Made You Up (5 page)

I
spent the rest of the game flipping my focus back and forth between my homework and Miles. He didn’t look back up at us, but I knew he knew I was watching him.

I distracted myself by trying to think of ways to pay Tucker back for the Coke. He ignored me when I brought it up and changed the subject to conspiracy theories— Roswell, the Illuminati, Elvis faking his own death, and when Miles glared up at us again, a nice little story about a Nazi moon base.

Tucker was the sort of intelligent, history-savvy person I could throw at my mother and watch him stick, but also the sort of person I’d never do that to, because I had a soul.

Then I thought,
Hey, I could hug him. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if I hugged him
. But I knew that physical
contact meant certain things in the world of normal social conduct, and while I trusted Tucker more than most of the other people I knew, I didn’t want to mean those certain things toward him.

Tucker left with the crowd when the game ended. I stayed behind to help the club, but they were so quick and efficient that the net was down and the ball carts stowed before I’d stepped off the bleachers.

Miles and Jetta stood at the scorer’s table. When I walked up to them, they fell silent; I was pretty sure they hadn’t been speaking English.

“What?” Miles snapped.

“Do you need me for anything or can I go home?”

“Yeah, go.” He turned back to Jetta.

“
Bis später
, Alex!” Jetta smiled and waved as I walked away. Apparently any feelings I’d hurt by not shaking her hand had been forgotten.

“Um. See you,” I replied.

Outside the school was pandemonium. I expected big crowds after football games, but this looked like the entire school had formed one huge tailgating party. At eight at night. After a volleyball game. On the first day of school.

There was no way I could do a sufficient perimeter check here, so I went for plan B: Get out. I wheeled Erwin
out of the bushes where I’d hidden him, and hoped to God no one noticed me. The people closest to the school entrance were the men still standing on the roof, the few football players probably waiting for their girlfriends, and Celia Hendricks and two other girls, doing who the hell knows what.

“Nice bike!” Celia called over her shoulder, flipping her bleached hair out of the way. Her two friends stifled laughs. “Where’d you get it?”

“Egypt,” I said, trying to figure out if she was serious.

Celia laughed. “Remind me never to go to Egypt.”

I ignored her and continued past the football players. I didn’t get far; all 230 pounds of Cliff Ackerley fell into step beside me. “Hey, you’re the new girl, right?”

“Yes.” His closeness sent shivers crawling up my spine. I veered away to put some distance between us.

He planted himself in front of me, pointed at my hair, and yelled, “HILLPARK FAN!”

A thunderous, rolling
BOO
instantly rose from the crowd. Most of them probably had no clue I’d actually gone to Hillpark, but brandishing any kind of red around here was asking for trouble.

I tried to move around Cliff, but he stuck his foot on Erwin’s front tire and pushed. “What the hell?” I stumbled backward to keep Erwin upright.

“What the hell?” one of the other guys mocked in a high falsetto, a million times more sinister than when Tucker had done it at work the night before. The rest of Cliff’s friends circled around me. I squeezed tighter against Erwin. Either these guys were all drunk or they were all douche bags. If they were drunk, they were less likely to see reason but also less likely to catch me if I ran for it. But I couldn’t run with Erwin. Maybe I could use him as a shield. That meant leaving him behind, and the last thing I wanted to do was leave Erwin behind. No matter how I played this situation,
Outlook not so good.

“Why don’t you stop being a dick and get out of my way?”

“Ooh, harsh words.” Cliff grinned. “Here’s the deal— I’ll let you by if you agree to let us dye your hair green.”

“My hair isn’t dyed; it’s naturally this red. And
no
.”

“Fine, then we’ll shave it off. Jones has a razor in his car, don’t you, Jones?”

I backed away, tugging on a lock of hair. I’d seen documentaries about stuff like this. Bullying, student brutality. They wouldn’t really shave my head, would they? But there were so many people, all watching, waiting. The men in suits on the roof weren’t doing a thing—so much for school security.

The ring of people drew in tighter. There was no . . . I
wouldn’t be able to get out . . . Maybe I could kick Ackerley in the balls and call it a day . . . .

Then everyone went quiet. Cliff’s gaze roamed to a spot above my shoulder.

Miles stood there, staring Cliff down. The Light triplets at his side.

Cliff scoffed. “Need something, Richter?”

“Not at all.” Miles shrugged. “Please, continue.”

Cliff narrowed his eyes and took a step back, looking me over. He leaned to the side and peered around me.

“Problem?” I asked.

Cliff scoffed again and stepped out of my way, his lips curling in distaste. Miles and the triplets moved to flank me, helping clear a path through the party. There were no more boos, no jeering, no search for razors. But when I looked back, Cliff and his friends had their heads together, and past them, Celia glared daggers at me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Didn’t do it for you.” Miles stopped beside a rusty sky-blue pickup on the far edge of the parking lot. He yanked the driver’s door open and tossed his bag in. “I really hate that guy.”

“Don’t listen to anything Cliff says,” Theo chimed in, pulling the pencils from her bun and shaking her hair out. “He’s a moron—he thinks we planned to have you do
something to make him look stupid. That’s why he left you alone. Besides, I don’t think he’d know how to use a razor if he had one.”

“I’m pretty sure his mother shaves his facial hair,” said Evan.

“I’m pretty sure a monkey shaves his facial hair,” said Ian. “Did you see his face last track season? I thought he’d need a blood donation.”

“Disregarding his faults in personal hygiene,” Miles interrupted, “I still think he needs his head shoved into a wood chipper.”

I took a long step away from Miles. “Right. Well, I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

The Light triplets said good-bye. Maybe they weren’t so bad after all, even if Evan and Ian did look like the exact same person. I hopped on Erwin and rode out of the parking lot, trying to forget about Cliff, Celia, that weird-ass scoreboard, and everything else.

I marked Miles’s parking spot so I could find his truck again tomorrow morning.

I wouldn’t let East Shoal and its psychotic inhabitants get the best of me.

M
y delusions became more frequent in the dark. More than once when I was little, I heard voices coming from beneath my bed, claws reaching up around the mattress to get me. Riding home, the sunlight fading, an enormous red bird with long tail feathers sailed over me. I stopped to take a picture of it. On the camera screen, its feathers glowed like fire. Freaking phoenixes. I’d had an obsession with phoenixes when I was ten, and this one followed me home every night. The Phoenix of Hannibal’s Rest.

Hannibal’s Rest. Home.

Here’s the thing about Hannibal’s Rest, Indiana: It is astoundingly small. So small I’m sure it wouldn’t show up on a GPS. You’d pass right through without realizing you were anywhere different. It’s just like the rest of central
Indiana: hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and the only way to know the weather other times of the year is to walk outside. You drive west to get to Hillpark and east to get to East Shoal, but nobody from either school can tell you the name of a single person who goes to the other, and they all hate one another.

My parents didn’t grow up here or anything. They chose to live in this nowhere town. Why? Because it was named after Hannibal of Carthage. Their basic train of thought was this:
Hannibal’s Rest? And we’re naming our child after Alexander the Great? MARVELOUS. Ah, the history, it tickles.

Sometimes I wanted to beat my parents over the head with a frying pan.

If you could say one thing about them, it was that they loved history. Literally, both of them were
in love
with history. Sure, they were in love with each other, but history was like the be-all, end-all of intellectual stimulation to them. They were married to each other and to history.

So, naturally, they weren’t going to give their kids any old
normal
names.

I was the lucky one. Alexander to Alexandra wasn’t a huge leap. Charlie, on the other hand, got the entire blunt force of the namesake sledgehammer: Charlemagne. So from the day she was born, I called her Charlie.

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.

“But what was it
like
?”

This was understandable. Charlie had never set foot in a real school.

“It was like school. I went to class and listened to the teacher and did the work.”

“And there were other kids there?”

“Yes, Charlie, there are lots of other kids there. It’s a school.”

“Did they discriminate against you because you’re new?”

Discriminate
. There it was. Charlie’s Word of the Week. Every week, Charlie had a word that she used whenever she could fit it in. This week it was
discriminate
. Last week it was
usurp
. The week before that was
defenestrate,
compliments of me. Just thinking about Charlie whipping that one out of her vocabulary utility belt in front of our mother made me smile.

“Has Mom been letting you watch the Disney Channel again?” I opened my closet to look for my pajamas.

“So . . . they don’t sing at lunch?”

“Nope.”

“Oh.” The blanket fell away from her head, revealing her straight, ketchup-red hair and big blue eyes. She pulled a black chess piece from her pocket and jammed it into her mouth. She’d been chewing on things since she was four years old. “Did you meet anyone cool?”

“Define
cool
.”

“You know.
Cool
.”

“Not really. I met nice people and stupid people and complete jerks, but I didn’t really meet any cool people.”

Charlie gasped, her eyes became the size of plates, and the chess piece fell out of her mouth. “Did you meet your
soul mate
? That always happens on the first day of school, right?”

“Oh God, Charlie, she’s letting you read again! You went straight to the paranormal section, didn’t you?”

Charlie huffed and crossed her arms. “No. But the TV doesn’t do high school very well.”

“The TV doesn’t do anything very well, Charlie.”

She looked glum after that, and I felt sorry that I’d crushed her hopes. She’d never go to high school. The only reason our mother had stopped homeschooling me was because my therapist said I’d do better around people my age. That led to my involvement in the Hillpark Gym Graffiti Incident and my senior year condemnation at East Shoal.

A familiar pang of guilt poked at my stomach whenever I looked at Charlie. I was the big sister. I was supposed to set an example and lead the way so people would say,
“Hey, you’re Alex’s sister, aren’t you? You two look exactly alike!”
instead of
“Hey, you’re Alex’s sister, aren’t you? Are you crazy, too?”

The only example I was ever going to set for her was to always check her food before she ate it.

Relief washed over me. Relief that she wasn’t old enough yet to understand why she should hate me.

“Get out of my room. I need to change.”

Charlie whined and pouted but grabbed the chess piece, scrambled off the bed, and hurried out the door. I changed into my pajamas and slipped under the covers.

I looked around the room at all my pictures and artifacts.

The pictures had no rhyme or reason. I realized a few years back that sometimes I’d look at an old picture and something would be different in it. Something would be
missing. I reached into my bag and pulled out my camera, then flipped through the pictures I’d taken today. The first one from this morning, the one of the squirrels—it was already different. It looked like I’d just taken a picture of the neighbor’s lawn. The squirrels were gone.

It wasn’t always so easy. Some things took longer to disappear than others. But this technique helped me figure out what was a hallucination and what wasn’t. I had albums full of pictures, too, but the albums were for things I knew were real, like my parents. Charlie had a whole album to herself. More than once I’d caught her in my room, looking through it.

My artifacts came from my dad. First and foremost, Dad was an archaeologist. I didn’t blame him. If I could do nothing but play in the dirt all day, I’d be an archaeologist, too. My mother used to travel with him, but then they had me and they took too long trying to decide if they wanted to take me to the digs. By that time, my mother had ended up homeschooling me and didn’t want to take me anywhere, and then Charlie was born and they didn’t have the money to take both of us. So my mother stayed home all the time and Dad was always gone.

Whenever he came home, he brought stuff: most of the things we owned, our furniture, and even some of our clothes. My mother crammed every available corner with
Dad’s stuff, and the house didn’t feel so empty.