The Opposite Of Tidy (30 page)

First, Junie showed him the basement. Not because she wanted to, particularly, but because she was nervous to take him to her room and be alone with him. She might have been a smart girl, and her father might have trusted her decision-making process, but Junie wasn’t sure that she trusted herself. They passed the phone on the way to the stairs, and Junie wondered if she could sneak a few minutes alone in the bathroom to call Tabitha. Maybe later. She left the phone where it was and opened the door to the basement.

The smell hit them in the face like an angry apparition. “Whoa.” Wade scrunched his nose. “What happened down there?”

Junie told him, trying to laugh it off. But Wade wasn’t laughing.

“You think it’s okay to go down there without hazmat
suits?” Junie laughed again, nervous. He wasn’t joking. though. “Seriously, Junie. I don’t want you to get sick. Or me.”

“Well, I was down there for the better part of a day, shovelling out crap and trashing shit-soaked junk. I’m not sick.” She knew she sounded defensive, but she couldn’t help it. This was the most embarrassing part of it all. Her basement, the sewer. That was why she wanted to get this part over with. Start with the worst, and it could only get easier after that, right?

She turned on the light and went down the stairs ahead of him. It was not the basement of a few days ago. This was clearly where most of the cleanup work had been done so far.

“It looks amazing!” Junie surveyed the big open room. Before, it had been packed up to the ceiling with garbage and junk and broken furniture that her mother had collected from alleys with every intention of repairing and selling it to make a little money. All the broken chairs and tables had been taken away, along with what must have been masses and masses of garbage that had been festering down there for years. She could even see the floor in a few places. The junk left was only about chest-high now. It was the worst of it, sure, as it had been rotting under the rest forever, but this was progress. Real, genuine progress. Junie’s eyes brimmed with tears. “It looks so great.”

“Junie?” Wade held her shoulders and turned her so he could see her face. “You’re being serious?”

Junie nodded. “You can’t even imagine what it looked like down here before. There’s no way I can even begin
to describe it. There just aren’t enough different words in the English language for ‘garbage.’ This is a huge improvement. It hasn’t looked this good for years.” Junie stepped onto the carpet, blackened with dirt and neglect and mould and shit and damp. It squelched underfoot. They’d started to pull up the carpet nearest the bathroom, revealing the concrete below. “I can’t even imagine how hard this was for my mom.” She shook her head, marvelling. “I’m surprised she isn’t hospitalized. Or drugged.” Junie laughed. “Then again, maybe Kendra’s clinical psychiatrist guy comes with a stocked pharmacy.”

“Tranquillizers,” Wade said. He hadn’t stepped off the stairs. “A beautiful thing.” He was trying to be funny. Junie could tell by his tone. But he just sounded weird. Junie knew why.

“You think this is gross.”

Wade said nothing. He held her glance, and then slowly nodded. “It’s a lot to take in, let’s put it that way.”

“It’s okay, Wade. It is gross.”

“Okay. Yeah, kinda gross, to be honest. Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Junie continued. “Of course I know that. But it’s an improvement. I almost wish that you’d seen it before, so you’d know how much better this is.”

Wade leaned against the stair rail and gave her a sad little smile. “But you didn’t give me the chance. Remember?”

“Yeah. I remember. And I’m sorry. But if you think this is gross, can you imagine how you would’ve reacted seeing it before?” Junie wanted out of there all of a sudden.
She shouldn’t have brought him down there. Not even Tabitha had been down there for years and years. It was a mistake. “I’m sorry.” She spun, and was happy to find that they’d cleared a path to the basement door that led outside, to the steps that climbed up to the back yard. It had been blocked by a heap of broken furniture for as long as Junie could remember. They’d probably been using it to cart out the overwhelming quantities of trash. The door was warped from the damp rot that pervaded the basement, and sticky after not being opened for so long, but it gave after she yanked hard.

Junie stumbled up the concrete steps, gulping in the fresh night air. Wade followed her. She’d thought he would, but still, she wasn’t sure she wanted him to. Being this honest . . . showing him how bad her house was . . . it was too raw. Too real. It hurt her heart in a way that felt dangerous. Like she was ruining herself. Forever. Like she was betraying the carefully spun web of lies that had served her so well for so many years. Like she was losing herself to the truth. Like she was losing herself, period.

“I hate this.” She collapsed onto the damp grass, feeling the cool wetness seep through her clothes. It felt good, to feel something real and earthy instead of the nebulous muddle inside her head. “I hate all of this mess.”

Wade sat on the grass beside her. “I can see why.”

“Can you?” Junie didn’t turn to him when she said it. She stared up at the sky. It was a clear night, but she couldn’t see many stars with the city lights sharing the dark. She kept staring up, hoping the night sky might unzip and invite her in. Dark, cool refuge. She’d stay up there
until this was all over, watched over by the constellations.
Delphina, Orion, Perseus
.

“I can.” Wade lay back too. He put one arm under his head, and slipped the other under Junie’s.

Junie felt almost warm with him near her. He radiated heat. She turned toward him. From the crook in his arm, she could see the angle of his jawbone. She reached up a finger and traced it, stopping at his chin. He lifted his head so he could see her.

“Thanks,” she said. “For letting me explain.”

Wade nodded, silent for a moment. “You know, when I saw Royce on the couch and thought he was dead . . .” Another long pause. “When my first instinct was to film him. It made me think of your mom.”

“Yeah?” Junie barely whispered. “How come?”

“The way that she’s just letting them in. To film everything. So raw, you know? Like being naked in front of the whole world. I don’t know if that’s okay.”

“Because it’s a talk show?” Junie worked hard to keep the defensiveness out of her voice. “Because, other than that, how is it different from your documentaries?”

“I know, right?” More silence. “I would film this.” He sat up and gestured at the house. “I would film all of it, if it were for a documentary. I don’t know how it’s different.” It was dark, but not so much that Junie couldn’t see him shrug. “I’m trying to figure that out. I just wanted to tell you that. That I get that it’s not all black-and-white.”

“I wish it were. I wish I could just wave a magic wand and all of a sudden my mom and I would be living in a
different house. A perfect house. That’s how I’d like to deal with it.”

The two of them lay back down for a while and watched the stars until they both got a chill. “Well, the magic wand didn’t work,” Junie finally said. “Come back inside the horror with me?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll show you my room.”

He squeezed her hand. “I thought you’d decided it was off limits or something.”

She’d already told him that her room was the tidiest space in the house, along with the upstairs bathroom. She’d told him so that he wouldn’t think she chose to live like this. She’d told him so that he would know that she was different from her mother. To prove that she was neat. Orderly. Organized. Of course he wanted to see it. But there was something behind that request. An urgency that Junie could relate to. There was a bed. They were alone. There was a natural progression of events ahead, and Junie wasn’t sure she knew how to handle herself.

“Not off limits, no. But I have to call Tabitha first. Super-quick. Then I’ll show you. Okay?”

“Okay.” He grinned at her. “You can tell her that I will be the perfect gentleman. Tell her not to worry.”

Junie left him outside and hurried in to find the phone. When Tabitha answered, Junie rushed an explanation of what had happened at her father’s, and afterwards.

“So let me get this straight,” Tabitha said. “You and
Wade are alone at your house, and your dad thinks you’re staying with your mom, and your mom thinks you’re staying with your dad, and Wade’s brother doesn’t care where he stays.”

“I never said that,” Junie said. “He might have a curfew. I don’t know.”

“Just . . .” Junie could hear the anxiety in Tabitha’s voice. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”

“Meaning, don’t have sex.”

“Exactly.”

Junie sucked in a loud breath. “Really?”

“Junie!” Tabitha yelled. “Do I have to come over there? I can bring a deck of cards. We could play cribbage. How about that? Sound good?”

“No.”

“Then don’t be stupid. Or I will come over there. Armed with my Hello Kitty cards and popcorn. It could be fun.”

“I’ll be good?”

“You’ll be good!”

“I’ll be good.”

“Good.” Tabitha sighed. “Because you know I hate playing card games.”

Junie said goodbye and hung up the phone. She stared at it for a moment, as if it might ring and the voice on the other end would tell her what was coming next.

Junie went back outside to find Wade on the back step, still gazing up at the sky.

“You talked to Tabitha?”

Junie nodded.

“Is she coming over to chaperone?” He stood up and took her by the hand. “Not that I want her to, but I’d understand if she was.”

“She threatened to.” Junie’s heart raced. “Do you play cribbage?”

“The card game? No. Why? You’re going to teach me?”

“Maybe. Come on. Let’s go inside.”

She led him upstairs to her room. “See?” she said as she pushed open her door. “My oasis.”

“That’s not surprising.” Wade slung a damp arm across her shoulders. “Even your handwriting is neat.” They stood there side by side for a few awkward moments until Wade finally dropped his arm and went ahead into the room, plopping down on the edge of the bed. “I promise I won’t bite, Junie. Seriously.”

Junie took a tentative step into the room. No guy had ever been in there. Other than her dad, and that didn’t count. Really, no one had ever been in there, besides Tabitha and Junie’s parents and her grandma. And that one time that Mrs. D. came in. Other than that, no one had ever set foot in there. It was bizarre that she had a boy in there, and no one was home to stop her.

Junie reached to plug in the fairy lights she’d strung after getting the idea from her room at Evelyn’s. She switched off the overhead, so that the tiny punches of glow dangling around the room were the only light. Junie sat beside him on the bed, not touching him. If she did touch him, she wasn’t sure where she would stop.

He reached for her hand, and they sat there like that for a very long, awkward moment. Eventually, he fell back, still holding her hand. “Coming?”

Junie laid back too, staring at the fairy lights, her heart pounding. She changed her mind and sat back up. He did too.

“Want to play cards?” He laughed, a short laugh that Junie had never heard before. So he was nervous too. That made everything seem a lot easier.

“Seriously, you could teach me to play crib.” He brushed her bangs off her face and kissed her. Junie felt as if all the bones in her body had melted, leaving her a floppy, spineless soup of person.

“I hate crib.”

He kissed her again. “Me too.” And again.

“Wait.” She put a hand on either side of his face and held him away as he leaned in one more time. “Wait.” But she didn’t know what to say after that.

“For?”

For what? Junie searched her brain for the next thing to say and came up empty. She was all feeling, and all of it was in her stomach, and lower. She’d lost her brain somewhere on the back lawn. She put her hands to her own head, willing her thoughts to pull together. “Don’t you have to get home? It’s a school night.”

“I don’t have to go anywhere.”

So much for that.

“I’ve got to get out of these wet clothes. And so do you.” As soon as she’d said it, Junie realized how it sounded. “I don’t mean that we—”