Girl Unmoored Read online

  I flung my covers into a triangle and rolled out of bed. I could hear M banging things down in the kitchen and voices coming up from Hello Maine! By the time I got home from the play last night, M was asleep. That was all she did these days. At first I thought maybe she was sleeping in the guest room until I put a marble on her pillow that never moved. “They’re doing it,” Rennie nodded. I wanted to punch her perfect Bambi face in when she said it, but I knew she was right.

  I shuffled over to my closet. You could hear a dog barking outside, which was Betty, whose mother, Nutter, was dead, too. My mom used to put leftover food on the porch for her until Mrs. Weller came over and told her that Nutter was getting too fat. My mom said, “Never again, Mrs. Weller. I’m sorry.” But Mrs. Weller stayed right there frowning in the doorway under her orange umbrella. It wasn’t raining, but everything she owned was orange. After that, Nutter came over anyway and my mom said, “A few bites won’t kill her,” which it might have, because after she fed her leftover meatloaf one time, Nutter got hit by a truck and the only way you could tell it was her was by the orange collar.

  I walked over to my mirror and pulled off my nightgown. Two miniature pyramids with nipples that looked like someone had poked them through from the other side with a pencil stared back at me. Half the girls in my class were already wearing bras, but not me. Or Rennie, who had even smaller pyramids than I did. We were going to get our first bras together, though. “At least you have big brains,” Rennie would say. But brains didn’t need bras, so boys never noticed me.

  I slipped on my long-sleeved T-shirt with Portland Head Light on it and stepped into my pants. Sometimes I went for days without changing my underwear.

  Then I brushed down my red, sleepy head, trying to see what M saw when she looked at me: someone pointless and pale and always in the way.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, M was standing at the stove stirring something bumpy. Her eyes were glued to Hello Maine! It was going to be sunny today: “Mid-70s and gorgeous, gorgeous.” She looked bad, even for M. She had sick mood written all over her and her black hair was down, which meant she wasn’t going to be a nurse until later and we would have to meet her at the hospital for dinner. She wasn’t a real nurse, she was only a nurse’s aide, so she got the worst shifts.

  When I walked by, she pulled her eyes off the screen just long enough to look me up and down once before turning back to the weather. “Morning, Aprons.”

  There weren’t two of me though; it was just her bad English. I was supposed to be named April after my great grandmother, but my dad found out that April in Latin meant “opening” and no way was his daughter going to be called that. My mom said Latin had nothing to do with the real world and my dad said it seemed to be paying for the real roof over her head. She put April on my birth certificate anyway, but in such tiny chicken scratch to hide it from my dad that some wizard thought it said Apron. “Apron?” my dad asked. “What kind of numbskull would write that?” But my mom said it served him right for being so stubborn. And then they never changed it.

  “Morning,” I told M.

  I climbed onto the counter and got down my bowl and cereal. Outside the trees were busy growing. Little green buds popping up everywhere.

  “There is oatmeal,” M said. Well if you wanted to glue something together, then you needed M’s oatmeal. So I jumped down and went straight to the icebox for the milk. “Better that you eat the oatmeals, Aprons. In Brazil the Mammas would never let their childrens eat that ca-ca.”

  I could feel that thing creeping up in my throat like it always did whenever M was close. Pretty soon even a Fruity Pebble wouldn’t fit down it, so I knew I better start eating fast. I got a spoon, took everything over to the table and sat down in my spot. A little girl lobster was painted right onto the wood. My mom had painted lobsters for all three of us: one with starfish sunglasses, one reading Latin, and one tap dancing. She quit tap dancing classes when she got into karate, but kept the lobster. The other side of the table was empty. It was supposed to have a baby lobster on it someday. I wanted a sister, but my dad wanted a son. Now though, I just wanted it blank. If M thought she could paint a nurse lobster there she had another think coming.

  I poured some cereal and put the box in front of me so I could read the Do You Knows on the back. You never wanted to talk to M if my dad wasn’t around.

  “You will get fat eating this,” she said anyway, pointing to the box and walking toward me with her bowl of glue and one of her Portuguese romance novels. “The boys will never like you.” I tried to look shocked that the yo-yo was the most popular toy in the world and took a bite of my cereal, which was the best thing you could ever taste unless you had something in your throat trying to kill you or M staring down at you. Then it tasted like cardboard.

  The toilet flushed in the hall bathroom. My dad would be in for more coffee soon. Out the corner of my eye, I saw M put her bowl down on top of the tap-dancer’s feelers. My skin caught fire. You weren’t supposed to put anything hot directly on top of the lobsters. “Please move that,” I said as smooth as silk. But she ignored me. So I picked it up myself and put it down on the empty side of the table.

  “Hey, that’s mines,” she whined.

  “Keep it off the lobsters, please.” I slid a place-mat from the center of the table over to her. My blood banged too hard inside of me, but my dad still wasn’t out of the bathroom so I took another bite of my cereal. M clucked her tongue and reached over for her oatmeal, her book dropping to the ground with a thud as she did. But before she could snatch it up I saw it: a folded piece of paper that had fallen out of her pages. “K-1 Visa: Marrying within the U.S.,” it said at the top.

  Just when you think the toilet is about to explode into a million pieces, it shuts off. But I didn’t hear it this time because of my bowl hitting the floor, causing a flood of Fruity Pebbles all around my chair. The cereal box had knocked over my bowl when I stood.

  “What’s going on?” my dad growled from the kitchen door. I swallowed that sugary milk gone sour and looked up at him.

  “Oh dears, just an accident, Dennis,” M said, wiping cereal off her bathrobe. The paper was nowhere to be seen now. I was the only one who knew the real M and what she was after, and M planned on keeping it that way. “I’ll get the mop,” she smiled.

  But my dad said, “No, Margie. Apron can clean it up,” and turned toward the coffee. “You’re not going to forget the tunics again, are you, Apron?”

  “Nope,” I said stepping away from M.

  “What did you say?” Nope was a four-letter word around here.

  “No, Dad,” I said, picking up my bowl, which was plastic, not even scratched. “I will not forget the tunics.”

  He went back to his pouring and I scooped up as much of the soggy mess as I could. “It might finally be our Dies Faustus,” he chuckled. M didn’t know what that meant, but I did: Lucky Day. “Margie’s never seen a touch football game, American football, the real kind. She’s in for quite a show with all of us old-timers out there, isn’t she?”

  I shook my head.

  When I opened the broom closet, something scurried. I froze. One time we found a raccoon in the corner. I couldn’t see any raccoons anywhere, but the scurry happened again. I stepped closer and saw a scurry this time. It was The Boss, behind the mop, rummaging around in his cage. “Hey,” I cooed. “What are you doing in here?”

  He twitched his salt and pepper whiskers at me and that was all I needed to hear. I picked up his cage and turned around.

  M and my dad were standing by the icebox. “Who put The Boss in there?”

  My dad looked confused, but M looked away. Then we both looked at her.

  “Dad,” I pleaded. “It’s freezing in there.”

  He stepped back. “Margie,” he said carefully. But before he could say any more, she covered her mouth with her hand and ran out the door.

  We both watched her go. I prayed she would run all the way out the front door and back to Brazil, but
no such luck. Pretty soon she’d have to, though. Her work visa was only good for a year. Now, she just walked up the stairs, leaving a trail of Fruity Pebbles so she could find her way back for more glue after my dad left.

  My dad sighed. “Sorry, Apron. I’ll tell her she can’t do that again.”

  I put the cage down. “He could have died,” I told him. “Guinea pigs cannot survive below sixty-five degrees, Dad.” Which may or may not have been true. My dad knew just about every fact out there, but hopefully not this one.

  He looked at me, exhausted. “Just try to be a little more patient, okay?” He said this like she was our new maid, which, when I thought about it, made me wish she was. Then she could get fired.

  “Dad,” I said. “You’re still married to Mom, right?”

  He tipped his head at me. “Of course I am. Now get to school, Apron.”

  He walked out the door and I left The Boss on the kitchen table, twitching and munching, while I went back to the closet to get out the mop. The truth was, he looked plenty fine to me. But M hated him almost as much as she hated me. “Why do all you Americans keep rats for pets? It is disgusting.”

  I grabbed the mop. I had never trusted M around The Boss, and now that she dared get close enough to move his cage, who knew what she would do to him next. Maybe she’d even take him out and set him free.

  The Boss stopped munching when he saw me. “Save yourself!” Jesus had warned everyone. But what he should have said was “Tell your owner to get a combination lock.” Because in the real world someone had to save you.

  3

  Sona si latine loqueris.

  Honk if you speak Latin.

  Hello Maine! was wrong as usual. Today was going to be humid, humid!

  When I finally made it to the bike racks at school, the back of my shirt was soaking wet and two seconds later the bell rang.

  Before I got to my desk, I stopped at Rennie’s. Today, her black pigtails were wrapped up in pink bows and her part was so straight it looked like a chalk line. “What, Apron?” she rolled her eyes at me.

  “Hi,” I smiled.

  “Look. I need to talk to you at recess,” she said, suddenly serious.

  “Why?” The last time she said that, she told me there was a rumor going around that I had kissed Johnny Berman in the boy’s room. I hadn’t, but I couldn’t say I wouldn’t have. Maybe not in the boy’s bathroom, but behind the lower school swing set, where everyone else did, I might have at least considered it. We never found out who started the rumor, but I kept hoping it was Johnny Berman himself.

  Rennie’s eyes flashed over to Jenny Pratt at the end of her row. “I can’t tell you here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, Apron,” she said. But then she looked up at me. “Look, I think we need to start making new friends, okay?”

  I felt like I had been punched in the stomach, but slowly, like I was watching it happen.

  “I mean, we’ve been friends for so long it’s just boring.” She looked back over to Jenny Pratt. This time, Jenny turned her perfect face toward her and smiled. When she noticed me though, she scowled. Jenny was the most popular girl in our class and we hated her. The only way you could be friends with her was if she picked you to be.

  I frowned at Rennie. “Jenny Pratt? But we hate her.”

  “I never said that,” Rennie whispered, panicked.

  “Yes you did. We both did.”

  “No. Apron. I never said that. You did.”

  I stared at her. I wasn’t a liar and we both knew it.

  Just then, Ms. Frane walked in and told everyone to sit. I gave Rennie one last look before I went to my desk, two rows in front of her.

  When everyone was seated, Ms. Frane, who was kind of pretty but still wasn’t married, probably because she always wore the same blue skirt and messy hair with two barrettes pulling it back for no reason, said, “Grammar books, please. Today we begin to study Latin roots.”

  Johnny Berman, who only sat next to me because Ms. Frane liked to keep things in alphabetical order, let out a groan. But I smiled. Even if you didn’t know my dad was a Latin professor, you might think something was up from our bumper sticker: Sona si latine loqueris! “Honk if you speak Latin!” Hardly anyone ever honked.

  I wasn’t exactly good at it, but my dad was determined to teach me. For a while, things got too serious for me to practice. But now with M hanging around, I was back to studying it full time. She could hardly understand English, no way could she understand Latin.

  “Page 132,” Ms. Frane said. “Today we’ll start with homos.”

  Johnny Berman snickered into his hand. I felt my cheeks turn on. It was kind of an embarrassing word.

  “Now. Can anyone tell me what the Latin root homo means?”

  A few more boys chuckled and Johnny Berman whispered, “Paul Green,” loud enough for only some of us, and Paul Green, to hear.

  “Anne, do you know?”

  A few seats down from Rennie, Annie Potts flipped her mousey brown hair over her shoulder and sat up higher. “Um. One?”

  “One fudge packer,” Johnny Berman whispered, coughing to cover it up. But Ms. Frane must have heard this time. “Another interruption and you get a red card, Johnny,” she warned, so he lost his smile. “Good guess, Anne. Not quite, though. Anyone else? Paul?”

  “Man,” Paul Green answered quietly, which made Johnny Berman cough again.

  Ms. Frane said, “Yes,” then added, “Perfect, Paul,” because he was one of her pets. “Can anyone give an example of a word using this root?”

  “Homicide?” Billy Moore called out.

  “Good,” Miss Frane nodded, writing it on the blackboard.

  “Homosexual?” Lynn Aouerbach said, like she said the word out loud every day. Which maybe she did. She always wore black.

  Johnny Berman let out a hoot this time and the room fell silent. Miss Frane turned to him with her lips pinched together. Everyone knew that if he got one more red card he was going to get suspended. “Yes. That is a proper use of the root. Lynn is correct.” She didn’t turn around to write it out, though. She just kept staring at Johnny. Deciding.

  “Homo habilis,” I called out quickly. Once in sixth grade, I’d seen him walking home in the rain, so I’d given him a ride on my bookrack. And ever since then he’d been nothing but nice to me.

  Miss Frane shifted her stare over, impressed. “And can you tell us what this means, Apron?” She caught me studying my dictionary again last week. “You remind me of me when I was your age,” she said, meaning to be nice but scaring me just the same.

  “A species of primitive man that first used sticks and stones as tools.” It said this a few pages later in our grammar book, but nobody else had probably read that far.

  “Very good,” Miss Frane said turning back to the board and writing Homo habilis on it. Johnny Berman exhaled and sat back. I smiled at him and he bugged his eyes out.

  “All right, now. Please get out your writing notebooks and give me three full sentences using the Latin root for homos. And if you’ll excuse me, I have someone waving at me from the hallway.”

  We looked over to the long skinny window inside the door, but all we could see was the back of a head. Principal Parker.

  As soon as Ms. Frane was gone, everyone started talking. “I hope she’s getting fired!” Johnny Berman said standing up. I watched Rennie stand too. But I got to her before she could go anywhere. “Rennie,” I said, careful not to sound desperate. “We need to be Avon ladies this weekend.”

  “Ucch,” she said. “See what I mean, Apron. Boring.” Then she shrugged and turned toward the end of her row. Toward Jenny Pratt. “We’re teenagers now, Apron. Not babies.”

  I lowered my voice. “It’s an emergency.”

  “What?” She turned back to me, which I hoped she would. Rennie loved emergencies.

  “M’s going to kill The Boss. I need a lock.”

  Rennie crossed her arms.

  “She is, Rennie
. She started hiding him in closets. You don’t believe me?”

  But then suddenly she looked like she did.

  “Well, too bad,” she said anyway. “It’s the Meaningless Bowl. Seth Chambers’s dad is bringing a real Patriots football.” She said this loudly, but no one looked over, not even the boys.

  I shifted in my sneakers. “It won’t take very long. I just need one with a combination. They’re cheaper.”

  Rennie pinched her forehead in. “They are?”

  I nodded. She believed me when I told her things like that because my dad was a professor. Rennie’s dad owned Perry’s Plumbing so all he knew about were pipes.

  “We can definitely still get to the game on time.”

  But Rennie shook her head and looked back around to Jenny Pratt, who had already stood up to go talk to Nan Wetherly, her last best friend. Rennie tried not to look hurt when she turned back to me. “No way. I have to make cookies. It’s our turn. And this time I’m making little footballs. My mom says I need to make like a hundred.” She flipped back one of her pigtails, which meant she was serious.

  A few boys started clapping, egging Johnny Berman on to do something. Then we all watched him jump up on Ms. Frane’s desk and start break dancing, which gets pretty boring pretty quickly without music. I turned back to Rennie.

  “Fine. What if I help you bake them Friday afternoon?”

  “So you’re inviting yourself over now, too?”

  “No, I’m not,” I said begging my freckles to stop burning. We used to just swap weekends at each other’s house. “Forget it. I’ll do it myself.”

  She grabbed my arm. “Wait! You can’t be Avon ladies alone. It’s in the rules.”