Authors: Callie Wright
“Did I say oatmeal?” Nonz peered down her freckled nose at the cookbook, then back up at me. “Three-fourths-cup sugar.”
“Shortbread,” I guessed, opening the bag of sugar.
Her eyes were the same nut-brown shade as mine but I couldn’t read them. “Two ounces unsweetened chocolate, roughly chopped,” said Nonz, and if she was changing the recipe mid-game, I didn’t care. We were passing time, baking a pan of double-fudge brownies on Nonz’s last day on earth, it turned out, and here were the brownies now, half eaten and covered in cellophane.
Early morning, the day of her funeral: I’d stamped muddy footprints at the edge of my grandmother’s grave. A weak slant of sun lit the grass between Nonz’s plot and the brick church, and I looked up at the steeple, shielding my eyes. I’d be back here in four hours with my family, with Father Armstrong, with ashes to ashes and Nonz’s casket, my grandmother inside, but for now it was just me, silent dawn, and the graveyard cast in first light. I closed my eyes and saw the Easter-egg hunts of my childhood, flamingo-pink and lime-green shells sprouting like mushrooms on the graves. I turned 360 degrees, taking in the redbrick church, the ivy-covered fence, the dirt parking lot, the marble headstones falling like dominoes toward River Street, and it seemed impossible that Sam and Carl weren’t here to consecrate this.
Our friendship had been lacquered to stone in coded slitters we’d made up at Nonz and Poppy’s card table.
Mayhi
translated as
extremely
.
Farm
was a slitter for the F-word.
Tardmore
was
more retarded
, and
OPs
were cigarettes, i.e., Official Purchases, e.g., Which tardmore’s turn is it to file up to the cash register for the OPs? We smoked our OPs in covert nunneries hidden from the collective eyes of Cooperstown, reinforcing our fortress with a language no one else spoke.
Provides, professional
—cool.
Perkins, piece of ass
—sucks. 122 Chestnut had been our capital, the card table our courthouse, and here at my grandparents’ house, over rounds of Pay Day and Bargain Hunter, we’d laid out the laws of the land.
A backgammon set; five pairs of khakis; four green highball glasses; two rakes; a push mower; a broom with straw bristles; a lamp shade with a silk fringe; and a toaster oven—these were the things that went back in the house.
A beetle collection; a TV set; five pairs of khakis; a hat stand; a trombone; a steamer trunk; a set of sheets; a nightstand with matching headboard; and an unopened bottle of Glenfiddich—these were the things that went into our car.
While Teddy and Dad tied Poppy’s headboard to the station wagon’s ski rack, I tracked Mom to Nonz’s side of the dismantled bed. She looked lost, hugging a worn paperback to her chest. I read the title upside down.
The Sex Cure.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“I found it under the mattress,” said Mom.
Which is where I kept my journal and Teddy kept his Victoria’s Secret catalogs. If you wanted to hide something, under the mattress was apparently the place to do it.
“Can I see it?” I asked.
Mom handed me the book and I studied the cover.
For the rich, beautiful women of the suburban fast set, young Dr. Justin Riley had a favorite prescription.
I’d heard of
The Sex Cure
but I’d never seen a copy—even I knew about the rumor that a prominent family in town had bought up all the copies, then ended the print run. Our town’s greatest secrets aired at the hands of a pulp-romance writer in 1962.
“Professional,” I said, backing into the hallway with it before Mom could think to say no.
* * *
Monday morning, Poppy’s first with us, I found my mother at the kitchen sink, rubbing the lapel of her gray blazer with a wet paper towel. Her dark hair fell forward across her face, hiding her blue eyes. When she was little, Mom looked like Snow White. Now she said she had to “work at it,” with a lipstick shade called Maraschino and a hair rinse called Brunette Express, but Sam and Carl had said they’d still farm her, which was like, okay, a compliment, but also mayhi Perkins.
“Where’d Dad go?” I asked.
“Nonz and Poppy’s house,” she said, bringing the blazer to her nose to sniff. “He’s cleaning all day.” She checked her watch. “Dad?” she called.
I followed her gaze to the den, where Poppy had kicked back in my father’s recliner. It felt like a holiday, having him here, and I couldn’t quite believe he was never leaving.
“What would you like for breakfast?” asked Mom. She ran down the list of things she could cook quickly before work. Number one: cheese toast.
“What?” asked Poppy.
“Cheese toast,” Mom repeated.
“It’s Perkins,” I volunteered.
“Julia, please. Dad—I’m late for work. Raisin bread?” Mom scanned the cupboard, then closed the pantry door and flung open the fridge. “Milk? Mustard?”
I knew Poppy hadn’t slept. Around three o’clock I’d seen the glow from his TV flickering on the floor in the hallway between our rooms, and I’d crept out of bed to listen but the volume was off and Poppy wasn’t making a peep. So I’d waited, watching myself in the full-length mirror on my wall: light-brown hair to my shoulders; eyes like pennies; a tiny mole on my left cheekbone, high like Mom’s and Nonz’s. Stretching my sleep shirt down over my chest, my breasts flattened softly. According to Sam and Carl, size didn’t matter so much as having them; like collectors, they were interested in all shapes and sizes.
Mom shut the refrigerator and swiveled to the bread drawer. “Toast?” she called. “Toasted graham crackers?”
“I’ll make him something,” I offered. I clapped once and Poppy turned to me and I said, “We’re out of eggs, we’re out of orange juice, and we’ve never had a grapefruit in this house that I remember.”
He allowed me to toast him a piece of raisin bread topped with butter and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, then I got him set up with the
Today
show and went upstairs to haul Teddy out of bed.
Cooperstown High School was a one-story brick building at the end of Linden Avenue, built the year after Mom had graduated from the original school on Glen Avenue. The hallways stretched out wormlike through three playing fields, twisting and growing every time a wing was added, and Teddy’s homeroom was smack in the middle, across from the main office. By the time we arrived everyone was already reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, led by Mr. Steinhoffer over the PA.
There was a rule at CHS that if you missed homeroom you couldn’t participate in after-school sports, so every morning Teddy and I went through the charade of me confessing to Teddy’s homeroom teacher that it was all my fault we hadn’t high-stepped it for a more profit arrival.
“Save it,” said Mr. Hershey as soon as I began. “I don’t understand a word you’re saying. Have you two ever thought of leaving for school five minutes earlier?”
Teddy smiled his killer smile, his black hair sleep-swirled. My brother had our mom’s eyes, and though he was tall like her, he was also broad like Dad. Teddy’s only visible blemish was a thin scar through his left eyebrow, courtesy of me, from where I’d stabbed him with my scissors when we were kids. I’d been slaving over a birthday card for Dad when Teddy grabbed a black crayon and signed his name in cakey block letters. I could still see his grin, like we were both in on the joke, and then there was blood running over his eye, drizzling the carpet. Girls loved that story, Teddy had told me, and it was true that Kim was always touching the white line in his brow, pressing it with her fingers.
In homeroom, as I slid into my desk between Sam and Carl, Mrs. Boulanger made a show of marking me tardy, but it didn’t matter that I was late. My friends were on the tennis team—Sam at second singles and Carl as an alternate/team manager—while I was only a disgruntled groupie.
“Hey,” said Sam, face plastered to hand, elbow nailed to desk. Fresh from Myrtle Beach, his nose and ear tips had begun to peel and his buzzed blond hair was bleached white. A tan line from his Syracuse cap crossed his forehead an inch above his eyebrows, but Sam was mayhi tall—6 feet 3½ inches—so when he stood, no one would be able to see it.
“How was it?” I asked.
“Profesh.” Sam spoke into his hand, mashing the word.
“It provided,” said Carl. His copper curls flopped over his eyes and he pushed them back, revealing loads of new freckles. Carl was the boyish image of his mom, who still spoke in a gentle brogue though she’d moved to America with her family thirty years ago, when she was fifteen. Older girls loved Carl’s hair and freckles. They were always saying what a hottie he’d be when he grew up. For now, Carl looked like a red-cheeked cherub, topping out near the bridge of my nose at an even five foot three.
Half of Cooperstown went to Myrtle Beach for spring break—the half that didn’t include my family, because Mom couldn’t take a week off from work. Carl went with his uncle’s family, and Sam went with his dad, stepmom, and six-year-old half brother, Curtis. This year, Sam’s dad had said I could go with them, but my parents thought it was an imposition, even if Sam’s dad said it wasn’t.
I looked around our homeroom at the tan faces, the peeling noses. The girls had returned with locks of their hair wrapped in brightly colored string, tiny silver charms—a fish for Renee English, a turtle for Stacey Michaelson—dangling from the ends. With only eighty kids in our grade—four homerooms of twenty—most of us had been in school together since we were five years old. Occasionally families moved away, occasionally new families moved in, but mostly the fabric of CHS didn’t change. Stacey and Sam had gone out for three months at the beginning of the ninth grade, and the three stalks of lavender and sea-foam thread now streaking her blond hair made me certain that I’d missed something in Myrtle Beach, certain that everyone had tried something new. Nicky Rivera—who used to skate up to my front door in his Vision Street Wear hat and balance on the back wheels of his board so that its vibrant belly was bared for all the world to see—now wore a T-shirt that said
COED NAKED MYRTLE BEACH VOLLEYBALL
, and I thought back to the ninth-grade homecoming dance, when Nicky and I had made out behind the high school gymnasium, while Sam slow-danced with Stacey, and Carl helped Izzie Adams run the concession stand. So far this year there hadn’t been any new talk of crushes.
When Mrs. Boulanger dismissed us from homeroom, Sam and Carl and I went out to our nunnery behind the propane tank just off school property, crossing the unlined football field side by side. We’d been gone for only a week but it was like returning to a different world. Already there was green grass on the fields and tiny yellow buds on the trees and sunlight that did more than create shadows, that actually felt warm.
Sam pointed to the OPs and I forked him the Marlboros, then offered Carl a Camel and took one for myself. Sam flicked his topless mermaid, lighting us up.
Since the sixth grade, when our class had moved from the elementary school to the combined middle and high school, the three of us had spent so much time together that we’d started to sound alike, mimicking one another’s speech patterns, a language that morphed and evolved even as we spoke it—we heard words in class, then poached them; or made them up, then tweaked them and mispronounced them, then forged on. When we’d read
Hamlet
in the ninth grade, Sam latched on to
Get thee to a nunnery
and repeated it whenever he needed a cigarette, until we were all saying it, until we had a slitter for the places where we smoked our OPs.
But just now no one spoke. The cool breeze blew across our faces and lifted my windbreaker at the hem. Sam puffed through squinty eyes, turning his back to the wind to exhale. His lips were dry and flaking, like they’d been sunburned, or kissed too hard. The summer after ninth grade, Sam had started taking Accutane, and it wasn’t like an overnight thing but by September his skin had turned from swollen red to milky white, and I’d begun to notice things. Sam’s eyes changed colors, shading from sea green to midnight blue. He had a small bowtie-shaped birthmark below his Adam’s apple, like he was always dressed up, always fancy, ready to go. When he buzzed his white-blond hair, I ran my fingers first with the grain, then against it, until something between us shifted and I quickly pulled away.
Sam and Megan. I knew I’d get him to tell me eventually, but not here.
Beside us, Carl scuffed the soles of his worn Adidas across the dewy grass and made a footprint with his right foot near the base of the cement shed next to the propane tank. Then he lifted his left foot and stamped his sole above and to the side of the first print. We watched and smoked. Carl worked quickly, clipping his OP between his lips and putting both hands in the grass to balance while he made the last footprint, shoulder height, and it looked like someone had walked up the side of the building. The sun was already drying the first footprints, so it was good for only a moment, but still we’d never thought of it before.
When the warning bell rang, I flicked my OP into the grass and Sam crushed his out on the sole of his shoe, then he and Carl fell into place beside me as we drifted slowly back toward the school.
“How was your week?” asked Sam.
My face felt hot and my eyes started to burn. “Nonz died,” I admitted. “And Poppy moved in.”
“Are you kidding?” asked Carl.
I shook my head.
Sam asked when it had happened and I said, “Monday night. Right after you left.”
“Jules,” said Sam softly.
Maybe he wanted to say he was sorry or that he wished he’d been here. The truth was, Nonz had died and I’d half-expected both of them to feel it eight hundred miles away.
“That sucks,” Sam said finally, and Carl, whose dad had died when we were six, said, “Yeah, I hate shit like that,” and then the bell rang for first period and Carl and I high-stepped it so we wouldn’t be late for Mr. Robin’s pre-calc.
Mr. Robin had zero tolerance for us, especially Carl, who sometimes seemed to have Tourette’s, he had such a hard time being quiet. We’d both been given assigned seats at the beginning of the school year: I was front-row center so Mr. Robin could keep an eye on me, while Carl was back-left, a halo of empty seats circling him so that he wouldn’t be tempted to talk. Mr. Robin rolled a stub of chalk between his thumb and pointer finger, waiting for us to settle. His white hair stood up like a cock’s comb and his kelly-green sweater-vest was tight over his barrel chest; he looked like a tropical bird.