Surviving the Applewhites (5 page)

E
.D. slammed the door to her room and threw herself on the bed.
Not one word!
she thought. Neither her mother nor Zedediah had said a single word about her to Jeremy Bernstein. Her name hadn’t even been mentioned. She might as well have been in Traybridge with her father! Invisible, that’s what she was. The invisible Applewhite. It was too much. She wanted out of this family.

She turned over and lay on her back, staring up at the posters of rock stars she had taped to the ceiling. Cordelia and Hal didn’t have posters of rock stars.
They wouldn’t sink so low as to admit they liked what almost every other kid their age in the whole civilized world liked. Oh no. They were much too individual for that. Much too artsy. And that wimpy Jeremy Bernstein probably never had rock stars on his ceiling either. He probably had posters of Shakespeare or Picasso or—or—Edith Wharton!

Well, she had news for her family. She might not have a talent that would get a television producer excited about doing a story on her. But
she
wouldn’t lose track of the date or forget to go to the grocery when they were out of food. Unlike certain other people, she was going to be able to cope with the real world when she got old enough to go out into it on her own.

The way Jeremy Bernstein had talked about the Creative Academy, anybody would have thought the adults had thought it up specifically to educate the next generation of artistic geniuses. The truth was, she was the only one who was doing anything to keep it any sort of
school
at all, the only one actually getting an education from it, and the only one making sure that Destiny would get an education.

She had read somewhere that the best way to learn something was to teach it, so she had built in a Teaching Opportunities section to every single project in her curriculum. When she’d learned enough about each project, she taught the main ideas to
Destiny. That way he was learning a whole bunch of things he might never decide to learn on his own, and he was learning them really early, before he was even supposed to be a student in the academy, so that when he began doing his own thing, whatever that turned out to be, he wouldn’t end up as ignorant as Cordelia and Hal were bound to be.

Jeremy Bernstein was worried about a television show invading their family’s privacy. That just showed how little he understood them. Every last one of them lived to be the center of attention. Even Hal. Turning himself into a recluse guaranteed that people would talk about him.

She threw her extra pillow across the room. She
hated
being an Applewhite.

A
ccording to the alarm clock on his bedside table, it was 5:03
A.M
. when Jake woke to the shrieking clatter of an electric coffee grinder. He buried his head under the pillow and turned over to go back to sleep. But now that he was awake, he had to go to the bathroom. When he opened the door of his bedroom, he saw Archie, dressed in jogging clothes and bustling around the cottage’s small kitchen area. Jake nodded in his direction but didn’t return Archie’s greeting. How could anyone have that much good cheer at that hour of the
morning? Lucille had called Archie a lark. True. Nobody but birds was up at this hour.

Or so he thought. He had just gone back to bed and was slipping happily into a dream about a spectacularly beautiful dancer in a purple leotard when something thundered across the room and landed on him like a mortar round, knocking the breath out of him. He felt the covers being pulled off his head.

“You are so too awake! Uncle Archie said you was asleep. He said you didn’t even wake up when you went to the bathroom before. You isn’t asleep at all. You gots your eyes open and everything!”

Groaning, Jake maneuvered so that Destiny’s weight slid off his stomach and onto the edge of the bed. Then he pushed himself up to his elbows. The boy, dressed in pirate pajamas, did not stop talking.

“Your hair points is all messed and flat. I told you! Nobody gots hair that grows in points like you said. You gots to do something to it to make it do that. I wanna watch you do it. Can I watch? Can I? Huh? Can I?”

“No!” Jake said. “Go away. I’m not ready to be awake yet. I’m
not
awake.”

“Are so. You gots your eyes open and you’re talking. Jake’s awake, Jake’s awake, Jake’s awake!”

“Go home. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to barge into somebody’s bedroom without knocking?”

Destiny jumped off the bed, ran to the open door, and knocked on it. “I knocked. Now do I gets to watch
you make your hair do points? Can I, can I, can I?”

“Destiny! What did I tell you?” Archie appeared in the doorway. He shook his head at Jake. “You might as well get up. I could take him away, but he’ll come back. Believe me, you’re better off getting up now. And here’s somebody who followed him over.” Winston came into the room, jumped heavily up onto Jake’s bed, and licked him on the nose.

“Okay! Okay! I give up.” The prospect of life at Juvenile Hall was beginning to seem tempting.

Jake took a shower, listening to what seemed like two hundred repetitions of “
Frère Jacques,
” which could be heard even over the sound of the water running. He got dressed and then let Destiny sit on the edge of the tub while he gelled and combed his hair into its all-over porcupine points. It was somehow a lot harder to do with somebody watching. Winston lay on the damp bath mat, his nose between his paws, his eyes focused on Jake as if the jar of gel were something to eat.

Archie stuck his head in to tell them he was off to jog and do his morning Tai Chi. “You can have breakfast here if you like—there’s cereal. Or go up to the main house and see what’s there, if anything. Somebody else is bound to be up in a couple of hours.”

Destiny begged Jake to gel and spike his hair, too, but Jake had no intention of becoming a hairdresser for a four-year-old. He told Destiny that, even with the gel, only teenage hair would stay up in points.
“Little-kid hair won’t do that.”

When Jake had finished his hair, Lucille still didn’t seem to be up. Jake wasn’t used to being up, dressed, and ready for the day at this hour. He told Destiny to go back to the main house and take Winston with him, but that was like telling a tidal wave to turn around and go back out to sea. So he went into the kitchen and looked through the cupboards till he found a box of Cheerios and two bowls. “You can eat with me,” he told Destiny, who was singing “Pop Goes the Weasel” now, “but after that, you have to go up to the house and get dressed. You don’t want to spend the day in pajamas.”

Destiny stopped singing long enough to say that he could spend the day in pajamas if he wanted to and sometimes he did.

Jake sighed. It wouldn’t be possible for Destiny to grow up to be a delinquent—there didn’t seem to be any rules for him to break.

The only milk in the refrigerator was in a canning jar. He poured it on both bowls of Cheerios. When he put the first spoonful into his mouth, he spit it right back into his spoon. “What’s the matter with this milk?” he said.

Destiny, chewing a mouthful perfectly cheerfully, shrugged. “It’s from the goatses,” he said when he’d swallowed.

Jake’s Cheerios went to Winston.

I
n the schoolroom E.D. was getting ready for the day’s work. She was going to start the Teaching Opportunities part of the Butterfly Project because it would give Jake something to do that didn’t involve any interaction with living creatures. If he didn’t want to cooperate, it wouldn’t be her fault. She’d brought a gallon jug of water, a bucket, a box of wheat paste, and a stack of newspapers to tear. She was going to make a papier-mâché caterpillar and chrysalis to teach Destiny about metamorphosis.

Jake, his earphones pushed back on his head, was slouched at his desk now with Winston at his feet, doing his best to fend off Destiny’s eternal questions. “What kinda stuff did you puts on your hair to make it red? Paint? How come you did red? Could you make it green instead? Could you make it blue or purple or silver?” E.D. remembered a nature documentary she’d seen where a male lion was being tormented by a cub who bit his tail and pounced on his back and chewed on his ears. Eventually the lion had swatted the cub with one huge paw and sent it tumbling. She hoped her father, who was the teacher on call today, would get here before Jake got fed up enough with Destiny to do any swatting. Her father was late. It was already almost nine-thirty.

She was just pouring the water into the bucket when Randolph appeared in the schoolroom doorway in pajamas and slippers, his hair disheveled and his eyes screwed up against the daylight. “Awful night,” he said. “Didn’t get a wink of sleep.” He peered at Jake. “We’re supposed to be keeping an eye on you till you get adjusted, but you’re just going to have to work on your own today. You do have something you can do, right?”

Jake shrugged.

“Good. Good. Excellent.” Randolph reached over and grabbed the earphones off Jake’s head. Jake swore as Randolph pulled the wire loose from his
Walkman, but Randolph paid no attention. “These things’ll make you deaf by the time you’re twenty.”

Randolph put the earphones around his neck and then rubbed his face with both hands as he turned to E.D. “The audition was a disaster. A raging disaster! You’d be amazed at how many stage mothers there are in a town the size of Traybridge. Unfortunately none of their kids has a shred of talent. And the adults! I’m not insisting on a Julie Andrews or a Mary Martin, but it would be nice to have one or two people who can sing
and
act, preferably at the same time. I’ll be on the phone all day, calling everyone who’s ever directed a musical in this state, trying to locate some—within driving distance, if possible. Thanks to Cordelia, I have to find a dance person, too. I gave her an opportunity to participate in what could be the best piece of musical theater ever produced in this county, and she turned me down cold. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful child!”

He started away and then turned back. “Where’s that wretched little road menace who destroyed my car? And why hasn’t the tow truck come to drag away that piece of junk he was driving? It looks like someone’s had a demolition derby in our front yard.”

“He’s in Dogwood Cottage,” E.D. said. “Grandpa said he could deal with his car today.”

“He’d better have himself a first-rate lawyer if he
wants to get out of this with a penny in his pocket.” He left, muttering under his breath about reckless driving. E.D. was starting to stir the wheat paste into the water when he put his head back through the doorway. “If you
really
need anything this morning, you can come and get me. If you
really
need it.” He blinked at Jake once or twice. “Independence. That’s what the Creative Academy is all about. Independence! Remember that.” Then he was gone.

“I’ll bet you never went to a school before where the teachers were too busy to hang out in the classroom with the students,” E.D. said to Jake.

“He stole my earphones!” Jake said. “He can’t do that.”

“He already did.” She turned to Destiny, who was talking about hair colors again. If no adult was going to protect the cub from the lion, she’d have to. “Destiny, you go find today’s newspaper and bring it to me, and I’ll set you up with your fingerpaints when you get back.”

Destiny went off humming to himself, and E.D. handed Jake her curriculum notebook. “I don’t see how you’re going to catch up with any of this, but if you aren’t planning to go to Juvenile Hall, you might as well do something.
Butterflies of the Carolinas
is over there on the computer desk. And there are a couple of butterfly websites you can check out.”

Jake set the notebook on his desk. “I can catch up
whenever I feel like it. I never got expelled for being
dumb
.”

“That depends on how smart you think it was to land yourself here.” She tossed him some newspapers. “If you don’t want to read about butterflies, you can tear strips.”

“Tear strips?”

“Newspaper strips.” She explained about the papier-mâché caterpillar, about Teaching Opportunities.

“What kind of caterpillar is it supposed to be?” He looked at the chart on the wall. “Better make it a great spangled fritillary, since you haven’t caught one.”

“The caterpillar I’m making is a monarch,” she said stiffly. “It has the prettiest chrysalis. But I
will
catch a fritillary.”

“Pretty sure of yourself.”

“I’ll catch one!”

When Destiny brought back the paper, E.D. spread it on the floor in the corner of the room and set him up with some huge pieces of shiny white paper, a bowl of water, and a box of fingerpaints. Before she let him start, she buttoned a paint-smeared man’s shirt onto him backward so that it hung like a dress from his chin to his ankles. He settled happily and began to work, smearing not only the paper, but the shirt and sometimes his face with color. As he painted, he talked steadily to himself, to the paint, to the paper. When he wasn’t talking, he was repeating nonsense
syllables over and over again, in a sort of singsong chant. “You get used to it,” E.D. told Jake. “After a while you won’t notice him anymore—like the sound of a refrigerator turning on and off.”

Jake, still slouched, began tearing strips of paper, and E.D. started to work on the caterpillar. By the time she was finished, Jake was reading
Butterflies of the Carolinas
. She wiped her hands on a rag and told him she would take the caterpillar out in the sun to dry. “Then I’m going to go catch a fritillary.” Destiny was earnestly telling himself about the big orange tiger he was about to paint in the green, green jungle. “You can keep an eye on Destiny.”

She took Jake’s lack of response as agreement, grabbed the butterfly net, and left. There were no fritillaries in the meadow. There were only a couple of summer azures and an orange sulphur. It couldn’t be getting too late in the season. It was only past the middle of September. She could feel her stomach getting more and more knotted as she pushed her way through the shoulder-high stalks of goldenrod. What if she
didn’t
find a fritillary? She hated the idea of leaving a space in the Butterfly Project without a check mark. Worse, she’d told Jake she would catch a fritillary. She absolutely
had
to!

She was just about to give up when an orange-and-beige butterfly of the right size flew out from behind a tulip tree at the edge of the meadow. It landed on a
spray of goldenrod, its wings closed so that she couldn’t see the markings. She crept closer, the net ready in her hand. As she was about to sweep the net to catch it, the butterfly opened its wings and fluttered away. E.D. bit her lip to keep from crying with disappointment. The markings were soft and brown, not black. It was a fritillary all right, but not a great spangled. Three different times she’d caught a variegated fritillary. She knew the difference by this time. Sweaty and furious, she stayed out awhile longer, but finally had to head back. She didn’t want to leave Destiny with Jake for too long.

As she got close to the house, she saw Jake coming from the direction of the dance studio. Winston was waddling along with him. Destiny wasn’t with them. Beneath the sound of hammering that came from Hal’s room, she could just make out the music for Cordelia’s ballet. Jake must have been watching her again.

“You were supposed to be keeping an eye on Destiny,” she told him as he joined her.

“Independence,” he said. “That’s what the Creative Academy is all about!”

“Destiny’s only four!”

“A pretty independent four if you ask me. I told him I didn’t think he was independent enough to finish the painting he was working on all by himself. He said he could prove he was. So I let him.”

“It’s never a good idea to leave Destiny alone.”

“Didn’t get your fritillary, huh?” He was smirking at her.

“I’ll get it!” she said.

When they got to the schoolroom, Destiny greeted them at the door. “Look at me! Look at me!” His hair, slathered with wheat paste, stood up in clumps and tufts all over his head. “See, Jake? Little-kid hair does so too stand up in points. When it’s all dry, I’m gonna paint it purple! Or green. I like green. Do you like green?”