Breathing Underwater (28 page)

“Now?” A bit of fudge dribbled onto my lip, and I caught it quick with my napkin. Mother would have said it was piggish, but Daddy didn’t wince.

“Sure. I told your mom we’d be late. Gameworks, maybe?”

Most people I knew would rather go there than anywhere, but the sounds of
Wicked
still filled my head, and I didn’t want to drown it out with pulsing game music. So I said, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the bookstore instead?” I loved going to the big bookstore, selecting a pile of novels, then spending an hour or more examining them over tea. “Would you be bored?”

Daddy grinned. “No, I can read. They prob’ly even have some of them there magazines with pitures in.”

“I didn’t mean that.” The kids at school all thought I was a nerd too.

“I know you didn’t, Pumpkin.” He glanced to the side. “Hey, don’t look now, but you’ve got yourself an admirer.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Right. Nine o’clock. Redhead’s been looking at you since dessert arrived.”

“Guys don’t look at me.”

“See for yourself.”

I shook my head. Parents lived in some happy place where everyone my age dated or had guys in love with them when, in truth, only popular girls like Courtney and Midori did. I looked around. To one side was a crowd of stick-thin girls in Greek letter shirts, pigging out on Earthquake Sundaes. But when I got to Daddy’s “nine o’clock,” I was surprised to see he was right. Someone
was
looking at me. It was Warner Glassman, a boy from school, a smart boy who’d won a playwriting contest. As soon as I saw him, I wondered if my face was clean, if I had whipped cream on my lips. It wasn’t like I could lick them now, though, not in front of Warner. I’d look like a perv. I fumbled with my napkin. Warner looked away.

“He’s a boy from school, Daddy. He’s looking at me because he knows me, that’s all. He’s probably trying to figure out where he’s seen me before.”

Daddy took a sip of his coffee. “You are a beautiful girl, Emma.”

“Mother says I’d be pretty—pretty, not beautiful—if I lost ten pounds and did something about my hair.”

“Mothers are too picky. You look great. Boys are going to be swarming.”

“Right.” Still, I straightened my shoulders and resolved to eat extra neatly until Warner and his family left. Maybe, if they passed close enough, I’d say hi. I took a minuscule bite of ice cream and glanced at Warner again. He
was
looking. This was the coolest day ever!

I knew I wasn’t ugly or fat either, just plain, like the heroines in books I loved, like
Jane Eyre
or
Little Women
. Of course, those girls usually ended up getting the guy.

“There’s something I have to tell you, Emma,” Daddy said.

“Sure.” I took another nibble, trying not to look at Warner. Still, I could sort of see him out of the corner of my right eye.

“… and her name is Lisette,” Dad was saying.

“What?”

“I said her name is Lisette.”

“Whose name? Start at the beginning.” I slurped up the ice cream that had melted to soup on my spoon. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I said I wasn’t sure if you remembered that, before I married your mom, I had another wife, and we had a daughter named Lisette.”

Remembered? I was three. But, yes, I knew he’d had a wife before Mother, in some foggy part of my mind. The daughter was news, though. I’d have remembered a daughter. “Where?” I choked out.

“She’s been living in Lantana with her mom.”

Lantana. Lantana wasn’t far. We passed it all the time when we drove up to visit my aunt. My aunt was two hours away, and Lantana was closer. How weird was it, that I’d never met her? Had my father had a secret life all these years, like one of those guys on talk shows who turns out to have two families? What else was there, what else I didn’t know?

“… here on Friday,” Dad was saying.

“Wait? What, again?”

“She’s coming here on Friday.”

“Coming? To visit?” No wonder Mother had been freaking out. She wasn’t big on things that weren’t all about her.

“No. To live. Aren’t you listening, Emma? Her mother passed away, and Lisette is coming here. You should get along great. She’s exactly your age.”

The chocolate ice cream fell from my open mouth and onto the front of the BCGB dress. I glanced down at the huge splotch, then at Dad, then at Warner.

Of course, everyone was looking right at me.

The first time I saw my stepsister, Lisette, she was crying. A battered white economy car with patches of rust so big it looked like a calico cat pulled into our driveway. The door opened and it disgorged its contents: a girl who was, as Daddy had said, my own age but taller; a carry-on, which I later found out held all her clothes; and a black plastic garbage bag, which I later learned held everything else. All her stuff in one suitcase and one garbage bag? We gave more than that to the Salvation Army. We threw more than that away.

It was Friday afternoon. I was in the tree house Daddy had built me when I was five, reading
Vanity Fair
(not the magazine, the novel by Thackeray, which Daddy had bought me after I got my jaw undropped from our talk), waiting for Lisette, but not waiting. Mother said I was too old for tree houses, that it ruined her landscaping. It was Daddy who said we could keep it and was always too busy to take it down when Mother complained. I liked to go there to read. And hide.

I was doing both that day, plus spying on Lisette. Mother was out, even though she’d told Daddy she’d be home. She’d wanted me to go too, but I said I had homework. I wanted to see Lisette. Since my conversation with Daddy, I’d been wondering what Lisette would look like. Would she be pretty? Prettier than me? Taller? Thinner? I hoped she’d be plain too, so we could be friends. Would she look like my father? Would he like her better? Would she think I was a geek? Would we be like sisters?

I peeked out from between the branches. Lisette tugged the black bag across the bright green lawn. Whoever had driven her didn’t offer to help. The engine started and the car was gone before Lisette was even halfway to the door.

Her head was down, so I couldn’t see her face. What I could see was her hair, gold-blond like Princess Aurora’s at the Disney character breakfasts we went to on vacation and spiraling to her waist. My fingers stole to my own frizz. She wore a black dress a size too small and black sneakers that were too large, but even in that, I could see that she was skinny, skinny and graceful, like a ballerina. She stopped to check a hole in the bag, which had something sticking out of it, a bit of sapphire-colored fabric. Her hand reached to stuff it back in but, instead, lingered on it, and that was when she began to sob.

Something black soared into my peripheral vision. I turned my head and saw it was a turkey buzzard. Two of them, actually, diving and bouncing at some dead thing in the street.

I should have welcomed Lisette, or at least introduced myself. That would be the normal thing to do. But I wanted to put off the time in my life when I became Lisette’s stepsister.

As long as I didn’t meet Lisette, everything could be the same. Everything could be possible. My father would still like me best, even though Lisette was his real daughter. I could still imagine that Lisette and I would be best friends. As long as I stayed in the tree house, there was still the possibility that Lisette might love me. But as soon as I approached her, that would all end. She’d take one look at me, with my curly hair and freckles, and realize I wasn’t worth knowing, just like girls at school did.

I ducked my head lower and went back to reading about Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp, BFFs even though Becky was evil, and about Dobbin, the grocer’s son, who was in love with the wimpy, goody-goody Amelia and stood by her for years, even when she married his unworthy friend George. I had a secret crush on Dobbin and pictured him looking like Warner Glassman. The book was eight hundred pages long, and it was the second time I’d read it since Sunday.

Which I knew Lisette would think was completely weird.

Everyone did. Most of the kids at school, even in the smart classes, which I was in, didn’t read books that weren’t assigned, certainly not classics. Sometimes, I’d try to act like them, force myself to slip a
Seventeen
or an
Elle
into my binder or spend the time before class texting. But always, by lunchtime, I’d be at the media center, begging for my Brontë or Austen fix. It was pathetic.

I pressed my face hard against the slippery slats of the tree house floor, looking down at her crying.

Mother and Daddy’s arguing had continued all week, and I’d read and read to drown out the yelling, but it didn’t always work.

“There must be someplace else,” Mother had said.

“We’ve been through this. There are no relatives on Nicole’s side.”

“On your side, then. Maybe she could move in with your mother.”

“Give me a break. My mother’s eighty.”

“There are other alternatives besides relatives.”

“Don’t go there, Andrea. I’m not putting my own daughter in foster care for your convenience.”

“Not convenience, safety. Who knows what sort of upbringing this girl has had. She could be into drugs or … worse. But maybe you don’t care about Emma.”

“Of course I care about Emma. I’ve always taken care of your daughter.”

Your daughter
. My father’s words were like a shard of ice through my heart.

“Besides, I’m sure Nicole’s done a fine job raising her. She was always a sensible woman.”

“Unlike me, I suppose.”

“Who said anything about … never mind. I know you’ll see reason in this. The girl is coming to live with us, and that’s final.”

And with that, a door slammed.

I’d known better than to ask Mother any questions, but the day before, she’d come into my room without knocking and sat on my bed. Taking me by the shoulders, she’d said, “Don’t worry, Emma. This is just temporary. Your father loves you. We won’t let anything change that.”

Which is when I started worrying that it would.

Now, I stared down at Lisette. I still couldn’t see her face. She’d pulled the piece of fabric from her bag. It turned out to be a shawl, which she sniffed deeply before draping it around her stooped shoulders. She knotted the broken bag, then pulled it the rest of the way toward the doorstep. Guilt tugged at me, urged me out. I knew I should go down the ladder. I didn’t. In my lap, my hands were working. I pulled out a page of
Vanity Fair
, then a second. Only when my hands were so full of the crumpled, ripped pages that I couldn’t hold any more did I stop. What was I doing?

Lisette rang the doorbell. No one answered. She rang a few more times, then she sat down on the garbage bag and cried some more, great, racking sobs that shook her shoulders. We sat that way for a long time, me in the tree house, Lisette sobbing by the door.

It struck me for the first time that my father was a jerk. A real jerk who’d left his wife and daughter and had never seen her again, just like my own father had. Lisette and I were the same.

Finally, the air was quiet. This was my chance, my one chance. I had to sneak down when she wasn’t looking.

The tree house creaked as I made my way down the ladder. Instead of walking toward the porch, I went in the opposite direction, toward the street.

Just as I reached it, she looked up. She stared at me full in the face and smiled through her tears.