Girl in Reverse (9781442497368) (25 page)

Where is he? Where would he go?

Mother stands on the front porch in her coat with Joy beside her. She yells, “Ralph . . . Ralph . . .” It is the oddest sound, her calling out to him like that. Dad returns. No Ralph. He looks old and very tense.

“I'm calling the police!” Mother says. In a minute she's describing my brother to the police department. Her voice is shaky but determined.

I recheck the basement, the side yard, call up the attic stairs. I look under his bed. “C'mon, Ralph, don't do this. You're scaring us to death.” Maybe he left a note, a clue. I check his dresser, his desk, my vanity, and the bathroom sink.
The attic!

I hear Dad back out of the driveway. Round two of the hunt. Mother sits by the phone. I climb the steep attic steps. It's cold. The streetlamp casts huge dusky shadows on the rafters. I grope for the light chain, knock it away from my hand before finally grabbing it.

I yank the light on, squeeze my eyes, blink against the glare. Joy meows, darts up the stairs, and heads for Ralph's lap. He sits by the broken window, surrounded by ancient bird doo and scattered sunflower seed shells.

“
GOD!
Ralph!” I pant. “Wow! Thank you. Thank you. What're you doing?”

He points. “Watching Dad's headlights circle the neighborhood.” His voice is tight and overly polite.

I tiptoe over. “I called. Why didn't you answer?”

Ralph shrugs.

“Where are all your birds?”

He looks at me—
duh . . .
“Pigeons don't like cats.”

“Why are you just sitting up here?”

“Well, I wonder
why
 . . . ,” he says, supersarcastic. He's Ralph, but he isn't.

I stammer without forming a word.

“You lied. You said you weren't gonna tell them about the phantom and blow everything up and then you turned right around and did it.” He raises his palms. “You promised me and you broke it. You're just
like
them, lying when it's handy!”

“But I . . . I thought it was the right thing . . .”

“For
you
!”

“I was trying to be honest.”

“With them, maybe, but you weren't with me.” He points in my face, shakes his pudgy hand. “So go on and live with your new people.”

“What?”

“In Chicago.”

“No!”

Ralphie stares out the window with his back to me. His shoulders jerk. Next comes a string of swooshing, gucky sobs. He wipes his face on his sleeve.
“Go away . . . !”

“I'm awful. I lied, but I didn't mean to. I didn't realize I
was even doing it. I am so . . . mad and sick of them and . . .” I start crying. “I get it. I just did to you what they did to me, and I didn't even know it. You're right. My ears
are
too tight. I love you, Ralphie. I love you more than anybody else on earth. I didn't think of how it would . . . I'm sorry. You are my best person. You are most esteemed brother of lowly rice-face girl.”

He flashes me a look and, after a minute, smiles a little. “Okay.” He sits up cross-legged with his shoulders bunched up to his ears—a bodhisattva with a runny nose. “How'd you think to look up here?”

“Messenger pigeon,” I say. Ralph's birds coo in the eaves outside. I pause a minute and say very carefully, “You know, I hate to say this, but I don't think they're pigeons.”

Ralph nods. “I know.”

“You
do
?”

“Yeah. I figured it out a while ago. They're
doves
.” He shrugs. “It's okay, I like doves better anyway.”

We hear our parents talking in the driveway. “I've got too many parents now,” I say. “It's real hard.”

“Yeah,” Ralph says. “How many too many?”

“Four.”

“Right. Four's a
load
.” He stands, shakes out his hands and shoulders. “So is
two
.” He tiptoes across the plywood planks and clomps down the stairs.

I'm sorry. I messed up, Ralphie. I love you.
I turn to the attic window and watch the treetops—crisp black feathers scraping the sky. I imagine flying out, slicing the night, a kite soaring without a string.

The whole class is ready and waiting on May 4, fifth hour, for Lillian Firestone's current event. Actually, nobody could care less, except me. I'm nervous for twenty people. My blouse is soggy and my tongue is glued to my teeth. I just pray I can go first and get it over with. I look toward the door, calculate the steps to escape just as Mr. Howard shows up with his ladder.
What?

He nods politely at Miss Arth and points at the ceiling light fixture—
This will only take a minute.
He positions his stepladder right by the door. The bell rings. I look at Miss Arth seated under the American flag framed by a giant pull-down map of the world. Mr. Howard lumbers up his ladder with a hunk of building keys on a ring and a canvas bag of lightbulbs hooked to his tool belt. I'll bet he actually unscrewed some earlier so he could stage this
moment. I stare at the gouged tornado on my desk until I hear my name.

My shoes and I walk to the front. I face my class. Miss Arth squints briefly at the drawings in black cardboard frames that I hold, one in each hand.

“I've got two current events to share. They go together.”

Miss Arth checks her watch and clucks, “Those look like
artworks
, Miss Firestone. Current events are to be gotten from the newspaper.”

Mr. Howard clears his throat.

Her tone is so infuriating it pushes me to say, “Oh, yes, you're so right, political cartoons
are
definitely works of art. These are related to events that have just currently happened.” I show the class Elliot's drawing. “This artwork was done by Elliot James, who is a good friend of mine. It won first place in the Fine Arts Showcase. It's called
Atalanta and Meleager
, which is a marble sculpture at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.” Snickers. Sighs. The couple is so real it almost pops off the paper. They could have come from Michelangelo's own sketchbook. Elliot has angled and shaded the figures so we see their arms and their sides and legs—nothing too controversial.

I step closer to the front row and point to Atalanta. “She's been
ruined
.” I stop to let “ruined” soak in. “See the mustache drawn on the woman?” I point to her upper lip. “A Fu Manchu mustache like these guys have.” Kids crane
forward, squint at the picture. I walk over to Neil's cartoon on the bulletin board with the army tank of raging Chinese soldiers. “A
chink
mustache.”

I look out over the room. Shiver. Catty Piddle won't look at me. Neither will Anita. I glance up at Mr. Howard—an angel in work boots hanging above us all.

“These are marks of prejudice. Things like this happen to me every day.” I tilt my head—
ching-chong.
I touch my eyebrow for
slant eye.
I demonstrate sidesteps in the hall. “Oh, and the buckteeth . . .”

There's the faint squeak of Mr. Howard unscrewing a lightbulb in the ceiling. Otherwise there's not a sound.

“Fear creates prejudice. Fear
thwarts
thinking.”

The guy sitting next to my empty desk looks confused. “ ‘Thwart' means to stop something. Thwarted thinking is the opposite of
using
your brain. It's letting your brain get
washed.
” I wait for someone to cough “thwart.” “During war we don't usually know the
enemy
as distinct people who live in another country. We typecast whole races of people from a distance.” I know the word “typecast” is lost on everybody, but at least
I
know what it means. “The wars happening in this building are very quiet—an ink mark, a cough, a look, but they're deadly too.”

Mr. Howard and I both know I am quoting him almost exactly. I hear my chest fill with air and exhale.

I hold up Elliot's new cartoon. “I would pass this around,
but since I have touched it, you might become
infected
with Communism.” Neil sits, arms folded, legs extended, ankles crossed. I lock eyes with him for half a second. He stretches and produces an elaborate yawn with a long
huh . . .
at the end. I know what he's doing—waiting for the chorus of affirmative yawns from his classmates. But there aren't any today. I feel unexpectedly sad for Neil, who is still acting so stupid. I guess he doesn't know what to do. Maybe I wouldn't either.

“That's me in the crosswalk. The weapons pointed at me aren't guns, they're words.” I cover my mouth and cough the word “commie.” I sneeze “chink.” Anger buzzes through me thinking of Ralph feeling the slap of prejudice because of me. Infuriating. “Any one of us might be in this crosswalk mistaking the thoughtless insults of others for truth. We draw mustaches on each other all the time.”

I pause, my heart pounding. Mr. Howard hangs above the doorway—huge and immovable. Miss Arth is silent. She must know he will swoop down and eat her whole. My next remark, before I die, is just for her. “Witnessing slurs and doing nothing is silent encouragement.”

I pin my two current events to the bulletin board.

Miss Arth checks the clock, traces her chipped purple fingernail down her grade book, and announces the next presenter. Patty Kittle!

Patty's report is about the fund drive the Red Cross Club
is sponsoring. “Uh, Elliot James is, uh, or
was
, donating his award-winning artwork for our auction,” she says, slicing me with a look. “But . . . uh . . . now I don't know what he'll . . .”

Atalanta and Meleager. HA!
I sit, feeling the flame jerking and fluttering inside. I can't get my heart to slow down.
I did the right thing, with help.

Just before the dismissal bell, maybe on purpose or maybe not, Mr. Howard drops a lightbulb on his way down the ladder. It pops off the floor and shatters. “Oops!” He gets busy, a buffalo with a whisk broom and dustpan blocking the doorway so everyone has to congregate in front of the bulletin board before heading out. They peer at my current events, wordless, and inch out of the room—an army of snails, tucked under their shells.

*  *  *

I leave school and walk all the way to
The Thinker
. Our class acted dull as a dry sponge. Mr. Howard was amazing though. Bodhisattvas can climb ladders when they need to.

“I did it,” I say to
The Thinker
. “I made a speech in front of my whole class. I will probably get a detention for insulting my teacher, which is
fine
by me. Detentions are doorways.” Squirrels skitter all over the sculpture. A lady with two dogs shuffles up. They sniff my shoes and go on.
Hello, good-bye.

I sit back, a chilly mist on my face, fighting the nasty tide starting to roll inside me—the front edge of a familiar
storm of old insults—wondering if I'll be an even bigger target now, remembering how Neil tried to start an all-class yawn and how nobody did it. Funny how someone not yawning in your face can feel like a victory.

On Monday everybody will probably act like it never happened, the same way my parents act like Michael Benton never happened. They simply dropped the subject of him—a whole human poofed away—the
Firestone
way. All I notice is that Dad acts less joke-book and a little more man-of-the-house weird and Mother looks right through me. She's made me invisible, which is much worse than her disappearing into the bedroom.

I head inside the museum, straight upstairs, and sink onto a bench in the temple. I cry a little from relief and from knowing that life, that
I
, will never be quite the same.

My heart finally slows down. I look around. If a room could be the perfect
blanket
, the Chinese Temple is that room—the lacy carved gates, the trace of sandalwood, the warm light, the honesty between Michael Benton and his wife that I witnessed in here.

If a statue could be a perfect
person
, the bodhisattva is that person. Its crystal gaze ignites the air. Michael Benton called it
rasa
—the feelings an object evokes in us. A wooden bodhisattva reminds us of our capacity for compassion and understanding.

The power is not in the statue, it's in
us
—waiting to surface.

No wonder Gone Mom brought me here. She must
have known the bodhisattva would eventually live here too. She and Michael Benton worked hard together. This is their room, their temple.

I look up at the statue.
We're all just people messing up and trying again. Right?

The bodhisattva is slow to answer.
That's right, which brings us back to the Elliot James issue, Lily. You need to thank him for the cartoon—in person.

Okay.

Think of something to give him.

And kiss him back.

Hmm . . . so strange and startling—these sparky ideas of mine.

Have a double date with Atalanta and Meleager.

“Ha!” I cover my mouth, my face hot. I swivel around, praying nobody heard my shriek.

I stop at the case in the Main Chinese Gallery with Dr. Benton's single cloud slipper perched on a little platform in front. The empty space beside it is sad. Lien never got to live with the love of her life. She gave me up too. Just like that. I turn away, their whole love story stuck in a stale glass box. I shut my eyes and clench my fists, trying not to let the raw edge of that fact shred my heart.

*  *  *

When I walk downstairs Evangeline and Ralph are chatting at the information desk. I jiggle my head, sure I'm seeing
a mirage. But before I can say a word he flashes Mother's compact at me. Ralph points behind the desk—
lost and found
. “It's been in the safe under there all this time.” He glances at Evangeline. “It's where they keep the valuables.” Ralph stuffs it in his pocket.