I bolted upright, making the hammock rock herkyjerkily. “Brooklyn!” I cried when I saw who it was. “Holy
crap,
you gave me a heart attack!”
She regarded me impassively from the director’s chair where she sat.
“How long have you been there?” I demanded. I felt caught out, and I wanted to blame someone—mainly
her.
“And ... where are your chips?”
She rubbed the bit of skin between her eye and the bridge of her nose, her expression indicating that my “where are your chips?” accusation sounded as pathetic to her as it did to me.
“You grunted,” Brooklyn stated. “Why?”
None of your beeswax,
I considered responding.
And it wasn’t a grunt. It was a groan.
But I changed my mind. Maybe it was the feeling of being weightless. Maybe it was the odd freedom of knowing that Brooklyn and I were still basically strangers, and that after another week, we would probably never cross paths again. She didn’t know Lars and wasn’t ever going to meet him. So what the heck?
“It’s my boyfriend,” I confessed. “We’re having ... problems.”
“He’s stepping out on you?” Brooklyn said.
“What? No.”
“You stepping out on him?”
“Are you kidding?” What a crazy thing to even consider. We were talking about
me
here. Winnie Perry. I wasn’t a stepping-out sort of girl. Anyway, who would I step out
with
?
I snuck a glance at her. Did she think there was someone I might conceivably be stepping out with? Not that I used that expression in normal life. At Westminster, kids said “cheating on.” As in, Bryce cheated on Cinnamon. Like that.
“So you’re not,” Brooklyn said.
“Brooklyn, do I look like the kind of girl who would step out on her guy?”
Okay, that sounded really weird,
my brain said to me. It was as if I were street-talking for Brooklyn’s benefit—and no doubt doing it wrong.
Brooklyn, who was wearing another of her tube tops—today’s was hot pink—rolled her eyes.
“What?” I said.
“I’ve seen you and you-know-who,” she said. “I’ve seen the looks he gives you.”
I was mortified by my suddenly racing pulse, but I did
not
let my voice shake—I think—when I said, “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
She arched her eyebrows.
“No, seriously. Who are you talking about?”
She pushed herself up from the director’s chair as if I were too wearisome to waste her time with.
I should have been glad she was dropping it. Instead I said, “Wait. You don’t mean
Alphonse,
do you?” I even pushed out a laugh.
“Hot black guy with the dreads?” she said sarcastically. “The one you take those early morning walks with?
Yeah,
him.”
This demanded further discussion.
“Sit,” I said, gesturing like a dog trainer. Not that she was a dog. Nonetheless, she sat, and I wiggled into a wobbly cross-legged position on the hammock.
“Do you think
I
have cheating thoughts toward
him
?” I said, trying my best to ignore the tidal wave of embarrassment swelling within me. “Or that
he
has cheating thoughts toward
me
?”
“I think you both have cheating thoughts toward each other,” she said, like
duh.
“Really?” I said eagerly. I tried again. This time, I went for casual skepticism. “I mean ...
really?”
The look she gave me told me clearly that she considered me an idiot.
I needed to get off the subject of Alphonse and back to Lars. Lars, Lars, Lars, who was my guy, but who didn’t always show it in the right way.
“Forget that,” I said. “Just forget that entirely. The thing is, my boyfriend gave me
a gift certificate
for my birthday.”
“Yeah? From where?” Brooklyn asked.
From
where?
I told her my boyfriend gave me a gift certificate for my birthday, and she wanted to know
from where
?
“Starbucks,” I said. “But that’s irrelevant.”
“How much?”
“Well ... twenty-five dollars.”
“Sweet.”
“No,
not ‘sweet.’ ” I flapped my hands impatiently. “A Starbucks card for your girlfriend’s birthday? C’mon, that’s a crap present and you know it.”
“You don’t want it? Give it to me.”
“Ha ha. I already spent it.”
She cocked her head. Her expression made my cheeks grow hot.
“Oh, shut up,” I muttered.
“Listen,” she said. “You want to know what my boyfriend gave me for my birthday? My
ex
-boyfriend, that is?”
Heck yeah, I did. I hoped it was so craptastic that it would make my Starbucks gift card look like a princess tiara. Like, if her ex gave her a mud flap with Yosemite Sam on it, then of course she’d see a Starbucks card as an acceptable gift. If her ex gave her a Yosemite Sam mud flap—a
mud flap,
when she wasn’t even old enough to have her driver’s license!—then I could stop feeling judged by her and get back to feeling sorry for myself.
“Sure,” I said. “Hit me with it.”
“A note scrawled on a Post-it. A breakup note, saying he was too young”—she brought out the quote fingers—“ ‘ to be saddled with such heavy crap.’ ”
“What heavy crap?” I said.
She twisted the corner of her mouth. “Darryl’s a loser. My kid brother—Lucas—he’s got CP. I take care of him a lot, that’s all.”
“CP, like ... cerebral palsy?”
“Yeah. And my mom, she works the night shift at the Black-eyed Pea, so ...” She lifted her fingers from the arm of her chair, then let them flutter back down. “Whatever. Like I said, Darryl’s a loser.”
Um, no, I’m the loser,
I thought. I didn’t know tons about cerebral palsy, but I’d seen kids who probably had CP. They were bound to wheelchairs, their hands curling in on themselves and their heads drooping on the fragile stems of their necks.
“I’m sorry,” I said awkwardly.
She grew fierce. “Hey. Lucas is worth ten Darryls. Ten
hundred
Darryls. No, forget that—Darryl can fall off the planet, and no one would even care, least of all me. But Lucas?” Her mouth did something funny: not a tremble, not a scowl, but a tightening that was defiant and proud and ...
adult.
“Lucas is special,” she said, jabbing her finger at me. The sparkly pink polish on her nail was chipped.
I nodded, choosing to believe her. Maybe needing to believe her.
She was so tiny. And she wore tube tops. Her pale tummy poofed out above the waist of her shorts, and she cared for her disabled kid brother while her mom worked at a chain restaurant that served, if I was remembering the right commercial, fried pickles and “cheese crunchers.”
Brooklyn leaned forward and dug a slim plastic wallet from her back pocket. She was a lot more friendly now that we weren’t talking about me. “Wanna see his picture?” She flipped open her wallet and held it out. “I take him to the portrait studio every three months. I have a punch card.”
The photo showed a toddler—Lucas—standing in a walker equipped with four wheels, a harness, and handgrips. Except he wasn’t exactly standing. More like
leaning,
in a skewed-hip, propped-up sort of way. He was grinning, and his head tilted at an odd angle over his shoulder. Across the bottom of the picture was the word KMART in gold gilt lettering.
“He’s adorable,” I said. I ran numbers in my head, reviewing what I’d learned from Mom’s baby books. “Is he ... two?”
“Two-and-a-half,” Brooklyn said.
“Is he, um, able to walk?” I said, struggling to sound as normal as I could.
Keepin’ it real,
said a voice in my brain, but luckily, I managed to suppress it.
“Near enough.” She looked at me sharply, like,
You gonna make something out of it?
I handed the picture back to her. “I have a three-month-old sister,” I told her. “Her name’s Magnolia Grace.”
“Aw, I like that,” Brooklyn said. “Bet she’s started laughing by now, huh? At three months, that’s when you can make them laugh for real, not those fake gassy laughs.”
I nodded, seeing baby Maggie in my mind. Her laughs were sweeter than gumdrops.
“You miss her?” Brooklyn asked.
“For sure,” I said. I hesitated. “Do you miss Lucas? Who’s taking care of him while you’re here?” Then I realized how untactful that was and said, “Never mind.”
“He’s with my grammy,” Brooklyn said. She turned away, pretending to look out the window. “I’ll see him in a week. No big.”
I felt sad for her. I also felt uncomfortable, because not in a million years could I imagine
being
her. Having her life. Having baby Mags, or Ty, be disabled and strapped in a walker. I saw her tube top in a new light, like a flag waved bravely in the face of adversity.
“What made you decide to come to DeBordieu?” I asked. “Since it meant leaving Lucas, I mean.” “My grammy wanted me to just be a teenager for a month,” she said, her voice barely there.
To lighten the mood, I said, “Well, sure makes my problems seem stupid, doesn’t it?”
“Pretty much.” She swiveled her head to regard me. “Does your boyfriend know you didn’t like the gift card?”
“Um...”
“What’d you want him to give you? Jewelry? Perfume?”
“What? No.” I was
so
not a stupid girly-girl pouting because I didn’t get a necklace with a chubby gold heart on it.
“Then what?” she pressed.
I scrubbed my face with my hand, then let my hand drop. “If you
have
to know,” I said. “I wanted a cupcake, all right?”
“A cupcake?”
“A cupcake.”
“A
cupcake?”
“Yes, a cupcake! Can we move on?”
“Well, did you
tell
him you wanted a cupcake?” she asked. “Because he’s not a mind reader, I’m guessing. Unless he works as a psychic in a carnival tent and you forgot to mention it.”
I rolled my eyes. “No, he’s not a mind reader.”
“So what’s the problem? Are you one of those shriveled violets who can’t stand up for herself?”
I suspected she meant
shrinking
violet, and
please,
how ridiculous. “I think you have me confused with Dinah,” I said.
“Dinah?” Brooklyn repeated. “Who right this minute’s wrestling alligators in the swamp?”
I tried to laugh, but the laugh didn’t even make it halfway out.
“And here you are, afraid to tell your boyfriend you want a cupcake.” She pressed her hands against her pale thighs, flexing her wrists and bending her elbows in a way elbows weren’t meant to be bent.
“Whoa,” I said. “Are you double-jointed?”
She shook out her limbs and rotated her wrists, not bothering to answer.
“Listen,” I said.
“You
didn’t go crabbing, either. You said you were too young to die.”
“Free piece of advice,” she said. She stood and tugged at her tube top, which had ridden up. “You only live once.”
“Gee, really?”
“Don’t waste it being stupid.” She fluffed her bangs and strode from the room.
Virginia found me later. I was this close to drowsing off when she jostled the hammock and said, “Dinner duty or cleanup—what’s your poison?”
“Huh?” I said, blinking up at her.
“Dinah and Milo are going to be back with the crabs soon. Do you want to cook or clean up?”
“Oh,” I said. “Cook. Only, I don’t know how to cook crabs.”
“Easiest thing in the world,” Virginia said. “Clean the muck off them, fill a pot with boiling water—it’s got to be boiling—and plop ’em in. Add the Old Bay, and you’re done.”
“What’s Old Bay?”
“Seasoning. I’ll put a bag on the counter. Maybe corn on the cob and salad to go with it?”
A
bang
sounded from the front of the house. A glance out the porch window told me it was Cinnamon and James returning from the beach.
“And tell those guys they’re in charge of cleaning up,” Virginia said.
I swiveled my legs off the hammock, slid my feet to the floor, and sat up. I yawned. “Okay, sure.”
“Great,” Virginia said. “I’m off to the aquarium, but I’ll be back in an hour.”
I nodded.
“Just be sure the water’s
boiling
before you put in the crabs, got it?”
“What would happen if the water wasn’t boiling? And wait—the crabs’ll be dead by the time I get them, right?”
“Dead? No, they die when they hit the water.”
Oh. I hadn’t thought about the mechanics of it until now. Without thinking, I put my hand to my stomach. “Do they...feel it?”
“I hope not, but I suppose it’s possible. You do have another option. You could stab an ice pick behind their eyes.”
I found that option horrifying, and I suspect my expression showed it.
“Handle it as you choose,” Virginia said. “I’m off.”
I handled it by switching jobs. That’s what I chose to do.
“You and James are supposed to cook dinner,” I told Cinnamon after hunting her down in the kitchen. She was freshly scrubbed and slightly pink from her afternoon in the sun. Out in the driveway, a low hum and the clunk of gravel announced that Dinah and Milo had arrived.
“Great,” Cinnamon said unenthusiastically. She sighed in resignation, then bellowed, “Ja-a-ames!”
“I’m right here,” he said, behind her.
“Oops,” she said, giggling. “Hey, we have to cook dinner.”
“So I heard.” He twined his fingers through hers, pulled her closer, and lightly kissed her lips. She giggled some more.
It was hard seeing Cinnamon be so lovey-dovey. She wasn’t doing anything wrong; I just felt twisty because of what was going on with Lars.
“You have to boil the crabs,” I told them. “You have to make sure the water is actually boiling when you drop them in.”
Cinnamon wrapped her arms around James’s neck, touching her nose to his. “Won’t that hurt them?”