Bad Apple (13 page)

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The doctors keep saying that the drugs they used to fix Grandpa’s pneumonia have side effects like loss of appetite and diarrhea, that this happens to lots of old people, and that he’ll get better soon. Every time we come to the hospital, we expect to find him sitting up in bed, cracking jokes, slurping chocolate pudding, teasing the nurses. But when we visit, he’s barely able to keep his eyes open, and we can’t get him to eat. We crowd into the room—me, my mom, Madge, Mr. Doctor, Grandma Emmy—our faces screwed up with hope and then worry. We bounce around like atomic particles, bumping into the IV pole and one another. Madge starts glaring, and Mom starts ranting about incompetent doctors, and Grandma Emmy starts wringing her hands and saying maybe we should let him sleep.
Look at him. He’s tired. He just wants to sleep. Let him sleep.

So we let him sleep. Normally, people seem so peaceful
when they sleep, but Grandpa is
too
peaceful. I perch on the end of my seat, watching his chest go up and down, occasionally putting my hand on his bony rib cage to feel the heart fluttering like a bird with a broken wing. He hasn’t bothered to put his false teeth in for days—his mouth is all caved in. His breath comes in pants, as if he’s dreaming about something that scares him. What scares me:

1. Grandpa’s roommate, ancient and hairless, his two broken ankles in casts, muttering “Babydollbabydollbabydollbabydoll” under his breath. When the nurses come to change his sheets, he screams as if they are killing him.
   
2. A white-haired woman in a wheelchair out in the hallway yelling, “Don’t touch me, I hate you! You lie you lie you all lie!” The man who wheels the woman around is her son, his face carefully ironed to a blank.
   
3. The nurse, a woman with hot pink fingernails and teased blond hair straight out of the eighties, always talking about the squirrels digging up her yard and how she tried to talk her cop husband into shooting them all. The stray cats, too.
   Dirty animals
   .
   

Mom can’t take it. She drags Mr. Doctor to the nursing station and is threatening lawsuits against the hospital. Grandma Emmy is down in the cafeteria playing cards with
Madge, but I know Grandma’s heart can’t be in it. She’s not losing money. She’s just losing.

I sit alone with Grandpa Joe, wondering what to do. I want to tell Grandpa Joe that I keep forgetting to call Dad but that he seems to have forgotten about me, too. I want to tell him that I never lied about what Mr. Mymer did; I just lied about what
I
did, and I didn’t really do that much anyway, and now it’s all blown out of proportion. And I want to tell him that even good people do stupid things and don’t tell the whole story later. Exhibit: Mom and Mr. Rosentople.

But I don’t say any of these things. Grandpa can’t even put in his own teeth; he can’t even get up to use the bathroom. The guy next door is muttering under his breath: “Baby-dollbabydollbabydollbabydoll.” Grandpa breathes in and out, in and out, like some mixed-up version of Sleeping Beauty. I wonder if I should tell him a story. I wonder if he can hear me in his sleep. Madge says that even people in comas respond to the voices of their wives and children and brothers and sisters, so why not Grandpa, who is only sleeping? I try to think of a good story, an uplifting story, but what pops into my head is all wrong. Like the story “The Death of the Little Hen.” When Little Hen chokes on a nut, her rooster husband asks every animal in the forest for help, but it all ends in disaster and everyone dies, including the rooster, who has just enough time to bury the little hen before keeling over on top of the grave and dying, too. Or the Spanish version of “Snow White,” where the evil queen doesn’t ask for the huntsman to bring back the heart of
the princess—she asks him to fill a vial with Snow White’s blood, stoppered with one of her severed toes.

Then I think of the story of Little Red Cap. Seems safe, seems happy. And I start the way every story starts, “
Once upon a time, there was a little girl
…” Grandpa stirs a little in his sleep, his arm lifting like he’s greeting someone. I take this as a good sign and go on.

“Her name, stupidly enough, was Little Red Cap. Little Red Cap is supposed to bring some wine and bread to her sick grandmother, because those old Germans thought that some good booze would cure everything. And maybe they were right. I can ask Mom to sneak you some booze if you want some.

“Anyway, back to Little Red Cap. Her mom tells her not to talk to anyone on the road, to go straight to Grandma’s. No detours. But of course she doesn’t listen. Little Red Cap probably isn’t that little. I bet she’s a teenager, thinking her mom is all stupid and overprotective and scared of the forest. Maybe she thinks she’s totally too old to be told what to do. Maybe she sits down by a tree and takes some hits off the wine, so when the wolf starts talking to her, she doesn’t think,
My, what big teeth you have
, she thinks,
Hey, pooch, you’re not so scary
. The wolf gets Grandma’s address out of Little Red Cap, who’s too drunk to notice, runs ahead along the road, gobbles Grandma, and waits for Little Red Cap to come stumbling along so he can eat her, too. And he does. She’s just lucky that the huntsman’s walking by when he is, that he hears that wolf snoring after such a big dinner. He
cuts Little Red Cap and Grandma out of the wolf’s belly, and everyone lives happily ever after.”

Grandpa twitches in his sleep. I lean in closer, to whisper in his ear.

“But Grandpa, what if that’s not what happened at all? What if Little Red Cap never veered off the road? What if she never even met the wolf or she got away from him? What if the huntsman just made all this stuff up and everybody believed him? What if he ruined Little Red Cap’s reputation for all eternity? Just because he could?”

Grandma Emmy comes back to the room and brings us all back down to the cafeteria for dinner. We grab whatever looks edible—pizza and pasta and salad—and drag it to a table. Nobody’s hungry but me. Mr. Doctor checks the messages with his answering service. Madge fiddles with her iPod, which is loaded with the most oppressive classical music she can find. June once burned a bunch of screamo for her, thinking it’d be right up Madge’s alley, but Madge said, “What do I need this for? If I want to hear someone shrieking at me, I can just piss off Mom.”

But Mom is quiet. She’s been pretty quiet for almost thirty-six hours, which is beginning to sound an alarm in my head. Mom hasn’t been so quiet for so long since Dad left, and who wants to go through that again?

I’ve eaten all the food except for one piece of pizza, and that’s only because it has black olives on it, and I hate those. Madge turns off the iPod and pulls out the earbuds. Her face
is shifting, her eyes growing bigger and darker and fangs creeping over her bottom lip, the jaw jutting like she’s preparing to bite. For safety, I slide closer to the wall.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Madge says suddenly, in a low, ominous voice that promises pain, pain, and more pain. I tug on her sleeve, but she yanks her arm away.

“Say anything about what?” my mom says. She doesn’t look at Madge but rummages around in her purse.

“That
isn’t
bronchitis, Mom. I’ve had bronchitis, I know what bronchitis looks like, and that is not it!”

“It’s a touch of pneumonia. I know he looks bad, but…” she says lamely, and trails off. This is so unlike her, the lameness, the trailing off. I want to bring up Mr. Mymer, distract her, energize her. I want to hand her the phone and tell her to call the school-board president, the principal, the police. I want to tell her what I did. That it’s my fault. That there is an emergency and only she can save us.

“He has cancer, doesn’t he?” says Madge.

“No,” my mom says. “He doesn’t have cancer.” Her purse thumps to the floor. She doesn’t pick it up. People at the surrounding tables are staring, but in the way people stare when they’ve been there themselves.

“Then something else,” says Madge. “Some sort of emphysema or blood disease.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“What aren’t you telling us?” Madge screams. Someone drops a tray, and the room is filled with the sounds of shattering glass. “We have a right to know what’s happening!”

“I’m not keeping anything from you,” Mom says. “I know this is hard, but what’s happening is that your grandfather is an old man who caught a bad cold. The fluid settled in his lungs. Sometimes old people have a hard time with colds. Their hearts and their lungs don’t work as well. They don’t recover as quickly.”

“Have you gone crazy?” Madge says. “This can’t be from a cold.”

“In the future,” Mom says, “we’ll have to be more careful when we go over for dinner. Make sure none of us has anything he could catch.”

“In the future? What future? What are you talking about? Grandpa looks like he’s going to die, and you’re just sitting there talking about dinner. What is
wrong
with you?”

“Tiffany. I’m so sorry,” my mom says. “This is just one of those things. It’s going to take some time.” She throws her hands up, once, twice. We’re playing charades, guess which movie she’s in now, the one with the crazy daughters, the one with the sick dad. “Grandpa loves you.”

“That’s not the point!”

“I love you.”

“You don’t love me,” Madge says, biting the end off each word. “Nobody loves me.”

My mom shakes her head and stares at the salad bar, blinking. It makes Madge insane. She doesn’t need screamo; she
is
screamo. She starts shrieking at Mom, why didn’t she tell us things were so bad, why does she keep saying that Grandpa will be fine, why is she so horrible, why is she so
uncaring and stupid, why does she think
we’re
stupid, Tola might be uncaring and stupid, but she, Madge, is not, and she is nineteen years old or almost and needs to understand exactly what’s happening with her family, and if her own mother won’t tell her, how is she supposed to live, that’s what she wants to know, how am I supposed to live, Mom, how? How how how how how how how how how, until Mr. Doctor, who never says anything, who never gets involved, who drives everywhere without complaining, says in the calmest voice, “Tiffany. That’s enough.”

Madge is so shocked, she doesn’t know what to do. She stares at Mr. Doctor as if she’s never seen him before, as if he just sprang fully formed from the thin, cheap carpeting.

This time, she doesn’t scream. She whispers. Somehow, it’s louder. “I hate you.”

Mr. Doctor nods. “I know. But does it matter right now?”

We go back to the room. Grandma Emmy naps in the big chair. Mom and Madge whisper-yell in the corner. Mr. Doctor leans against the wall.

I don’t talk. I don’t tell any stories. I hold Grandpa’s hand. I squeeze. I think he squeezes back.

It’s amazing to me. How holding someone’s hand, something so small, could be so big.

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Snow turns to rain turns to ice. The world is encased in glittering glass like Snow White was, beautiful and dead.

Thankfully, no more bio for me. I have a study in the library instead. Ms. Esme, the librarian, is in charge of my “studies.” When she sees me, she grins and gives me a book on Joseph McCarthy.

I go to cooking class. The whole room smells like roasting chicken and onions. We figure the Duck is cooking a feast for the teachers’ holiday party. Just to taunt us.

She passes out the recipes for the mayonnaise again. Plain, spicy, mango-chutney. Drop, drop, drop. We are old pros. We finish in a few minutes: no accidents with the eggs or the oil.

The Duck passes out a second set of recipes. Not for more mayo, but for sandwiches. Chicken with peppers and
spicy mayonnaise in a tortilla. Chicken with red peppers and mango-chutney mayo on wheat. Chicken with lettuce, bacon, and tomato and plain mayo on rye. For the vegetarians, she has a recipe for a roasted vegetable sandwich with sundried-tomato mayo.

The Duck takes the chicken and the vegetables out of the oven. Nobody asks the question, but she answers it anyway.

“It’s cold outside,” says the Duck. “I thought we could all use some comfort food.”

Mr. Mymer isn’t back yet, so we have another sub in art. She is round and happy, with a gray halo of hair and earrings made from red Christmas ornaments. She shows us pictures of her cats. They are all named after hobbits. Bilbo, Merry, Pippin, Rosie, Myrtle. She tells us to pick a cat and draw, paint, or sculpt it. I draw my own cat. I give him a hat, a sword, and a sweet pair of boots.

After school, Mr. Doctor picks me up, drives me home. Madge is watching one of her movies. I’ve brought home the drawing of Pib, which I think I can turn into a painting.

I set up in my room. First, I do some studies—sketching what the painting might look like. Then I get out my paints and palette and start mixing some colors for the fur—white and sienna and bronze. It smells good. It feels good. It’s been a good day. Grandpa’s still sick, but Mom’s visiting him alone tonight and hopes to pin the doctors down on the treat
ment. Madge is still crazy, but she’s taking some medicine and maybe it will work. Mr. Mymer is coming back. Maybe I’m coming back, too.

Madge kicks open my door. She sits on my bed and opens her laptop. Pib tries to walk across the keyboard, but she shoves him off. She brings up The Truth About Tola Riley on screen. Chelsea’s saved the best for last: ART, A STATUTORY LOVE STORY. It’s a grainy video of me and Mr. Mymer at the museum, slowed down and jazzed up. You see the talking, the smiling, the paging through the Klimt book, me reaching for his hand, holding it. My face, so naked, so hungry, so obvious. The images morph and blend, changing colors like Andy Warhol prints. Scrolling underneath the video is a series of quotes and comments:
this girl is a crazy skank, i heard she totally did Michael Brandeis too, he’s sooooo ugly! eewwwww
, and on and on.

And over it all is the sound of my voice, from the day Chelsea Patrick turned me into a happy face: “Sorry for what? Sorry for what? Sorry for what?”

When Mr. Doctor gets home, I ask him to drive me to the mall. I find her at the electronics store where she works. I crouch in the video game section across the aisle, watching. She’s in the computer department, stocking the shelves with adapters and flash drives while a bunch of guys wearing Geek Force T-shirts hang around the shiny new Macs, not doing much of anything. A girl walks by, one of those
stick figures with boobs, and the guys stare and nudge one another.

“Can I help you, miss?” one of them says.

The girl barely glances at him. “I don’t think so.”

Another says, “How about your number?”

She rolls her eyes and keeps walking. The guys’ smiles get tight and fake. I don’t know what they expected, or maybe she did exactly what stick figures with boobs always did to them. Either way, they’re mad and looking for someone to take it out on. Their eyes find
her
, carefully hanging plastic packages on hooks. They glance around, probably making sure there’s no manager around to stop them.

Then: “Hey, Patrick. Wanna go out sometime?”

She doesn’t answer, but even from where I’m hiding I can see the blood that burns in her cheeks.

“You’re sooo hot,” says the one who asked for the stick girl’s number. “Do you do three-ways?”

Chelsea lifts up her head and glares, which only makes them snicker. And I guess here’s where I’m supposed to feel sorry for her, where I discover that she’s in pain, too, mocked by a bunch of angry, overcompensating woman-haters with hairballs for brains. And maybe I
would
have felt sorry for her if she didn’t drop the basket of adapters and stomp over to the Geek Force, dispersing them like bunny rabbits. If she didn’t see me crouched on the floor across the aisle, pretending to study the latest version of Grand Theft Auto.

Her eyes narrow, then she smirks. “Looking for some
thing? We’ve got
lots
of computers with
tons
of memory. Great for watching videos on the internet.”

I shove the game back on the shelf and stand to face her. “My computer’s fine. It’s the psycho in my school who’s giving me all the problems.”

She breaks out in a grin. “Did you know there was an exhibit about digital art that day you and Mr. Mymer went to the museum? That’s what I was there to see. Lots of good stuff, but none of it went far enough, in my opinion. Sort of dead on arrival. Bland electronic imitations of two-dimensional art. I filmed them anyway; I’ve got a great camera and I know how to hide it from the guards. But none of it had the right impact. And then, there you were with Mymer. God. The look on your face! Pure desperation.”

“What is wrong with you?”

“You told the school board nothing was going on,” she says, thoroughly enjoying herself. “Why would you care what I put online? I mean, if nothing was happening.”

“Nothing
was
happening.”

“Sure. Whatever you say. I can’t help what
other people
will say about it, though.”

My whole body is buzzing, I’m so angry. I suddenly understand every bit of violence in every fairy tale I’ve ever read. The ovens, the axes, the cauldrons full of snakes and lizards and the urge to shove people into them. People always say there are two sides to every story, but I don’t believe that’s true. Not always. There are villains in this world who
do terrible things.
Why
they do them is something else.

“Why?” I say.

“Because you’re a stupid slut.”

“Cut the crap.”

“Being a slut isn’t enough?”

In stories, the villains launch into their confessions, spilling their guts as soon as you ask the right question:
I want to be the most beautiful in the land. I want to marry the prince. I want the throne for myself. I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too.

“We were friends for a long time,” I say.

“So we played hopscotch in the third grade. I’m supposed to feel bad?”

“You’re supposed to feel
something
.”

“You think you can do anything,” she says.

“Climb every mountain? Swim every sea?”

“Paint your stupid paintings—God, those paintings! They’re like pages from a bad calendar you get at the dollar store. And Mymer! You never shut up about him. Mr. Mymer
loves
my work. Mr. Mymer thinks I’m sooo talented.”

Did I say that? Did I lie? “He never even complimented me.” And now that I’m saying it, I realize it’s true. He talked to me, he encouraged me, he pushed me, but he never told me I was a great painter. Not once.

“All because you screwed him,” Chelsea’s saying.

“You screwed yourself,” I say. “There are actually laws against stalking.”

“Whatever. No one will be able to trace the site or the video or anything back to me, and every time your mother gets it shut down, I can get it back up somewhere else. To the police, I’m just a concerned student worried that my old friend is being abused, that’s all.”

“If you had that video the whole time, why did you wait until now to post it?” But even as I’m saying it, I know why. Because waiting until now just prolongs the fun for her, and the agony for me.

“You’re sick,” I say. “Something happened to you. What happened to you?”

“I told everyone that I’ll put the best comments in the piece. There are already hundreds of new ones,” she says, smiling evilly. “Everyone wants to be a part of my little video. I love reading them. It’s like the world’s best bedtime story. Puts me right to sleep.”

“Someone should do that permanently.”

She takes two giant steps forward and puts her face in mine. “Are you going to do it?” She pokes me in the chest. “With what? The power of your thoughts?”

She pokes me again. I grab her finger. She tries to pull away, but I’m locked down. She yanks harder, dragging me into the aisle with her. I don’t care. I’ve been punched by the best of them.

“Don’t you get it? You can’t win,” she says. Her breath smells bad, like something inside her died long ago. “You’re useless. What are you going to do, paint a picture?”

“What’s going on here?”

Our heads whip around to see a guy way too young for the enormous gut straining his Geek Force T-shirt. The white tag on his chest says CHUCK HUGHES: ASSISTANT MANAGER.

“I asked you a question. What’s going on?”

I let go of Chelsea’s finger. She takes a step back.

Both of us, in unison: “Nothing.”

“Looked like something to me. Chelsea? You want to explain?”

“We were just talking, Mr. Hughes,” she says.

He looks from her to me, raising his shaggy unibrow. I could do some damage here, I know, tell this guy that she wanted to beat me up, tell him that she wanted to sell me stolen televisions. But it won’t be the right kind of damage. And it won’t be enough.

“It’s like she says. We were just catching up. We know each other from school.”

“From school, huh?” He frowns. “You seem familiar to me. Don’t I know you?”

“No,” I say, turning to go. “People just think they do.”

Afterward, I have to wait in front of the corner department store for Mr. Doctor. He pulls up in his hybrid SUV.

“Thanks for picking me up,” I say.

He grunts cheerfully in reply. He puts the car in gear and drives. As I sink into my seat, I realize how much I love this
car, the murmur of the engine, the whir of the fan, the radio. It saves me from attempting the smallest small talk, not that Mr. Doctor needs it. In Mr. Doctor’s car, you’re safe, even if it’s only for the time it takes to get where you’re going.

I ask Mr. Doctor to turn up the heat, and he does. All around us, the town glistens. Icicles hang from telephone lines, ice coats the trees. I wonder how the trees survive, weighed down like that. I wonder how they don’t break.

Mr. Doctor turns up the radio. His favorite talk radio show yammers on about the removal of a judge who threw forty-six people in jail after no one would admit to owning the cell phone that rang in his court. A Japanese man was arrested for releasing hundreds of beetle larvae inside an express train to try to scare female passengers.

And then this:

“In local news, a teacher recently exonerated by police and reinstated to his teaching position is again under suspicion over a video released anonymously on the internet. The teacher, Al Mymer, was investigated for an alleged affair with a student, but police found no evidence of the affair. Last night, however, a video showing the teacher and the same student holding hands at a New York City museum café popped up on a website, casting doubt on the result of the police investigation.

“In response to this new evidence, Al Mymer released this statement:

“‘It is with great sadness that I resign my position at
Willow Park High School. I was thrilled to be exonerated of all charges of wrongdoing and planned to return to my job, but it is clear to me today nothing will change the fact that my reputation, and the reputation of my student, have been permanently damaged. I sincerely hope she can get on with her life. And I will have to move on with mine. I thank everyone on the staff of Willow Park High School and the parents and students who wrote letters supporting me. I will miss you all.’”

My eyes water, but it isn’t the heat blasting from the vents. It’s my voice blasting from my throat.

“It’s my fault,” I say. “It’s all my fault. I was at the museum café. I was sitting alone. He just happened to be there at the same time, and he sat with me. He was always so nice. And I was…lonely.”

I stare straight ahead. I don’t know who I’m telling. The windshield. The ice-encased trees. The road.

“I touched him. Just his hand, and just the once, but it was me, not him. And only for a few seconds before he pulled away. He never told anybody what I did, but then I never told anybody what I did, either. At first, I didn’t say anything because I was embarrassed. And then later, I didn’t say anything because it all seemed so stupid.” I want to cry. I
should
cry, big ugly Madge-sized sobs. But I’m all locked up inside.

Mr. Doctor says what he always says: nothing.

Then Mr. Doctor opens his mouth. “I love to drive.”

I turn to stare at him.

“People think I’m crazy, but I love it.”

I sit perfectly still, wondering what the hell is going on.

“When I was young,” he says, “I used to drive and drive and drive, hoping that I would get lost.”

I’m still staring at him, but he keeps his eyes on the road. Mr. Safety, Mr. Doctor is, even now.

“But I never got lost,” he says, his voice heavy with disappointment. “I seem to have a compass in my head.”

He doesn’t speak for ten more minutes. Not till we’re turning onto our block.

“I could teach you, if you want.”