Bellweather Rhapsody (3 page)

He’s going to tell his sister. Tonight. Or tomorrow. Statewide is the perfect opportunity to come out to her. They’ll be together, away from home and their parents, with time and space to themselves. If he tells her in the next twenty-four hours, she’ll have three days to acclimate to the idea, three days for her magpie mind to be distracted by something shinier, more scandalously shareable.

He already knows how he’s going to do it. He’s going to ask what happened between her and Jimmy Kopek, her first real boyfriend. Jimmy seemed a decent enough guy, way more vanilla than Rabbit liked and honestly kind of dumb; Alice was so clearly, ridiculously out of his league, as far as talent and personality were concerned, their relationship had never seemed very real to Rabbit. Alice was playing the part of Jimmy Kopek’s Girlfriend, he assumed, until something juicier came along.

Then Jimmy called last Sunday. Rabbit had answered the phone and handed it to Alice without suspicion; Jimmy seemed just as Jimmy-like as all the other times he’d called. Until Rabbit got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and heard his sister crying softly, he hadn’t a clue anything was wrong. They were definitely done, though. On Monday she took the bus home with Rabbit instead of getting a ride in Jimmy’s Geo. All of the signs were there: she had been dumped. Alice Hatmaker, star of the show, had been
dumped.

He’s insanely curious, of course, but he’s also genuinely concerned. Alice has never had an emotion she didn’t want to shout from the hilltops, so the fact that she’s hiding the Kopek situation is worrisome. In spite of everything, she isn’t a bad person. She doesn’t deserve to be hurt. In some ways he knows his sister far too well, but in others, not at all. He wishes she would look to him as a confidant. And while confidences are flying around—

She’s his sister. She’s his
twin
. If he can’t tell the person with whom he shared a womb, how can he ever tell anyone?

A yellow station wagon emblazoned with
RUBY FALLS CENTRAL SCHOOLS,
caution lights mounted on the roof, pulls up to the curb.

“We’re going in
that?
” Alice says. “We’re taking a
short bus?
”

Mrs. Wilson waves to them from the driver’s seat.

Natalie Wilson has been the head of the music program at Ruby Falls High for just two months and two weeks, but already she knows that the Hatmaker twins are the kind of blessed creatures that occasionally bob to the surface of small-town high schools: strange and petite, matched like elfin salt and pepper shakers. Glossy black hair in a short bob and a short Caesar, dark brown eyes and round noses. Frightfully talented. Between Alice’s voice—bright, bigger than the entire town—and Rabbit’s bassoon, the Hatmaker name is synonymous with musical achievement. They aren’t picked on, as far as Natalie can tell, but they aren’t exactly the king and queen of the prom, and if they didn’t have each other, she suspects they’d be horribly lonely. Natalie remembers too well how it feels to be talented and seventeen.

She watches as the twins slide their luggage into the back. Everything about Alice, from her talent to her own idea of herself, is obvious, and she is obviously not amused that she’ll arrive at Statewide as a conquering senior in a canary-yellow station wagon with a retractable stop sign by the driver’s window. Honestly, Natalie would have fought harder to rent a regular car if she hadn’t suspected that a school vehicle would royally piss Alice Hatmaker off. Humbling teenagers has turned out to be one of the few consistent joys of her teaching career.

Alice slams the rear gate. She’s frowning so dramatically Natalie can’t stifle a laugh.

Rabbit, now, Rabbit Hatmaker is different. He pauses as his sister climbs into the back seat. It’s clear to Natalie that he’s wondering whether it would be ruder to sit in back with Alice or weirder to sit beside his teacher in the front, and whether it is better to be rude or weird.

Natalie lets him decide without any encouragement. He chooses to sit up front.

“Hi, Mrs. Wilson,” he says. “Thanks for driving us.”

“Thanks for making Statewide,” Natalie says. “I haven’t been to one of these festivals in years. Since I was a student.”

“
You
went to Statewide?” Alice sneers.

“Something very much like it,” Natalie says.

“What did you play?” Rabbit asks, more softly than his sister.

“Piano,” she replies. Their faces are rosy and they both sniffle in the sudden warmth of the car. “Sorry you had to wait in the cold.”

She was late, but she isn’t terribly sorry. The fact is that when Natalie should have been putting on her coat, driving her car over to the bus garage and trading it for the district’s vehicle, she was sitting at her desk in her office, staring out the double-paned window into the rehearsal room. The room was always set up for band, folding chairs down and music stands at the ready. The window was old, plastic and warped, and in the odd reflections she could imagine every child who’d passed through this school, who’d played music in this room—glints of light bending and flashing and vanishing as she turned her head. They were moths. Ghosts. They passed by and through. Some were talented, some were terrible. They all played their songs and the room didn’t change, and that was the whole story. The whole message. She couldn’t turn away. The transience of life was so clear and crystal-sharp she wanted to throw herself on it and die.

So she sat there and stared, breathing.

She eases the station wagon down Route 12 in silence. They are officially on their way. On their way to hours and hours of endless, soul-deadening rehearsals for the Hatmakers, and hours and hours of endless, inane workshops and receptions for Natalie, should she be so bored as to consider attending. She is honestly kind of angry they made Statewide, and that she, newly hired, toeing the line, volunteered to chaperone. She prefers to spend her weekends drinking and napping, though when she made that argument to Emmett, it only strengthened his insistence that she go.

Rabbit fidgets in the passenger seat. He’s opened his coat, and she notices a Discman peeking from the pouch of his sweatshirt.

“What are you listening to?” she asks.

“Uh.” She caught him off guard. “Oh, you mean—um, Weezer?”

“The newest album?”

Rabbit blinks at her. She’s unsure whether he’s confused that she knows Weezer is the name of a band, or that she referred to their CD as an album.

“It’s their second CD, and, um.” He tilts his head. “I’m not sure. It’s really different? Like, it’s really . . . a lot angrier.”

“I think it’s brilliant,” Alice says from the back seat, and then belts, apropos of nothing, “
God damn you half-Japaneeeese girls!
”

Natalie catches Rabbit’s wince. They smile at each other sideways in the silence that follows his sister’s outburst.

“I think maybe I just need to listen to it for a while longer? You know, how, sometimes you don’t know how you feel about something until you’ve had time to process it?”

She’s suddenly irritated by the way he poses his statements as questions. It reminds her of her husband, Emmett, who seems to have abandoned declaratives completely since last spring. She sets her teeth.

“Like, at first I didn’t think I liked
The X-Files
—”

God, he
is
Emmett.

“But then the more I watched it, the more I liked it, and now it’s one of my favorite shows?”

Emmett had watched
X-Files
on the night of the break-in. It had been a Sunday. Who breaks into someone’s house on a Sunday night? Only a real asshole, a real desperate asshole. Natalie remembers walking into the den and there was Emmett, hand sunk in a bowl of popcorn, staring glassy-eyed at Scully and Mulder investigating some dank basement.

“This show is one big commercial for flashlights,” she said, and Emmett said, “Shhhhh, this is an important—”

Something jumped out of the dark of the television screen and Emmett flinched, launching popcorn everywhere. She laughed at him, and he said, “Aw, shit,” but laughed too, and she said, “Clean up when you’re done and come to bed.”

This is what the newspaper said happened next:

MAN DIES IN BREAK-IN

Minneapolis—A man died Sunday night after allegedly breaking into a private residence on Stratford Street. Around 2
A.M.
, Edward Hollis, 20, of Minneapolis allegedly forced his way into the home. After rendering one occupant unconscious, Hollis reportedly attacked the second homeowner in the master bedroom. He sustained one bullet wound at close range and was pronounced dead at the scene.

The newspaper did not say that Natalie had brushed her teeth and hair and slipped into one of Emmett’s old dress shirts, thought about reading but decided she was too tired, and turned out the light. The newspaper also neglected to mention that she lay awake for a long time worrying about the Monday to come, when the school board was to vote on whether to reallocate money away from the music program for the third year running; and that she cried a little to herself because she hated that this had become her life—this endless fight to justify her existence, losing ground one steady inch at a time—and she was too exhausted to do anything about it but cry.

That, hours later, she felt the mattress jostle.

“Have you, um . . . seen it?”

Natalie starts. Yes. Yes, she saw it. She was there and she knows what she did.

“It’s a TV show.”

“Rabbit’s got a crush on Scully,” says a girl’s voice.

She shakes her head. The gray road stretches ahead of her.

“I do not,” says Rabbit.

“Who wouldn’t?” says Natalie. She smiles at him and then catches his needling sister’s eye in the rearview mirror.

Unbelievable. Freaking unbelievable.

Alice knew, from the first time she saw her, that there was something deeply wrong with Mrs. Wilson. Weirdo Wilson. When you talk to her, she acts like she doesn’t hear you the first time. She looks kind of
beyond
you, not at you. And that
face
she just shot Alice through the rearview—two parts bitch to one part psycho—that proves it. The rumors are true. Some of them, maybe all of them: that she’s in the witness protection program, that she testified against a Mob boss out in the Midwest, that she strangled a man with her bare hands.

God, she’s a Freak with a capital F. Maybe that’s the attraction. Maybe Rabbit’s still waters run freak-deep, and that’s why he didn’t sit in the back with his own sister.

“Are we there yet?” Alice asks.

She rests her chin on the back of Rabbit’s seat and palms his skull. His hair is thick and bristly. She’s told him she does this because she loves the way it feels, which is true, but mostly she does it because she believes rubbing her brother’s head brings her luck. Before opening nights, before concerts, before the solo that qualified her to be in this car, she rubbed her brother’s head. Her little brother (by three minutes and twelve seconds) is her good-luck charm, and she is beyond superstitious. The greatest performers—the singers, the dancers, the baseball players—all are. We came by it easy, and we know how easily it can be taken away.

“We have about two hours and forty-five minutes to go,” Weirdo Wilson reports, and it isn’t Alice’s imagination that her voice sounds gleeful. The woman totally has it out for her, which Alice can only attribute to a case of raging jealousy.
Get over it, lady
.
Not my fault you used to be pretty good and now you teach mouth breathers to play on the downbeat.

When you’re not chaperoning shooting stars. Oh,
she thinks,
I should write that down.

She gives her brother’s head an extra rub. Then she reaches over the back seat and snags her JanSport.

Alice has been writing her autobiography, collecting anecdotes, accolades, playbills, and photographs, since middle school. She carries it with her everywhere and writes in it at least once a day. It’s an old Trapper Keeper she begged her mother to buy her before the first day of third grade, so it’s pretty ratty-looking at this point, but that’s part of its charm. The Velcro flap makes a satisfying
fzzzip
as she opens it. She clicks and unclicks and clicks and unclicks the pen clipped to the divider and passes her hand over the cool smoothness of a college-ruled page.

Here I am,
she writes.
Route 81. A little after noon on Thursday. My second year at Statewide. A shooting star being chaperoned and chauffeured in a freaking short bus.

Have feeling of impending doom. Laid out a tarot hand for myself last night. First I played Temperance. The Star. Harmony and balance, good things coming in the future. Good news for Statewide, right? Then what card do I play next but DEATH.

They say it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to die, only that you’re going to change. But then why don’t they call the card CHANGE instead of DEATH?

She taps the pen on the paper and clicks and unclicks it again.

Her mother thinks it’s just a journal, but it’s much more than that. It’s the definitive dossier for her posthumous biographer. Alice knows how these things work: she started young, which she knows means she has to end young too—talent like hers eats you up, flames you out brighter than the sun. You can’t conquer fate. You can’t change your destiny, no matter how tragically avoidable. Talent made you doomed.

And beautiful. Alice’s voice, in fact, is the only part of her that doesn’t feel ugly. She’s petite, but like a gnome rather than an elf or a pixie. Her eyes are too large for her face and her nose too round, and her ears are too small considering the scale of the rest of her features. And her body—ugh. She can hardly bear thinking about it. Becoming aware of her body and realizing it was uniquely deficient occurred simultaneously and subtly, so that Alice herself couldn’t have distinguished one intelligence from the other. Her ugliness was something deep and total and
felt,
constantly, a perpetual discomfort in her arms and her thighs and her stomach and butt and face and hair and hands and feet and nonexistent breasts.