Sunshine (5 page)

I start making Leena a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She runs over to where Trei is sitting and hugs her. “Well hello beautiful,” Trei says as Leena climbs onto her lap. Then she stares at Myles. Placing hand on her hip, she asks, “Who’s this?”
“This is Myles, he’s our new friend,” Boo answers.
“Oh,” she says, already uninterested now that she knows he’s just a friend and not anyone special like someone who can make balloon animals.
I set the sandwich in front of Leena, and she starts giggling for some reason. I shrug and figure she's being a five year old. I stand near the table, drinking some water so I have something to do besides just standing there.
“You’re a pretty boy,” Leena says suddenly, her mouth half full of PB&J.
She’s not the only one who thinks that. Wait, maybe that’s
too
nice. I’m not supposed to be
that
nice. It only gives him permission to be nice back. Which leads to…not so good things.
I nearly spit out the water I’m drinking, but I swallow it the best I can without people noticing that I’m acting like a numb skull.
“Well, you’re a very pretty girl,” Myles says back to her.
“I know,” Leena says happily. “Sophie tells me every day.”
“Well, Sophie must be a very smart sister,” Myles replies.
“Oh, she is, and she’s very pretty too.”
“Okay!” I interrupt before things get too out of hand. “How about we get to those movies?”
First Trei and I agree to get
The Breakfast Club
out of the way. Boo’s thrilled to share his movie with Myles. After the endless torture that is Boo mouthing all of the lines and explaining to Myles what is going on as it happens and all of the specific reasons why he liked any particular part, the movie is finally over.
Next we watch
Finding Nemo
, which is a relief after having to watch all of those sad pathetic teenagers crying, but I don’t really like this movie either. I mean, some clown fish dad looking for his clown fish kid and risking his life to find him and all. It's just not a very good message to deliver to little kids. If things are really as dangerous as a fish swimming through an ocean full of sharks, no one is looking for anyone.
Soon it’s seven o’clock and Stevie and Jade are pulling into the driveway. We pause
Finding Nemo
and go to the driveway to greet them.
Stevie hugs me first, and the tightest. “How are you?” he asks as he lets go; my organs can now breathe.
“Good.” I answer.
Stevie is just like having another big brother, only more girly. He has shoulder length, thick, black wavy hair. Think Davey Havok from AFI, Pre-
Decemberunderground.
“You sure?” Jade butts in, trying to pry Leena off of his back.
“Mmmm hmm,” I say.
I just dodged this whole thing with Myles, now Jade and Stevie are bringing it up again? I mean, my eyes aren’t even red and swollen anymore.
Then Boo and Trei take their turns hugging Stevie and Jade as Myles, Leena, and I stand around awkwardly. Well, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one that feels awkward. Leena and Myles seem to be hitting it off. Leena is telling Myles all about her stuffed animal collection when Jade interrupts her.
“Hi. Who are you?” Jade says in Myles’ direction.
“Oh, this is Myles, he’s new at school.” Boo glares at me when he says this, like I was supposed to be the one to introduce him. Hey, he has a mouth.
Jade sticks out his hand to shake. “I’m Jade, Sophie’s brother.”
They’re both smiling at each other, but Jade looks cautious. “Nice to meet you, I’m Myles.” He smiles again. God is it hard to ignore that.
Shake it off.
“This is my other half, Stevie.” Jade gestures towards him.
“Nice to meet you, Myles.” Stevie tries to tuck his thick hair behind his ear, but it refuses to stay there.
“You too,” Myles replies.
We head back inside, everyone walking ahead of Jade and I, Stevie asking Myles questions about himself and everyone else wanting to listen to his answers.
“So,” Jade starts whispering at me.
“So,” I whisper back.
“This kid cool?” He has that same, cautious look on his face. Like some girl’s dad when she has her date pick her up for prom.
“Uh, I don’t know,” I say. “He’s Boo and Trei’s friend.”
“Oh.” He sounds slightly relieved. Jade doesn’t like me hanging with boys. He remembers what happened last time. He knows what can happen.
I spend the rest of the night squished in between Stevie and Jade. This is enough of a distraction. They make kissy-goo-goo-faces at each other the whole time, making me want to throw up.
After Leena’s asleep, we watch
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. Unlike
Finding Nemo
and
The Breakfast Club
,
Rocky Horror
doesn’t try to fool you into thinking that this kind of thing happens. You know it’s unrealistic and it’s supposed to be unrealistic and that’s why it’s so amazing.
In the beginning, Stevie and Jade get up and start doing the time warp.
“Do you know how to do it, Myles?” Stevie asks.
Myles smiles, but shakes his head no.
Boo gasps the loudest I have ever heard. “Myles. Wait. Hold on a second,” he places his hand to his chest like he’s having a heart attack. “You’ve never seen
this
movie either?”
Myles smiles again. “No.”
Boo stares at him with his mouth wide open. “Sophie,” he says, “he has never seen this movie.”
Knowing that this is my absolute favorite, Boo hints in this subtle way that I should say something to Myles about how completely insane it is that he’s
never
seen it.
I shrug, pretending to be too engrossed.
It’s stupid that I’ve never noticed it until just now, but
Rocky Horror
has a lot of sex in it. Watching it with a complete stranger who has never seen it before makes me feel disgusting for some reason. Self conscious, embarrassed even.
But I seem to be the only one. So I push this feeling away, figuring I’m being ridiculous.
Tim Curry is God. He will distract me.
My favorite song in the whole movie is the last one. The one where Frankfurter is singing to a bunch of empty lawn chairs. Usually I sing along with Mr. Curry, but I don’t want Myles to think I’m weird on top of him thinking I’m mean.
When it’s over, I casually look around. No one is paying any attention to how happy the song just made me; they’re all having their own separate conversations about the movie except for Myles, who is smiling at me.
I think he noticed how happy the song just made me.
Damn it.
“Hey Myles, you need a ride home?” Boo asks as everyone is leaving.
“Uhm, sure.” Myles sticks his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
“Well, Trei and I are going to walk home, we live just a few houses down. But I’m sure Sophie wouldn’t mind driving you.”
It takes everything I have not to rip out Boo’s hair.
“I can walk,” Myles answers.
“Nuh uh, you live like, five miles from here,” Boo argues.
Myles’ blue eyes stare at me. He doesn’t want a ride home from me, I can tell.
I decide to drive him, but I pretend my bag needs a seat of its own in the passenger’s side and I make him sit in the back.
This is the first time I have ever had a hetero male alone in my car since I was with Jack. I hate it. My hands are all sweaty and my stomach hurts.
You know what, I blame Boo and Trei. If it weren’t for them telling me that I was so mean to him and Boo bringing up that I could use more friends, I wouldn’t even be in this situation.
“So,” I say like an idiot.
“So,” he says back.
“Your friends, the ones I saw you with at my job, they don’t go to Lucky?” I ask. It’s better than this silence.
I glance at his face in the rear-view. He smiles. “They don’t live around here.”
“Oh.”
And more silence.
“Turn here,” he says after a while.
And more silence.
“So…do you like it here?” I ask. Of course that’s a trick question. No one likes living in South Jersey.
“It’s okay. Better than where I was.”
“Where were you before?”
“Turn here,” he says again.
We pull onto a street of a bunch of older houses.
He doesn’t answer me.
“So aren’t you cold?” he asks out of nowhere.
I look at him again in the rear-view as we slow to a red light. “Uhm, no. Why?” It’s a weird question to ask someone in the beginning of September.
“Well, I just thought you were maybe one of those people who, you know, are always cold.”
“Why would you think that?”
“You’re always wearing that huge coat,” he says like it’s obvious.
Oh. I forgot. I’m a walking side show.
The light turns green and I keep going.
I could tell him now, but I don’t want to. If he knows I have something wrong with me, then he’ll treat me like there’s something wrong with me.
“Yeah,” I say stupidly. “I
am
cold a lot. But not now.”
I check his reaction behind me. He looks unconvinced, but he says, “Oh, okay,” anyway.
“Here,” he says as I start to pass his house. It’s a white one story. It looks out of place on this street. Like it was once an old house like the rest of them, but someone decided to make it something that it’s not by painting glossy white paint over it. I pull over and park.
Myles opens the door to get out, but pauses. “So I guess I’ll see you in school tomorrow.”
“Yup.”
“I’m glad you invited me over to hang out with you guys,” he re-starts the conversation.
Haven’t I talked to him enough for one day? I limit the rest of our talking to one word answers.
“Yeah?”
“I was kind of lonely. I didn’t think I would ever make friends.”
I nod.
“Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow then,” he says as he gets out of my car.
I try not to watch him as he disappears into his house, but I do.

Chapter 5
The Real Thing
“Send transmission from the one-armed scissor.”-At The Drive In

It’s Saturday morning and Laura is in my room yelling at me.

I pretend I don’t hear her. Maybe if she keeps it up, she’ll lose her voice altogether and I won’t have to listen to it anymore.
“Wake up, you freak!” she screams again.
Violently shaking off my blankets, I sit straight up. “What?” I shout the loudest I can, but my voice is scratchy from sleep.
Laura just smiles, like I’m the funniest thing she’s ever seen. “Mom says you have a doctor’s appointment, and you have to go.”
“I told her, I’m not going there anymore.”
Not that she was listening. Not that I expected her to.
Laura crosses her arms in front of her chest. “Well, Mom’s going to make you.”
I place my hand on my hip, trying my best to imitate Laura this early in the morning. “Well,” I say as I flip my hair, “Mom like, can’t make me do like, anything.”
Then Laura slams the door in my face, no doubt running to Mommy. A few minutes later, my suspicions are confirmed. “I told you!” Mom shrieks.
“Don’t say that,” Adam’s voice says back. I’m sure Mom has called me some name by the tone of his voice, but I don’t catch it.
“I’ll say whatever I want about her. She’s mine, not yours.”
I can guess how Adam is feeling right now. It’s probably a lot like being punched in the stomach. I’ve always thought of Adam as my father, or at least the closest I would get to one. I know that he thinks of himself that way too.
“At least I treat her like a daughter!” Adam's voice booms so loud that I'm surprised the house doesn't shake.
Mom makes a huffing sound. The front door slams. Adam’s going to work.
Then I hear her stomping up the stairs to my room.
Now that Adam’s left, she’ll be coming after me.
I grab my bag and throw on all of my anti-sun clothes over my pajamas. I shove on my combat boots without even bothering to tie them and I lock my door. She might break it down in her blind rage, but at least it’ll slow her down.
I shimmy myself down the slippery drain pipe outside of my window, my heart racing until my feet hit grass.
“Here, put these on,” Trei says, handing me some clothes.
Boo and Trei live across the street and down a few houses from me. I’m surprised Mom hasn’t come looking for me here. She’s probably afraid that Boo and Trei’s mom is home. It’s one thing to yell like a raving lunatic in front of people you know, it’s a whole new thing when people she doesn’t know as well are involved.
They let me use their shower and I get dressed in Boo’s way too tight pants. Trei lets me borrow an over sized tie dye T-shirt that I pin in the back with safety pins. At least it covers my ass.
We never get anywhere when we decide to find a name for our band, but we figure today’s as good a day as any. The main problem in finding a name is our music itself. With me playing piano and vocals, Boo playing drums, and Trei on violin, we’re not the average local band.
“Hey, don’t you have to get Myles?” Boo interrupts my thinking.
Oh yeah, I have to catch him up with English class. I shrug.
Boo already texted him earlier asking if two was okay, which he agreed to. He’s just bringing it up because he probably thinks I’ll forget. I wish.
“Okay,” Boo says. “How about, The Experience?” This is an abnormal name for Boo to come up with. He’s usually more creative with it.
Once he came up with The Agoraphobic Albinos.
Trei and I look at each other. “Nah,” we both say.
“Fine then, Miss Sunshine, you got anything better?”
I flip blindly through the dictionary and point somewhere on a random page:
A-nach-ro-nism- n.
1. Anything out of its proper historical time.
“How about we use anachronism?” I suggest.
“What the hell is that?” Boo asks.
I hand him the dictionary so he can read for himself. Then Boo passes the book to Trei who does the same thing. “I like it,” Trei announces.
“I don’t know,” Boo says. “I mean, we’re not exactly out of our ‘proper historical place.’”
“Yeah, but if you stretch the meaning to the music being out of place, it works,” Trei says.
Boo considers this for a minute. “Ohhhh. I get it.”
Name: found. For now, anyway.
We wait until we see my mom pull out of the driveway from Boo and Trei’s basement window before I sneak back into my house to grab my car keys and sneak back out.
Myles is already waiting outside for us as I pull up to his house. He’s wearing jeans and a blue shirt. His dark hair is shiny in the afternoon sun.
Must stop looking at him like that.
I pretend to be searching for a CD to distract myself.
“Hey Myles,” Boo says as he gets in to sit next to him in the back.
“Hey Boo,” he says. “Trei.”
“Hi,” she says turning to smile at him.
I start the engine with one hand as my other is flipping through my CD book.
“Hi, Sophie,” Myles says to me.
“Hey.” I continue flipping.
“I like your shirt. It’s different.”
Whoa. Did this kid just give me a compliment? What is
that
about? Play it cool. “Yeah it’s Trei’s.” I pretend I’m too preoccupied to look at him. “Long story.”
I finally settle on The Clash, and I blast it so loud the whole ride back that there isn’t room for any talking. It isn’t until I pull into Boo and Trei’s driveway that Myles says to Trei, “Oh, are we studying at your house?”
“Yeah. It’s better if Sophie doesn’t go home for a while,” Boo answers.
I grit my teeth, trying not to get too mad at Boo for hinting at my screwed up home life.
“Oh, why?” Myles asks. I can tell he’s asking me, but I’m not answering that question. There are too many ways to respond.
“Because Sophie’s mom is, uhm…a little bit, how do I say this?” Trei says.
“Insane,” I finish for her.
“What do you mean?” Myles directs his attention to me again.
I sigh. I hate thinking about my mother when I’m out of the house and I don’t have to deal with her. I’m happy whenever she isn’t near me. Talking about her when I’m not home always makes me realize that at some point, I have to go home to face her.
All the crap that’s happened between us just pisses me off and makes me feel sick. Like the time I got fired from the surgical supply store that Boo and Trei’s mom worked at when I was about fifteen.
Boo and Trei think I quit, but the reality of it is that I was stuffing supplies in my bag. I used to have a little problem with sharp objects.
Sometimes I still do, but it was really bad when I was fifteen.
I collected anything shiny and capable of inflicting some type of mark. I never once thought that Boo and Trei’s mom would figure out where the supplies were going.
I’m surprised when I look at the scars on my body now that I didn’t have to go to the hospital for stitches or worse. Especially this one time it got really bad. I carved a huge disgusting gash in my leg that kind of looked like a unicorn.
It got infected. I got a fever. No one noticed.
At least, I thought no one noticed.
Unknown to me, Boo and Trei’s mom had seen my unicorn through one of the bathroom stalls at work when I was changing into my uniform one day. She was worried, so she called my mom.
Probably the worst idea. Ever.
I was asleep the morning after I got fired when Mom busted into my room. She yanked off my PJ pants, revealing the infected gash.
And she just stared at it. “I don’t have time for this,” she said after the longest time.
She left me there, half naked, and alone in my room.
“Because she is.” I say, answering Myles’ question.