The Poison Apples (24 page)

This remark also hurt my feelings, although now, in the harsh cold light of After the Fact, she kind of—
sort of
—had a point.

“Anyway,” I continued, waving my hands in the air to dismiss that particular topic, “screw boys! We need to reclaim our lives!”

I was happy to see that Molly was nodding. Then she actually got to her feet and started pacing up and down the room.

“Okay,” she muttered. “You're right. This is a war. But how do we win the war?”

“What do you mean, how do we win the war? We haven't even gone into battle yet!” My cheeks were flushed with excitement. I was starting to feel a little bit better.

“Okay, so … what? What do we do now?”

“We go to battle! We get revenge!”

“How?” She stopped pacing. “Seriously. How?”

I put my hands on my hips. “Um…”

Molly stroked her chin. “Well, okay. Let's think about it. Like what revolutionaries have done in the past. The Boston Tea Party, for instance. That was really effective.”

I sat down on the bed, embarrassed. “Um. I kind of forget what the Boston Tea Party is.”

“The Americans threw all the tea into the ocean. The tea that belonged to the British people.”

I wasn't quite getting it. “Okay…”

“They took the thing that was most important to the British, and then they just … trashed it.”

It was starting to make sense to me. Weird sense. But sense.

“So,” Molly continued, “one way to wage war, or initiate war, or whatever, is to, like, take the thing that's most important to the person … and, like, throw it away.”

We looked at each other.

“Molly Miller,” I said. “I think you've got it.”

“Get out some paper and pen,” she instructed me, pushing up her glasses with her forefinger like she always did when she got excited, “and take notes.”

 

Revenge
—
A Comprehensive Plan

(calligraphy by Mlle. Paruchuri)

The Enemies:

R. Klausenhook, actress/evil stepmother

Shanti Shruti, yoga instructor/evil stepmother

Candy Lamb, pregnant housewife/waitress/evil stepmother

The Heroines:

Alice Bingley-Beckerman, student/wronged stepdaughter

Reena Paruchuri, student/wronged stepdaughter

Molly Miller, student/wronged stepdaughter/lexicography expert

The Goal:

1. Destroy what is dearest to the enemy.

2. Get away with it.

The Time Frame:

Thanksgiving vacation.

Plan 1:
R. Klausenhook

What R. Klausenhook holds dearest: her acting career.

Instructions for A. Bingley-Beckerman: Destroy Acting Career.

Plan 2:
Shanti Shruti

What Shanti Shruti holds dearest: her penguin.

Instructions for R. Paruchuri: Destroy Penguin.

Plan 3:
Candy Lamb

What Candy Lamb holds dearest: her harmonious relationship with Spencer.

Instructions for M. Miller: Destroy the Relationship.

FIVE

Molly

“Destroy Spencer?”
Alice gasped.

“No, no, not Spencer,” Reena said. “The Poison Apples is a nonviolent organization. Destroy Candy Lamb's
relationship
with Spencer.”

Alice drew a blanket around her shoulders and shivered. It was Sunday night and we'd just arrived back at Putnam Mount McKinsey, but Reena had insisted—on tiny slips of paper that had mysteriously made their way into our suitcases that morning—
Mandatory Poison Apples Meeting Tonight
—that we all meet on the roof of Middleton right after curfew. Reena had just unfurled the Revenge Plan and read it out loud to us.

“I don't get it,” Alice said, shaking her head. “When did you guys come up with this plan? When did you make this list?”

Reena stood up, exasperated. She was wearing a bathrobe and slippers, and her hair was standing up in messy chunks. She actually looked kind of insane, with the stars and the night sky behind her and the full moon illuminating her profile. And she'd been acting a little insane, too. Almost as if to compensate for the great disappointment that turned out to be David Newman, she'd become maniacally focused on the Poison Apples and our Thanksgiving revenge plan.

“We made this list,” barked Reena, “while you were making out on a bobsled with Jamal Chapman!”

Alice ducked her face behind her hair and waved her hands in the air. “Okay, okay.”

“Show a little appreciation!”

“I appreciate it, I appreciate it. I'm just … I'm not quite sure how we're going to, um,
execute
the plan.”

“That's up to each of us, individually. Thanksgiving is this coming Thursday. I'm going back to LA, you're going back to New York, and Mol is going back to … um … North Flywood.”

“North Forest,” I said.

“Right, right.”

I shook my head. “Wow, Reena. You really do have zero interest in any place that isn't a major city.”

Reena smiled. “That's correct.”

“So let me get this straight,” Alice said. “Before Thursday, I have to find a way to sabotage R.'s career, Molly has to find a way to, um, find a nonviolent way of ruining Candy's relationship with Spencer, and you have to … steal a penguin?”

Reena nodded. “Yup.”

“And what will happen once we've completed these near-impossible tasks?”

“We'll have power,” Reena said grandly. “Negotiating power.”

“We'll be the ones holding the poison apple,” I said, feeling poetic.

Reena looked at me, her eyes glinting. “Exactly,” she said. “And they'll be the ones eating the poison.”

*   *   *

This time no one was waiting
for me when I got off the bus in North Forest. Not even Spencer. I shouldn't have been surprised—no one knew I was coming—and yet I still felt sad and lonely standing alone in the middle of the snow-covered parking lot next to the Savings Bank.

I don't belong here anymore,
I thought.

But then I thought:
Did I ever really belong here?

I trudged along Main Street, past the post office, past the American Legion, past the gas station, and, finally, past my mother's boarded-up hair salon. A light snow began to fall, and I stared at the streetlamps through the wet flakes that had landed on my lashes. The round yellow lights pulsed and beamed in all directions like stars.

I felt like a ghost. The town center was totally empty—it was the day before Thanksgiving—and the muffled silence of the falling snow made it feel like North Forest had been abandoned years and years ago. The sun had just set, and the sky was a deep indigo.

I was started to get cold. Really, really cold.

And I still hadn't figured out how to execute Revenge Plan 3.

Reena had made it explicitly clear: Spencer was my bargaining tool. But what did that mean? And what exactly was I trying to bargain for?

Maybe (and it was painful for me to realize it) I wanted to be able to see my father again. To have dinner with him occasionally and still feel like I had a home. And I wanted to be able to do that without Candy threatening to pull me out of Putnam Mount McKinsey and make me her live-in maid.

I wanted North Forest to be a place I could go back to, and not the place where I lived.

Was that selfish of me?

I shook my head to clear my thoughts. (“No time for doubts!” Reena had instructed me. “No time for feeling guilty!”) I continued walking down Main Street and then turned right, up the unplowed road that led to Candy's house. My old house—empty for over six months now—was on the other side of Main Street, and down a hill. I tried not to picture my bedroom, dark and cold and dusty. I tried not to picture the mice that were probably skittering over the floors, up and down the stairs—I always used to hear them moving inside the walls as I was lying in bed at night. Now they were probably having the time of their lives.

I continued up the side of the road, wading through the deep snow, shielding my face with my hand whenever a car swung its bright headlights around a bend. My boots were leaking, and my toes were starting to go numb.

Eventually I was standing in front of Candy's house. Or now, I reminded myself—my father and Spencer had been living there for more than six months, after all—it was my family's house.

Their car was in the driveway, and almost all the lights were on.

I stepped into the front yard. The top layer of the snow had iced over, and my boots made a horrible crunching noise. I winced. I couldn't afford for anybody to see or hear me. I stepped behind a tree, then leaned out and peered through the dining room window.

They were all there.

Framed in the picture window, lit up by the yellow glow of a lamp. And—like a movie—they were all laughing. Even my dad, who almost never laughed. At one point Candy reached over and touched Spencer's hair. They were sitting around the table and passing around food and pouring drinks and they looked so … happy.

And instead of feeling angry, or left out, or abandoned—all the feelings I'd been having since the summer, all the feelings I'd ordinarily expect to have—I experienced a different sensation. At first I couldn't tell what it was, exactly. It was a slight stirring in my stomach, an impalpable feeling of longing. I didn't want to be inside with my father and Candy and Spencer and Sandie and Randie—I wasn't longing for
that
. After all, I wasn't part of that family.

And then I realized what the feeling was.

I missed my mother.

So then why was I standing by the side of the road, covered with slush, staring at them like some kind of crazy stalker, when my mother was sitting alone at Silverwood less than five miles away? So what if she was bonkers? She was my mother. And she needed me. Just like I needed her.

My heart surged with joy, and I stepped backward in the snow, away from the house. My boots made another loud cracking sound as they broke through the ice, and this time I saw Candy stop talking and turn toward the window.

She'd heard me.

Praying I wouldn't slip and fall, I turned and ran, sloshing through gray puddles of freezing slush.

I ran and ran and ran.

I stopped briefly just before I reached the highway, to catch my breath and take out my cell phone with cold, trembling hands. I quickly sent Reena a text message:
PLAN 3
ABORTED
.

Then I started running again.

When I reached the big wrought-iron gates of Silverwood, I bent over, put my head between my legs, and almost started hyperventilating. I couldn't feel my feet or my hands or my ears or my face, just the icy-cold air I kept gulping into my lungs. A minute later, my heart still pounding in my chest, I pulled open the heavy gates and started walking up the long driveway to the Silverwood's reception center.

“Oh my God,” the woman at the desk said when she saw me.

I could barely see anything, because my glasses had steamed up the second I stepped inside the overheated building. I took them off to wipe them on my jacket, but then I realized that my jacket was soaking wet. Along with my shirt. And my pants. And my boots. And my hair.

“Hi,” I said. My entire body was shaking.

The woman rose out of her chair and came out from behind the desk. She had a puffy gray halo of hair, and a pin shaped like a turkey affixed to her turtleneck sweater. “Are you okay?” she asked me.

I nodded, my teeth chattering. “Yeah,” I said. “I'm okay.”

“Do you need a change of clothes?”

“No. I'm … I'm okay. I'm actually here to see my mother.”

She frowned. “Your mother? She's a patient here?”

I rubbed my hands together to try to get some feeling back in my fingers. “Yes. Patsy Miller. Is she still in Room 152? I'd like to visit her.”

The woman suddenly took a step back, and her hand flew up, almost protectively, to touch her turkey pin. “Patsy Miller?”

“Yeah. I'm her daughter.”

She closed her eyes, revealing a shaky blue line drawn across each of her eyelids. “Oh, dear.”

There was a sharp, throbbing pain in my feet. “What … is something wrong?”

“Oh, dear,” she repeated. “Oh, dear.”

“Please just tell me what's going on,” I said, trying to sound calm.

She took my elbow and led me over to one of the orange plastic chairs near the desk. “Have a seat first.”

I sat. She stood in front of me, wringing her hands and moving her lips around, as if she were trying to find the right words.

“Patsy…,” she began, “your mother…”

“Yes?”

“She … no one told you?”

A cold drop of water ran down my cheek. The pile of snow that had collected on top of my head was starting to melt. “No one told me
what
?”

The woman folded her arms over her chest. “Your mother disappeared two weeks ago.”

I stared at her.

“I'm sorry that I'm the one to tell you this. We told her husband—I'm sorry, ex-husband—and we assumed he'd let the rest of the family know.”

I rose up out of my chair so fast that the woman backed away from me, her fingers still fluttering nervously.

“I don't understand,” I told her. “I'm sorry. What does ‘disappear' mean?”

The woman took another step backward. “It means that when the nurses showed up with her breakfast in the morning she was gone.”

“I don't understand how that could happen.”