Fear and Laundry (7 page)

Lia whirled on her father, index finger extended. “What about you? Did you know about this?”

John sipped his tea. “No, honey. If
I’d
known, I’d have told you.”

“Thanks a lot.” Elyse shoved at his elbow. Tea sloshed out of John’s glass, wetting the front of his polo shirt.

“Oh, come on,” he protested.

“I can’t believe this.” Lia covered her eyes. “I cannot believe this. I’ve been betrayed by my very own family. Stabbed in the back by my own mother!”

Elyse blinked, completely at a loss. “Betrayed?”

“Thanks to you, I was scooped by
Torched
. You know who writes
Torched
, Mom?” Lia snatched the zine from Jake’s hand and pointed at it. “Eugenia Ridley.”

Elyse looked at Jake and me for help. “Who?”

“Ridley’s Lia’s sworn enemy,” answered Jake, fake-serious. “Even I know that.”

“They’re arch-rivals,” I corroborated.

“I...Hate...Her.” Lia dragged out the words.

Elyse looked appalled. “Lia!”

Lia’s fingers shook as she lowered the zine and stared daggers at the cover. Then, abruptly, she ripped the whole thing into little pieces while her parents looked on in confused awe.

“Alright.” Jake crossed to his sister and put his hands on her shoulders. “That’s enough.”

I crouched, gathering shreds of paper from Lia’s fists and the floor and dropping them into the kitchen garbage can.

“If you really want to play at Lynch’s on the twenty-seventh,” said Jake, steering his sister toward the door, “then we should get to work,”

“Work?” John shifted his drinking glass from one hand to the other, wiping condensation from his fingers onto his jeans. Elyse, seeing an opportunity to escape what was obviously for her a confounding situation, swiveled her chair away and picked up the telephone again.

“Practice,” Lia growled. “You know, band rehearsal?”

“Where’s your other little friend?” John’s forehead wrinkled. “The one with the hair?” He held his hand, fingers fanned, to the side of his head, miming Sierra’s Mohawk.

“Sierra. She’s out.” Lia nodded at her brother. “Jake’s taking her place for now.”

“Jake?” John seemed bewildered by the prospect, and having witnessed Lia at Jake’s throat so many times over the years, I thought I understood why.

“Yeah, yeah,” Lia sighed. “Desperate times and all that.”

John looked at Jake. “Well, I’m glad you’ve got time to horse around with your little sister and her friends,” he told him stiffly, “even if you can’t be bothered to go to school. Or look for work.”

Lia was offended. “Horse around?”

“It’s Saturday, Dad,” said Jake. “Who looks for a job on the weekend?”

“You could at least come to the store with me,” John muttered, sipping his tea. “I’m about to make my rounds in an hour.”

“Thought we covered this,” Jake said evenly. “Why would I want to come to the store with you? I have absolutely no interest in groceries. Produce holds no appeal for me whatsoever.”

John set his glass down hard, preparing to say something else.

Beside him, Elyse covered the phone’s mouthpiece. “Leave him alone, Johnny,” she scolded. “Go on,” she said to the rest of us, shooing us out of the room. I had the impression she was less interested in defending Jake than in keeping her family’s argument from disrupting her phone call.

Jake’s hand curled into a fist by his side. He might’ve stayed behind and argued, but Lia and I forcibly hauled him out of the kitchen, through the living room and out the side door into the garage.

***

“S
orry about my mom trying to recruit you for party duty,” Lia said as I sat down in the garage. She angled her folding chair to more fully face mine. “You know how she gets.”

“It’s okay.” I did know, and after three years of best friendship with Lia, I was used to it. “I don’t mind helping out with the party if she really wants me to,” I said truthfully. Sweat trickled down the side of my face. As warm as it was now, I knew the temperature would drop significantly in a few hours. Late summer in West Texas was strangely mercurial, the days hot but the evenings chilly.

“Forget it.” She leaned her elbows on her knees, looking glum. “She’s so self-centered, always ordering everybody around. I swear she never thinks of anyone but herself.”

I thought of Elyse’s near-constant charity work, but kept quiet.

“What are you so mad about?” Jake leaned against the garage wall, one long leg bent and his thumb hooked in his belt loop. “So you got scooped. You’re still getting what you want. Clyde’s coming to Carreen.”

“Excuse me. Was anyone talking to you? This is none of your business.” Lia plucked a pebble off the garage floor and skipped it angrily in Jake’s direction.

His eyes flashed but I interceded before he could reply. I’d left my backpack in the living room when we came in, I said. Would he grab Lia’s song book out of it? “It’s the black and white composition book.”

In the past, he might’ve ignored me, taken his sister’s bait and argued with her anyway. But now he pushed away from the wall and went back inside.

I stared at Lia until she met my eyes. “What’re you looking at?” she demanded.

“Lia. What are we going to do?”

“You mean about the interview?”

“Uh,
yeah
, I mean the interview.”

“What’s this ‘we’ stuff?” It was her zine, she said. This was on her and she’d handle it. I had nothing to worry about.

“Yeah right,” I said. Everyone knew I wrote for
The Blank Slate
and was Lia’s best friend. Did she really think people weren’t going to question me about this? And just what was I supposed to say when they did?

“Don’t say anything.” The fewer people who knew the better, she said. And she especially wanted to keep Jake out of her business, so I shouldn’t breathe a word to him.

“Are you kidding? Katrina Sampson’s probably told half the town by now. He’s going to find out.” Everyone was going to find out, I thought with a sickening feeling.

“Maybe. But hopefully by the time it starts to get around, I’ll have a plan.”

A plan I’d no doubt be coerced into helping carry out, I thought irritably. I sat back, crossed one leg over the other and bobbed my foot restlessly until she reached out to stop it, telling me to calm down for God’s sake. It took me back to the beginning of freshman year, when Lia and I’d first met. I’d been so nervous about starting high school I hadn’t been able to stop tapping my pen on my desk – until Lia, seated beside me, had leaned over and snatched it away from me. “Need a bucket or something?” she’d asked cheerfully.

“Huh?”

“You look like you’re about to puke,” she’d explained. Then she’d introduced herself and told me to calm down because everything was going to be fine. The instant I’d looked into her confident gray eyes, I’d believed her. And really, she hadn’t given me a reason to doubt her since.

“Will you just trust me?” she asked me now.

“Okay,” I said. “But do me a favor? Try not to jump down your brother’s throat every ten seconds? I don’t think I can take much more of it.”

Maybe I should’ve thought of that, she muttered, before lobbying so hard to get him into the band.

“Maybe I should’ve,” I conceded, rubbing my temples. But it was too late now and I was asking her to work with me here.

She seemed genuinely baffled. “Just what do you expect me to do?”

“You could try being nice to him.” Even as I said it, I recognized the futility of the suggestion.

She snorted. That wasn’t their dynamic, she said (as if I needed to be reminded); it wasn’t how she and Jake operated.

Well, maybe it was time they tried something new?

She leaned back in her chair, saying that was a funny suggestion coming from me.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Only that you’re the most stubborn person I know and you’re telling me to be flexible,” she laughed.

“I am not...” I started to defend myself but thought better of it. “Look. Just ease up on Jake, okay? He’s acting a little strangely.” I thought of his unhappy demeanor at Mr. Lee’s, and of the way he’d just now let me so easily defuse a potential argument with his sister. Sarcastic comments to his father aside, it was as if the fight had gone out of him or something.

Acting strangely? He was a strange person, she said. A big weirdo. This is what she’d been trying to tell me all these years, if only I’d listen.

“You know what I mean,” I murmured, glancing at the door. “Something’s bothering him.”

“Something’s
always
bothering him. He’s almost as perpetually miserable as you are.”

“Hey.”

Okay, she said, seeing she was really annoying me, maybe he seemed a little more morose than usual. Who cared?

“You should ask him if he’s okay.”

“Maybe you should ask him, if you’re so worried. He’s more likely to talk to you anyway.”

I frowned, uncertain. Jake and I’d always gotten along, but had never been what I’d call close. We’d rarely spent time together other than in Lia’s company, and never talked about anything personal I could recall. “Why should he talk to me?”

She didn’t answer. Behind me, the door creaked open.

Jake’s eyes were cast down, scanning the turned-back pages of the weathered notebook where Lia recorded her song ideas. “There’s some good stuff in here,” he said, nearing us.

“Mind your own business, would you?” Lia leaned over and snatched the book from his hands.

***

A
fter several false starts, Jake and I managed to accompany Lia as she sang some of her latest lyrics directly from the song book, letting the frustrations of the day fuel her performance. When it seemed we’d finally nailed down a possible framework for the song, she hopped up and down on her toes, doing a little dance step. Her eyes shone in the dim light of the garage and two bright spots of color burned high on her cheeks. She said we should run through the song again because it was really coming together.

“It’s getting late. I should head home,” I said, pulling my arm across my forehead.

“Can’t you stay the night?” Lia pouted.

“I dunno.” I picked up the towel I kept beside the drum kit and draped it around my neck. “Mom’s been complaining she doesn’t see me enough. And she says I’m gonna wear out my welcome eating dinner here all the time.” I spent the night at Lia’s so often I kept a toothbrush in the bathroom, my penguin print pajama pants, and spare clothes in a personally designated drawer of Lia’s dresser.  

“As if,” she said. “Come on. Mom and Dad have some fundraiser tonight. If you don’t stay, I’ll be stuck here with just
him
,” she nodded at Jake, who was busy with his guitar at the other end of the garage, too far away to hear.

“He probably won’t even stick around tonight,” I said, pointing out he’d likely want to go out and catch up with his friends.

“Even worse,” she said. “I’ll be here alone.” Now that the performance buzz was wearing off, her eyes dimmed. I guessed her anxiety about Ridley and the zine was returning, encroaching on her better mood. I hated to leave her like this. “I’ll throw some dinner together and we can watch a movie. It’ll be fun,” she added, probably sensing I was about to cave.

“I’ll call Mom,” I said, dabbing at my face with the towel.

“You’re the best, Vee.”

***

“O
h, Pumpkin, I was about to call and see if I could catch you before you left.” My mother sounded breathless and distracted over the phone. “Are you on your way home?”

“Not exactly,” I said. I was alone in Lia’s bedroom, sitting on her bed with one leg tucked under me and Clyde 2 sprawled across my lap, purring happily as I stroked the fur between his ears. “Lia’s had sort of a rough day. She wants me to spend the night.”

I looked at the multi-colored loops of wiring visible inside Lia’s clear plastic phone, expecting to hear my mother sigh and tell me she wished I’d come home. I was preparing to remind her we’d just had a perfectly good dinner together the night before, filled with all sorts of quality time, when she surprised me by saying she thought my spending the night at Lia’s was a “great” idea.

George had called, she explained. A friend of his had canceled plans to go to the first-look, invitation only, D.F. Tarsington exhibit at the Carreen College Museum tonight and passed the invites along to him.

“Who’s D.F. Tarsington?” I asked.

My mother sighed at my ignorance. He was a very up-and-coming visual artist, she said. A big, soon-to-be even bigger, deal in the arena of mixed-media...

“Okay, okay, I get it,” I said, swinging my free leg.

“If you left Lia’s now, you’d just be coming home to a frozen dinner and a night alone in front of the TV,” she said, trying to convince me of my own idea to stay put.

“’kay, Mom. Guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Perfect. I should go, Pumpkin. I need to do something with my hair.” We told one another to have a good time, exchanged good nights and hung up.

“My mother goes on more real dates than I do,” I complained to the cat. “What do you think of that, huh?” He nipped my finger, drawing a tiny spot of blood.

***

A
fter washing my bitten hand in the bathroom, I found Lia and Jake in the kitchen. Jake had apparently decided to stay in with us after all, and they were arguing over which movie to watch. 

“You’ll just pick
Pretty in Pink
again,” Jake replied when Lia told him she wanted to choose, “for the millionth time.”

“For your information, I was not going to choose
Pretty in Pink
.”

“Or
Some Kind of Wonderful
,” he said.

Lia paused. “It’s an underrated film, you know.” Lia wasn’t a big movie fan; she really only liked John Hughes movies that were almost ten years old.
Some Kind of Wonderful
was a particular obsession with her, at one point prompting her to spell her name with an “e,” so she was Lea, like Lea Thompson. She’d have chopped all her hair off and streaked it just like Mary Stuart Masterson’s, too, if Elyse hadn’t put her foot down.

“Right,” said Jake.