The Poison Apples (5 page)

When it comes to these subjects, I am a huge disappointment to her.

My name is Molly Miller. My father is Herb Miller, owner of Herb's Diner, the only restaurant in our hometown of North Forest, Massachusetts. My mother is Patsy Miller, associate manager of Shear Bliss, the only hair salon in North Forest. My little sister is Spencer Miller, the youngest North Forest baton twirler ever to win a blue ribbon at the Chesterton County Fair.

Something that's important to know about me: I'm not really that interested in Fashion and General Coolness. Or baton twirling, for that matter.

I am, however, interested in the Oxford English Dictionary.

People don't spend enough time talking about the OED. It is amazing. It's like a normal dictionary (it gives you a definition of every word in the English language), but then it goes way beyond the call of duty and gives you like the complete history of the word you're looking up. Where it originated, what country and language it's taken from, who first wrote it down, and how the word has changed over time. Each word gets its own little section of quotes that demonstrate all the different ways it can be used, and the quotes are from famous books and authors, and …

Yeah. You're already bored. I can tell. That's okay. Everyone thinks it's boring. I'm probably the only person in the world who thinks the Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest thing since sliced bread. But I do. And I plan to work there someday. The head offices of the OED are in Oxford, England. I've never been to England, but I know I'd love it. After all, everyone there speaks with an English accent. And I love English accents. I also imagine that everyone in England reads books and drinks tea and quotes poetry and goes apple picking. Oh, they also all own horses. And walk with little white umbrellas. And play croquet.

I guess I imagine England to be the polar opposite of North Forest. Because if you're someone who enjoys reading the dictionary and you also happen to be nearsighted and have frizzy hair and weirdly pale white legs that never change color no matter how long you lie out in your backyard every summer (they turn blotchy red for like twelve hours, and then go back to pale white), and you don't really like parties or baton twirling or prom queens or homecoming queens or outdoor sports or television, North Forest is a really, really, really terrible place to live. Especially if your ten-year-old sister is gorgeous, mysteriously tan, and adored by the entire town population (2,333 people, to be exact).

I've lived in North Forest my entire life.

So have my parents. So has Candy Lamb.

For some reason they all seem to think it's great.

Sometimes I pretend that I was actually born to a bespectacled, pale-legged, croquet-playing British couple, and that I was accidentally switched at birth with the real elder daughter of Herb and Patsy Miller. But then I realize: What in God's name would a bespectacled, pale-legged, croquet-playing British couple be doing at the local hospital in North Forest, Massachusetts?

North Forest is basically one diner (my dad's), one hair salon (my mom's), one general store, one gas station, one post office, and one really terrible and underfunded public school, North Forest High. Oh, and a whole lot of maple trees.

The most important annual event in North Forest is the Fourth of July pork roast. The second most important annual event is the high school's February pancake breakfast. In the months between the pork roast and the pancake breakfast, people spend their leisure time watching television, drinking beer, shoveling the snow off their front walk and then watching a new coat of snow fall on it two hours later, playing poker, gossiping, watching more television, and drinking more beer. What else? North Forest is incredibly cold in the winter and incredibly hot in the summer. In the late spring all the trees get infested with gypsy moths, and everyone freaks out and congregates in the general store to try to come up with a solution (they never do). In the autumn everyone rakes their leaves to the curb and puts them in orange jack-o'-lantern trash bags, and if you forget to rake your leaves to the curb and put them in an orange jack-o'-lantern trash bag, you receive a very sad and betrayed-sounding note from the postman in your mailbox. (This happened to our family once, and it was my fault, and my mother never forgave me for it.)

Candy Lamb says I have a bad attitude when it comes to North Forest. She says that North Forest is an amazing place in which to grow up. Everyone knows everyone, and it's like one big family, and there's barely any crime (if you don't count the shaving cream felonies committed by the senior class every June), and the surrounding nature is so beautiful, and on a clear day you can see, off in the distance, the glorious peak of Mount McKinsey.…

The thing is, until very recently, just the mention of Mount McKinsey made weird, resentful chills run up and down my spine. Why? Because in the shadow of Mount McKinsey, just twenty miles away from boring, claustrophobic North Forest, lies paradise.

Perfect, unattainable, even-better-than-England paradise.

While I was growing up, sometimes, seemingly out of nowhere, a group of incredibly attractive, well-dressed teenagers would appear in the center of North Forest, buying penny candy from the general store or squeezing into a booth at my dad's diner and gigglingly ordering ice cream floats.

“Who are those people?” I would whisper, breathless, peeping out from behind the diner counter.

And my father would roll his eyes and say: “Probably Putnam Mount McKinsey students. Spoiled brats.”

I wasn't sure what he meant. But I remember gazing at one of them, a gorgeous boy in a pink shirt who was gobbling down his sundae and making all the girls at his table laugh, and I remember thinking:
What I wouldn't give to be a spoiled brat.
Then, later, when their little group got up to leave, I noticed a paperback book sticking out of the boy's back pocket, and managed to catch a glimpse of its title just before his perfect denim-coated bottom sashayed out of my father's diner. The title was
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
.

I'd never seen a guy that handsome walking around with a volume of poetry in his pocket. And I'd certainly never seen a guy that handsome who had read—or had even heard of—Emily Dickinson. I adored Emily Dickinson. I'd found a book of her poems at a thrift store when I was eight and had fallen in love with her. She was this reclusive Massachusetts poet from the nineteenth century who never married and stayed in her little room all day and wrote poems about death and loneliness and …

Okay. You're bored again. Sorry. The point is, I suddenly realized that there was a school within twenty miles of my house where handsome boys in pink shirts walked around with books of Emily Dickinson poems sticking out of their back pockets. It seemed impossible. But I'd
seen
one of them. I'd seen him with my own eyes. So I casually attempted to ask my father one night over dinner how a person could go about attending this school he'd mentioned, this “Putnam Mount McKinsey.”

He coughed on his food, shook his head, took a gulp of his beer, and sighed. “How do you think, Mol?”

“Uh … I don't know. That's why I am asking.”

“You know how much it costs for one year of school at Putnam Mount McKinsey?”

“It costs money?” I was surprised. I was twelve at the time. I'd attended public school my entire life. It had never occurred to me that other people paid to go to school.

My father looked at me sadly. “Mol, I'd send you there in a second if I could. God knows you're smart enough. But the place costs thirty thousand dollars a year.”

I gaped at him. “You're kidding.”

“It's a school full of rich kids, honey. Brats from New York City and Beverly Hills. Kids with private jets and boats who spend their summers doing nothing in Europe. You wouldn't want to be friends with them anyway. They're probably all little jerks.”

I tried to nod and look like I understood. But all I could think was
jerks from New York City and Beverly Hills with private jets and boats who READ EMILY DICKINSON.

From that moment on, the existence of Putnam Mount McKinsey tormented me. I mean, I'd never been crazy about the North Forest school system. The teachers weren't great (my sixth grade teacher was fond of saying I was “too smart for my own good”) and everyone called me Nerd and Brown Noser and Goody Two-Shoes. Oh, and Four Eyes. And Rabbit Teeth. And Big Mouth. And Molly Miller the Puppy Killer (I could never figure that one out. I used to weep and yell, “BUT I'VE NEVER KILLED A PUPPY!” and for some reason that just made everyone laugh harder). Still, I always thought that school was like that for everyone. But now I knew that within a half-an-hour drive of my house there was a school so wonderful that people paid to attend it. And my family just didn't have the money to send me there. Actually they didn't have a fraction of a fraction of the money to send me there. And it wasn't because my parents didn't work hard. It was because life—I was starting to realize—was Totally and Utterly Unfair.

Then high school started, and Candy Lamb entered our lives, and I decided that life was not only Totally and Utterly Unfair, it was also Cruel, Sadistic, Stupid, and Pointless.

Candy Lamb was one of the waitresses at my father's diner. I'd known her for years. She was always extra-friendly and extra-sweet whenever Spencer and I came in, and she'd sneak us free slices of key lime pie when my parents weren't looking. She always seemed a little fake, like maybe she was trying too hard to make people like her, but I didn't care. She was just part of the Herb's Diner staff. There were way weirder people who worked at the diner, like Gus, the prep cook, who had one eye and claimed to be a former pirate.

But then something strange happened. One day, out of nowhere, my parents stopped fighting.

This was actually much more surreal than it sounds. The background noise of my childhood was either Spencer, tutu-clad, screeching “The Star-Spangled Banner” into a plastic toy microphone, or my parents screaming at each other in the kitchen. Actually sometimes they would scream at each other in our driveway. Or our living room. Or the upstairs hallway. They were usually screaming at each other about money. Sometimes they were screaming at each other about how my father watched too much television. Or how my mother spent too much time talking to her friends on the phone. I would hear one of them threaten divorce, and then the other would climb into the car and screech out of the driveway, but eventually, by dinnertime, we were all sitting around the table and acting normal again. I guess I trusted that no matter how bad things got, they'd never split up. Even though it sometimes seemed like they hated each other, I always assumed that that was what marriage was like for everyone. Sort of like how I'd once assumed all schools were like the crappy public schools in North Forest.

Anyway, on this particular day I was lying on the couch reading the OED entry for
punctilious
(it originally comes from the Latin for “to prick,” if you're interested) and I suddenly realized that it had been more than a week since I'd heard my parents screaming at each other. I put down the OED and looked around our living room. Both of them were home. My mother was peeling potatoes in the kitchen and my father was repairing our bathroom cabinet. Spencer was at Lassie League practice. So why weren't they yelling? I started to feel nervous. I'd always hated their fighting. But now its absence was eerie. Foreboding. Like what they say about the silence before a storm.

That night at dinner, my mother—with exquisite politeness—asked my father if he would please pass her the potatoes. My father said that he would be delighted to. And would she be willing to pour him another glass of water? My mother said it would be her pleasure.

I was starting to feel ill. I tried to make eye contact with Spencer, but she was too focused on building a castle out of her mashed potatoes and humming a song under her breath.

We all finished eating and I cleared the dishes off the table and brought them into the kitchen. I came back into the dining room and sat down. My mother and father smiled pleasantly at us.

“What's going on?” I asked.

My mother's smile got wider. And creepier. Her eyes were glittering like they were behind a mask.

Spencer finally stopped humming and looked up.
“What?”
she asked, as if we were all waiting for her to do something.

My father cleared his throat. “Your mother and I are separating,” he said.

There was a stunned silence. My mother's face looked like it was going to fall off.

“Why?” I asked.

“We don't love each other anymore,” my mother said. She was still smiling.

“You
don't
?” Spencer squealed.

“We haven't loved each other for a long time,” said my father.

“Oh,” said Spencer. Her voice sounded so small that I almost didn't recognize it.

“I'm moving in with Candy Lamb,” my father said. “You remember Candy.”

Spencer shot me a pleading you're-the-older-sister-do-something! look.

But I had no idea what I was supposed to do.

“Candy is a very nice woman,” my mother added.

My father nodded. I could hear the clock ticking in the other room.

“Well,” I said, “I think this is dumb. I think the two of you are really dumb.”

“It has nothing to do with you guys,” my mother said. “You know that, right? It has nothing to do with you.”

There was a long silence.

“I'm going to go do my homework,” I announced. I pushed my chair back and stood up.

“Do you want to talk about anything, Mol?” my mother asked. Her eyes were still gleaming desperately.

“No,” I said. “I just think you're both stupid jerks.”

I walked out of the room, up the stairs, and into my bedroom. I sat down at my desk and pulled out my English textbook. A single tear dropped out of my eye and onto the page. It landed on the word
until
and made the black letters blur on the white page.