The Steps (2 page)

Two years had passed without me there to crack the secret family code that would have developed among Jack, Penny, Lucy, Angus, and Beatrice. I wondered if Lucy had figured out that on cold nights Jack loved to drink real hot chocolate not made from a mix, or that when he performed a bad set and the audience never laughed, that afterward, to cheer up, he liked to eat peanut M&Ms and watch Nick at Nite shows like
The Odd Couple
and
Bewitched,
but never
ever I Love Lucy.

How I was going to figure out their secret family language and still manage to steal Jack back, I really, truly did not know. That's right, I, Annabel Whoopi Schubert, middle-namesake of Whoopi Goldberg, seventh-grade class president at the Progress School on the Upper West Side, future fashion designer whose clothes will one day be featured in every important fashion mag in the whole wide world, did not know how to win my dad back.

The first thing I noticed about the Steps was that they called Jack “Dad.”

I had been on planes from New York to Sydney for practically twenty-four hours, and I was tired and totally disoriented by the time the plane landed in Sydney. Then I had to stand around and make small talk with my “chaperone”—the flight attendant who kept calling herself an “air hostess.” What was up with that, anyway? Just because she was Australian, now she was an “air hostess” instead of a regular American flight attendant? While she stood with me in the passport and luggage lines, I imagined her twirling around in blue-sky space serving red cocktails with green olives. As we waited the air hostess jabbered on and on about how much I was going to love Sydney, Australia. A lot that air hostess knew.

By the time I made it out to the passenger meeting area, all I wanted was to see Jack and for him to carry me home.

“There she is, Dad!” a voice screamed when I emerged from customs.
Dad?

I identified the pointy finger attached to the rosy, blond face as the Lucy whose pictures I had been inspecting on the plane. The curly-headed boy who came up to Lucy's waist was jumping up and down too. “That's Annabel, that's Annabel!” It seemed like everyone at the airport was staring at me, and they were all smiling at us like,
Oh, how cute are they.
The flight attendant/air hostess was grinning, all wide eyed and white teeth, like,
Awww. Oy vey,
as Bubbe would say! I was so embarrassed, I wanted the Steps to shut up before I'd even met them. Their unwelcome enthusiasm was causing a very uncool scene. And I couldn't jump into Jack's arms, as I'd been waiting to do the whole plane ride. He had baby Beatrice attached to his chest in a Snugli.

“What's that scowl all about, Anna-the-Belle?” Jack asked when I made it to them. His voice seemed deeper than I remembered. Hearing it live and in person, not a zillion miles away by phone, sounded so good. One nice thing, even if he couldn't lift me into his arms (maybe I'm a little too big anyway), he was grinning from ear to ear, and he leaned down to kiss my face again and again and again. It's so nice when people are happy to see you.

Except when those people are the Steps.

I could barely kiss my dad before Lucy jumped over and—you're not going to believe this—hugged me! I was like,
Hello, I don't even know you, why are you hugging me,
but I didn't say anything. I was kind of shocked.

“I have been counting the days until you came! I've always wanted a sister my own age!” she squealed. My shocked head was squeezed against hers in that unwelcome hug. I noticed even more airport people watching us, smiling all kindly, like we were in some soda commercial and a band was playing music and we would all start to dance around in the luggage carts, swigging 7UP like one big, happy family.

Not.

“Me, too!” Angus shrieked. He wrapped his arms around my thigh. I was wearing extra-chic designer jeans that Bubbe had given me for my birthday, and I was not happy to have a five-year-old slobbering on them.

The Steps spoke in the weirdest accent, like if you had a science experiment and mixed together a British Tinkerbell fairy with a chef from Louisiana, then the way the Australian Steps spoke would be the result.

“Some folks here have been very excited to see you, Anna-the-Belle,” Jack said. “Her, too.” Beatrice was sleeping against his chest, and she had the longest eyelashes you ever saw and puffy red cheeks and soft black hair like an angel. She did not look anything like me or Jack, and she did not smell like an angel.

“Dad, Beatrice needs a nappy change,” Lucy said. She tried to lock her hand in mine, but I shook her off.

Dad?
See what I mean about a secret understanding developing between Jack and the Steps in the two years since he'd been gone, a language that did not include me? Jack had told me a long time ago that Lucy and Angus's real father, Lachlan, had died in a car accident one month before Angus was born. He said things were really bad for Penny, Lucy, and Angus for a long time after that, but now they were better, much better.

“A nappy?” I said.

“That's a diaper,” Jack said. “In Australia diapers are called nappies.” I latched on to his hand.

I was pretty annoyed about the Steps, but I couldn't help but giggle at their strange choice of words.

I was too tired to talk, really, but it didn't matter. The Steps blabbered on and on as we walked out to the car. Lucy wanted to take me to some place called Darling Harbor, and Angus wanted me to see the giant clown face at a place called Luna Park. On and on and on they jabbered. I thought,
You people talk faster than New Yorkers, and even I didn't think that was possible.

Jack looked different. The Jack I remembered from New York seemed like he was always staring at the sky, wondering what to do next. The Australia Jack walking us to the car looked taller, broader, more confident. Like he had found his place in the world.

Without me.

You would not believe how warm it was as we walked from the airport to the car. I knew it was December. Charlie Brown, Rudolph, and Kris Kringle had already proved that on my television the last few weeks in Manhattan. Yet as I stepped outside the airport, the day after Christmas, the weather was balmy and warm, almost tropical.

“The weather feels like July, Jack,” I said, suspicious. I held on to his belt straps, not letting go of him even when he was trying to put Beatrice into the car seat.

“I told you, that's because in the Southern Hemisphere the seasons are the opposite of those in America. You didn't believe me when I wrote you about that, did you, Annabel?” I let out my first and only laugh of the day right then. Jack, besides Angelina and Bubbe, knows me better than anybody. He knew that I didn't think it was actually possible to be in a place that felt like summer when I could see Christmas lights twinkling everywhere, even if he had promised it to be so. I needed to experience it to believe it.

Tilted weather for the hemisphere tilt. I took off my down vest and believed.
Tilted country,
I thought.

They drive on the left side of the road in Australia. How weird is that! I was sitting in what in America would be the driver's side of the car, and when I looked out the window at the freeway on the way home from the airport, the oncoming stream of traffic was on the right side of my vision. I screamed! For a second I thought all those cars were driving on the wrong side of the road and we were about to hit them. My scream started a chain reaction.

Beatrice, Angus, and Lucy were riding in the backseat. After I screamed, Beatrice woke up from her little snooze and started howling herself. Then Angus started whining about all the noise Beatrice was making, which made Lucy yell at him to shut up.

For a second I felt at home, like I was riding in a cab in Manhattan, only instead of honking horns and screeching brakes and yelling drivers, it was screaming children. It was chaos. That was fine with me.

Only the thing was, Jack didn't seem annoyed by all the noise—and he used to hate cab rides in Manhattan more than anybody I've ever known, said they were wild and scary. No, Jack was smiling to himself, like he was thinking:
This is right, this is how it should be.

The view from my window changed as we exited off the freeway, and I was distracted from the backseat noise. All these famous places I'd seen on TV, like the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, were suddenly passing right in front of my window. I wondered how Lucy would feel if she ever got to see the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. I doubted she was cool enough to ever visit Manhattan, though. I was sure of it.

I can't say I was any more impressed with Penny than I was with the Steps. When we arrived home, Penny was standing on the porch of their cottage. (Cottage! Who ever heard of living in a cottage when you're in the city? Cities are supposed to have apartment buildings, not little cottage houses.) Penny was biting her fingernails. I looked down at my own gold glitter-painted fingernails, which Angelina had painted before I left for Australia. Angelina never bit her nails.

As Jack helped Beatrice and the Steps out of the car I stayed seated, inspecting Penny from the car window. She was small but muscular, and she wore all black, so at least I could relate to her clothing. She had black hair cut really short, and she wore these—I hated to give her credit—most excellent black leather calf-length riding boots over her black leggings. She was pretty-okay, not pretty-beautiful like Angelina, but sort of spooky and attractive in a plain kind of way. As she walked toward the car she looked more nervous than I felt.

For a second I was scared. What if she hated me as much as I hated her and the Steps for taking Jack away? It had never occurred to me that she could possibly do anything other than adore me, since I had known Jack the longest and of course he loved me best. But when I saw her biting her nails and taking cautious steps toward me, I realized she was just as scared as I was. Maybe she was scared I would take Jack back home with me.

That thought gave me courage.
She should be scared,
I thought, to even the score. She and her Dad-calling children had taken away my Jack. I needed to remember that so I could not fall under the spell of her thrift-store-chic look.

“Welcome, Annabel,” she said when I got out of the car. I looked down and scrunched my shoulders so she would not try to hug me. Her accent was soft and pretty; she didn't sound anything like Crocodile Dundee. “I've heard so many great things about you. We're so happy you're here.” She pronounced “great” like “graayate.”

I thought,
I see your bitten-down fingernails. I know you're not thrilled to have me here.
I mumbled, “Thanks,” and to myself I thought,
I am not going to like you, but I have to admit those are killer boots you are wearing.

So I had barely been in Australia a few hours, and already I was teed off that Lucy and Angus were calling Jack “Dad” (I don't even call him that, and I'm his real daughter), that Penny wasn't ugly and horrible, and the fact that I was stranded halfway around the world from Manhattan, U.S. of A., when Jack made it worse that first night.

He prepared chicken cacciatore, my former favorite food, for dinner.

Obviously, Jack had forgotten the E-mail I sent him where I explained about the seventh-grade class elections at the Progress School, which had resulted in my becoming a vegetarian.

The seventh-grade class at the Progress School has twenty-three kids: ten girls and thirteen boys. Of those twenty-three, eight kids are vegetarian, two are totally vegan (Wheaties, of course, is one of those kids—I think he does it just to annoy his dad), three are strictly kosher, five are lactose intolerant, and one eats only macrobiotic foods. I know because I polled the class and created a very superior pie-chart graph showing our food habits for a social studies project.

In order for me to win that election as class president, I needed what Justine, who nominated me, called a “gimmick.” My rival for the election was Brittany Carlson, whose father is, like, the most powerful lawyer in Manhattan. Bubbe used to say she wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of him if, God forbid, Angelina ever got a divorce—then Bubbe would mumble, “And God forbid my daughter should get married already in order to have a divorce.” Brittany's dad—I'm so not kidding—funded her campaign with candy-filled plastic pumpkins that had Brittany's picture plastered all over them, which Brittany conveniently placed on our cafeteria tables!

Brittany is basically pukefying. She has big blue eyes and long, honey-colored hair, which she is constantly brushing with this fancy wood brush that has a holographic sticker of that Rachel girl from
Friends
on the handle. Aside from the unfortunate fact that she is a very pretty girl who's never read a book that wasn't about some popular cheerleader fighting back from a terrible disease, Brittany is the worst person to have as a study partner or member of your group project because she is totally not school smart and can't pay attention longer than it takes to brush her hair until it shimmers. What Brittany had going for her in the election was one very important factoid: Brittany was going steady with the most popular boy in the eighth grade, Bradley Duff—or Brad Dufus the Third, as Justine and I and our other best friends, Keisha and Gloria, call him. Brad Dufus the Third, who could intimidate the thirteen boys in our seventh-grade class with one strong-armed throw of a football, and who made the remaining girls in our class (besides me, Justine, Gloria, and Keisha, who know better) just swoon with “OhMyGod's.” And the very fact that Brittany was the only person in our class to have an acknowledged boyfriend—who sat with her at lunch and played with her hair (when she wasn't brushing it), who walked her home from school—well, that was a very big obstacle of awe for me to overcome among the voting public, despite my admirable wardrobe and excellent report card.