Also Known as Elvis (8 page)

“Where'd you get that shirt?” I ask as if I don't know the answer.

When she doesn't say anything, I kick at her butt and she squeals, “Stop it, Skeezie!” before going, “Where do you think? Daddy.”

“Wow,” I say. “Wonder when I get
my
new shirt.”

Megan grunts. I kick her butt. She kicks the air. I walk into the kitchen, where nothing—like food preparation, for instance—is happening.

“Where's Mom?” I ask Jessie, who follows me in. “She's not supposed to leave you guys alone.”

Jessie points to the fridge, and I spot a note stuck behind a Water Slide World magnet.

“Your dad and I are going out to supper so we can talk,” it reads. “I brought home pizza for you to heat up and there's salad stuff. I told the girls they can stay up until 9:30. NO LATER! Thanks, baby. I owe you one.”

Other than the fact that my mother called me “baby”—seriously, how creepy is that?—I'm cool with her note, I guess, although it bothers me that she left the girls on their own when I'd get into serious trouble for doing the same thing. I mean, no way would she have done this before my dad showed up. He is
so
messing with her head.

Anyways, pizza's easy. Jessie likes to help make salad. And by the time my mom gets back from “talking,” I'll be in my room with a big bag of corn chips and a sign on the door that says
DO NOT DISTURB
.

It almost works out. Too bad that:

1. Jessie gets sick after supper, and I spend the next two hours holding her head over the toilet and then reading
to her until she falls asleep a little after nine.

2. Megan uses the computer without permission and tells me there's a picture of me on Facebook mopping up ice cream with the caption, “Soda Jerk Squeezie T. would make a good jantor.” Kevin may have entered the world of cyberbullying, but he still hasn't mastered spelling.

3. Becca texts to say that she saw the picture and doesn't think it's funny.

4. I delete her text, and

5. We're out of chips.

Oh, on top of which:

6. My mom gets home at 9:32, yells at Megan for not being in bed yet, yells at me for playing my music too loud, yells at all of us for leaving the kitchen a mess (which, other than a pizza box lying
open on a counter, it isn't), slams the door to her bedroom, and yells a bunch of words I'm not going to put down here but you can use your imagination.

I was hoping I could convince her to run me out to the Stewart's and spring for a big bag of Doritos using her employee discount, but when I hear her stop cursing and start crying, I figure I can just forget about the “one” she owes me.

I'm mentally ripping up her note when I hear Jessie knocking at my door informing me she's going to be sick again.

About an hour later my head hits my pillow and I fall asleep to the rattling of the air conditioner my mom got at a tag sale for ten bucks, telling myself that I'm not a bad person just because I hope my friends are all having totally sucky vacations.

The next morning Jessie is fine. She throws up sometimes, that's all. But after she and Megan go over to Megan's friend Kyra's house, my mom is all on my case about how I didn't tell her that Jessie was sick the minute she slammed home from the Olive Garden last night. Here I am thinking I deserve a medal for holding my little sister's head for two hours while she pukes, but instead I get grief because I failed to interrupt my mom mid-meltdown with a newsflash.

And what's even worse, according to her, is that I didn't call her at the restaurant so she could race right home.

I say, “Mom.”

She says, “What is wrong with you, Skeezie?”

I say, “What's wrong with
me
?”

She says, “Your sister might have been really ill.”

I say, “Yeah, but she wasn't.”

She says, “But you didn't know that.”

I say, “But I did. Jessie throws up. Remember?”

She says, “But I'm her mother.”

I say, “Yeah, and I'm her brother. And I took care of it. Even
after
you got home. And she's fine.”

She doesn't say anything to that. She just sits at the kitchen table, downing her third cup of coffee, and then calls my dad a bad name. At least I assume she's talking about my dad.

I glance at the clock over the stove.

“I gotta go to work,” I tell her, thinking no matter what Kevin Hennessey or Becca Wrightsman or anybody else has in store for me today, it's got to be better than this.

“You want to know why he's here?” she says.

“Not really,” I say.

“Oh, it's good,” she says. “It's rich.”

“That's nice,” I say.

“You think he wants to come back to us?” she says. “Is that what you think?”

She pulls a cigarette out of her purse.

“Could you not smoke in the house?” I say.

“Who made you the mayor?” she says.

She puts the cigarette back.

“He came back,” she says, “to get a divorce.”

I shrug.

“He came back to get a divorce because he wants to get married to some girl he met in Rochester.”

“Okay.”

“He owes me money and he hardly ever sees you kids and he comes back wearing a
tie
and tells me he wants a divorce so he can marry some girl in Rochester.”

My cereal has turned to mush, which I hate. I pick up the bowl and dump the whole thing in the garbage. It's disgusting, but less disgusting than eating it.

“So I guess I don't have to spend any quality time with him,” I say, keeping my back to her so she doesn't see the part of me that was kind of hoping he was coming back for good. Which, to be honest, totally confuses me.

“He's still your father,” she says. “He has a legal
right to see you. And besides, he wants to talk with you about something. He wouldn't say what, just said it was time you two talked man to man.”

Omigod, not The Talk. Anything but The Talk.

“Well, I can't see him today,” I say. “I'm working the lunch shift, and then Zachary asked me to come over and hang out. And then—”

“He's going fishing with Del today,” she says. Del is an old high school friend of my dad's. “He wants to spend the day with you tomorrow. I told him fine.”

My cheeks burn so hot you could fry eggs on them. “Who told you that you could tell him fine?” I say, turning to face her. “Maybe I don't want to see my dad. Or maybe, just maybe,
I
want to decide when I'm going to see him.”

“Don't get all het up,” my mom says, using one of my grandma's expressions. “You can spare one day out of your busy social life to see your father.”

This is too stinkin' much!

“Social life?” I go. “I'm working all the time, remember? And when I'm not working, I'm taking
care of
your
daughters. You're out eating garlic knots while I'm watching Jessie upchuck pizza into the toilet. It's a good thing it flushes, thanks to money
I
earned!”

My mom looks at me like I slapped her. “Do you have any idea how hard it is being an adult?” she screams. “I can't handle it! I'm thirty-two years old and I feel like I'm fifty! I can't help it that I need your help, Skeezie! I can't help it that your father left me here with you three kids and hardly comes around and when he does it's so he can get married to someone else. Some girl in Rochester! Some girl he knows in this life he has in Rochester that doesn't include us!

“And for your information, I
hate
garlic knots! They are doughy and greasy and I was
not
eating them last night! I was
not
having a good time! I was sitting across the table from your father in his ridiculous tie wondering why I was hoping he wanted to come back to me when I hate him even more than I hate garlic knots! Do you get this? Do you get any of this?”

It is not fun watching your mother have a nervous breakdown, even if you have seen it before. You never know what to say.

“Yeah, okay,” I tell her. “You hate garlic knots, I get it.”

Clearly, this is not the right thing to say. She bursts into tears and runs out of the kitchen.

And now it is time for me to go to work at the Candy Kitchen. I swear, if Kevin Hennessey shows up today, I am going to have to do him bodily harm. I am not normally the violent type, but sometimes a person can only take so much.

Life is funny, and I don't mean ha-ha. What I mean, Little E, is that even though it may not seem like it at the time, sometimes things happen for a reason. Like that summer. If my friends hadn't all been away the week my dad was in town, I probably wouldn't have gotten to talking about things with Steffi the way I did.

I was only thirteen, so I wasn't used to talking about serious stuff all that much, but the closest I'd ever had to what you might call heavy conversations were with Bobby and Joe and Addie. They had become my best friends after Addie sent me a secret Valentine in second grade. Up until then I didn't really have any friends at all, except for Penny and she was a dog. I don't like admitting this to you, because I don't want you getting the idea that you should follow in my footsteps, but I was kind of a troublemaker before that secret Valentine. I did things to get noticed, things that weren't very nice. So big
surprise that I didn't have any friends, right? But Addie, well, she was this no-nonsense person—she still is; you'll get to know her because she's still one of my best friends—and she just said, in so many words, “Skeezie, I think you're nice even if you are kind of a jerk.”

The other thing about Addie is that she's strong. When she makes up her mind about something, that's it! I don't know why, but she made up her mind that I was going to be her friend and she wasn't about to have a friend who was a jerk, so what could I do? I became her friend and stopped being a jerk. And because Bobby and Joe were already her friends, I became their friend, too.

Anyway, like I said, I think there are reasons that things happen when they do. Like Penny running away a couple of months before Addie asked me to be her friend. I had finally known what it was like to have a friend, even if she had four legs and stinky breath, and I wasn't ready to be lonely again.

And then near the end of second grade, Bobby's mom got real sick. I didn't know just how sick at the time, and I couldn't make sense of it when she died the summer between second and third grade. But when we went
back to school that fall, I knew that being friends was the best thing Addie and Joe and I could do for Bobby. And so we became the Gang of Five, even though there were only four of us. I was the one who came up with that name, because I thought it was funny, and it stuck. And
we
stuck. Up until then, it was as if we'd been held together by Scotch tape, but once we were the Gang of Five, we were stuck to each other with Krazy Glue.

After my dad left when I was ten, it was Addie and Joe and Bobby who kept me from running away. Whether I wanted to run off to find my dad or to make him worry so much he'd come back home, who knows. But it was the gang that convinced me to stay.

They were always there for me—until the week I needed them most.