The Steps (6 page)

Like Angus. Who knew that he could be so fun at museums? At the modern-art museum he stood in front of the paintings and sculptures, rubbing his chin with his hand, like he was a professor stroking his beard and thinking up some totally smart thing to say. And when I laughed at him, he giggled too and impulsively hugged my leg. “I like you, Annabel,” he said. I think he meant like-like, too! I never heard of anyone having their first crush on their step, but all righty then, Angusfreak. At the aquarium at Darling Harbour (his favorite place) he knew everything about every last moving creature in water. I never knew a five-year-old could know so many facts. He'd be great to have around in biology class. Most fun was watching Angus stare intently at the different fish species and then try to imitate the way they swam or the way their faces looked. Even Lucy was giggling, and Angus probably annoys her the most of anybody.

Lucy had her moments too. At the Strand Arcade—which is this gorgeous shopping mall, but not like a mall in America, because it is a building of two narrow stories with gilt trim and crystal lights everywhere and small boutiques selling the coolest clothes and jewelry—Lucy grabbed my hand and dragged me into a sewing shop. The tiny shop was covered wall-to-wall with beautiful fabrics and laces and braided trim. Lucy went right to the drawers of sewing patterns. “Let's choose one!” she said.

“But why?” I said.

“So we can make something together,” she said, like of course I should have known that.

“But I don't know how to sew,” I said.

Her baby blue eyes were wide with shock. “But I thought you said you wanted to be a fashion designer.”

“I do.”

“And you don't know how to sew?” Lucy said it like I was some kind of idiot.

“No.” It had never occurred to me even to try. I just liked to draw designs; shop, shop, shop; pick outfits for Angelina, Justine, Gloria, and Keisha; and look at the pictures in
Vogue
and
W
magazines like those magazines were the Bible. “You know how to sew?” I asked her. I said it like it was no big deal.

“Of course,” she said.
Of course.
That was such a stuck-up answer, I thought. “My Granny Nell taught me. We were going to work on a special party dress for me this holiday. Until you had to come.”

Her eyes stared right into mine, accusing. I guess I felt a little bad that she thought that, even though I knew it wasn't my fault she wasn't visiting her grandmother, so I said, “Maybe you could teach me how to sew?”

Her face turned bright pink happy. “That would be so fun!” she said. The thing about Lucy was, all I had to do was be a little nice to her to make her so happy. And considering that she had had a miserable first year in Sydney, that she couldn't see her Granny Nell, and that she was pretty funny every night when she brushed her teeth and sang “Spice Up Your Life,” her mouth filled with toothpaste and her eyes laughing, shaking her hips and gurgling, “Shake it to the left! Spice up your life!” so that she almost made me like the Spice Girls again, I figured I could do this favor for her and let her teach me to sew.

One day we drove over to Bondi Beach (pronounced “Bond-eye”). I couldn't believe it, but Lucy knew how to surf, too. Even Justine, who can rollerblade across Central Park faster than anyone you ever saw and who can do cartwheels all up and down Fifth Avenue, cannot surf.

The beach was beautiful, with tons of kids hanging around, wearing the most excellent surf clothes and bathing suits I've ever seen. The only beach I'd ever been to before was in Miami with Bubbe, but that was pretty boring. Mostly Bubbe sunned herself on a beach chair, drinking cocktails and smoking and talking to other old people, and I would end up floating in the water on a raft and counting the minutes until we went back to New York. But Bondi Beach! It was swarming with kids and music and fun. And I couldn't believe I could be enjoying such incredible weather at the end of December.

“Who taught you how to surf?” I asked Lucy as we sunbathed on the beach by ourselves. Jack, Penny, Angus, and Beatrice had gone for a walk to get ice creams.

“My dad. My real dad,” Lucy said. She was wearing sunglasses, so I couldn't tell whether talking about her real dad was going to make her cry. There was a girl in my third-grade class whose mother had died of cancer. The girl used to cry a lot, and she hardly talked to anyone ever, until finally her dad took her out of school and home-schooled her until she could get better. I knew that even though I was mad about Jack's moving to Australia, I was still lucky to have a dad.

“Do you remember your real dad?” I asked Lucy. I guess we must have been getting comfortable with each other, because I didn't feel weird about asking, and she didn't seem to feel too weird about answering.

“Totally,” she said. “He wasn't funny like your dad, or tall, and he was older. He was very kind and sweet. We read fairy books together every night. He taught me how to surf. He loved the ocean. I think Angus gets that from him. Except Angus never knew our dad. But he looks just like him.”

“Do you miss him?”

She took her sunglasses off and locked her eyes with mine. “Of course,” she said. That
of course
again, except this
of course
wasn't stuck up. It was sad and painful. I understood that, like me, the day didn't go by that she didn't think about and miss her dad. I guess I minded a little less that she had borrowed Jack for a while. Lucy and Angus needed some Jack too.

We were almost cozy, me and the Steps. For like a day.

It was New Year's Eve day, and we were all going to stay at home. Penny and Jack needed a quiet day after all the running around of the past few days.

Jack had dug into the garage (or car port, as they call it in Australia) and found Lucy's grandmother's sewing machine in a box that hadn't been unpacked yet. It didn't even take him too long to find the box. He had everything in the garage categorized, labeled, and organized by size and weight. This was not the Jack I remembered when he lived with Angelina and me. That Jack was confused a lot of the time, disorganized, and miserable from fighting with Angelina. The Australia Jack was not incompetent, as Angelina and Bubbe said. This Jack could cook using metric measurements, he could drive on the left side of the road, he could soothe a screaming baby. And when Lucy saw that sewing machine sitting on her desk in her room, Jack was her hero.

“I'm so glad you're becoming friends with Lucy,” Jack said to me privately. “She's had a tough time since we moved from Melbourne.” I raised my eyebrows at him. Who said we were becoming friends? Lucy and I were more like schoolmates from different cliques who had no choice about working on a history project together. I had only gotten to the point where I could barely tolerate her. That was all.

Lucy set up the sewing machine on the desk in her room. Yes, the desk was plastered with sappy smiley faces and flowers, but it was a nice desk otherwise, painted a really cool yellow color with white trim. “My real dad made this desk,” Lucy told me. She opened a desk drawer and showed me some Barbie clothes her Granny Nell had helped her make years earlier on the same sewing machine, at the same desk.

I had been staying in her room for a week, but I never felt like it was a room we shared. It was so totally her space, her things. And I was very into brown and gray that season and would never decorate my room in colors like yellow and pink.

“Wouldn't it be neat if I could have bunk beds and we could share this room?” Lucy asked. We were both standing over Beatrice and cooing at her. The baby was asleep on Lucy's bed. Penny and Jack were taking a nap with Angus. They had let Lucy and me baby-sit Beatrice all by ourselves. “And then when Beatrice is older, we could add another bed for her. And we'd all be, like, sisters in the same room.”

I may have steps and a half sister, but I will always consider myself an only child. And only children never share rooms.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked Lucy.

She whispered in my ear, “I liked this boy when I first came to Sydney. He was in my class. He was from America. His name was Bo. He was from a place called Atlanta. Everybody made fun of him, too. But then his family moved back to the States last July. He sends me E-mail sometimes!”

“You don't have to whisper in my ear,” I said. “No one's around.”

Lucy giggled and blushed. She pulled a picture out of her desk drawer of a geeky-looking boy wearing an Atlanta Braves T-shirt and a goofy, sweet grin. “I know,” she said shyly. “Is there any boy you like?”

“All the cute boys from my school graduated into ninth grade. I like high school boys.” It was true. There were no boys in my class or the eighth-grade class even close to dreamy. They were all either scrawny and peculiar, like Wheaties, or lost to their PlayStations. It was so distressing. I couldn't wait for high school.

Lucy really knew what she was doing with that sewing machine. After measuring a sleeping Beatrice, she cut a piece of plain blue cotton fabric and sewed together the body of a simple dress for Beatrice.

“Next, we can sew on some buttons and stuff, and then we'll make the sleeves,” she said.

She tried to show me how to thread the needle, but I kept pricking myself. I was no more successful when Lucy tried to show me how to work the pedal on the sewing machine. I also couldn't keep track of where to put the fabric under the needle.

“How 'bout if I am the designer, and you be the seamstress?” I asked. I didn't want her to see me struggling to do a craft she was obviously great at.

“That's a good idea,” Lucy said. I got my white sketch pad and pencils from my suitcase. She put on the radio, and we sat together for almost an hour, her sewing, me drawing, Beatrice sleeping.

Penny came in, still a little groggy from her nap. “What a nice picture,” she said. She went to the living room and came back with her camera and started snapping pics of us. Penny is a really good photographer. The neat thing about her photos is they're not simple portraits. People are always in action in her pictures: the Steps looking like they're floating through space in a shot of them riding swings, laughing and waving; Lucy coming out of the ocean in her wet suit, carrying her surfboard, a face of pure joy and concentration from having caught an excellent curl; Angus staring through the glass at an octopus at the aquarium, totally mesmerized; Jack sitting in the rocking chair, feeding Beatrice, with a lazy smile on his face, and both of them asleep. Penny's pictures are framed and plastered all over the house. She only photographs in black and white. She has a job as an aerobics instructor, but really she would like to one day make money from her photographs. I'll give her this: She's major talented. She could make money from her pictures.

Angus came in, totally energized from his nap. He heard the radio playing and asked, as he always does whenever pop music is playing, “Is this hit from the seventies, eighties, or nineties?” He then ripped through Lucy's room, knocking over a tin of buttons, dragging a spool of thread across the room, shouting, and laughing. “Take my picture, Mum! Take my picture!” Penny was so involved in her picture taking, she did not yell at Angus for being so wild. Somehow, though, for once Lucy and I did not care. He was so funny. We laughed and started decorating Lucy's room with beads and buttons everywhere, and we ran around the beds waving ribbons, and when Beatrice woke up, she didn't cry, she laughed, and you could tell she recognized us and was glad we were playing around her.

Then Jack joined the party. When he came inside Lucy's room, Angus pointed at me and said, “Annabel, now you take Mum's camera, you take some pictures so we can have pictures of just our family.”

Just our family.
That's when the fun ended. I got the message.

I will not say that I had begun to like the Steps. No way, no day. Appreciate them, occasionally. But no matter what, I just never felt totally comfortable in their house. Their accent was weird. The food never tasted right. The television programs looked all wrong. I knew I didn't belong. Like when I was offering to help with the dishes, and Penny said, “Thank you, Annabel, but you're our guest. Lucy and I will do the dishes.” See what I am saying? Angus's wanting me out of the family picture only confirmed that feeling.

So by the end of the first week, even though I had come to love Sydney, I was ready to go home. I missed talking to Justine every night on the phone. I missed sitting on the floor at Angelina's feet before bedtime, watching Nick at Nite as Angelina braided my hair for bed. I missed going clothes shopping with Bubbe and then sharing a gigantic chocolate sundae with her afterward, surrounded by shopping bags. I missed the energy of New York, the lights in all the buildings glowing in the crisp winter air, and the doormen at our building slapping me five as I came home from school every day. I missed home.

So finally, on the night of New Year's Eve, I laid it all out to Jack. I was supposed to be in Sydney for only four more days, so I figured I had better make my case so Jack would have time to prepare.

For once I had Jack to myself. Angus and Beatrice were in bed. Lucy and Penny were upstairs fighting again. I think working on her Granny Nell's sewing machine had made Lucy mad all over again about not getting to spend some of her holiday with her grandma. I would have been mad too.

So Jack and I were sitting on that big chair again, me in his lap, only this time we weren't making up from a fight.

“Jack,” I said. I rested my head on his chest. “We need to talk. I think it's time you move back to New York.”

I could hear his heartbeat quickening. “That's pretty funny, Annabel,” he said.

I lifted my head and shook it so he would see I wasn't kidding. He put his hand under my chin and rubbed it.