We Are Water (35 page)

Daddy nods toward me. “And that’s true of your sister? She gets A’s not because she works hard for them, but because she butters up her teachers? She thinks she’s better than—”

“No, not her, but . . .”

“But what?”

“Nothing. Never mind. Just forget it.”

Marissa chimes in. “The brains in my school act all stuck-up, too,” she tells Daddy. You’d never know it from the way she goes out of her way to bug Andrew, but she idolizes him. She’s told me that all her friends have crushes on him.

“You stay out of it,” Dad tells her. Then he turns back to Andrew. “Don’t you dare tell your sister to ignore you at school. And don’t ignore her, either. You understand?”

“Okay, okay. I got it. Can I be excused?”

“Yeah, you can be excused to clear the table and wash the dishes. And when you’re finished, you can skip the weight lifting and get right to your homework.”

“It’s not my week to do the dishes!” Andrew protests. “It’s the twerp’s week. Look on the refrigerator if you don’t believe me. It says it right on the schedule.”

“I don’t care what the schedule says. When I tell you to do something, you do it.” Daddy stands up and thanks Mama for the very nice meal she’s cooked. “Now if you’ll all excuse me, I have to go make some phone calls.”

That ends it, I assume. Mama and Andrew start clearing the table. Freed from her responsibility, Marissa heads for the living room to watch TV, the little brat. But when I get up and carry the rest of the dishes into the kitchen, there’s Mama, armed with our big soup spoon and whacking Andrew on the back of his head and his neck. Once, twice, three times. My brother’s just standing there, shoulders scrunched up, taking it as usual. “Don’t you ever, EVER make your sister feel like a second-class citizen!” she yells.

“Mama, stop. It’s not that big a deal,” I say.

“It is to me!” When she hits him again, I hear the sound of metal against skull. Then she throws the soup spoon and it lands with a clatter in the sink. I rinse it off, put it in the drawer. She’s struck him so hard that she’s bent the handle.

Poor Andrew. Mama never hits Marissa or me. But ever since we were little, my brother’s been her whipping boy, even when we were both in trouble for something. I’d get yelled at, and Andrew would get yelled at, hit, and put in the bad boy chair.

Later that evening, I stand at my brother’s doorway and ask him if he’s okay. Why wouldn’t he be, he says. When he gets off his bed and approaches, I assume he wants to tell me something without Marissa’s big ears hearing it down the hall, or maybe even to apologize. But that isn’t it. He’s only gotten up to close the door in my face.

The next morning at school, Cindy and I get excused from first period study hall so that we can put up our campaign posters. And two periods later, passing one of my posters in the hall outside the library, I see that it’s been defaced. “ARIANE OH FOR CLASS TREA$URER!!” it says in the block letters I’ve drawn and filled in with different colored markers. And on the bottom, someone’s scrawled, “She’s Tons of Fun!!” In tears, I pull the poster off the wall, tear it up, and stuff the pieces into my purse. I don’t get it. I don’t ever act mean or stuck up. I try to be friendly to everyone. I don’t know who would do this. But Andrew does.

I love my brother. I always have. And even if he acts snotty toward me when we’re at home, I know he loves me, too. So I’m scared for him when, in the cafeteria at lunchtime, I see him rush Digger Blankenship from behind, and put him in a choke hold. I run toward them. “Andrew, don’t!” I beg him. “You’ll get in trouble!”

When he screams at me to shut up and stay out of it, Digger takes advantage of the distraction and breaks free from Andrew’s hold. He takes a swing, but my brother grabs his arm before it connects and wrenches it back. Digger screams out in pain, so that now even kids on the other side of the cafeteria know something’s going on. Andrew punches Digger in the temple, where, if you hit someone hard enough, I’ve heard, you can kill them. Oh, god! Stop it, Andrew! Stop it! When he lands a punch in Digger’s face, blood sprays out of his nose and onto the floor.

Kids are out of their chairs, yelling “Fight! Fight!” and forming a circle around my brother and Digger. Both boys are on the floor now, rolling around and pounding each other. I’m relieved when I see Mr. Driscoll and Mr. Scarlatta running over to stop the fight.

They’re both suspended, Digger for two days and Andrew for a whole week because he started it. Because Andrew can’t come to school, he can’t compete in the wrestling quarter-finals, which probably means our school will get eliminated by Fitch, our biggest rival. Andrew’s the team’s second best wrestler. It’s because of me. Because Andrew was defending his fat twin sister. “Your brother should go see a shrink!” Beverly Bundy tells me when I’m at my locker a few days later. “He’s psycho!” She deserves a really mean comeback for saying it, but the only thing I can think of is, “No, he’s not.”

On the day of the elections, Andrew’s still on suspension. During first period, there’s a sophomore assembly so that everyone can listen to the class officer candidates’ speeches. Our class adviser, Mrs. Masterson, is introducing us in alphabetical order; the candidates for president first and so on. Kevin Formiglio, our class president last year, stands at the podium, and just like last year, he makes all these ridiculous promises: he’ll convince the school to start selling McDonald’s for lunch, he’ll bring back the smoking area. He gets a standing ovation from some of the general studies kids when he says that, but not many of those kids ever bother to vote anyway. Then it’s Cindy’s turn. When she and I helped each other with our speeches last weekend, I suggested she not list as one of her credentials that she’s made the honor roll each semester since we’ve been students here. My brother’s right; the majority of our classmates hate honors kids. Cindy said she’d think about cutting out that part, but she hasn’t, and when she mentions the honor roll, the same section of kids who cheered about the smoking area start making kissing sounds. Voting doesn’t start until next period, but in my opinion, Cindy’s already lost the election. Seth Sugarman’s next. He says that when he gets elected president, he’ll represent our
whole
class, not just the college prep students, so he hopes that not just college prep kids vote today. I wish I had thought to say something like that. Seth says that being in sports has taught him how to be a good team player. He’s wearing a tie and his basketball jacket with the leather sleeves instead of a tie and a nice sports coat like the boys were told to wear, and when he goes to sit down, a bunch of the other boys on the basketball team stand up and start chanting, “Seth! Seth! Seth!”

There are three candidates for all the other offices, but it’s just Beverly and me running for treasurer. When it’s only us left to speak, Mrs. Masterson says, “And now you’ll hear from your two candidates for the important office of class treasurer.” It’s
B
before
O,
so Beverly goes first, and when she walks to the podium in her tight pink sweater and black leather skirt, she gets whistled at. Her speech is terrible; it’s not even really a speech. “I didn’t prepare anything because I didn’t want to bore you guys to death,” she says. “All I want to say is that I’ll work wicked hard for our class like I did this past year. I promise! Okay, that’s it. Thanks, you guys!” Well, I think to myself, at least my remarks are going to be substantive. I have my index cards with me, but I’ve pretty much memorized my speech so that it won’t look like I’m reading.

“And last but not least, Ariane Oh,” Mrs. Masterson says.

On my way to the podium, I accidentally drop my index cards on the floor and, when I bend over to pick them up, someone makes a really loud and disgusting noise that makes it seem like I’ve just passed gas. Everyone laughs, even a lot of the girls. When I start my speech, I speak too closely into the microphone and my words come out like an explosion. I’m so nervous by now that I
do
have to read it instead of saying it from memory, except that I didn’t number the cards and now they’re all out of order, so that I have to stop twice to organize them and then start again. I tell my classmates that I’m responsible with money, and that I’ll work really hard to make our fund-raisers a success. I’ve thought up some really good ideas for fund-raising—a doughnut sale every Friday during homeroom, a dance where we fill out forms about ourselves and the computer matches up boys and girls who are compatible—but that index card’s not in the right place and I won’t even realize I didn’t mention my ideas until afterward. When I wrote my speech the weekend before, I meant every word of it, but I can hear in my voice that I don’t even want to be class treasurer anymore. All I want is to get off this stupid stage.

After the assembly’s over, I go into the girls’ room instead of class, lock myself in one of the stalls, and cry into a wad of toilet paper. At lunch, Hillary Hopfer tells me it was Butchie Evanko who made the breaking wind sound. It figures. Beverly and Butch are first cousins. But I feel better as the day goes on. By last period, so many of the kids in my classes have told me I did a good job— that they couldn’t even hardly tell how nervous I was—that I start thinking it might be close, or that I even might have won if the voters saw past that leather skirt of hers and took into consideration that she couldn’t even be bothered to write a speech, so how hard was she really going to work for our class?

That night, Mrs. Masterson calls with the election results. Cindy and I have both lost. When I ask her how close it was for treasurer, Mrs. M says she’s not really at liberty to say, so I guess I have my answer. “Think about it this way,” I tell Cindy when we console each other over the phone. “It’s our class that’s really lost. You and I would have worked a hundred percent harder and made way better leaders.”

Later, after my homework’s done, I’m lying facedown on my bed feeling sorry for myself when someone says, “Hey.” I think it’s Daddy, but when I look up, it’s Andrew standing at the door. “Sorry you lost,” he says.

“Just tell me,” I say. “If you weren’t suspended, would you have voted for me?”

“Shit, yeah,” he says. “And I would have made sure all my friends voted for you, too.” I get up and walk toward him. But when I put my arms out to give him a hug, he takes a backward step. “All right already,” he says. “Don’t go overboard.”

God, I was so young back then. So naïve. I thought the harder you tried to be the best and most useful person you could be, the more you’d succeed. I wonder whatever happened to Beverly Bundy. And Digger. And Cindy, who was as earnest and eager to serve back then as I was. Did she get married and keep her maiden name? Is she still single? Does she have some great career? I guess I’d know if I had become her Facebook friend like she wanted me to. The real reason I didn’t, I realize now, is that I didn’t want to suffer by comparison. What would I tell her about how my life turned out? That I’m pregnant by a sperm donor? Working my head off at a job that pays thirty-eight thousand dollars a year? That my parents got a divorce because my mother’s decided she’s a lesbian? Well, who cares? Me, I guess. High school was a million years ago. Why in the world am I still letting it rent space in my head?

When the plane lands and taxis to the gate, Dolly slips her wooden bead bracelet off her wrist and hands it to me. She says she wants me to have it.

“Oh, no, I can’t,” I tell her. “It’s yours. You should keep it.”

“Honey, I’ve got a dozen more just like it in my bag. I make them for my AA friends, and for people just coming into the rooms. I’ll be going to meetings while I’m helping out at my daughter’s, so I brought some with me.”

“But I don’t have a drinking problem.”

“Didn’t think you did,” she says. “New mothers need serenity as much as drunks do.”

I smile and thank her. Slip on the bracelet and shake my wrist a little, watch the dangling medal rock back and forth. “Before?” I tell her. “When I said my husband liked football? I wasn’t telling you the truth.”

“No?” She waits.

“I’m not married. I
had
a boyfriend but . . . I got artificially inseminated at a clinic. I just . . . I didn’t want you to think. . . .”

She reaches over and places her hand on my belly. “Honey, all that counts is this little one in here,” she says. “Doesn’t matter a fiddler’s fart how it came about. Artificial insemination, huh? Wish they’d have had that available when I was your age. I could have saved myself a peck of trouble.”

There’s a chime; the seat belt sign goes off. When we stand up to deplane, the guy in the aisle seat opens the overhead, pulls out his bag, and then slams it shut with my stuff and Dolly’s still in there. I’ve had it with this self-important jerk. At Hope’s Table, when guests are being rude, I don’t take
their
crap, do I? Why should I give this idiot a free pass just because he’s wearing an expensive suit? “Hey,” I tell him. “Our luggage is in there, too, you know. Open it back up.” He looks shocked but does what he’s told. “Now take our bags out and hand them to us.” He does that, too. Then he starts up the aisle, pushing past the passengers in front of us.

“Congratulations,” Dolly says. “That knucklehead had it coming.”

“No problem,” I say, feeling light-headed and liberated—better than I’ve felt this whole trip. Dolly and I wish each other good luck. I step aside to let her go first. Then I follow her toward the exit, walking on rubbery legs.

Inside the airport, I head toward baggage claim, which is where Daddy said he’d meet me. I hope he’s there. It’ll freak me out if he isn’t. I step onto the escalator and descend, scanning the crowd. I don’t see him, and there are no messages on my cell phone. Waiting at the baggage carousel, I text Cicely about ordering the nutritional supplements. From the opposite side of the conveyor belt, I watch Dolly lift her new grandchild out of her daughter’s front pack and hold her to her chest, pat her tiny back. The baby’s father is handsome. Tall and tattooed, a ponytail.