“So Mrs. Hudson called me aside the other day,” Willa says with affected casualness. “She wanted to talk to me.”
“What about?” This bodes ill for me.
“She wanted to let me know that she’s thinking of grading us separately on our term project because you’re ‘not as active a participant.’”
“Whatever.” It’s only fair, even if it sucks.
“I told her not to.”
“Why not?”
Willa sets a strainer in the sink for the vegetables. “I’m a team player,” she answers sarcastically. She’s not going tell me the real reason.
She pities you, you idiot
.
“So listen.”
“Listening.” The vegetable water splashes in the sink.
“About why I came over…” She dumps the carrots and peas into the blender.
“Yeah?”
“It’s about something you said in class.”
“What’s that?” Willa puts a big dollop of honey and a splash of milk into the blender jug with a dash of some spice I can’t identify.
“Look, it was totally not cool when you—” Willa starts the blender and cuts off the rest of my sentence. She looks over at me with Bambi-eyes and switches it off.
“What?”
“When you—” She does it again.
“Did you say something?”
“Stop being a twat, Kirk.”
“Spit it out, Harper.”
“I—” She fires up the blender again.
“I swear to God, Kirk…” She just smirks and turns the damn blender back on. She lets it run for more than five seconds this time and takes out a soup bowl. I wonder how hard she’d struggle if I tried to strangle her…
Willa pours her orange concoction out into the bowl and sets it in front of me with a tall glass of milk and a spoon.
“I’m not hungry.” But it does smell good. The steam feels nice on my face.
“Try it.”
The soup won’t look any better coming back up. “I’d rather not.”
“You’re half a foot taller than me and we weigh about the same.”
“You don’t have cancer.”
“Apparently you don’t either.”
Damn it, I should have just said she had a fat ass or something. But she doesn’t. She has a nice ass, actually.
“Try one bite.”
So I do. I coat my spoon with a fine layer of soup and lick it, waiting for the bitterness. Good Lord, it’s good. Nothing tastes good anymore. I take a full bite. It’s still good. I forgot what hot food tastes like after all this yogurt and Jell-O.
“It can’t be throat cancer,” Willa muses aloud. “Your voice is still smooth. Not lung cancer, either—you don’t cough.”
I’m too busy enjoying my soup to tell her to shut up and stop guessing.
“You’re in the right age bracket for testicular cancer.”
“My balls are none of your business, Kirk.”
There’s the click of a key in the front door and a moment later her brother steps in. He calls out his sister’s name and she replies that she’s in the kitchen.
“The chicken will be ready in five.”
He comes into the kitchen and I stand up to say hello. I recognize his EMT uniform, and hope that he doesn’t recognize me. He looks from me to his sister with a totally readable expression:
What is Cancer Boy doing in my kitchen?
“We got company for dinner?”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you.” I hold out my hand and he shakes it like I’m made of glass.
“Frank Kirk.” He, like most other people, is uncomfortable looking at me for more than three seconds, and quickly turns away to get himself a drink. I sit back down and return to my soup.
Willa fills in the awkward blank: “Jem’s in my Social Studies class.”
“Yeah? You guys working on homework?” I haven’t turned in a piece of homework since last semester.
“Yeah, our term project,” Willa says.
“I’ll keep the TV down.”
“Can we work upstairs?”
Frank looks over at me under his lashes and clears his throat. I guess he has a rule about no boys on the second floor, or in the general vicinity of his sister altogether. But Cancer Boy isn’t a threat. Who would want to fool around with him? And surely he’s too weak and pathetic to force himself on her.
Stop talking about yourself in the third person, you twit.
“Okay. Not too late, though.”
*
Willa’s room isn’t quite messy, but it isn’t clean either. There are shoes and books scattered all over the floor and her desk is buried under paper. It’s the only part of the house that looks lived-in. She leaves the door ajar and invites me to sit wherever.
“If you feel sick, the bathroom is the next door down the hall.”
“I’m all right.” The soup is sitting comfortably, even after two helpings. I feel full for the first time in awhile, and it’s not painful like it used to be. Frank even remarked on my appetite over dinner. It didn’t occur to me until he said something that I was eating at an embarrassing speed.
“Where’d you learn to make that stuff?”
“I had the recipe lying around.” Willa takes a seat at her desk chair and puts her feet up on the footboard. Her socks don’t match. They’re also the only colorful thing I’ve seen her wear besides the gloves, which she never takes off. Today’s pair is pink.
“Could I get the recipe?”
“If you want.” Willa takes a pad of paper out of her desk drawer and locates a stray pen amid the mess. She writes it all down for me quickly and tears the page out.
“So why’d you come here?” Willa folds the paper carefully, taking her time. Aw, hell, she’s ransoming the damn thing.
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“So you said.”
“You kept changing the subject.”
“Talk now.”
“It’s about something you said last week.”
“Just say it, Harper.”
I take a deep breath. “Suffice it to say, I like ripping on you. And I’m pretty sure you like ripping on me. We wouldn’t have anything to say to each other if we didn’t.”
“Now say something interesting.”
“There are things that are off limits, Kirk.” She makes a prompting hand motion to show that she’s listening. “We can only rip on each other for stuff we can control, all right?”
“Is this about the lime Jell-O?”
“No, it’s about you calling me Uncle Fester.”
Willa smiles and I ask her what’s so damn funny. “You spent four hours here trying to work up the nerve to tell me not to razz you for being bald? Jeez, save yourself the effort and just text me next time.”
“We’re agreed, though? No more insults about stuff we can’t control?”
She hands over the soup recipe. “Agreed—unless you really tempt me.”
Sunday
I have zero energy and my joints ache, but for the first time in a long time, I’m excited to get out of bed. I’m eager to get down to the kitchen and eat—when was the last time that happened? Soup can be a breakfast food, right?
Mom is the only one in the kitchen when I get downstairs. Dad is still at the hospital and my siblings aren’t awake yet. She has the Sunday paper spread out in front of her and a steaming mug of coffee in her hand.
“Morning, sweetie,” she says.
“Morning.” My cheerful tone throws her and she looks up to see me taking carrots and peas out of the fridge. “Do we have any honey?”
“You want food?” She says it like the notion is absurd to the nth degree.
“I found a recipe that doesn’t upset my stomach.” Mom leaves her paper and comes to look over the recipe. She quietly assembles the rest of the ingredients while I wash and peel carrots.
“What’s this?” Mom points to the last ingredient on Willa’s list. It’s simply The Secret Ingredient. Damn it.
I take the page from Mom and get the phonebook out of the desk. I find the Kirks’ listing and dial. It doesn’t occur to me until the phone rings that her brother might not take kindly to being woken up early on a Sunday.
Willa answers the phone with a tired mumble that passes for ‘hello.’
“What’s the secret ingredient, Kirk?”
“Who is this?” She clears her throat of sleep.
“It’s Jem. What’s the secret ingredient?”
“Any excuse to call me, eh Harper?”
“Don’t be difficult. Just tell me so I can eat.”
“Meditate. It’ll come to you.”
“You enjoy screwing with me, don’t you?”
“Nah, you’re too boney. Screwing with you might cause a fire.”
I curl my hands into fists and count to ten very slowly. “
Please,
Kirk.”
“It’s fresh ginger. Or dried, if you don’t have fresh.”
“Honestly?”
“Would I screw with you?” Evidently not.
“Why didn’t you just write that?”
“Your frustration amuses me.”
“You’re sick.”
“We match.”
I hang up on her. Another second of that and I’d be tempted to commit a very messy homicide.
It’s not like I want to screw her either.
Is that so?
Monday
I wonder what Chris Elwood sees in Willa. She’s such a bitch. And yet there he is, flirting with her again and again no matter how many times she shuts him down. I guess she’s polite about it, but still.
I wonder what she doesn’t see in him. He’s good looking, I guess, and popular. Hell if I understand why. I don’t think he’s funny and he’s not all that bright or good at sports. I guess he’s the mediocre everyman. Apparently Willa doesn’t like that.
She’s too quick for him anyway. He couldn’t handle her. Getting involved with Willa is like playing with fire.
Social Studies is simple today. I don’t even have to talk to Willa. Mrs. Hudson puts on a movie for us. It’s a documentary about international development projects in Africa. The lights go off, my head goes down, and I doze. The scraping of chairs across the floor wakes me up at the end of class, and I trudge off to English.
Elise catches up to me outside the languages wing after the final bell. She puts on her sweet voice and tries to borrow money from me.
“What did you blow yours on?”
“Nothing. I’m trying to put together enough to buy an outfit for winter formal.”
“So ask Mom.”
“I did. She suggested that I just alter the dress I wore at Christmas.”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
She rolls her eyes at me with a long-suffering sigh. “You’re such a guy.”
We’ve got a bit of a wait for Eric, so Elise and I chill in the car while the parking lot empties around us. This is a great vantage point to people-watch, but the most interesting specimen is sitting in the seat directly in front of me. A group of seniors walk by and Elise leans forward, craning her neck to keep them in view until they’re gone. Could she be a little more obvious?
“Do seniors ever think about dating juniors?” she says. I reach over the front seat and pat her spiky, over-gelled head.
“Keep dreaming, jail bait.”
Tuesday
I balance my notebook on my knee and try to find something non-boring in this textbook. Willa did all the work of watching yesterday’s movie and writing our report on the subject, so it’s my turn to contribute and prepare our proposal for the term project. Mrs. Hudson wants us to design an in-depth analysis of a social issue in our community and prepare a mock grant proposal for imaginary study funding. “No, you will not actually get paid for this,” she told the class. The cretins in the room laughed. Willa was one of them. Suck up.
The nurse makes her round of the dialysis patients, checking connections and equipment. I’ve got another hour here before I can go home. I want to finish this proposal in that time so I never have to look at it again.
I hear the squeaky wheels of the book cart coming down the hall beyond the curtain that divides me from the patient in the next recliner. The hospital has volunteers walk up and down the place, offering magazines, reading material, and chewing gum to patients. The volunteers are always either old people (visiting their friends or staking out a bed for when they end up here), or they’re students trying to earn enough volunteer hours to merit a scholarship.
The squeaky cart stops in front of me. “Harper.”
I look up. It’s Willa, wearing a green volunteer vest. “What the hell are you doing here?” Must I see her smirking face everywhere? Must she see me hooked up to a machine like some sort of freak?
She taps the volunteer tag on her vest in answer. “Care for something to read?” she says, and looks at the textbook on my knee. “How’s it coming?”
“Boring as hell.”
“Just pick one of the chapter questions and design a topic around that.”
“Is part of your job to harass patients?”
“It’s just one more service I offer.” She starts to push the book cart away to the next cubicle. “Later, Harper.”
Wednesday
I am awesome. Mrs. Hudson approved my proposal and told five other groups to refine theirs. Okay, so it’s
our
proposal, but it’s my genius.
“Soil pollution and pesticides? Really? There’s so much other cool stuff we could have done with this. And why’d you pick snapdragons as an experimental model?”
“My mom grows them. The sample group is in her planters. The project is half-done already.”
“I underestimated your laziness.”
“It’s pronounced
intelligence
, Kirk.”
Thursday
“You should think about going,” Elise says. I slouch in the chair outside the fitting rooms and ponder insanity. Mom roped me into this shopping trip. She said she’s tired of seeing me walk around in clothes three sizes too big. I told her that I don’t want to waste money on clothes that will only fit until I gain the weight back, but she managed to bully me into buying one shirt and one pair of pants, which is how I ended up in the chair outside the fitting rooms, waiting for Elise to choose a dress for the stupid winter formal.
“Not going,” I reply.
“You don’t have enough fun.” She opens the changing room door.
“That dress is way too short.” Mom comes back from browsing the racks just in time to undermine my opinion.
“Ooh, sweetie, turn around. That looks great on you.”
Damn it, I don’t want to see my little sister’s
legs
. No one else should want to either. As far as I’m concerned it’d be better if she went to this dance in a nun’s habit.