I turned down my street and aimed for the one-story, dirt-colored house lit up like a Christmas tree. My mother had this thing about leaving all the lights on until I got home, as if I would forget which house was ours. The sounds of a furious violin poured from the living-room window. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, as usual.
I leaned Erwin up against the garage door and did a perimeter check. Street. Driveway. Garage. Front yard. Porch. House. The porch swing creaked and swayed like someone had just gotten out of it, but that could’ve been the wind. I did another check when I stepped in through the front door, but the house looked like it always did, cramped and barren at the same time. Charlie stood in the living room with her violin, playing her musical prodigy stuff. When my mother wasn’t teaching online college classes, she homeschooled Charlie like she had me, so Charlie was always practicing.
My mother was in the kitchen. I braced myself, remembered not to do another perimeter check—my mother hated them—and went to find her. She stood at the sink, dishrag in hand.
“I’m home,” I said.
She turned. “I left out a bowl of soup for you. It’s mushroom, your favorite.”
Minestrone was my favorite soup. Mushroom was Dad’s. She always got them mixed up. “Thanks, but I’m not really hungry. I’m gonna go do my homework.”
“Alexandra, you need to eat.”
I hated that voice. Alexandra, you need to eat. Alexandra, you need to take your pills. Alexandra, you need to put your shirt on right side out.
I sat down at the table, dropping my bag next to me. My books made a pitiful shunk sound, reminding me that I couldn’t let my mother look in my bag. She’d think I’d destroyed them, and that would definitely warrant a therapist call.
“So, how was it?”
“All right,” I replied, swirling the cold soup in the bowl, checking for poison. I didn’t really think my mother would poison me. Most of the time.
“That’s it?”
I shrugged. “It was all right. It was a day of school.”
“Meet anyone interesting?”
“Everyone’s interesting if you stare at them long enough.”
She put her hands on her hips. Tally one for Things Alex Shouldn’t Say at the Dinner Table.
“How did it go with that club?”
“I really didn’t have to do that much. I like them, though. They’re nice.” Most of them. Mom hmm’d in her very passive-aggressive way.
“What?” I shot.
“Nothing.”
I sipped a bit of soup. “I’m on speaking terms with the valedictorian and the salutatorian, if that makes you feel any better,” I said.
Okay, so the valedictorian was a bit of a stretch. Most of our conversations that day had ended with one of us pissed off. But I did, technically, speak to him.
Thoughts of Blue Eyes strutted forward once again, and I beat them back. The moment I mentioned a lobster tank, my mother would have a conniption. She’d spent years trying to forget the Freeing of the Lobsters.
“Oh really?” My mother perked up a bit. “And what are they like?”
“The salutatorian’s really nice, but the valedictorian could work on his people skills.”
“You should ask them for college advice, you know,” she said. “I bet they’re aiming for the Ivy League. Oh, they could help you with your essays! You’ve never really been good at writing.”
Tally one for Mother Mentions College Future and Unlikeliness of Such at Dinner Table. It probably wouldn’t help my case to tell her Tucker had applied to half a dozen Ivy League schools, and had already been accepted at twice as many less prestigious institutions. “I don’t need help getting into college. I have good grades, and most people can’t write to save their lives, but they get in. Besides, you have to be an idiot not to get into state college.”
“You’re saying that now,” she said, waving a soapy knife at me. “But what are you going to do when you don’t get in?”
I dropped my spoon. “The hell, Mom? Do you want me to get in or not?”
“Language!” she snapped, going back to the dishes. I rolled my eyes and hunched over my soup.
The violin music came to an abrupt halt. There was the patter of small feet in the hallway, and then Charlie’s arms wrapped around me and her momentum nearly knocked me out of my chair. She was undersized for her age but hit like a wrecking ball.
“Hi, Charlie.”
“Hi.” My shirt muffled her voice.
I pried Charlie away from my side and stood up, pulling my bag with me. “I’m going to my room.”
“I expect lights out by ten,” my mother said.
“Oh, and apparently I need a school uniform.”
She slapped a wet hand against her forehead. Water ran down the side of her face. “Oh, I completely forgot. Your principal mentioned a uniform to me when we went for that tour. How much are they?”
“Like, seventy dollars. It’s ridiculous. All for a school crest on the breast pocket.”
My mother turned to look at me again, her face creased with that damn pity look. We weren’t so poor that we couldn’t pay seventy dollars for something I had to have, but she would make me feel awful about it anyway.
“I’m getting a spare from the janitor tomorrow,” I said quickly. “It shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Okay, good.” She relaxed. “I already laid out your clothes for tomorrow, so you can wear those to school and bring them home with you.”
“Fine.”
I stalked out of the kitchen and down the back hallway, Charlie close on my heels. She jabbered incessantly about the song she’d been playing, what she thought of our mother’s mushroom soup, how much she wanted to go to high school.
She hustled to get inside my bedroom door before I closed it. Even in the room I’d slept in for seventeen years, the place I knew better than anywhere else, I had to make sure nothing was out of the ordinary.
“What’s it like?” Charlie flung herself on my bed and pulled the covers up over her head like a cloak. The resulting gust of air made the pictures tacked to the walls flutter. The artifacts on my shelves rattled ominously.
“Be careful, Charlie. You break anything, you’re paying for it.” I opened up the top dresser drawer and pushed pairs of striped socks out of the way until I found my stash of superglue, hidden so my mother didn’t think I was huffing it. I tossed it onto the nightstand partly as a warning to Charlie and partly as a reminder to myself to pick it up for the morning. “I don’t know. It was school.” I grabbed the clothes my mother had left out on the end of the bed and tossed them on the floor. After seventeen years, she still picked out my clothes. I was a schizophrenic, not a damn invalid.