The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door (6 page)

My mom finally animated. “Your father and I need some time to sort things out, Celia. We haven’t decided on a divorce.”

“But we don’t want you to worry about that,” my father added quickly. “We want you to let us worry about the details. We’ll still be a family, Turtle,” my dad started to choke on the words, “no matter what happens.”

“Don’t worry about the
details
? Like who I’m going to live with?” Anxiety started its little fire in my stomach.

“This is what we think is best,” my dad said. My mom came over to the chair where I was sitting and tried to put her arm around me.

No
was all I managed to say as I wrenched myself from under my mother’s arm and bounded down to my room. It was hard to go back to reading
Charlotte’s Web
with the tears streaming down my face, but somehow I managed.

× × ×

I decided to respond to Dorathea’s email before my dad’s.

Re: Friendship

From: Celia ([email protected])

Sent: Fri 9/10 3:46 PM

To: Dorathea Eberhardt ([email protected])

hey, Dorathea,

things are okay without dad, i guess. how long do people have trial separations? if dad likes his job in atlanta, and mom likes her job here, then where are we going to live if they get back together?

do you know anyone who is gay?

celia

“Celia, come out and be social,” my mom called from the kitchen, tearing me away from my email.

I reluctantly logged off and dragged my feet down the hall. The pot roast still had hours to cook, but my mom handed me a potato and a peeler and suggested we have some “girl time.” I resisted the urge to tell her that she hadn’t been a girl in over a decade.

“So, June Bug,” she started, fixing an apron around her neck in an obvious effort to appear domestic. I hadn’t seen my mom put on an apron and cook a meal in months. She looked thinner since my dad left. “Tell me about your first week of high school.”

It is moments like these that make me want to fling potato peels at my mother’s head and scream, “Why did you force me to stay here?” But since all the screaming I did through the months of May and June didn’t make a dent in her resolve, I have to settle for being sullen instead.

“It was fine,” I answered, blinding my potato with the cone-shaped blade of the peeler.

“What is your favorite class so far?” she prodded, opening the oven to check on her still-pink pot roast and shaking her head slightly.

“I don’t know . . . Earth Science, I guess.” I remembered Drake turning around to look at me in that class after he was jarred awake by Mr. Diaz yelling, “That’s right, inert gases!” Tireless note passer and classroom complainer Debra Madison had actually gotten a question right.

“Science?” said my mother closing the oven door. “But you’ve always been an English and history girl.”

“People change, Mom. Try not to get all worked up.”

My mom wiped her hands on her apron even though they obviously weren’t wet from looking in the oven. She took a deep breath. I never would have spoken to my mom this way while my dad was still here. But they were the ones who decided to change things, so they should have expected that I would change, too.

“Well, have you made any new friends yet?” she asked brightly, turning back to a new cookbook she bought after my dad left and flipping a few pages.

My mom had no idea I was hanging out with Drake after school because she worked the swing shift so much. It would probably make her happy to hear I had a new friend, even a temporary one. It might make her think she had made the right choice by forcing me to stay in Hershey. I wasn’t willing to give her that satisfaction. I just shrugged. “Okay, I’m done peeling potatoes, is that all you wanted?”

“Now you need to cut them into one-inch squares for boiling.” She handed me a cutting board. I slapped it down on the counter and started a sloppy job of slicing.

“What book are you reading?” The investigation continued.

“
To Kill a Mockingbird
,” I mumbled, wishing I could be in my room reading it. “Dad told me to remind you about the mortgage payment.”

My mom sighed again and thumped her hand down on the cookbook where she was looking at the recipe for Old-Fashioned Pot Roast.

“I told him not to bother you about the bills,” she snapped. “Your father can call me if he thinks I need reminders about my responsibilities.” She twisted a finger into her curly, brown hair and then pulled it out.

I stopped slicing and stared at her.

“Sorry, Celia.” She sighed. “I shouldn’t take it out on you. I’ll be right back.” She took off her apron and headed toward the bathroom.

I finished cutting the potatoes and dropped them into a pot of boiling water on the stove. As tiny bits of the water splashed out, they made hissing noises against the burners. The yellow cubes were tumbling around in the water when the phone rang. I was just going to let it ring, since no one ever called for me, when it occurred to me that it might be Drake. Maybe he was calling on the way to New York for a last-minute check-in before seeing Japhy.

“Hello,” I answered, careful not to seem too eager.

“Gina?” asked a man’s voice I didn’t recognize.

“No.”

“Oh, sorry, may I speak with Gina?”

I hesitated, not sure I wanted to let this man, who called my mother by her first name, speak to her. “Gina, there’s a man on the phone for you,” I yelled down the hall without covering the mouthpiece.

My mother came out of the bathroom carrying a tissue in one hand and combing her fingers through her hair with the other. She took the receiver from me and put her hand over the end you talk into. “You still call me
Mom
, not Gina,” she said before taking away her palm and speaking a sunny hello into the phone.

After a pause, she said, “Oh yes, Simon from the hospital.” My mom turned her back to me and twirled the phone cord around her finger. “Sure, that sounds great,” she said after another pause. “I’ll see you then.” She hung up the phone.

“Tell me that wasn’t a date,” I said with my hands folded over my chest.

My mother looked momentarily startled by my tone. “No,” she said defensively, “it wasn’t.”

“You said it was a
trial
separation. You said you were trying to work things out.”

She turned away from the phone and raised her voice. “I am your mother, and you don’t get to interrogate me, Celia.”

When I stomped down the hall and slammed the door to my room, she didn’t try to follow me. I plopped down and opened my email again, even though I knew there wouldn’t be anything new. I tried to read, but ended up writing a poem.

Autumn stomps around outside the house

like an annoying little sister, tapping

on all the shutters, kicking up the piles

of leaves you rake, pretending to howl

like a wolf. But I’m glad she’s here,

so we can cuss at Summer together,

pretend we don’t even remember her name.

My mom didn’t bother me again until hours later when she knocked on the door gently and said, “The pot roast is ready.”

CHAPTER

12

I’m kind of a public-library celebrity. Between third and eighth grade, I collected the first-place prize for every Summer Reading Star contest in my age group. The librarians got suspicious. After I read
The Catcher in the Rye
at age ten, one looked over her glasses at me and said, “Dear, what was your favorite part of this book?” She acted like she was being sweet and curious, but I knew she thought I was too young to read Salinger.

“I resonated with the way the main character Holden Caulfield is always calling people out on being phony.” I said the word
phony
with emphasis. I guess I was a little Dark even before I turned fourteen.

If I was suddenly struck blind, I would still have a pretty good chance of finding my way to the teen section of the library without the use of a guide dog. “Hi, Celia,” two different librarians called out before I made it up the stairs and into the back room marked
YOUNG ADULT
.
My mom had a rare Saturday off, so I knew that if I stayed home, I would end up cleaning out the attic or rearranging the silverware drawer. I invented a school project excuse and rode my bike to the Hershey Public Library, which is located, no joke, on Cocoa Avenue.

I relaxed more with each row of books I passed. Then I plopped down on one of the orange plastic sofas intended to make teens comfortable and opened my backpack. I always have my poetry notebook with me. You never know when you will have a few minutes to write, or when you might need distraction or a hiding place.

I’ve been working for a while on a list of instructions for writing poetry. This seemed like a good opportunity to add some more thoughts.

HOW TO WRITE POETRY

By Celia the Dark

1. Use your own words. Don’t use words like “’tis” or “thou” or “forthwith.” It sounds too much like the Bible or Shakespeare.

2. Don’t rhyme unless you have to because everyone tries to rhyme when they start writing poetry and it makes you sound like everyone else.

3. Be specific. Sometimes people are vague in their poems because they think it makes them sound deep.

4. If you don’t know how to end your poem, just take the first two lines from the beginning of your poem and write them over again at the end. It gives your poem something called “closure.”

5. Don’t be afraid to be Dark.

I was working on the list, letting the spell of the library hypnotize me, forgetting my anxiety over seeing Drake talking to Sandy, my dull ache for revenge against her, and my mom’s call from Simon, when I heard a familiar voice say, “Please . . . just for a minute.”

I looked over toward the staircase in time to catch the sight of two heads, each with a blonde braid, disappearing quickly down the stairs. I stood up and followed them to the landing, but the glass door was swinging shut as if someone had just pushed through it. I hurried back, past the couch and over to the nearest window. Below me in the parking lot, I saw a familiar station wagon. Before getting into it, Ruth looked up at me and waved.

CHAPTER

13

At two o’clock on Sunday afternoon, the phone in the kitchen rang. I had spent the morning on odious homework activities and overdue laundry chores. My mom and I had just finished lunch.

“Hello.”

“Can you come over?” Drake asked.

“You’re home! I didn’t think you would be back until tonight.” My heart did a Rockettes line of high kicks.

“Are you free? Can you come over now?”

I looked at my mom who was sponging off the table. “Ten minutes,” I said.

“Meet me in the lot.”

“Gotta go,” I said to my mom as I replaced the receiver.

“Where?” she asked, pulling crumbs from the table into her hand.

“To . . . see . . . a friend,” I managed, although I knew it would unleash a pack of question-sniffing dogs.

“Does this friend have a name, address, and social security number?” Parents are so predictably nosy.

“Drake,” I mumbled, pulling my sneakers out of the hall closet. “Cloverdale Avenue.”

“Oh, a
boy
,” she said, dumping her palm crumbs into the trash.

“Yes, Mom, a friend with male genitalia. Leaving now,” I said, grabbing my backpack from its spot near the door and backing out.

“Remember I’m on night shift tonight,” she said as I pulled the door closed, “and they’re calling for rain today.”

When I reached Drake’s house, I walked across the neatly kept grass, past the flower beds, and into the thick blanket of leaves in the wooded lot. Fall was evident in the canopy. Every day the trees showed more of their naked limbs.

As I made my way in, I could see Drake already sitting on our regular log. He was holding his skateboard upside down between his knees and prying at something.

“What are you doing?” I asked, dropping my backpack into a mound of tree roots.

“Trying to pop a rusty bearing out of this wheel,” he said. “Got a new one this weekend.”

I took a Sharpie out of my hoodie pocket and propped my low tops up on the nurse log. I started drawing shapes on the white toes.

“How did it go?”

“Not so good.”

I examined Drake’s face. His jaw muscles were fixed, like he was grinding his teeth together. He was working on his skateboard with the intensity of a surgeon. I blacked out the word
Converse
on my shoe with a five-point star.

“I got so nervous waiting for Saturday night,” Drake said through his tight jaw. “Friday at the show and all day Saturday, I felt like my body was trying to eat itself from the inside out. I kept pacing around the apartment or making excuses to go outside. When Japhy finally rang the doorbell, my hands were shaking as I opened it.” Drake’s screwdriver slipped and made a scraping sound against the bottom of his board. “Shit.”

I stopped drawing on my shoe and looked at Drake. I put the cap on the Sharpie.

“My mom left for the show with his dad since Japhy’s mom and my dad were already at the theatre. The minute they were gone, Japhy took off his sweater and said, ‘Let’s drink some of your dad’s whiskey.’ I’d never had alcohol before. I don’t think he had either.” Drake kept working the screwdriver into the wheel as he spoke. He wasn’t looking at me, like he was telling the story to his skateboard.

“I felt so panicked about talking to him. I thought,
Maybe I should have a drink. Maybe this will be easier
.
So we opened the liquor cabinet, and he waved around the bottle and said, ‘Look, Drake . . . the envelope.’ I mixed my whiskey with Coke, but Japhy just poured his over some ice. Then we climbed onto the fire escape to people watch. I didn’t feel much. At least, I didn’t feel
drunk
the way people describe it. I did feel a little more relaxed. We decided to have another one.”

The wind started to shuffle the leaves around our feet. It was always cooler in the wooded lot than out on the grassy lawns of the neighborhood. I pulled on my hood.

“Japhy turned the music up loud and made our second drinks with vodka. This time he mixed mine with less Coke and didn’t put any ice in his at all. We went back out on the fire escape and called things to the people down on the street. Japhy would yell, ‘Hey, dude, you dropped something,’ and then keep directing the person to some imaginary object like, ‘Right behind you . . . a little to the left . . . there, don’t you see it?’ until the guy figured out that he was messing with him. He did it to three different people before—” Suddenly, the screwdriver slipped again and tore a thin line of blood across the top of Drake’s left hand. “Damn it!” He threw the screwdriver into the leaves like it was a snake that had bitten him.

“Are you okay?” I sat up on the log. “Let me see it.”

Drake shook his head and tucked his injured hand under his other arm, squeezing it to his torso without showing it to me. “Fire escapes are tiny, so we had to sit close together and press against each other every time we wanted to move. After he tricked the third guy on the sidewalk, he was laughing and he looked at me. His face was close to mine and he looked so happy and I just . . . kissed him. I kissed him.”

The wind picked up a pile of leaves and dumped them on Drake’s feet. His hair blew into his eyes despite the styling product. “And?” I held my breath.

“He kissed me back.” Drake pulled his injured hand out and looked at the red line across his skin where a few droplets of blood were forming. “And it was amazing. Everything in New York went silent. The fire escape detached from the building and flew around the city like a helicopter. The sun went down and came up again. It was perfect.” Drake ran his good hand through his hair. I exhaled, imagining two boys kissing on a fire escape in the sky. “Until he pushed me away and said ‘I gotta go.’ Then he pushed me again, even though we weren’t touching anymore.”

Drake started pacing through the leaves. The wind was picking up strength each minute, and it felt like a storm was coming. It started getting dark even though it was late afternoon.

“What happened?” I asked, rooting in my backpack now for Band-Aids.

“He climbed through the window and back into the apartment; I followed him. And I was so close to telling him. I mean, I was seconds away from telling him everything I was feeling, when he said, ‘I’m not gay,’ and he grabbed his stuff and ran out the door. He actually
ran
.”

I felt helpless. I looked desperately until I found a tiny first aid kit hiding out in the bottom of my bag. Part of having a nurse for a mom. I motioned for Drake to sit down next to me, and carefully took hold of his injured hand. I tore open the wrapper, pulled off the slick paper and covered Drake’s cut.

“I went back to the fire escape and watched him run all the way down the street toward the subway. I cried. I thought about jumping off. I thought about drinking all the whiskey and the vodka,” Drake said. “But I ended up just putting the bottles away and going to bed. My mom came in my room when she got home and asked if Japhy and I had a fight because he had texted his parents to tell them he went home. They were all angry because Japhy left and took the subway alone at night. That’s funny, huh?” said Drake, even though it wasn’t funny.

“I told my parents I wanted to take the train back early today. I didn’t tell them what really happened with Japhy, I just said I needed to get back and do some homework,” he finished, stuffing his bandaged hand into his jacket pocket. “I feel so stupid. I’m so stupid.”

A few fat raindrops plopped onto my shoulder, and the wind picked up more leaves and dumped them against our log.

“So much for coming out,” Drake said, kicking at the leaves that were trying to bury us. “Being in the closet isn’t so bad. Closets are warm and cozy, and filled with clothes,” he said without smiling.

My heart cracked right down the middle. I couldn’t think of one useful thing to say.

Drake stood up to fish around for his screwdriver in the leaves where he threw it. I picked up his skateboard as five more heavy drops fell on my back.

Then we turned and put our arms around each other. The sky opened its mouth and cried all over us.