Shivering Mind

Chapter 27

  “We’re going to Sandy Claw Beach for a bonfire,” Samantha calls up. She’s in a blue sarong thing, towel around her neck, arm around Jase’s waist. “Come with?”

Jase jerks his head in the direction of the Mustang. “Yeah, come on.”

Everyone’s already crowding into various vehicles, laughing and shoving, little squeals from girls climbing on guys’ laps, low laughter from the dudes.

It looks like fun. The kind of fun I haven’t had in a while.

“Can’t.” It’s not like I can drag the kid along to a beach party. Toss me a Coke without braining the infant? Besides, he’s already asleep . . . for a while.

“C’mon, Max. You can’t just lurk in there like a troll under a bridge,” Sam calls. “Throw on your trunks. We’re going to have a swim to the breakwater challenge. We need your speed.”

Cal stirs, makes this strange face, and I hear a gurgling sound.

Crap. Literally.

“I can’t, got it? Not right now.”

Sam starts to protest and Jase puts his hand on her arm. He shoots me a look. “Hey, we can blow this off, snag a pizza and hang out.”

He thinks it’s about getting spun. And I let him. “Nah. I’m just gonna study”—maybe Hester’s baby instructions—“and crash. I’m good.”

Samantha shields her eyes. “We’ll stay.” She puts her hand on the railing, all set to climb the steps and charge into the middle of my current nightmare.

Cal’s squirming around and kicking off to cry.

“No!” I say. “Take no for an answer, will you?”

“Oh!” she says. “Got it. Okay.”

She obviously thinks I’ve got some chick up here. Jase thinks I’m stressing about booze.

I’m lying to both of them.

Thought I was done with that garbage.

Feels as shitty as Cal’s diaper.

Well, almost.

Chapter Twenty-two

Matilda

“You’re not taking the Mustang? Reliving your lost youth on the school bus, J.?”

“Ha-ha. My youth isn’t lost, Al. Still around here somewhere. But nah. Too much hassle for parking spots on the first day. Just ends in aggravation and dings on the 5.0.”

“You certainly wouldn’t want dings on perfection,” I say, eyeing Jase’s battered car, which he spent half the summer rehabbing and tinkering over, after buying it with a chunk of his college savings.

He grins, sliding his palm along the side. He’s repainted only the hood so far, a deep, rich, sparkling dark green. The rest of the paint job is a jumble of dark red-orange primer and the original color, a metallic ’70s-style lime. “Some respect. She’s a work in progress.”

He’s been up for hours now—for his paper route, the second job he insists on having, despite the fact that he’s either too old or way too young to be delivering The Stony Bay Sentinel before dawn’s early light. Then for a run on the beach. Now it’s barely six thirty and he’s showered and plowed his way through a virtual coop full of eggs and is already waiting at our mailbox, the bus stop. In a decent mood.

I can’t brin

g myself to drag him into the hospital bill mess, the bank—he was already offering to quit school over Garrett’s—let alone tell Mom and Dad. I picture Mr. Mason at his desk, feel my breath come short, my throat shrink. I close my eyes. Open them. Deep breath. I’ll figure something out. I just need a little Maxe.

“Andeeeee,” I call back to the house. First day of ninth grade and she’s, of course, running late.

“You’d be better off texting her,” Jase advises. “She’s been in the upstairs bathroom for nearly an hour.”

On cue, Andy comes hurtling down the front steps, heels in one hand, hair straightened, tank top and bright red mini on.

“Go change,” I say flatly. “You look like the poster girl for freshman fresh meat.”

“No Maxe,” Andy says breathlessly. “Besides, you’re one to talk. This is your skirt. It’s in your first-day-of-high-school picture. I can’t believe Mom’s not awake to take one for us today.”

It’s my skirt. Of course it is. Though Mom and I had plenty of debates about my clothing choices, I don’t sound like her now; I sound like some bitchy Puritan. Some days I don’t even recognize myself anymore.

“She’s exhausted, Ands. And trust me, those pics are hard to live down if the bus comes while she’s still lining up the shot,” Jase says. “But Matilda is right about the outfit.”

“Again, let me repeat: You guys are not Mom and Dad,” Andy says. “I have a hoodie, anyway.” She wags her backpack in our direction with one hand, tugging a shoe on with the other.

“I need evidence.” I reach for the backpack.

“Al-ice. God. It’s like you two have been replaced by pod people.”

Of course there’s no hoodie in there (“I swear I put it in”), so I’m about to head for the house to get some Amish cover-up when Jase pulls a T-shirt out of his backpack.

“Wear this.” He tosses it to her. It’s one of our Garrett’s Hardware WE NAIL IT shirts, which we just had done up for the Fourth of July sale. God, how much did those set us back? “Promotion and protection in one handy package.”

Andy regards him dubiously. I can read her thoughts. A T-shirt? Big-brother-sized? On the first day of high school? Might as well just commit social hari-kari during first assembly.

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“Okaaaay,” she says finally, dragging it on over the tank top. Andy is a nicer person than I am. Or more devious. As she stretches to pull it over her head, I realize my little sister is taller than me. No wonder that skirt looks so short.

“Twenty bucks says that lives in her locker all day. Maybe all year.”

Jase shrugs. “Not taking that one, Matilda. You were young once too.”

“Of course, I also have my period,” Andy adds, looking back and forth between us as though we both, definitely, need to hear this. “Naturally. Because why wouldn’t I be breaking out on the first day of school? Does being on the Pill really help with that, or is that just something people say because they need to use it for other reasons?”

“Don’t look at me,” Jase says.

“Why not? Sam’s on it, right? And she never has pimples—ever.”

“Andy. None of your business.”

“Matilda? Come on, you know, right?”

“Talk to Mom,” I mutter. Wait—I’ve been taking mine, right? I can’t remember punching the little vacuum pack, holding the pink tablet in my hand, washing it down. But I wouldn’t forget. I never forget. Besides, Brad’s gone.

Or not. My cell phone dings. Brad. Early-morning at the gym probably. It’s a picture of a puppy begging, “I may not be Red Rover, but can I come over?”

What happened to we’re over?

I put my head in my hands.

“Matilda!” shouts Duff from the house steps. “I can’t find my glasses anywhere! Or my summer reading book.”

“Matilda!” yells Harry from the screen door. “Whatja do with my owl? Someone moved it!”

“Matilda!” George calls from Jase’s window upstairs. “That lady who lived in the shoe—what kind of shoe was it? I hafta draw a picture.”

“Matilda,” Jase says, bending to pick up his backpack, “go for a long run on the beach as soon as we get on the bus. I grabbed a three-pack of spearmint Mentos for you at Gas and Go this morning—it’s hidden behind the box of that oatmeal stuff so no one else gets to it first. There’s an everything bagel too.”

The school bus screeches, hitting the top of the hill. As it comes down the street, the brakes shrill out a long, groaning sigh, almost exactly like the sound I’m trying hard to repress.

I’m a hundred and ten.

I’m the old woman who lives in the shoe.

“Hang in there,” Jase calls, turning back with one foot on the bus stairs. “You’re only temping as Mom.”

“Thank God for that,” I call. “I’m selling these kids on eBay and never having any of my own.”

Andy scrambles up the steps, the door slams shut, there’s more squealing from the brakes, a puff of gray exhaust rising into the bright blue sky.

A whistle and an “Al-eece!” from some guy in the back of the bus. Jimmy Pieretti. Dated his brother Tom three years ago. Under normal circumstances, the whistle would make me roll my eyes. Jim’s, what, Jase’s age?

Oh.

Right.

So’s Max.

But Tom was fun, Jim’s a sweetheart, and I’m grateful for any evidence that I’m not as ancient as I feel, so I shoot a smile at the window.

Scattered whistles.

There’s almost a spring in my step as I turn away from the bus.

Max

Total blur. All of it.

Cal’s sleeping, he’s crying, he’s drinking, he’s lying on my stomach while I lie on the floor of the apartment or the grass at Dominic’s waiting for the fever to break or the buzz to go away so everything goes back to normal.

But it doesn’t, because neither of those things is real. Cal is real. When he sleeps for a while, I jolt up sweaty because I’m afraid he’s dead. When he only sleeps for a short Maxe, I walk around sweaty because I’m so bushed and what’s wrong with this kid anyway? He doesn’t have any rhythm or I can’t find one. He drinks the whole bottle and then screams for an hour like he’s starving. He drinks nothing and falls asleep fast. I don’t know if this is because he’s a baby or because he’s mine and therefore terminally unreliable. Either way, it blows. I can’t believe I ever felt sorry for myself about anything ever before because I should have saved it all up for this. This tops anything Pop could have devised—I mean, he could have sectioned me, for Chrissake, locked me away to recover in rehab for as long as he wanted. Because this? It’s been three whole days and it’s honestly lasted longer than the entire seventeen years of my life.

Not to mention:

It was cake to pull crap over on my parents because they didn’t want to know, so sucky excuses and lame explanations played fine.

But with the Garretts, I don’t have that home-field advantage. Too many sharp eyes, too many working brains. Not to mention the fact that I’m not trying to smuggle Bacardi into a movie theater in an antibacterial gel container, but an actual human in and out of my apartment and their yard with his diaper bag and all his other crap. I actually do drive-bys to make sure there are no cars in the driveway or the lights are off or whatever before I skulk into or out of the apartment. Then I haul ass faster than Christmas. So Cal and I are spending a lot of Maxe hanging at Dominic’s, since he’s in between fishing gigs. I sit on his steps, throw sticks for Dom’s massive German shepherd Sarge, and hold the kid while Cal sleeps or drinks or stares, and Dom power-washes the hull of his boat or chops firewood or repaves the driveway.

“Could you maybe, like, bake cupcakes or sew an apron or something?” I ask, after watching him clean out the storm drains.

“You have messed-up ideas about manhood. I bake awesome cakes, by the way. What’s losing you cojones points is that you’re holing up here.”

I know, I know, I know.

Me on the phone with Hester, way the eff early in the morning on day three: “Look, I’ve got—stuff—to do. I’ve got an econ class online that I’m behind in and a civics test and a physics one I need to get in by the end of the week. Not to mention a couple days on at the hardware store.” With Matilda there too, during at least one of them. God. “When can I drop off Cal?”