Liar, Liar (7 page)

I had second thoughts about asking her for advice on Tina when I heard her pretend to banter with
her imaginary cohost (“Well, Chuck, you
would
say that, hahaha”). One. Crazy. Broad.

I went downstairs to check my email. I sent a long note to Connie that I cut and pasted from the town council’s monthly minutes, throwing in a lot of
heretofore
s and
therewith
s. Then I emailed Katie that I’d just gotten back from a lab draw and—good news!—my white blood cell count was down. I said yes to a request from Markie’s parents to babysit the next day, and I IM’d JonPaul to see how he was feeling. My buddies had sent me homework from the classes I’d missed, so I started to tackle that pile of mindlessness.

Truth be told, as much as I liked looking at Tina and devoting all my time and energy during all my free hours to thinking about making her crazy about me, it was already Wednesday and I still hadn’t come up with any brainstorms to get her to like me.

A few more pointless days like this and I was just going to lie to her. This truthfulness thing was a whole lot harder than my spur-of-the-moment inventions.

took a break from homework to check my phone for new texts later that evening and nearly jumped out of my skin.

“Mom!” I leapt up from the computer desk in the basement and raced upstairs to the kitchen to find her. I’d heard her come in, and had heard Buzz leave, a while ago. “JonPaul and his cousin, you know, the one in college they call Goober? Well, they have tickets for the Blind Rage concert festival at the Kane County Fairgrounds this weekend and they want to sell me one and take me with. The greatest part is that Buket o’ Puke ’n Snot is headlining.”

“Buket o’ Puke ’n Snot? Can’t say I’m familiar with their body of work.”

“You’ve heard them, you just don’t know it. ‘I Could Kill and Eat You,’ ‘You Suck, but Let’s Hook Up Anyway,’ ‘Anarchy Rules,’ ‘Dissension Is the Answer,’ ‘Loving You Is a Pit of Death.’ ”

She shuddered and shook her head. “Poetic though they sound, and I appreciate that you’ve just described both tender ballads of love and socially prescient commentary, I still don’t believe this rings any bells.”

“Dude and the Jailbaits are playing too, and Skullkraker.”

“Delightful bill. How much is this … ode to dark despair going to run you?”

“Tickets are two fifty.”

“Two hundred and fifty? Dollars?”

“I have money from working for Auntie Buzz, and I’ll pay.”

“Yeah, you will.”

“The thing is, we gotta camp out the night before because it’s open seating so we need to get there early to get good spots near the stage. And it’s a two-day festival with a whole bunch of up-and-coming
bands in addition to the headliners, so we’ll leave on Friday and then come home Sunday, late, when it’s all wrapped up. Better make that early Monday morning.”

“Kevin. Son. Are you crazy? You think your father and I are going to sign off on allowing you, a fourteen-year-old boy, to go off with some … Goober creature for two days and nights of antisocial music—and I use that term lightly and with apologies to musicians and composers everywhere—without parental or even coherent adult supervision?”

“What’s your point?”

“No.
N. O
. That’s my point.”

“Can we discuss this?”

“We just did.” She gave me that look. The one that said I was about to go somewhere I didn’t want to go. And that I was bound to make things worse for myself if I pressed the issue. I know my mom; she’s got no wiggle room. Yes/no, right/wrong, black/white, good/bad. End of discussion.

I stormed back to the family room downstairs, pounding hard on each of the ten steps to let her know that Kevin. Was. Not. At. All. Happy. About. What. Just. Happened.

Because I wasn’t speaking to her, I didn’t say anything as I turned right around and stomped back up the stairs to the kitchen to make myself a banana with melted chocolate chips, and then, just for good measure, I accidentally/deliberately burned a bag of microwave popcorn so that the whole house reeked.

She went to the living room with a book.

I pondered our discussion as I ate my snack. It’s times like this when loopholes become a guy’s best friend. What had she said, again? Something about my father? Hm. Doesn’t seem to me that he was consulted at all.

I’ll fix that.

I sent Dad a quick text, stressing the wonder of the situation and the once-in-a-lifetime aspect of the offer. My dad’s a big music fan, so I knew he’d be predisposed to thinking it was a good idea. I forgot to mention I’d already spoken to Mom. Forget, neglect, tomato, tomahto.

The great thing about my dad being gone all the time is that he always responds to text messages and emails from us at the speed of light.

“snds gd. ill txt mom. hom soon.”

Fab. I get to go to the concert
and
Dad breaks the
news to Mom. I hoped she’d be so mad that he went ahead and okayed the concert that she wouldn’t even notice I’d gone behind her back to get permission.

I took the phone to my room to call JonPaul and tell him and Goober to count me in. Mom must have heard from Dad, because I heard her cell beep with an incoming text message. She remained in the living room, though. And didn’t say a word. The hairs on the back of my neck rose.

Playing one parent against the other has always been strictly forbidden in this house. But it wasn’t my fault Dad was never home to know what was going on.

I told myself my actions were justified because Mom would have let Sarah go in a heartbeat—she’s “trustworthy,” which, of course, just means my sister’s smart enough to never let our folks find out what she’s done or where she’s been.

And Mom would have felt okay about Daniel going, because he never does anything without his hockey team and they’re all so terrified of messing up and getting benched for the next tourney that they never get in any trouble. Bunch of brownnosers. Bloodied brownnosers with missing teeth.

I was tired of getting the short end of the stick in
this family just because I was the youngest. The ends justified the means.

I could see myself strolling into school after the concert and walking past Tina wearing my Buket o’ Puke ’n Snot T-shirt. That would be the icebreaker I needed to talk to Tina and make her aware that I was a cool guy into alternative music who went on weekend concert trips with college students.

I was trying to find my black jeans and figure out which shirts I’d pack. Dig out the old sleeping bag, too. I wondered how much spending money I’d have to bring.

I heard the front door slam and my father’s voice call out, “Helllllllllooooooo …” I stopped moving and I held my breath.

Dad was home.

I peeked out my door and down the hall. I had a perfect view of the kitchen.

Mom must have heard Dad. And learned how to telekinetically transport herself, because she was immediately standing in front of him in the kitchen.

She wasn’t wearing a happy face.

“Hi, honey,” Dad said absentmindedly as he shuffled through the pile of mail on the counter, and therefore did not notice her clenched jaw. Or fists.
“What a trip. I’m beat. Oh, and that new dry cleaner you took my suits to last time is a moron.”

“Michael, you treat this house and family like a hotel and staff members. You never do the laundry or handle the dry cleaning yourself, you haven’t gone grocery shopping or cooked in years and you have never once cleaned the cat box. And then you undermine my authority by giving Kevin permission to go to a concert I’d already said no to.”

“We have a cat?”

“Yes! His name is Teddy.”

“When did this happen? Last week when I was in Philly?”

“Three and a half months ago when you were … gone. Like you always are.”

Is he
always
gone? I wondered. Yeah, I guess he is. I mean, he’s traveled a lot for work for as long as I can remember, but once I heard that Dad didn’t even know we had a cat, I realized that he’d been gone nearly all the time lately and that, even for this family, he hadn’t been paying very much attention to us when he
was
around. He was always frowning at his PDA or reading reports or …

Wait. Just. A. Minute. Here.

Come to think of it, I hadn’t been paying much attention to Dad or what he’d been doing lately either.

JonPaul once dared me to bite down on a wad of tinfoil. Being an idiot, I did. The same shock and pain and nausea zinged through me now when I realized how … detached Dad had become.

We’ve always taken it for granted that Dad goes on tons of business trips; Sarah scoops the little soaps and shampoos and shoeshine cloths out of his shaving kit, and Daniel has more pens and badge holders than any fifteen-year-old kid on the planet. That’s really all I think of when Dad crosses my mind these days—the junky stuff he brings home for us and the work he’s always preoccupied with between flights.

I couldn’t remember the last time Dad and I had hung out and watched a ballgame on television together or when all five of us had sat down at the dinner table or … well, anything much more than hellos in the hallway and notes to each other on the fridge about schedules and—in Daniel’s and Sarah’s cases … and Mom’s and mine … and now Mom and Dad’s—fighting with each other in the kitchen.

Everyone was so busy—work, school, part-time
jobs and friends—and I guessed … I guessed we’d just gotten used to doing without Dad.

Man. You miss a little in this house, you miss a lot.

I was still staring at the floor, trying to make sense of what was going on in the kitchen, when I heard my mother blow her nose. She didn’t have a cold. She didn’t suffer from allergies. She must have been crying. This was really bad.

My dad started talking, but I couldn’t hear anymore; I was frozen in place in the doorway of my bedroom, clutching a pair of jeans.

I looked and saw Sarah standing at the bathroom door, her flatiron for her hair in her hand, and her mouth wide open. She too had heard everything—the bit about our cat, and Mom crying. Daniel was in his doorway, his head cocked, listening.

Sarah unplugged the iron and jerked her head at me as she passed me in the hallway. She snapped her fingers at Daniel.

We moved, unnoticed, past the kitchen, where my parents were standing in the middle of the floor silently looking at each other. Sarah led us out of the house and down to the curb, where she’d parked our/her car.

We all climbed into the car with jerky, unnatural movements like we’d recently been cut out of full-body casts and hadn’t yet become reacquainted with our full range of motion. Sarah sat back in the driver’s seat and took a deep breath, staring out the window at Mrs. Ebeling unloading groceries from her car two driveways over. Daniel sat next to Sarah in the front, looking down and picking a blister off his thumb like it was the most important thing that was going to happen all day. I sat stiff and tense in the backseat as if I was being graded on posture.

“Well,” Sarah finally said. “That was … ugly.”

I grunted, and Daniel made a sound that I couldn’t decipher.

“In Dad’s defense,” Daniel finally piped up, “Teddy’s not the friendliest cat who ever lived. I can see how Dad wouldn’t have noticed him, because Teddy’s always hiding. Most of the time you can only see his tail, and that’s if you know where to look. Or,” he added slowly, “if you look at all.”

“That’s the thing, Daniel: Dad
doesn’t
look.” Sarah was still studying Mrs. Ebeling as if the secrets of the universe, or at least of our family, could be found by determining the most effective manner of bringing groceries into the house. “And besides, the cat is not
the problem; Dad not knowing he exists is merely a symptom of what’s wrong with this family.”

“How long have you known things suck?” We all asked each other the same question at the same time. If it hadn’t been so sad, I’d have been impressed.

“A few months,” Sarah admitted. “I asked them about it last week, but they said everything was fine, that they just had normal family issues to work through.”

“When he went away for over a week for the third time in a month.” Daniel was still working on that blister.