me to dinner, let alone marry. I stared at Laurie, and his fingers stopped cold. I ducked down just as he looked toward our window, and Beth laughed when I popped my head back up.
He was still sitting there, but the book was back in his hands, and he had stopped playing music.
“What have you been working on lately, Jo?” Beth asked, to change the subject from matrimony and riches.
A lot of things, I wanted to say. I was only a few paragraphs short of finishing my longest piece, an essay on female sex trafficking in Cambodia. I’d spent more time on this piece than anything I had written before. I knew that Mr. Geckle would never allow me to publish it in the school newspaper, so I was planning on sending it to Vice myself. It was a long shot, and they would probably never even read it, let alone publish it, but sending it in was something I had to do for myself. Once I did that, I would be ready for anything. Mr. Geckle could only control my voice within the walls of White Rock High.
“Nothing special,” I started, even though I was lying through my teeth. It was special; it was the most special thing I had ever written. I felt it deep in the whites of my bones.
“I read your paper about sex slavery. The one on your laptop,” Amy began. I whirled around and grabbed her arm. The soda can dropped onto the floor, and fizzy orange liquid sprayed onto the tile.
“You what?” I shouted at her. She pulled back from me, but I held her arm.
“It was open on your laptop!” she yelled in her defense.
“I don’t care!” I let go of her when I felt Beth’s eyes burning on me.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want anyone to read it; I was mad because I thought my laptop was the one place where I had privacy from my three sisters, and Amy had just ripped that away from me.
Meredith came barreling into the kitchen and I stepped back, away from the orange puddle on the floor.
“What the hell is going on in here?” Meredith stepped around the mess and let out a deep breath before anyone answered her.
“Nothing, Meredith. Everything is fine,” Beth said, and grabbed a towel hanging on the oven door. She laid it down, and both Amy and I stopped glaring at each other as Beth cleaned up our mess.
“Who was fighting? I heard yelling.” Meredith’s voice was steady, and she wasn’t in the mood for our games.
“No one.” Beth bent down. “We were just messing around. Don’t worry, we’re cooking and getting everything ready for tonight. I’m almost finished with my cheese ball.”
Meredith looked at the four of us and shook her head. I figured that she didn’t believe Beth but didn’t feel like fighting on New Year’s Eve. Meredith had a glass of clear liquid in her hand, and I thought she should have another. She had never before looked as tense and tired as she did lately.
She told us to be careful and not make any more messes and left us in the kitchen.
I gave Amy a look and turned back to the window. Laurie was gone.
I went to my room and closed the door and wrote to forget how mad I was at my sister.