Shivering Mind

Chapter 29

She looks even more rumpled today than the first Maxe I saw her. Her dark hair’s in this twisted-knot-thing that looks like a squirrel’s nest: she’s got khakis on, but they’re tight—and not in a good way—and her shirt is buttoned wrong. She’s going somewhere like this?

“So when’s your appointment?”

She brushes some flyaway hair out of her eyes. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to come. I wasn’t asking you to. Your name isn’t on the birth certificate anyway.”

I hadn’t given one second of thought to the birth certificate, but, “Uh, shouldn’t it be?”

Hester explains, in this elaborately patient tone, that she wasn’t sure I would “acknowledge paternity.”

“And yet here I am, acknowledging,” I say, my voice, like hers, sounding like someone is chopping each word off from the one next to it. She pulls out her phone and scrolls through it, the text-check blow-off move. Usually I have to know someone better for them to piss me off this much.

The kid who was over in the bushes buying is now riding down the street toward us on his bike. He’s got the backward-hat thing going on and kind of a freak-out face—because he sees us, or because he hasn’t done this before, or because he somehow knows he’s taken a giant step down the Road to Stupid.

He can’t be more than twelve.

Almost as much of a baby as Cal.

He speeds on by, his eyes dead ahead, jaw set, legs a blur.

Takes just about all I have not to step out into the street in front of him like the goddamn Ghost of Christmas Future.

Matilda

I come into the kitchen after the school bus trundles away to find Duff and Harry dueling with Popsicles. It’s seven o’clock in the morning.

“I am not left-handed,” Duff says triumphantly as I walk in, swapping his Popsicle to the other hand and smashing it into Harry’s, shattering sugary purple shards of ice all over the floor.

Harry leaps onto Duff’s back, all ready for hand-to-hand combat. I grab both the backs of their pajamas, twist, and pull them apart. “Knock it off or you’re both going to the fire swamp.”

I serve breakfast, helped by the presence of actual food in our cabinets and fridge.

I even find both Duff’s glasses and his summer reading book hidden in and under Harry’s LEGO castle, as part of a complicated revenge plot, the details of which I’d rather not know. “You have a lot to learn about revenge,” I say, drowning out Harry’s outraged “No fair no fair no fair.” “Never hide things in the most obvious place, for starters.”

“Don’t give him tips, Matilda!” Duff says. “Whose side are you on?”

“Whichever pays better. Get dressed.”

I have this down. I can hear water running, so Mom’s up, but the least I can do is give her Maxe for a shower. Assuming Andy left any hot water.

Patsy has escaped from her crib, of course, but she’s no match for me. Although my diapering while she’s trying to run away skills really aren’t up to Dad’s.

I tell George to draw eight kids for the Old Woman’s shoe, and negotiate a discussion of what kind of shoe it would be, which turns ugly.

“It wouldn’t be a high heel, duh,” Duff says. “They’d all escape.”

Or she would. But I don’t even say that out loud. I’m a goddess.

Except I forgot about the owl.

“Where is it?” Harry asks, tears streaming down his freckled cheeks, searching frantically through our kitchen junk drawer, scattering pizza delivery menus and pencils all over the floor.

“Do you have something to do with this?” I ask Duff.

He gives me an actually innocent look, instead of the super-wide-eyed one that is always suspect. “I was the one who found it for him in the first place!”

Text Jase: Where is effin owl?

But he doesn’t answer because no cell phones at school, duh.

Harry’s now on his hands and knees, rummaging through the drawer where all the Tupperware is, tossing it all out on the floor, sobbing. His skinny little shoulders . . . he sounds so lost—and I could be right there on the floor with him in a heartbeat, kicking and screaming. I put my arms around him, try to pull him onto my lap, the way I wo

uld George (who is hunting for the owl in the broom closet, judging by the crashes) but he looks at me like I’m a demon from the pits of hell. “You took him. I know you did, Matilda. You never wanted me to have him in the first place. I hate you.”

“Jesus God,” I say loudly, sounding like Max. “Shut up.”

Beat of silence.

“We’re not supposed to say that,” Duff says righteously.

Patsy is now crunching something that looks a lot like it came from the cat dish.

I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this. I never, ever signed on for this.

Now my chest is seizing up and I really can’t breathe, and . . .

Mom comes in, slightly green, and solves it all. She might as well have a wand. The owl turns out to have mysteriously disappeared, but there are many photographs of it, from every disgusting angle. “This is better,” she tells Harry firmly. “I’m fairly sure Mrs. Costa is allergic to feathers. Besides, it would’ve been hard to carry in your backpack.”

“I could have put him in my lunch box,” Harry says sulkily, but the fight’s gone out of him, even as he still has almost as many tears on his face as freckles.

She admires George’s picture, while scooping the cat food (yes, it was) out of Patsy’s mouth, saying, “Jase needs to keep this in his own room.”

Sends Duff off to reorganize the broom closet, because he loves to do stuff like that, and I’m glad someone does.

Then Mom looks up at me, shielding her eyes from the light streaming in from the window over the sink. “Go for a run, Matilda. I’m on this.”

I practically beat my best Maxe just getting to the hallway, then turn back. “Mom . . .” Why the hell would you ever do this? Why? “How do you do this?”

“I have access to the Dark Arts. Run, Matilda.”

So I do.

Chapter Twenty-three

Max

From hell to heaven, the minute I get back to the Garretts’.

Matilda is in the driveway, washing the Bug. White halter bikini top, cutoffs. Man, will it suck when the cold weather comes. Right now, this can make up for everything—GEDs, global warming, even the last few days of my life.