Trauma Queen (13 page)

“I guess.”

“Great! Thanks a lot, Mari. Oh, and I baked some carrot muffins for breakfast. They're pretty good, although I think I prefer more cinnamon.”

Kennedy and I eat the carrot muffins in the kitchenette while Mom chatters in the living room about Cinnamon Versus Ginger, and how even though ginger is wonderful for your digestion, there's no better smell on a cold winter morning than cinnamon baking in the oven. This is a spontaneous performance, obviously; the weird thing is that I can imagine her saying the very same words as Nu-Trisha, although of course I'm not going to give her any ideas.

Finally she flips over and sends a whole bunch of marbles rolling.

“Well, precious daughters,” she says, her face flushed. “Last night sure wasn't any fun, was it? But today will be better, promise. I have a big surprise for you both.”

“A surprise?” Kennedy says hopefully. “You mean like Chocolate Night?”

“Oh, no. Last night was Chocolate Night, even
without chocolate. Today is a whole new day.”

Meaning what? Mom's not starting a Humiliate Marigold Club? Dad's not marrying The Horrible? I'm still best friends with Emma?

Just thinking the word “Emma” makes my throat start to ache.

I push my plate away.

“Marigold?” Mom says, looking at me with question-mark eyes. “Don't you want to guess the surprise?”

“Well, if I did, it wouldn't be a surprise,” I say.

She opens her mouth like she's going to answer something. But then she just shakes out her hair and pretends to smile.

“You know what, Mari? You're absolutely right” is all she says.

When I walk in the door to morning homeroom, Mr. Hubley is spitting a blob of phlegm into his hankie. It's so disgusting I'm almost wishing I'd totally skipped the carrot muffins.

“Attention, please. Settle yourselves down, people,” he says. People settle themselves down, meaning they take their seats and keep talking. So he raps on the side of his desk with a rolled-up tube of papers.
“ATTENTION. We have PTA business to conduct. Jada, since this is your mom's, uh, field, why don't you pass around these, whatever they are. Forms.”

Jada rolls her eyes, but she immediately gets up and hands out the forms titled
SPRING AFTER-SCHOOL CLUB APPLICATION
(Want to start your own club? Please do! We encourage all Crampton Middle parents, students and teachers to design fun, worthwhile programs for our after-school program, but first you'll need PTA approval. Simply fill out the attached questionnaire. . . .)

When Jada gets to my desk, she stops. And waits.

“Um, can I please have one?” I ask.

“What?” She looks at me with Bambi eyes.

“A form. Can I please have a form.”

“Oh,
sure
,” she says, smiling sweetly. Then she drops a form on my desk.

I stuff it into my backpack. Some people crumple theirs into balls and start pelting each other. Layla, I see, is hunched over hers, writing something with a stubby pencil. She's still mad at Brody, I'm pretty sure, because when he leans over to see what she's writing, she growls and hides the form under her desk.

All morning long I'm spacing out, my brain too crammed with last night to take in anything else. And
then at lunch I don't even think about where to sit; I just head over to Quinn and Layla.

“You okay?” Layla asks, squinting at me through her mascara.

“Fabutastic,” I say.

“I'll take that as ironic.” She pushes her club application toward me. “So you're a poet. Check my spelling on this, all right?”

Name of Proposed Club or Activity:
JOUSTING CLUB

Desired Number of Students:
Infinite, but two at a time

Desired Location:
Medieval England, but will settle
for Crampton football field

Equipment Needed:
2 horses
2 tents
2 complete sets of armor
for knights
(chain mail, helmets, shield,
breastplates, arm & shoulder pieces)
2 iron shields to protect
horses' heads
2 solid oak lances
(good ones, not crappy ones)
long-necked spurs

I stop reading. “Uh, Layla? You don't really expect them to approve this, do you?”

“Of course not. My club ideas never get approved.”

“So then why are you even—”

“Because,” she says, grinning, “if I don't submit something, Jada's mom will be sooo disappointed.”

Quinn smiles at me. Her teeth look like baby teeth. “In fifth grade Layla proposed a Yodeling Club. And last year she came up with—what was it called?”

“The Wonderful World of Condiments,” Layla says in a cozy Martha Stewart sort of voice. She clasps her hands. “Every week we'd explore a different condiment: mayo, salsa, relish, guacamole.”

“What about peanut butter?” I ask.

“That's a food, not a condiment,” Layla corrects me. “Besides, I'm deadly allergic to peanut butter. One
bite and I'm a goner.” She sticks her fingers in Quinn's Tupperware, and pulls out what looks like a chunk of tofu in soy sauce. “Anyway, Jada's mom wrote me this incredibly polite note that said while she ‘appreciated my enthusiasm,' she didn't think Condiments was ‘an appropriate theme for a PTA-sponsored club.' So I was stuck taking stupid Origami until I got kicked out for making paper airplanes.”

I have to smile. “Well, if you thought Origami was stupid, why did you bother signing up?”

“Because you have to.” She wiggles her saucy fingers at me. “Or else.”

Quinn hands Layla a napkin, and also a pair of those wooden chopsticks they give you in Chinese restaurants. “Mr. Shamsky made spring term into this big after-school thing,” she explains. “And now the rule is, everybody has to do a club.”

Oh, great,
I think. Because if everybody has to do a club, someone will end up doing Mom's.

Unless Jada's mom doesn't approve. In fact, knowing how Mom writes her grant applications, with the hyper fonts and the photos and the detail-by-detail descriptions of her past performances, I can definitely
see the PTA banning her from the building.

So maybe there's no reason to freak,
I tell myself.

And then I think:
Yeah, but for Jada's mom to reject Mom's proposal, first she has to sit down and read it.

I walk into our apartment with a deal already worked out in my head
(Listen, Mom, if you forget about that improv club, I'll do anything you want. For the entire rest of my life).
But before I even take off my backpack, Kennedy comes rushing in from the living room. “Remember Mom's surprise?” she shouts. “Well, guess what, Mari! Gram's here!”

“Gram?”

“She's visiting for the weekend. Isn't that
splendid
?”

I toss my backpack, kick off my boots, and run into the living room. And here's Gram walking toward me with her arms outstretched, ready to give me a big hug.

“Marigold,” she says, and I melt. Some people are
just like that, I guess. They have the magical power to warm you up. With Gram it's mainly her voice that's so warming, but it's also something special in her eyes. The funny thing is that she has the same dark eyes we all do—by “we all” I mean Mom, Kennedy, and me—but hers just have a special glow. And when she looks at you, you just relax, I guess, because you know she always likes whatever she's seeing.

She kisses my forehead and rubs off the magenta lipstick. Then she stands back and beams at me. “You've gotten taller,” she says. “Also curvier.”

“Gram.”

“Well, you have. You look gorgeous. So what have you been up to? Making new friends?”

I nod.

“Working on your quilt?”

I make a pretend-annoyed face. “It's not a quilt, Gram. I keep telling you: It's a Thing.”

“Oops, I forgot,” she says, smiling. “So can I take a peek at this famous Thing?”

“You mean right now?”

“Sure. You have something better to do?”

“I don't know. You just got here. Don't you want some tea or something?”

She hoots at that. “All your mom has is that godawful ginger stuff. Besides, I didn't come all this way to drink tea.”

So I lead her into my bedroom, which I suddenly wish was a whole lot cleaner. And cozier, too. I watch her take in the unmade beds, the two scuffed white desks pushed up against the foggy window, my small flower-shaped corkboard crowded with, like, twenty overlapping photos: of Dad, of Gram, of Emma. She doesn't say,
Oh, Marigold, this room could be so much nicer if . . .
But I can tell what she's thinking:
If only you'd paint it some cheery color. If only you'd tidy it up a little. If only it looked as if you and Kennedy were really settled in.

I un-smush the Thing from the foot of my bed and carefully spread it out. It's such a funny shape that it trails onto the floor, then reaches across my pillow like a backward tentacle. And the scraps are so clashing—pink gingham, big purple flowers, kind of a sixties Pop Art print, swirly rainbow stripes, all in different shapes and sizes—that the whole thing looks sort of alarming, like some sort of mutant shape-shifting alien that's oozed all over my bed.

Still, I like it. I don't know why, but for some bizarre
reason I think it's beautiful. Beautiful and random. Beautiful
because
random.

Gram studies it for a long time, as if she's reading a hard poem. She touches it gently, running her wrinkled fingers over the fabric, smoothing out the puckers. Finally she looks at me with bright eyes.

“It's wonderful,” she says. “Did you get the other scraps I sent?”

“Yesterday,” I answer. “The iridescent ones are great. And the flannel ones are so soft. I'm sorry I forgot to thank you—”

She holds up a hand. “Never mind about that. But here's a question for you, cookie: Do you ever wonder where I get all this fabric?”

“Actually, yes.”

“Well, then, what if I tell you. Okay if we sit a minute?”

I push aside the Thing so we can both fit on my bed, but Gram pulls the tentacle part into her lap. She strokes it a couple of times, then says, “So how are things between you and Mom these days?”

I blink at her. Gram's old, I guess, but it's not like she loses her place in conversations. So why are we suddenly talking about
Mom
?

“Sort of terrible,” I admit.

She purses her lips. “What's going on?”

I tell her about Mom's phone call to Trisha, how Trisha threw a fit and now Emma doesn't want to be friends. And while I'm on the endless topic of Mom Ruining My Life, I mention the whole after-school club business. I even tell her about Pajama Day.

Gram listens to it all without saying anything. Finally she takes my hands into her lap. “I know you're going through a rough time right now,” she says gently. “And I know you're used to thinking about your mom in a certain way. But you know what, honey? When I think of Becca, I see her at just about your age. She was such a creative, spirited, talented girl, and I was always very, very proud of her.”

“I know that, Gram.”

“But she wasn't easy. Your Uncle Robby was a piece of cake, but your mom . . .”

We both laugh a little, but the truth is, this conversation has me totally lost.

“And she was always performing,” Gram says. “Locking herself in the bathroom, trying on all my makeup, and singing. Or turning her bed into a stage and making up speeches. Half the time I didn't understand what she was
even doing. And if I asked her,
‘Becca, sweetie, why don't you just try out for the school play,'
she'd just look at me with those big dark eyes of hers and say something like,
‘Oh Ma, the school play is so boooring. Besides, I'd rather write my own lines.'
And she was so intense about everything, so after a while I just let her be.”

Gram strokes my hands thoughtfully, not looking at me. “But she was always so restless,” she adds. “It was as if she didn't know what she wanted.”

“Not anymore,” I insist. “Mom always knows
exactly
what she wants. That's the problem. She doesn't care about anything else. Or any
one
.”

“You think so?” Gram says. “Let me share a little incident with you, Mari. One day when your mom was about thirteen, she closed the door to her bedroom and didn't come out.” She sighs. “I didn't realize it at the time because I was busy helping your uncle with his homework. But when suppertime came, and I knocked on Becca's door, there she was, with a big pair of scissors, cutting all her favorite clothes into scraps. Just tatters, all over the floor, her bed . . .” Gram shakes her head.