The Poison Apples (6 page)

I stared at the textbook for a long time, not reading, just letting my eyes pass over the same sentences over and over again. I felt like my entire chest had been hollowed out. But the same thought kept running through my brain, over and over again. Eventually I said it out loud.

“Got to get out of this stupid, stupid town,” I whispered.

Downstairs I could hear the sounds of my mother and father washing the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen. They weren't saying anything. Then I heard Spencer stomp up the staircase and slam her bedroom door. Outside my window, the crickets seemed to be chirping louder than they'd ever chirped before.

*   *   *

I didn't tell anyone
that I was applying to Putnam Mount McKinsey, except for the two teachers I needed to ask for recommendations. While I was filling out application forms, I just checked yes when the school asked if I wanted to be considered for financial aid. I got a copy of my transcript from the principal's office. I forged my mother's signature. I put the entire application into a large manila envelope and put it in the mailbox downtown. Then I made a conscious decision to forget that I'd ever applied at all. After all, if they let me in—and why would they?—we'd never be able to afford it, even if they did give me some financial aid. It was unclear why I'd applied at all. But I just felt like I had to.

It was my first year at North Forest High. I'd never gotten along with my classmates, but somehow things got even worse once we all entered ninth grade. The last of my fellow awkward female students grew into themselves and got contacts and straightened their hair and started wearing pink workout pants and refused to do their homework. Suddenly everyone was only interested in talking about cheerleading tryouts and the homecoming game. Girls I'd known for years were suddenly dating red-faced senior boys with bulging muscles. Boys I'd known for years were wearing white baseball caps and studiously ignoring me when I tried to say hello to them in the hallways. I was used to being teased and laughed at, but I wasn't used to … not existing. I mean, it's hard not to exist in a small town.

And yet somehow I managed it.

Meanwhile, my father had moved out of our house and in with Candy Lamb, who lived on the edge of town in a tiny house with her seven-year-old twin daughters, Randie and Sandie. I barely ever saw him. Since Spencer was always off doing a thousand extracurricular activities (one, she confessed to me late one night, was kissing boys) … there is nothing more humiliating than having your younger sibling kiss someone for the first time before you do … I spent most of my time home alone with my mother, who had undergone such a significant personality change since the separation that some days I barely recognized her. For most of my life, my mother had been a huge presence in North Forest. She was loud and social and constantly chatting with her friends on the phone or organizing huge poker parties for all the women who worked at Shear Bliss. Now she was more interested in watching television or cooking by herself in the kitchen. The phone would ring and she'd refuse to answer it. Our dinner conversations consisted mostly of silence. I'd ask her how she was doing and she'd say, “Fine, honey, just great,” but then I'd see that same glittering desperate look in her eyes. Our house started to get really messy. I left a bunch of dirty dishes in the sink as an experiment (my mother always
hated
dirty dishes) and she never scolded me or even reminded me that they were there.

One afternoon I came home from school and my father was sitting on our couch. I hadn't seen him in weeks.

“Hi, Mol,” he said.

“Hi, Dad,” I said. I put on my best fake smile. “How are Sandie and Randie?”

He sighed. “Fine.”

“Where's Mom?” I asked.

“Your mom,” he said, and then paused. “Your mom is having a hard time, Molly.”

“What does that mean?”

“She, uh … she checked in to Silverwood this morning. She, uh, called me and asked me to drive her there.”

Silverwood was a small complex of white wooden buildings off the highway about two towns away. I'd always pressed my face to the car window and gaped at it when we drove by on our family trips. It was, for lack of a better phrase, a mental hospital.

I stared at my father.
There's a point,
I thought,
where life gets so unfair that you stop even caring.

“You and Spence are gonna come stay with me and Candy for a while,” he said. “Okay?”

“Stupid,” I said. The word just came out of my mouth.

My father gazed at me. “What's stupid?” he asked.

“Everything.”

He smiled sadly. “You say the word
stupid
a lot, Mol. You've been saying it for years. But I'm never exactly sure what you mean.”

“I mean stupid,” I said. “I mean dumb. I mean idiotic.”

He sighed. “Why don't you go up to your room and start packing up your stuff? I'm going to go pick Spencer up at her dance class and then we'll all drive to my place.”

I turned and started walking toward the staircase.

“Oh,” my father said, “one more thing.”

I turned around. He held out a thick white envelope.

“This came for you,” he said. “But I think they might have the wrong person. It's from Putnam Mount McKinsey.”

*   *   *

I heaved the last volume
of the OED into the trunk of the car, took a step back, and checked my watch. We were leaving in ten minutes. Ten minutes until I embarked on the road to paradise.

I felt a small hand tugging at my skirt. It was Sandie. I looked down at her and was reminded once again of how she resembled a tiny vampire.

“Hi, Sandie,” I said.

“Are you happy to leave us?” she asked. Her mouth and cheeks were streaked with red Popsicle stains.

I smiled down at her.
No,
I thought,
of course not! Why would I be happy to leave a stupid town, a stupid high school, a stupid absent mother, a stupid emotionless father, a stupid stepmother who openly states that she wishes I were “prettier,” two tiny stupid stepsisters who just spent the summer short-sheeting my bed, and a stupid traitorous younger sister who actually seems to
like
our new life on the edge of town with Candy and Randie and Sandie? Who actually seems to get along with them and enjoy their company?

“No, Sandie,” I said. “Of course I'm not happy to leave. But they gave me a full scholarship and stipend. It'll save us money if I go.”

She squinted at me suspiciously.

“I'll come back to visit all the time,” I reassured her, and crossed my fingers behind my back.

Candy Lamb came out of the house, banging the front door behind her. Randie followed close behind, clutching a bedraggled Barbie doll.

“You sure you don't want to change that skirt?” Candy asked.

I grinned at her. Nothing could make me feel bad now. Nothing.

“I'm sure,” I said.

“HERB!” Candy shrieked.

My father emerged from the backyard, brushing the dirt off his pants. “Yep?” he asked.

“Don't you think Molly looks like a librarian in that skirt?”

He gazed at me. “Huh,” he said. “I don't know. What does a librarian look like?”

Candy sighed. “Just go,” she told me. “I don't care if you make a bad first impression.”

“Where's Spencer?” I asked.

“SPENCER!” Candy bellowed. I winced. Candy's favorite activity seemed to be screaming the names of her new family members at the top of her lungs.

The screen door creaked open, and Spencer's blond head peeped out.

“Aren't you gonna give me a hug good-bye?” I said.

She reluctantly stepped outside and made her way toward me, teetering in a pair of enormous high heels.

“What are you doing in those ridiculous shoes?” I demanded.

Spencer's bright blue eyes flickered in Candy's direction. “Candy let me try them on.”

I turned to Candy. “You're letting her traipse around in a pair of trashy high heels?”

“Excuse me, young lady,” Candy snapped, “they are not trashy. And what business is it of yours if—”

“Let's just go, Dad,” I said, shaking my head.

My father obediently took out his keys, and the two of us squeezed into the front seat, wedging ourselves between the piles of books I'd stacked on the floor. My father turned on the car. Just the sound of the engine purring filled my heart with excitement. Candy and Spencer and Sandie and Randie stood in the yard and watched us pull out of the driveway. Randie waved her Barbie back and forth. Sandie did a little dance. Candy still looked angry about my skirt. Spencer stared at the ground, her arms folded.

I rolled down the window. “If Mom calls, you'll give her my new number?” I called out.

“Okay,” said Candy. “Yeah.”

“I LOVE YOU!” Sandie yelled.

I looked at her in surprise. Neither she nor Randie had ever said anything like that before.

“I love you, too,” I said slowly.

Sandie nodded and wiped her nose, smearing more red Popsicle juice across her face.

“Ready?” my father asked me.

“Ready,” I said, and he put his foot on the gas.

It was nearly a half an hour later—when we were just a few minutes from my new home—when I remembered that I'd forgotten to hug Spencer good-bye.

 

From the
North Forest Courier

August 10

FOUR

Alice

There are a lot of graveyards
in western Massachusetts. Our van passed by dozens of them on its way to Putnam Mount McKinsey. There were old shady graveyards with paper-thin tombstones covered in ivy. There were new graveyards with the sun beating down and little American flags whipping in the wind. There were graveyards on the sides of mountains. There were graveyards in the center of each tiny town.

“I guess people in Massachusetts die a lot,” I said to the boy sitting on my right. He ignored me.

I was smushed into a big, weird-smelling van with ten other kids who had also flown into Boston from New York. They were all returning students who already knew one another (there had been about twenty minutes of squealing and hugging at the airport), except for the one guy on my right. When we piled into the van, he'd reluctantly introduced himself to me as “Judah Lipston the Third.” Then he proceeded to bury his face in a comic book for the rest of the drive.

So I had nothing to do but stare out the window at graveyards for the next two hours.

At first we were driving through the suburbs of Boston. Then we were driving through medium-size towns. Then we were driving through small towns. Then we were driving through tiny towns. Then we were driving through places that weren't towns at all, just expanses of farmland with the occasional dot of a house off in the distance, followed by a graveyard, followed by another expanse of farmland, followed by another tiny house dot.

At this point someone yelled: “There's Mount McKinsey!”

I squinted into the distance and saw the outline of something jagged and gray in the sky.

“I cannot
wait
until Mount McKinsey weekend,” one girl murmured. She wiggled her eyebrows, and everyone laughed.

“The Essence Game,” another girl said. “We have to remember to play the Essence Game.”

“You are sooo sadistic!” shrieked her friend.

It was like they were speaking a foreign language. I glanced at Judah Lipston the Third for help, but he was staring fixedly into his comic book at a picture of a purple alien with boobs getting blown to pieces by a small boy.

We eventually turned onto a gravel road, and then a dirt road, and then we drove past a carved red-and-gold sign that said PUTNAM MOUNT MCKINSEY. Everyone cheered. I muttered a halfhearted “yay.”

Then, suddenly, I absorbed the fact that we were
there
. This would be the setting for the next three years of my life. (That summer I had gotten in the weird habit of thinking about my life as if it were a movie. Every time R. scowled at me, or Dad ignored me, or I had to say a final good-bye to a friend or neighbor, I would just pretend I was watching a sad movie about girl named Alice. I would even imagine the musical score—when there would be cheerful trumpets, when there would be sad strings. It was kind of sick. But I couldn't stop.)

I stared out the window. The new set for
Alice the Depressing Movie
was …

Unbelievably beautiful.

First of all, the campus was the greenest place I'd ever seen. I didn't know a place could be that green. There were dark green swaying pines and bright green maples and light green grass and old brick buildings with green-shingled roofs. And then there was the
light
. It was magical. The late summer sun was starting to set, and it was like the air was filled with shimmering gold. Gold light fell in patterns across the pavement in front of the buildings. Gold light shone through the branches of the trees. Gold light filled our van and made the faces of my gossiping, makeup-y future classmates look positively … angelic.