Every Shiny Thing Read online

  I don’t tell her that without Mom

  I feel like I’m

  sinking.

  She pauses, puts down her project, looks me in the eye,

  tells me her mother was an alcoholic.

  That she grew up living with her grandmother.

  I know she is saying this to try to

  lighten the weight between us.

  But looking out the window,

  trees shedding leaves,

  the only way I can imagine

  feeling calm again

  is by being with Mom,

  any room, any apartment,

  it doesn’t matter.

  I need to be there

  to make sure she is sober.

  Don’t they know

  I am the only one who can do any of that for her?

  They say now I am safe—but I’m not the one in danger.

  With me here

  who’s going to take care of her?

  Gnaws & Wishes

  The feeling gnaws at me.

  I need to know how she is.

  Our call’s not scheduled for a few days.

  I text Cassidy:

  Has my mom called yours?

  Cassidy:

  Dunno. Mom’s out.

  That annoying Brian again.

  School sucked 2day.

  Come back!!

  I curl up into my blue room

  and wish, wish, wish I could.

  LAUREN

  Costumes for Three

  The day I met Sierra, I listed the jeans online for $100. And by the time I got home from school on Sierra’s first day, somebody had already sent me the money on PayPal.

  It wasn’t even that hard to mail them. I told Mom I was working on a history project with Audrey after field hockey practice yesterday, and I got off at Audrey’s bus stop instead of mine. I told Audrey that was because Mom needed me to do an errand, and then I just walked to the post office to package up the jeans. Then I went to the bank to take the $100 out of the account Dad opened for me last spring, when I started earning babysitting money, because I know he can check the account balance online. Easy as anything. No problem at all.

  And I finally got a video message back from Ryan yesterday, too. He showed me the three guppies in his tiny tank—one red, one green, one blue—and told me about his new friend Ellie, who knows just as much about Ancient Egypt as he does and thinks his fish are awesome. He said Scott the OT might take them to an aquarium that’s half an hour away the next time they have a free weekend day. But I looked up the aquarium on my phone, and it doesn’t have hippos like the one in Camden does. And the shark tank doesn’t look anywhere near as good, and it might be crowded if Scott hasn’t been before and doesn’t know the right time to go. Or what if Ellie doesn’t actually like fish as much as Ryan does and she doesn’t have fun at the aquarium, and Ry thinks the whole day is going to be great, but then it’s just a giant disappointment?

  At the end of his message, Ry asked me to make my next video in front of his fish tank, so he could see how his other fish are doing.

  So I took the $100 down to the basement and fed the fish a quarter of a teaspoon of flake food, just the way Ry taught me before he left. When all the fish came out to eat, I made sure I got every single one on my video, even the two little Cory catfish that like to hide behind plants. At least this way he can watch all his fish and know that I’m taking good care of them, even if the aquarium trip isn’t what he’s expecting.

  Then after I sent the message, I stashed the $100 at the bottom of a tub of old puzzles in the storage part of the basement, and I put Audrey’s silver bracelet there, too. I’ll give it back if she mentions it, definitely. I’ll probably even give it back if she doesn’t. But she was wearing a different one today—a thick chain with a heart dangling off it, from Tiffany’s. And I just . . . I don’t know. I sort of can’t deal with Audrey right now.

  In advisory this morning, Ms. Meadows went over the same old Halloween costume rules we have to listen to every year. Then Audrey, Sierra, and I went to the space outside the classroom to get our stuff for first period.

  “How about we dress up as salt and pepper shakers this year?” Audrey said. “Ooh, or ketchup and mustard? Angel and devil? Elphaba and Glinda?”

  I looked at Sierra, who was right there, paging through a notebook, and tried to send Audrey a message with my eyes.

  “Lauren! Halloween’s next week! We’re running out of time.” Audrey snapped her fingers. Completely clueless.

  Is it really that hard for Audrey to see how sad Sierra looks when she lets herself take a break from smiling for two seconds? Does Audrey just not pay attention to anything that doesn’t have to do with her? I still don’t know what happened that means Sierra has to live with Anne and Carl instead of her own mom and dad. But it was a big deal, obviously, whatever it was. Sierra could use some friends.

  Not that she’s my charity case or anything. She’s funny, and she’s just . . . different. She asks questions about stuff I’ve never stopped to think about, like why we don’t have real lockers at school, except for gym, and why there’s so much stone in our neighborhood. Stone houses, stone walls, stone slabs along the sidewalks. I’d never really noticed until she pointed it out.

  And she wears Target brand shoes instead of Vans or Converse or lace-up boots like everybody else, and she’s never met Ryan. So when I told her about him going away to school, she didn’t say, “Well, he said he wanted to go, Lauren. And the website looks so nice!” the way Audrey did. She just said, “North Carolina’s far. You must really miss your brother.” So then I told her about Family Weekend and how Piedmont’s supposedly so great but I just know it’s wrong for Ryan and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  Not wrong the way the Keller School was. Piedmont’s not wrong for everybody who goes there, probably. Maybe it’s a great place for Ryan’s new friend Ellie. But wrong for Ryan, because he should be home with us and his fish tank and his favorite Philadelphia places and his routines.

  And Sierra nodded like she really understood, and then she said, “If you ever want to talk about him more, you can.” And I wanted to hug her, but I didn’t want to spook her again.

  As Audrey stood there, tapping the toe of her boot on the ground and waiting for me to respond about Halloween, I grabbed my Spanish stuff and found a pencil that still had lead. Then I took a step back, so I was even with Sierra. “How about Charlie’s Angels? All three of us could do it. Remember we saw that movie once, Aud? With your parents?”

  Audrey nodded, but her face had gone all pinched, just like it had the other day when she asked if I wanted to go for an extra field-hockey training run after school, since we didn’t have practice, but I’d already promised Sierra we’d take the bus home together.

  “With Lucy Liu and the two white actresses,” Audrey said. “I remember.”

  “So what do you think?”

  She stuck her chin out. “Lucy Liu is Chinese, Lauren. Not Korean.”

  Oops. “Well, I think the actresses in the original version were all white. I . . . I don’t know if their race is really that important.”

  Audrey’s chin only jutted out farther, and I didn’t really blame her. That hadn’t come out right at all.

  “Hey, how about the three little pigs, then? That could be kind of cute.” Or it would have been when we were five, anyway, but I couldn’t think of anything else. “What do you think, Sierra?”

  Sierra was hugging her notebook to her chest now, and her mouth curled into a small smile. “Are you sure that’s not a-whatever-ating the pig culture?”

  I burst out laughing, and Sierra’s smile got bigger. A lot of the time it doesn’t seem real, the way Sierra smiles, but this smile was. I could tell.

  “Good point. If we’re sure it isn’t appropriating the pig culture, what do you think of going as the three little pigs, Aud?”

  Audrey’s mouth was still all pinched up, and now she wrinkled her nose, too. “Two
of the three little pigs die, you know.”

  Mr. Ellis peeked out into the hallway and told us all to hurry up and get to class.

  “My mom bought this really beautiful beaded mask for a masquerade ball benefit thing. Maybe I’ll just wear that,” Audrey said. Then she took off for science without saying goodbye.

  Sierra’s brown eyes were extra big when she watched Audrey go. “What version of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ did she read?”

  I laughed again as I linked my arm through Sierra’s, and we went down the hall together to Spanish.

  At lunchtime, Sierra was coming with me to Worship and Ministry.

  “It’s technically supposed to be one person per advisory,” I explained as we went down to the cafeteria to get our food. “But Mr. Ellis said it’s fine for you to come, since so many advisories don’t have representatives.”

  Audrey was already sitting at our usual table, with Emma and a couple of other friends. I started to wave to her as Sierra and I walked by, but she looked away.

  I remembered when Aunt Jill picked me up after Audrey’s fifth-grade birthday party. “Audrey is used to getting her way, huh?” she said to Mom when she dropped me off at home.

  Aunt Jill was right, obviously. And now I’m finding out what happens when I don’t cooperate.

  Sierra and I took our lunches upstairs, and only Mr. Ellis and Mariah were already there in his classroom. I took the chair next to Mariah, and Sierra took the one next to me.

  “I’m so glad you’re joining us, Sierra!” Mr. Ellis said when we came in. “Great to see you, girls.”

  And the thing about Mr. Ellis is, it always feels like he really does think it’s great to see us.

  Jake showed up next, wearing an orangey-red shirt. The last time I went shopping with Audrey, before camp, I tried on a bathing suit that was almost that same exact shade, and she shook her head. “I don’t think that’s your color. But don’t feel bad. Orange doesn’t look good on anybody.”

  She was wrong, though, because it looked good on Jake, with his light brown skin. Really good. I’ve seen Jake’s parents at school stuff, and his dad is black and his mom is white—the opposite of Anne and Carl next door. I never got to meet Anne and Carl’s daughter, Amy, but I imagine her with skin the same color as Jake’s.

  He caught me looking at him, so I focused my eyes on my tray and stuffed half a chicken finger into my mouth. Then Gordy came in with another sixth grader he’d recruited to join—a kid named Oscar—and Mr. Ellis got us started talking about our simplicity initiative.

  “Mariah, Jake, I hear you were a huge part of planning the recycling initiative last year,” Mr. Ellis said. “What awesome ideas are you sitting on now?”

  Jake shrugged, and Mariah smoothed down her blue bangs.

  “Stewardship was easier than simplicity,” Jake said. “We just had to think of what we could do to help the environment. We found out lots of people threw away stuff that’s recyclable, so we made signs to hang in the cafeteria and the halls about what you can recycle and what you can’t.”

  I remembered them standing up during morning meeting to announce the recycling signs: Mariah fidgeting with her hair, which was still dirty blond then, and Jake standing up tall, enunciating as if he’d practiced at home.

  Mr. Ellis nodded. “Well, that might not have been hard to do, but it made a big impact. Often the best ideas are the simplest ones. No pun intended.”

  “We also gave a prize to the advisory that filled up a recycling bin the fastest,” Mariah reminded Jake. “Everybody likes prizes.”

  “Maybe we’ll offer some kind of prize this year, too,” Mr. Ellis said. He wrote the word prize on the board with a question mark.

  Mariah nodded. “It’s harder to come up with an initiative for simplicity than stewardship, though.”

  Mr. Ellis sat back down. “Well, let’s go ahead and get our brainstorm on! Hard doesn’t mean impossible. I have faith.”

  Jake took out a notebook and started scribbling a brainstorming web, with the word simplicity in the middle. He crossed something out, frowning down at the page.

  Meanwhile, Mariah, Gordy, and Gordy’s friend Oscar pretended to be fascinated by their lunches, and Sierra stared out the window, watching leaves spin in the breeze.

  Sierra understands simplicity better than any of us. She doesn’t wear brand-name clothes. She didn’t have a phone until Carl gave her his old one, and it doesn’t even get Internet. I thought she’d feel comfortable in this group. I thought she could . . . I don’t know. Lead us in the right direction. Guide us. But maybe that was just as wrong as when I told Audrey it doesn’t matter what race Charlie’s Angels are.

  At the front of the room, Mr. Ellis was looking at me as if he was counting on me and my “strong sense of social responsibility” to get us going. But I had nothing.

  There was a red flyer hanging on the bulletin board behind Mr. Ellis’s head. Join us for the Philadelphia AIDS Walk this weekend!

  A walk. Mom, Dad, Ry, and I all did an Autism Acceptance Walk last April. I joined a fund-raising team and got people to sponsor me.

  “We could have a Simplicity-a-Thon!”

  I said it so loudly, Sierra jumped in her seat.

  “A Simplicity-a-Thon?” Jake echoed, but his voice was interested, not sarcastic.

  “It would be a whole day when people can’t use any electronics or buy anything. Anybody who wants to participate could get people to sponsor them by making a donation. And we’d give the money to a really good cause. To people who actually need it.”

  “And we could give a prize for whoever raises the most!” Mariah added.

  Mr. Ellis wrote it on the board: Simplicity-a-Thon. Then he added an exclamation point and underlined it twice.

  And once the idea seal was broken, I got another one. “We could have a Simplicity Prize on Halloween, too! For the best homemade costume!”

  “We could make signs this week, maybe,” Mariah said. “To try to get people to make their own costumes instead of buying them.”

  Mr. Ellis wrote down the Halloween idea, and then Sierra spoke up.

  “Um . . . I think I have an idea.”

  Everybody turned to her, and she shrank down smaller in her chair, but she said it anyway.

  “Maybe around the holidays, we could encourage people to do favors for other people instead of buying them stuff? It’s something my mom and I used to do when . . .” She paused for a second before she finished the thought. “Some years.”

  Mr. Ellis smiled at her. “A Favor Swap. What an awesome idea!”

  And it was. So much better than the Secret Gifter Swaps we usually did in advisory, when everybody wasted ten bucks on candy or iTunes gift cards for whichever person they got assigned. I knew it had been the right thing to get Sierra to come to the group.

  On the way out, Jake stopped us. “Good job today. I’m glad you both joined.”

  My cheeks went warm. “Thanks.”

  “See ya!” He took one hand off his lunch tray to give us a little wave, and we watched him go. But he said hi to three different people in the hallway before he made it even five feet from the classroom, so it probably wasn’t that special that he’d stopped to talk to us.

  “Are you glad you joined?” I asked Sierra.

  “I liked it, yeah,” she said. Then she leaned in close to whisper. “Will Audrey be mad about the Simplicity Prize at Halloween if she wears that mask, though?”

  I thought of Audrey’s pinched-up face that morning and the way she’d looked away from me in the cafeteria. She would definitely be mad if she knew I’d come up with a prize she wouldn’t have a shot at winning. A little voice inside me said, “So let her be!”

  But this was Audrey, who had spent an entire afternoon building a guinea-pig obstacle course with me. Whose house I’d had double sleepovers at on weekends sometimes and whose family always took me to the Poconos for New Year’s. Who used to get Ryan to show her his fish tank when she came over and then ask
what the different breeds and plants were called.

  “I’ll talk to her,” I promised. “She’ll change her mind about the costume. We’ll do one for three people, all of us.”

  But Sierra didn’t look convinced.

  That night, Dad came home for dinner and picked up pizza on the way. Even though we weren’t eating anything special, Mom set the dining room table with fancy silverware, fancy plates, and matching placemats and cloth napkins. She put fresh flowers in the middle—orange, red, and yellow ones—in a brand-new vase the same shade of yellow as the smallest flowers.

  She said she’d bought it because she “needed a cheerful little pick-me-up,” and Dad complimented her on how pretty everything looked.

  But I was thinking about how Aunt Jill once told me that she and Mom hadn’t gotten along that well when they were younger. Mom was so orderly. So focused on keeping everything neat and matching and perfect, and Aunt Jill was “wild,” whatever that meant. She said Mom had let go of some of that need for things to look just right. Thanks to Ryan, Mom’s priorities had changed, and they understood each other better now.

  But now maybe Mom is turning back into the version of herself that Aunt Jill didn’t get along with. That I never even met at all.

  “I got tickets to the Eagles game this weekend,” Dad said when we all sat down.

  For a second, I got excited. We used to have Dad-and-Lauren days, when Mom would do something else with Ry. Dad’s a Philly sports nut, and Mom and Ry don’t really like going to games, but I do. I could always tell how happy it made Dad that I knew the players’ names and who was having a good year and who wasn’t. And it made me happy, too, to have something that was just for the two of us.

  “Upper level?” I asked.

  Those are the seats he used to get, way up high. He’d pick me up and hold me over his shoulders when the Eagles scored a touchdown, and I felt like I was flying.

  “Even better,” he said. “Box seats from the firm. For all three of us!”

  Then he started explaining the gourmet food we’d have to choose from, and how we wouldn’t be cold even if it was chilly because we could stay inside, and how there were brand-new TVs in every box. Which somehow people think they need even though they are literally in the place where the game is being played?