Livvie Owen Lived Here (3 page)

“But, Mom, she almost knocked over Bentley!”

“No mice at the breakfast table,” Karen said firmly without looking. Then, just as firmly, “No cats at the breakfast table, either.” I didn't know how she knew I had just picked up Gray Cat and snuck her onto my lap, but I quickly set her down again and folded my hands on the table. After last night's adventures, I didn't want to get myself into any extra trouble.

My father came stumbling out of the bedroom moments later, his glasses crooked and his chin dark with stubble. His hair stood up on the pillow side and his eyes were rimmed with red. Pulling his sweater on
over his head, he shuffled toward Natasha's room with an audible yawn.

It would be a while before he returned. I never understood how Natasha managed to sleep so soundly, sharing a room with Lanie as she did, but then Tash was the quietest of all us Owens, anyway. Especially lately. She used to break her silence long enough to laugh and joke sometimes, and always to yell at Lanie if Lanie was mean to me. But lately all she did was read and eat, mostly in that order.

Her reading used to be a good thing. She used to read to me every day, the same three books over and over. She said it was like visiting an old friend, sweet and familiar. I could read to myself, but not very good. Mostly just
-at
and
-op
and
-ug
words and they didn't make much sense when you strung them together in a sentence. My parents read, too, but they did the voices and the faces as if I was a little kid, stringing words into a story even Lanie was too old for. The way Natasha strung words together, they painted beautiful stories on the insides of my eyelids. They made me feel like I was part of the story, as if I was one of the pages turning. I could feel the warm words, the way they felt as they were read, released from the pressure of their pages.

But Natasha hadn't been reading to me lately. I
wasn't sure why, but it had something to do with Orange Cat.

Natasha stumbled in to fix herself a bagel, plopping half on the table in front of me. Crumbs scattered and I wrinkled my nose, meticulously wiping them away. Orange Cat's baby collar jingled on my wrist and I caught Lanie glaring.

“What'd you do to your foot, Liv-long-and-prosper?” Natasha asked. It was one of her goofy nicknames for me that made me uneasy when I was a little kid and made me giggle now.

“I broke my mug and stepped on it.” I picked at the bagel. I really wanted yogurt, but there was nothing to drink it out of.

“Your mud mug?” She gave me a quick glance. I think the look there was called sympathy. “I'm sorry, hon.”

“It was stupid.” I shrugged. “I shouldn't have been climbing on the chair, but also the whistle shouldn't have blown.”

“Yeah, that was weird, huh?” Natasha agreed. “Somebody must have been fooling around at the old factory.”

Eyes roved around the table—mine, Lanie's, my parents'—everyone but Natasha's. Hers stayed cluelessly on her book, just above her bagel.

“You mean you—you heard that?” I asked faintly
when it appeared the rest of my family was not going to ask.

“Yeah, it was weird. It sounded just like it used to back at the Sun House. It was like old times.” She smiled quickly up at the table, then looked up again at length when she realized we were all still staring at her.

“What?” she asked with something funny in her voice that I thought might be called guilt. “Livvie always says she misses the Sun House. Why can't I?”

“I guess there really was a whistle,” Simon breathed to Karen.

I felt something bubble up in my stomach too suddenly for me to put a name to it. My hands clenched up and I wrinkled my forehead. “How come you believe it when Tash says it? I told you I heard it, but just because Lanie didn't—”

“That's because they know I'm sensible,” Lanie said in what she pretended was a helpful voice. “You're fanciful. That's something different. It means you might be making up a whistle, but
I
would tell the truth.”

I slapped my bagel back down on my plate, making Natasha's fork jump out of the cream cheese tub and clatter on the table. “I always tell the truth! And Tash heard it, too, so who's the liar now, huh?
You must have heard it! You share a room with Tash and she heard it!”

“The only thing I heard was you banging and hollering in the middle of the night when Bentley and I needed our sleep!”

“You and stupid Bentley!” I stood up and slammed my chair back so hard it hit the counter. Bentley's cage rocked dangerously. “Why don't you just go marry him?”

“Olivia!” My father fixed me with a stare that made my insides feel like I had swallowed something slimy. “Have a seat, young lady.”

“But—” I stomped and pointed at Lanie. She stomped back and crossed her arms over her chest, turning her back squarely to me. Usually Lanie proclaimed herself too old for such behavior, but I seemed uniquely able to bring it out in her.

My father held up his hand to silence both of us, then turned to Lanie. “Melanie, please stop picking at your sister.”

“But she—” She pointed back at me.

Natasha grabbed Lanie's pointing finger and folded it back to her side, under the table so Karen and Simon couldn't see. “Honey,” she said to me calmly while Lanie struggled to get free. “What time did you hear that whistle?”

“Precisely nine-fifteen,” I said in kind of a small voice. With Natasha's calm gaze on me, I remembered how important it was now not to have outbursts. I was forever remembering things too late.

“Well, that's funny, 'cause I was asleep,” Natasha said. “But I definitely heard it.”

Lanie yanked her hand away with a huff, but she didn't point or say anything else. This, coupled with Natasha's words, finally made it possible for me to settle back into my chair. If Natasha believed me, it didn't matter what Lanie thought. I scooted my chair farther away from Lanie's.

“So, what are you doing at school today, Livvie?” My mother was halfway through her coffee and still blinking sleep out of her eyes. She looked eager to steer the conversation in a new direction.

“I don't know, not much,” I grumped. “The new sub is stupid. But the speech therapist said she would come and get me and we can play UNO.”

“What's wrong with the new sub this time?” Lanie asked. “Is her hair the wrong color, or does she just not like putting up with all your—”

“Melanie Elizabeth!” Simon sat back with a thump and pointed at the sink. “Get your dishes rinsed. Get your mouse. Get going. Now.”

“But I'm not finished with my—”

“
Now!
”

Lanie sighed a loud, dramatic sigh, the kind Miss Mandy used to say was impolite when I did it to her and Mr. Raldy. “Fine,” she grumbled. “Don't mind me. I'm going to go win one for science. Just see if I share my prize money with any of you crazy people.” She banged out of the room with Bentley swinging in his cage.

I took a last bite of my bagel—bringing the grand total of bites I'd taken to three—and dumped the rest in the trash. Turning back to the table, I caught Natasha staring.

“You used to eat,” she observed drily. “Do you remember those days?”

“I eat,” I said defensively.

“Three bites. When you were a baby, you always finished first. Then you launched yourself mouth-first at whatever was still left on my plate. Usually pumpkin pie.” Turning to our parents, she added, “Does it seem like we had pumpkin pie a lot back then?”

“Your grandmother gave us about eighteen cans of pie filling that winter.” Karen drained her coffee mug and rolled her shoulders to wake up. “I think it must have been on sale. Either that or expired. We used to eat it on crackers. It was better than the canned meat—that's the other thing she gave us.”

My father whisked his plate and coffee cup to
the sink. “I'm going to pretend I don't hear you talking about my mother,” he said in a joking sort of voice. Joking voices, I was pretty good at recognizing, after years of growing up with my parents and my sisters. It was the more serious emotions I had a hard time labeling. The ones my family didn't talk about.

Simon eyed Lanie and me warily as we piled into the car, but we were finished fighting, mostly. Lanie grabbed the front seat and I huffed a sigh and settled into the back, next to Simon's Walmart apron. Karen was off today and would pick us up on foot, me from the high school and Lanie from her car pool. These were my favorite days because Karen never made us walk straight home. We roamed up through the pinewoods or down to the swings at the elementary school. Sometimes we wound through downtown Nabor to buy an ice cream at the U-Save.

Natasha waved a peaceful-looking good-bye from her bike as she pedaled down the drive. Even in winter, Natasha loved to bike to school if we lived close enough. I watched her go, wistfully. I would love nothing more than to bike to school—my hair, which
I pictured longer and thinner in my daydreams, drifting back in the gentle wind, eyes watering with the cold, but in a good way. It would sure beat sitting here in this backseat behind Lanie, listening to her huff and sigh and yawn giant fake yawns that made my ears dizzy.

There was a time, way back—not quite as way back as the Sun House, but almost—when Lanie and I were friends. Not when she was a baby. When she was a baby, she was so loud she hurt my ears, and she always had Karen's and Simon's attention when she wanted it, while they told me to be a big girl and they would help me in a little while. Sometimes I bounced Lanie on my knee with Simon's help, and sometimes Karen let me hold her in the rocking chair, but mostly she was a change in my life that I just didn't feel ready for.

Around the time Lanie was born, I pulled out such a big chunk of my hair that my scalp bled. My parents were horrified. They rushed me to the hospital, like there was anything the hospital could do about a stupid missing chunk of hair. For a while after that, they made me keep my hair cut short. It was only lately they started letting me grow it out again, long like Natasha's, only too thick and not as pretty.

But when Lanie was one year and five months
old, something changed in our relationship. Around that time, she started speaking a language I could sort of understand, all about the colors and the motions of things. Her speech was visible. I could see the words she said because they made so much sense to me. It surprised me to learn that my family couldn't understand her. Her words were like pictures painted on the air. We spent all our time together.

I wasn't sure exactly when our friendship started to fade. Maybe when she said her first sentence that made sense to our parents. Maybe when Natasha started to understand her. And then there was the matter of the neighbor girl in one of the places we lived. The neighbor girl was my age, but she acted different. And Lanie liked her better.

By the time Lanie began speaking in clear, complete sentences to the people around her, she had stopped making sense to me. And it was as if she had forgotten I had ever made any sense to her.

“Try not to fall off any more chairs,” Lanie said nastily as I climbed out of the car at my school. I stuck my tongue out at her and slammed the car door. Even though she thought she was too old for things like that, I still saw her stick her tongue out as the car pulled away. She would be riding with my father as far as Neighbor's city limits, where her science and mathematics middle school was located.
Her stupid Bentley mouse had helped her win a scholarship last year.

I stayed exactly where Simon left me until I saw Natasha pull up on her bike. Locking it to the rack, she slung an arm through mine the way we always did. We strolled through the courtyard, me hopping when necessary, stepping over book bags students had dropped in their rush to play horseshoes and four square and to huddle in groups to talk. I didn't like the way they looked at me as I passed—a fake smile here, a nervous look there. The problem was, they were always looking. I stuck my hands in my pockets and worried the lining of my sweater until the threads came loose in my fingertips. I clenched and unclenched my joints, starting with my shoulders. Rolled my head around in a circle on my neck. Hummed a little to myself, the same note over and over.

“Why so stressed today?” Natasha asked as we approached my classroom door.

“Stupid Lanie,” I replied. “She's got Livvie all upset.”

“She doesn't mean anything,” Natasha answered. “She's eleven. That's why she's so mean. That's what eleven-year-olds do.”

“You weren't mean when you were eleven,” I pointed out.

“I was to Lanie,” Natasha confided. “A million years ago, you know.”

“Uh-uh, it was not a million years ago, it was five.”

Tash smiled. “I know. It just
feels
like a million.” With a sympathetic wave for my substitute teacher, she left me at the classroom door.

Mrs. Paxton was one of those substitutes you'd rather they would substitute for somebody else. Today was her fourth day and she was finally confident enough to smile, the kind with too much lipstick all around it, instead of scrutinizing me like I was about to attack her. Something about her behavior made me think my reputation preceded me, but she managed not to say it. She only patted me uncomfortably. She was a skinny lady with hair that was so white-blond it made my eyes feel dizzy. I moved away from her by several steps and watched her frown.

My school was a funny place. It had classrooms for the other kids, the ones who attended regular subjects like algebra and art. Instead of a classroom, we had this whole wing of our own, like maybe what we had was catching, which wasn't true except for Robert, who always had a cold. He liked card tricks and was pretty talented, according to Mrs. Paxton. To me, his tricks were flat. I could see how they were going to end from the start.