“I hope not,” I said. “Your other choice is to stab them with an ice pick.”
“Winnie, gross.”
Dinah and Milo entered the house through the basement.
“We have cra-abs!” Dinah called.
“TMI!” Cinnamon called back. James cracked up, and I would have, too, except I wasn’t in the mood.
Dinah tromped up the stairs and plonked a five-gallon bucket on the counter. It was full to the top.
“Look how many!” she bragged.
“Dinah, that’s awesome,” I said. “Was it fun?”
“
So
fun,” she said. She brushed past me on the way to the sink and whispered, “I kissed him!”
“What?! Dinah,
omigosh!”
She turned on the faucet.
“Shhh!”
“We’re not going to boil them
alive,”
Cinnamon pronounced, still gazing at James.
“You have to. Virginia said.” Milo came in looking
very
happy and
very
proud, and I cruised by the sink. To Dinah, I whispered, “For real? You kissed him?”
She leaned closer, eyes shining. “Actually,
he
kissed
me!”
I’d
known
this was going to happen. I’d known it from the very first day we got here—and
omigosh,
it really had! I as happy for Dinah—I
was
—but I felt a prick in my heart, too. I covered my feelings with a smile.
“Nice haul,” James said to Milo. “You guys have fun?”
Milo’s eyes flew to Dinah. “We saw an alligator,” he said.
“But Milo threw a rock at it,” she said proudly. “It hit him smack on his snout, and he ran off.”
“Dude,” James said.
“Ah-ha, I know,” Cinnamon said. “We’ll put them in cold water, then gradually heat the water up. Don’t you think that would be better, Dinah?”
“Uh-huh,” she said. She wasn’t listening.
Cinnamon addressed the room in general. “Like how you get in the tub, and you
think
the water’s hot, but really you can stand it so much hotter. You just have to get used to it first.”
“But that doesn’t apply to scalding yourself,” I said. “If you heated the bathwater to boiling, you would feel it.”
“Not necessarily,” Cinnamon argued.
Dinah shut off the faucet and turned around. Across the room, Milo swallowed.
“Should we, uh, go unload the rest of the stuff?” he said.
“Okay,” she agreed. They clattered joyfully back down the stairs.
Cinnamon broke free from James and strode to the bucket of crabs. “Hey, sweet little crabbies,” she cooed. “Time for your bathie-wathie, crabbies.”
“Cinnamon ...”
“What?!”
she snapped.
“God,
Winnie.”
All I wanted was to tell her that it really did matter, the boiling water part. But her tone, and the exasperated way she was looking at me ...
It made me mad, and tight, and because of those bad feelings, I said, “Fine. Nothing.”
James slipped his arms around her from behind and rested his chin on top of her head.
“You can leave,” Cinnamon informed me.
“Oh, can I?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “We’ll call you when it’s time.”
Fifteen minutes later, she did exactly that. I was already on my way back to the kitchen when I heard her, because my conscience, which had been wrestling with my grumpiness ever since I left, had finally come out on top. I couldn’t let Cinnamon hurt those crabs. I might be pissed at
her,
but I couldn’t take it out on the poor, innocent crabs.
From the middle of the staircase, I heard,
“Ahhhhh! Help, help! OMIGOD THEY’RE CLIMBING OUT OF THE POT!!!”
I rushed the rest of the way. The crabs were scrabbling up and over the top of the pot, while Cinnamon, who was up on her toes, flapped her hands and shrieked as James lunged about, trying to catch the crabs. The water in the pot was lightly steaming, and as the last crab flung itself to freedom—
forgive me!
—I pressed my hands to my mouth to smother a laugh.
“Omigosh,” I managed to say. “You were supposed to
boil
the water first, remember?”
One crab click-clacked across the floor and over Cinnamon’s bare foot. She screamed.
James scooped up a crab on a mad dash for the living room. Its legs flailed. “Cinnamon, bring me the bucket!” he said.
“Winnie, bring him the bucket!” she screeched.
But I couldn’t. The crabs were too scuttle-y and gross, and plus, I was laughing too hard. I had never in my life seen Cinnamon reduced to a girly-girl screecher.
“Run, little crabs!” I said. “Run for your lives!”
“Get it off me, get-it-off-me,
getitoffme!”
Cinnamon squealed, hopping around like a crazed booly-booly dancer. Swinging from her cutoffs, its crusher claw affixed to the frayed denim, was a humongous crab. Its hard shell was grayish-green; it had way more legs than seemed necessary; and horrible thin antennae protruded from his head, with nubblets that were possibly eyeballs bobbling from the tips.
I sank helplessly to the floor—then sprang right back up as a stampede of crabs made a break for it less than a foot away.
“James!” Cinnamon wailed. When she moved, the crab on her cutoffs swung back and forth. I thought of my grandmother’s curtains, brown and orange with pom-pom balls dangling from the trim.
“He likes you!” I said through mad laughter. “You are his savior!”
“Get it
off
!
”
she said. “It’s yucky!”
“Did you know that once a crab imprints on you, he follows you everywhere?”
The crab must have heard me, because he floundered his crusty legs, scrambling for purchase on her smooth thigh.
“I’m going to faint,” she said, and if James hadn’t dashed to catch her, she might have. From her prone position on the floor, the crabs would have borne her away, lifting her high and proclaiming her Queen of Crustaceans.
I went to her and shook the leg of her shorts, dislodging the monster crab. I jumped back as it hit the ground. Cinnamon looked at me greenly.
“Remember the very first day we were here, when you hid under my bed?” I said. I was making this up, this cobbled-together motivation that hid the uglier truth of my jealousy. But the crabs were safe, and I felt better ... and Cinnamon
did
have it coming to her.
“And you jumped out and said ‘boo,’?” I shook my head. “I almost
died,
that’s how scared I was.”
“I didn’t say ‘boo,’ and you didn’t almost die.”
“Well, now we’re even.”
Dinner was delicious, consisting of corn, salad, and buttered slices of bread. Virginia also put a jar of peanut butter in the middle of the table.
“I can’t believe you boiled the corn alive,” I said to Cinnamon as I took a warm, salty bite.
Mmm,
I loved corn on the cob.
Ryan guffawed. “And think of all the wheat you murdered to make the bread.”
“Ha ha,” Cinnamon said. “The bread is store-bought, doofus.”
“Ah, but you condoned it,” I said. “Every time you eat a piece of bread, you’re saying it’s all right to chop down those poor stalks of wheat and ... husk them or whatever.” I had no idea what you did with wheat, really, to turn it into bread. I crunched off another bite of corn.
“You guys are, too, then,” Cinnamon said. She nodded to include the table at large. “Every single one of you who has bread is condoning the murder of innocent grains of wheat.”
“I, for one, am glad you let the crabs go,” Dinah said. She sat next to Milo, and I could almost swear their knees were pressing up together beneath the table. “Even though I’m the one who caught them—”
“Yes, Dinah,” we all chorused. We’d heard many times the story of how she’d braved the alligator-infested marsh.
“Well,
Milo
and I,” she self-corrected, giving Milo a dreamy look.
“Yes, Dinah,” we chorused.
Milo’s acne-scarred skin turned redder than usual. Dinah sighed happily. “Even though Milo and I are the ones who caught the crabs—all twenty-five of them, did I mention that? Twenty-five crabs?”
“Yes, Dinah!”
we caroled.
“And Milo!” I added.
Dinah smiled. “I was just going to say that even though we caught the crabs, I, personally, am glad you didn’t kill them, Cinnamon.”
Cinnamon gave a slight bow.
“Thank
you.”
“I agree,” said tube-top Brooklyn. “It’s mean. Some of them probably have babies to take care of.”
“Aw,
geez,”
Mark scoffed. “Babies? Who cares about crab
babies?”
“Anyone with a heart,” I responded. Later, I would catch Cinnamon and Dinah up on all I’d found out about Brooklyn. For now, I wadded up a piece of bread and lobbed it at Mark. I caught Brooklyn’s eye, and she hesitated, then shot me a smile.
“You shouldn’t eat an animal you’ve met,” Dinah said.
“A crab isn’t an animal,” Ryan said. “It’s a crustacean.”
“But it’s okay to eat an animal you haven’t met?” Alphonse pressed. “Like a McDonald’s hamburger?”
“A McDonald’s hamburger isn’t an animal, either,” Ryan said. Mark joined in for the follow-up: “It’s a McDonald’s hamburger.” Cracking up, the two of them slapped palms.
Lifting her chin, Dinah said, “Actually, I’m considering becoming a vegetarian.”
“You go, girl,” I said, gesturing with my corn. I didn’t believe her—she liked Chick-fil-A too much to go to such an extreme—but I gave her points for saying something,
any
thing
,
to Alphonse, who had a knack for winning most arguments he took on.
I mulled over Dinah’s new feistiness, wondering if somewhere in the world, a previously self-assured girl had suddenly lost her spunk. I was thinking about the whole yin-yang concept, I suppose. Like a quote I’d once seen: “For every well-balanced person in the world, there is an equal and opposite person with a huge fanny.” (Now
there
was an excellent Starbucks quote for you. It was just begging to be made into inspirational framed art.)
You’re avoiding the question,
my brain broke in.
Oh, plop.
I was. Because when it came down to the nitty-gritty, maybe what I was really wondering was this: If Dinah was no longer the shriveled violet of our group, where did that leave me?
Don’t Die
G
OOD-BYES WERE NEVER FUN, and I knew saying good-bye to my DeBordieu buds was going to be especially hard. When Brooklyn decided to leave early, I got to do a trial run, kinda. I was sad to see her go, but glad for her, since it was what she wanted.
When her mom arrived to pick her up, we all walked outside with her. She tossed her bag into the trunk of her mom’s beat-up car, and then she leaned halfway into the backseat and emerged with her little brother, Lucas. Her face was lit up. She looked happier than I’d ever seen.
“This is Alphonse,” she told Lucas, “and this is Mark, and this is Ryan.”
Ryan let out a low whistle. “Her brother’s handicapped, huh?”
I stepped backward onto his toe.
“Ow! ”
he said.
Brooklyn made the rounds, lifting Lucas’s wrist and making him wave at all of us. When she got to me, my heart seized. I reached out and touched his chubby foot.
“Hey, big guy,” I said, suddenly and desperately missing teensy baby Maggie.
Brooklyn shifted Lucas to her other hip with practiced ease. “All right, well ... bye,” she said to all of us.
“Bye,” we said back.
“We’ll miss you,” Virginia said.
Brooklyn opened her mouth like she was going to say something. Then she changed her mind. She climbed into the backseat, got Lucas strapped in, and fastened her seat belt beside him.
“Bye!” I called as Brooklyn’s mom drove away. “Bye-eee!”
It was the beginning of the end. It made my stomach knot up.
“Only four more days till the rest of us have to go, too,” Cinnamon wailed that evening, falling backward onto her rainbow-quilted bed and gazing tragically at the sloped ceiling. “What am I going to do? I’m going to miss James
so much
!”
“What about me?” Dinah cried. “You’ve at least had a boyfriend before, but—”
“Bryce does
not
count as a boyfriend,” Cinnamon interjected.
“Yes, he does,” I said. “You kissed him in the cloakroom at Becca’s Bat Mitzvah.”
“I’m erasing him from my mind,” Cinnamon proclaimed. She swiped her hand above her in the air.
“Swoop.
Gone. And why? Because nobody can hold a candle to James.” She groan-moaned. “What am I going to
do?!”
Dinah, realizing she wasn’t going to get much of anything from Cinnamon, turned to me. “Winnie, I don’t know how you do it. Don’t you miss Lars so much?”
I winced, kind of, and slightly raised my shoulders. It could have been interpreted any number of ways.
“You’re so brave,” Dinah said. She looked at me but didn’t see me. “You’re just. So.
Brave.”
Another moan came from Cinnamon’s prone form. Next, she would probably rend her garments and gird herself with sackcloth—
if
she could hunt down any sackcloth.
On Wednesday, Cinnamon moped ghoulishly down the halls. I trailed behind her, because it was entertaining in a macabre sort of way.
“Three more days,” she intoned, sticking her head into Ryan and Mark’s bedroom.
She found Erika in the den, reading a paperback on the window seat.
“Three more days,” Cinnamon informed her.
“I know,” Erika said. “Go away.”
On Thursday:
“Two more daaaaays.”
On Friday, with feeling, and as if she were trapped in a drainpipe:
“Only one mooooore daaaaaay!”
“You are going to drive me to an early grave!” I told her, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her. “Stop focusing on the bad part! Enjoy the good!”