VII
Cheeky

On our drive back home, my mother hummed entire musicals and made me hold the jar of poppies that the desk admin had allowed her to take home. Fifteen minutes into the drive, and three songs into Evita: The Musical, we took a left instead of a right and pulled into the parking lot of the stables where my sister took her weekly equestrian classes. The call that had used so much of my mother’s monthly plan was from my sister, who commanded that we come pick her up so that she didn’t have to sit in a stinky taxi.
This is what my sister is like. In fact, this is what my entire family is like (unless my mother is high). I didn’t understand what had happened to me and why I was the way I was, but I reveled in being different. I liked the way my father listed me last in all family introductions, and the way my mother never asked me if I wanted to take a class she had signed up my sister for. Oh, I was smart. I got high test scores and had a good memory. I just didn’t apply myself, as my teachers, who were all weeping on the inside, told my parents.
We sat in the parking lot for several minutes. My mother was busy fiddling with her powder puff, which she often does at even intervals, and was taking deep, calming breaths in between verses of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.
“Did you like that school, baby?” my mother asked, a little nervously. “I thought it was pretty cute.”
I amused myself with the contents of the glove compartment. “Yeah. I guess.”
Apparently, my mother was designed not to Take A Hint. She plowed on relentlessly, still smearing face powder all over her nose. “Yeah, you guess, what? You guess you like it? Or you guess it’s cute? Do you want to go back?” When she had finished dunking her face in extract of snow white, she pulled out a tube of what was meant to be ‘natural’-looking lipstick, but when you caked it on the way she did, it looked just like any other gaudy makeup device. “You made friends, didn’t you?”
“Ngrk,” I replied. “I see you made some friends, too.”
She pretended to look innocent. It was a pretty good job of a look, too. “Well, the desk admin was very nice. And I met a few of the teachers while we were walking. They’re all very unique.” Then she set her makeup items down and looked at me a bit funny. “You’re not thinking of attending, are you?”
Surprised at her sudden burst of clarity, I replied straightforwardly. “Oh. No, mom. I like my school…” …because overcrowded private schools are great for my general well being and self-confidence, I finished silently.
    But my mother was still looking at me worriedly. “If you want to change schools, honey, Mrs. Lipschitz told me about this famous prep school downtown, it’s not too much, Daddy and I were thinking of sending Christal there—”
Christal was my little sister, and I had no intention of ever going to the same school as her.
“I’ve only got one school year left to go,” I reminded my mother. Not much time had passed since my revival of obsession. I was still seventeen.
“Oh, that’s right.” Puckering up in the mirror, my mother took another swipe at her lips. “Still, if you want to…”
And she winked at me, like she was back in high school and talking once again to my father about skipping school on Wednesdays. (I found this out through the yearbook, too.)
Silence fell over our expensive car again. I propped my chin on my elbow, yawned, and then squinted out over the—extremely real and not just Photoshopped into my mind—quaint green fields scattered with chocolate-brown horses and perfect little girls in riding gear. Without even knowing their names or fathers or where they lived, it was obvious that they were all rich and spoiled, my sister very much invluded. I could just make her out, the tall, blonde one on the outermost fringe of the group, leading around her pony with her chin thrust into the air.
If she were my age, I would have hated her with a passion. As it stands, I had to love her. But it still felt more like a duty, rather than something that came naturally.
For a moment I wondered if Purchase had any siblings. Were they brother or sister, younger or older, shorter or taller? What colour was their hair, and did they dye it every month like I had heard Purchase did? What school did they attend, if any? And were they potentially hazardous, as Purchase definitely was? I made up my mind to ask her the next time I saw her. In fact, I made up my mind to have a stable conversation with her, one in which she was not high and I was not worrying about how my guts looked when they exploded.
Then there came a frustrated tapping at my window. I turned, my chin still resting on my palm, to meet the red, blotchy face of my little sister.
Christal was twelve and, to put it in very simple, very un-vulgar terms, a brat. Little sisters in movies did not even live up to her. They were her prototype, and she was the put-together version. It was as if, in the uterus, devoid of anything else to do but listen to my mother read Salinger novels to her unborn child, she secretly listened to all the movies I was watching on our brand-new widescreen television. Movies that taught an amateur serial killer where to hide and what to say, that revealed the stereotype mean chick with the short skirts and boots, that depicted evil little sisters who yelled too much and stole your cookies. She was blonde and was blonde. She got straight A’s and didn’t even try for them. She ironed all of her clothes and wore makeup and had weekly manicures and pedicures.
She looked down at me, and I looked down at her. It was a fair trade.
“Jesus Christ, open the door,” she roared.
Next to me, my mother giggled. Not because she was high: she highly disapproved of my saying God’s name in vain, but whenever Christal decided to drop profanity within earshot, she merely laughed it off. When asked why, she would grin and say it was cute.
“Christal, dear, are we taking anybody around today?” asked my mother sweetly. Instinct told her that she was most definitely programmed to enjoy driving to completely opposite ends of town, just to drop around her daughter’s kidlet friends. I thought it was a shitty job.
“No,” growled my dear sister. “They all found someone new to tag along with.”
My eyes automatically rolled, with every bit of sarcasm that I saved especially for occasions like these. “Jesus, Christal.”
“Shut the hell up!”
For a twelve-year-old, my little sister was awfully verbose.
Still, my mother’s instincts kicked in, and she remembered that her program forced her to care about inane, egotistical things, like my sister’s life. “What are you going on about, dear? You need to explain, please. Mommy doesn’t understand.”
I was pretty sure that my mother didn’t even care to understand, she just had to. Duty over desire, once again. But she did look genuinely concerned, her twig-on-a-stick neck craned tightly over the leather seat to stare down at my pouting, pudgy blonde sister.
The pout and pudge just gave a highly exaggerated sigh in response. “It’s nothing, mother. Just drive.”
“But Chrissie—”
“Mother, I command that you—”
“For Chrissakes, Chrissie, you are so—”
“Hey, I told you to shut up. Nobody asked you!”
(This was the usual sort of spat between us females. I often told Christal that she had a superiority complex; that she thought everyone was either stupid or insane and therefore she was the only person on earth capable of giving directions. Age to her did not mean wiser, it just meant they’d been born earlier and so what? Even though I was five years older than she was, she insisted on being the desk admin, the ruling empress, and the nagging fly of my life. For instance:
“Why don’t you take extracurriculur courses like I am? They’re good on your college application. And resumes.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Oh, my God. You are so lazy! You’ll never get anywhere in life. I demand you take at least a ballet class, or something.”
She also thought that by giving direct orders, she could fix anyone and anything. The words ‘I think’ never came out of her mouth, instead, it was ‘I demand’ or ‘I command’. My parents chuckled and told me to get over it; that it was a just phase. But I knew better. I’d been twelve once, and still remembered the feelings.)
“Christal, darling,” began my mother again as she drove, a bit awkwardly, past more expensive fields and grand houses. “Please don’t make all that racket. And you,” she said, turning to me (I was always the afterthought), “should not be saying words like ‘chrissakes’.”
“Oh, I see,” I replied bitterly, “so it’s okay for your twelve-year-old to open her mouth and be profane, but I’m seventeen, and it’s just plain wrong?”
“Christal will grow out of it. She is a fine young woman, aimed at putting herself high in the market, posed at putting herself on the most glorious shelf of them all. I don’t worry about her.”
My mother, although she had no real place in the jungle of economy, liked to think that she had a thorough and extensive knowledge of human psychology. She also liked to talk about my sister like she wasn’t there, and instead was an item you found at the best department stores around, that movie stars couldn’t even buy without a layaway.
“You, on the other hand, I do worry about, and you never did grow out of obscenity.”
Oh, here we go, I thought, turning to the window, the accusatory battle of the century.
“Don’t shift when Mother is talking to you,” Christal said bitterly from the backseat, snapping in her seatbelt like she was snapping the neck off a chicken. “We can all tell you’re extremely apathetic, but you could at least try to act like you care, instead of exhibiting signs of Asperger’s and attempting to become the emotional tragedy of the century. God knows your friends are already in the line-up.”
I could have shot her right then and there. But my mother was still talking, so I instead turned my apathetic, Asperger’s-like attention back to her inane chatter.
“—Always a beautiful lady, I thought you could end up being like Christal. I always imagined you would be her role model, you know, the whole big sister, little sister thing…I had visions of this. That you would be prim and proper and since you were, Christal would be, too. When she was a baby…”
We narrowly avoided smashing a skunk straight on. As a result, we scratched the curb and the woman in the car behind us began to scream in rapid Spanish.
“Mom, I think she just said she has a pistol in her garter,” I remarked casually, my ear pressed against the thin windowpane, listening to the high-pitched yelling. “And that she intends to use it if we don’t…move.”
That was not the exact verb, but I was, after all, getting a lecture on profanity.
As my mother continued to play psychiatrist and my sister tended to her self-pity party of being abandoned for acting like a bitch, I watched the scenery outside our shaky-moving vehicle. We traveled along highways, and I counted and said good-by to yellow faded lines as they zoomed past our tires. The roads were lined with pine trees and signs for rest stops, and I noted graffiti and trash and then the blue blue sky. As we rolled onto the main roads, we slowed down in neighborhoods with fancy, almost corny names like ‘Crestwood Glen’, ‘Upper Mermaid Crest’ (there was no Lower Mermaid Crest, to my disappointment), and ‘Spingfest Ponds’. The houses contained in these neighborhoods were all different, with European motifs. One thing was the same, however: their yards were all a bright, healthy green (whether it was fake or not I couldn’t tell) and they all had at least two very shiny, very expensive cars.
It pains even now me to confess to other people that I lived in one of these houses, expensive cars, blinding lawns and all. They will ask me, “Oh, where are you from?” I’ll give the name of my rich town, which is okay, since I still have time to lie. I’ll still have time to tell whoever is asking that I lived on the outskirts of the county, where some lawns are green, some brown, and some people pray their Oldsmobile won’t die on them, instead of buying SUVs when they’re bored. But then they ask, “How interesting, I kind of know the area. Where exactly did you live?” Then I’ll have to give a vague street address, or a rickety description of what surrounded me (man-made lakes, artificial forests, and cashmered women). Things usually end there, and if it doesn’t, I’ll make up an excuse to leave, to quit talking about my house where I did not really live.
Finally there was a pause in my mother’s speech as she slowed down to the mandatory 10 miles per hour at the upper-crust elementary school that happened to be less than a mile near our home. I was happy for the diversion, for the sound of silence, but my sister—and damn her to this day—decided to vocalize her pre-teen despair.
“Mother,” she whined (and was champion at it). “I haven’t told you about what happened today, yet.”
The attention my mother was giving the young man at the crosswalk suddenly flew, sound effects and all, over to my younger sister. “Oh, I’m so sorry, honeypie. Go on then and tell Mommy what’s bothering you. She’s here to listen.”
“Okay, Mummeeee…”
I belched for emphasis, so that, later, when accused of being completely non-supportive, I could recall this obvious moment of lending a hand.
While my sister kicked my seat, screamed a few unholy words, and then began her tirade of some boy named Juan and how he was stealing all of my sister’s pretty white friends, the young man directing traffic at the crosswalk glanced at our car again, this time at me. He grinned and waved. I waved back. I noticed he was a redhead, but it didn’t really register in my mind at the time. My faith in redheads was dimming.
“…Had no right to do so Mummeeeee he was horrible I tried to be nice but he didn’t smile back Mumeeee he was horrible…”
I looked away from Young Man at Crosswalk and tried to focus on my sister’s non-usage of the comma or period, but he was waving small children over now, and smiling guilely at some of them. At least, it looked like guile to me. He would later confess to me, in bed late at night, that he’d always wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, and telling them how to cross the street safely was the next best thing, since he could never pass the test to gain his license.
Children in parkas, fuzzy hats with ears, and galoshes passed us. It was a sunny day, but I knew that ultra-suburban mothers had no trust in weathermen at all, since they had all broken their hearts at one time or another. (In fact, my own had had her share of steamy affairs, but we never talked about them, and I will spare her the embarrassment, for once in our embarrassment-fueld lives, right now.) Some held umbrellas, others dragged fleece coats over the gravelly road. It was a roaring sea of color, and, dizzy, I forced myself to look away for a moment.
“…Don’t get how they could just leave me Mother how on earth could they possibly think of thanking me this way I just don’t understand it at all at all I tell you Mother are you listening Mother!”
Commas everywhere wept for the sake of usage. Discouraged by my sister’s lack of proper grammar (something that had always irked me), I turned back to the scene in front of me—small, brightly lit children, a redhead wearing a reflective vest, and a pile-up of BMWs, SUVs and Lamborghinis (you certainly never knew) behind us. Near my side window, a little girl in pigtails and a piglet suit tripped over nothing and began to cry, and Crosswalk Guy bent down to help her up.
It was like one of those short films that always precede animated hits: a little reminder to each and every one of us that, when all is said and done, people really are good, whether you’d like to think so or not. Tear-streaked and smiling with oodles of space from missing teeth (the sort of image you’d show to people to make them relent), the little girl thanked, in a pronounced lisp, Mr. Crosswalk Man, who in turn patted her on the head and sent her along the way.
(Could I actually hear them? No. We were stopped at an intersection, my sister was yapping her pretty little head off, my mother was coming down from an extravagant high—what else was I expected to do but let my mind wander? And oh, wandering it most definitely was!)
The last of toddler, teacher’s aide and inclement weather device-toting child stepped out of our path and Crosswalk pulled a whistle out of nowhere (it really did look like nowhere. And he did this, every single time. I would ask, “O Crosswalk Man, wherefore art thou blowing device?” and he would wink because, for one, it was a secret, and secondly, I’d just made a rather dirty sexual reference) and blew into it loudly, causing my sister to wail indignantly and my mother to jump a mile out of her seat.
“Oh dear,” said my mother, a tad breathlessly. Her eyes took a moment to focus on the road in front of her. “That was quite loud, don’t you think? It’s as if he assumes no one is paying attention.”
I sighed. “No one is paying attention, Mother.”
“Mother!” In the backseat, Christal let out an almost convincing, angst-wracked sob. “You were supposed to be listening to me!”
“I was listening to you, dear,” my mother muttered as she slowly drifted the car along the school sidewalks. As we passed Cross (I had run out of clever nicknames to call him, and the sifter of claims had to eventually dwindle down to the disappointing and measly of all possible names), he gave me a quirky grin and a salute. I returned the salute, and offered my tongue instead of a smile, rolled and pointed at the end.
After all, my teachers wouldn’t have written cheeky and obnoxious on my report cards if I hadn’t amounted to anything over the years.


IX
The Incident Regarding the Letter

Before we move on, we are required a bit of history.  
I am not the one in the family to fetch the mail. Neither is my father, who wakes up at five-thirty and locks himself in his office, oldies music blaring through the entire lower section of the house, or my mother, who sleeps in until whenever and walks around the house in nothing but a lavender silk kimono, or my sister, who does not usually wake up until noon on the weekends. On the whole, we are not much of a do family. We are a think and act upon it whenever you think is right family, which does not exactly work for us because they (i.e., everyone else but me) require our white-picket fenced-in house to be completely and utterly spotless and shiny.  
This is why we have a maid.
Maids have already made enough ground to be covered in my rambles. I have talked of them being foreign and cleaning up after our messes, because we tend to think about whether our messes are worth cleaning up, realize they aren’t, and then call a maid to do it. Our maids are doers. We wouldn’t be able to tolerate thinkers. (Well, I would, but it would be quite irritating if I didn’t wake up to breakfast already laid out before me. That is the only thing I am stingy about.)
The maid that we had at the time was German. Marsha had cornfield-yellow hair, thick pink lips, wide, wide-set bright blue eyes and always nodded and smiled when you asked her to do something. She cleaned up efficiently and well. Her noise level was barely on the chart and she hardly ever got into our way, and her pancakes were to die for. In short, she was the perfect maid to have in our family.
She was the one who got the mail in the mornings.
When she first arrived, we didn’t even ask her to do it. The morning after we’d given her a room and a schedule she unlocked our front door at five o’clock in the morning, stepped out into the dewy air with her terrycloth robe and chinchilla slippers and tip-toed across the slick pathway to open our mailbox. How she even knew the mail came exactly at five, we were never to know. How she even knew we had mail, we were never to know. Marsha was a mystery, and we didn’t really care.
“Marsha, where are you off to?”
“Ja, I am off to der shopping.”
“Oh, okay. Don’t forget to buy eggs.”
“Ja, I hear.”
“Marsha? Have you seen my boots?”
“They are in der hallvay, madame.”
“I don’t see them.”
“By der staircase, madame.”
    “Ah! Thanks, Marsh.”
“Ja, ja.”
Convenience suited her. Hell, it suited us because she suited us. Usually we fired a maid within a week, because most of the ones we hired annoyed my mother, or didn’t do what anyone asked (even if we did so politely, and that was pretty hard on us). But Marsha was an absolute doll. She did and did and did and never complained. We loved her: my mother because she didn’t get in her way, my sister because she liked giving orders and Marsha liked (or just didn’t care) to receive them, my father because she was beautiful and quiet and I because she made killer breakfast dishes. Our mutual affection for Marsha was probably the one thing during that year that my family agreed on and it would be the only thing we ever agreed on, even after she left, for quite some time.
And then, on that one day, the morning after I’d visited St. Abernathy’s, I received a letter.
Since I hardly ever receive mail (my sister gets, on a daily basis, bunches of admiring letters from faraway friends and anticipated universities; my mother, catalogue after catalogue after catalogue, and my father, undisclosed amounts of risky business information that we are not allowed to stare at), everyone at the breakfast table was extremely surprised when Marsha slipped me the envelope under my glass of milk.
“A letter for you, miss,” she said gruffly (her voice fluctuated between sweet, doting and manly, brutal, like a badly tuned television set).
Frantically, my mother slapped her hand to her heart. I could swear she had tears in her eyes.
“Oh sweet heavens, does my wonderful daughter now have a boy admirer?” she squealed, fanning herself with the hand that was not clutching her chest. “Tell me that’s what it is! Your momsy will be so happy.”  
My sister snorted loudly into her cup of coffee. “You may have to wait about ten more years, Mother.”
I spit into her cereal. While she began to hyperventilate, I calmly returned to my letter.
It came in a fancy, cream-coloured envelope, with a red wax seal on the flap that was mushed. The return address was nothing but the letters SANCSG in fancy, looping English script, with the S’s curled like vines, the N intertwining with the last three symbols and the end G curling off into nothingness. In the center of the backside was a monogrammed poppy petal, which, mingled in with the veins, contained my address and my name, as elegantly written as the rest of the words. My heart began to quicken and my eyes to burn. Who was this cloudy figure with the beautiful handwriting? And why were they writing to me—me, of all the people they could possibly write to?
“Go on,” prodded Marsha, who was standing patiently behind me. “Now open it, please.”
I found Marsha’s enthusiasm for my private matter very strange. So did my mother. “Marsha, I ask kindly that you leave the kitchen to us, please,” she said in a docile, clearly maternal manner.
“Not today, madame,” grunted our maid once again. At this remark, we were all thrown backwards in our seats. For the first time in her career at our household, Marsha was denying an order straight from her payer. “I am a part of this family, too, madame, and I want to see this letter.”
Oh, okay, I see how it is, I thought, now slightly miffed as I tugged at the wax-encrusted flap. Now I’m the circus freak, doing amazing flips and turns at the speed of light. Everyone watch me, I’m free of charge!
But my mother wasn’t having any of this. “Marsha, I ask kindly once again that you leave the kitchen to my daughters and I as we have breakfast.”
Glancing up, I saw Christal’s jaw, by now practically on the floor, and my mother’s face, which was an exact copy of the time when I had told her I wanted to live in a cardboard box when I grew up. My father was not in the room at the moment, but I bet that if he were, his face would have remained unchanged during the whole brouhaha. That is just the kind of man my father is.
“No, Madame, I…” began Marsha gruffly, but my mother, fed up with a maid that had her own opinions, stood up from her chair and pointed at the door.
“Marsha, I am extremely disappointed in you,” she said with as much authority as a teakettle. “I must ask you to leave now. We will talk of your disobedience later, once I have finished having breakfast with my daughters. You know how much we value this time as a family.”
(Mother had breakfast with us once a week. Whenever she talked about it, though, she made it seem like we all had breakfast every single morning, with even my father in tow, and we all spoke politely and made plans and laughed daintily over scones. In reality, though, my sister was a pig, my mother ate a sliver of cheese every morning and I was stuck with whatever Christal didn’t like. So, even though she talked of us valuing breakfastime, we all just wanted to get it out of our way.)
Marsha stayed put; her mouth set in a decidedly grim line. The kitchen, normally buzzing with the mating call of a hundred expensive electronics, suddenly fell silent. My mother’s hair, which had been perfectly set this morning, was now frizzling steadily from the ends up, like a rope of steadily burning ash. To say that you could have cut the tension with a knife does not even begin to explain how stiff the atmosphere was. You would have needed a sledgehammer and a few pickaxes to deal with the fury of that moment.
My letter was now lying abandoned on top of my eggs benedict, and was streaked on the bottom with bits of hollandaise sauce. To my left, my sister had her hands clamped over her mouth, shuddering violently with repressed laughter (something she had enough sense to do, because if she had laughed right then, a guillotine probably would have come swishing down on her head), and my mother and our maid were still attempting to stare the other into oblivion.
And then suddenly, dry hands smelling of disinfectant and a failed coverup of lavender thrust themselves into my hair and yanked me to one side, where I stumbled into the chair next to me and then crashed to the floor. I saw nothing of what happened next, for my face was squished into the lineoleum, but I heard it all: squeaks and screams, some in English, some in German, and some in an unintelligible gibberish that was actually my sister laughing hysterically. My plate of eggs benedict tumbled to its death, which was actually my foot, and as I swerved round to inspect the damage I tripped up Marsha, who, anticipating a speedy getaway, had accidentally grabbed the tablecloth with my letter and was now bringing it down with her.
Through tasty sauce, a hand covered in yolk and the sounds of our maid (who was tangled in my legs) grubbling into the linen tablecloth I managed to notice that my father had entered the room. He was impeccably dressed, clean-shaven, and looking deeply disturbed over the rim of his coffee mug
“My…God,” he muttered after a pause, and then turned around and went back into his office (most likely to forget the image of his eldest daughter covered in yellow sauce and his wife looking as if she had just swallowed broken glass. My father liked perfection).
Needless to say, Marsha was fired that evening, with a tearful upbraiding from my mother, complete with broken German phrases that she had attemped to learn in five minutes. Christal and I stood outside the door, she still giggling every so often and I just upset at the loss of exquisite pancakes and sausages. And my father, sad to see such a pert-bosomed woman leave, nodded in acknowledgement—the most he had ever given, despite his being fond of her—as she stepped into the taxi, dragging her forlorn suitcase along with her.
“Oh well,” sighed Christal to herself (only very loudly) in the foyer, twirling a piece of hair around her middle finger. “Whatever.”
And while it is a sad confession to make, her words did sum the entire episode up. I forgot about Marsha falling on my ankle, and I forgot about having my own breakfast dish thrown into my face, albeit on sort-of accident. My father immersed himself in caffeine and news and came out of his office the next morning more chipper than usual. And my mother calmed herself (not by way of illicit drug, I still hope today) and went to call her friends for new housekeeper recommendations.
Whenever asked about the motives behind Marsha’s outburst, my mother would laugh, high and tinkly, and wiggle her fingers in a noncommittal gesture. “Something quite odd,” she would always begin, and then go on to state the details:
Marsha, who we did not know to be as smart as she really was, according to the anecdote, was keeping a steamy and extremely potent affair with the deliveryman. Afraid of going public for a number of obvious reasons, Marsha pleaded with the UPS man to send her his love in a way no one would notice—whatever he decided to do, as long as it was secret, she would go along with. And so he began to slip her letters through the mailbox, so that she could filter out her own letters from everyone else’s. To differentiate himself from the others, he got his niece (why she went along with any of this beats me) to create fake addresses written in fancy, elegant script on the outside of the envelopes. On the morning on the incident, however, the letter that had arrived for me was also written in fancy script, and Marsha had been apprehensive as to whom it belonged to. On impulse, she decided it was for me, but when I did not open it immediately she became nervous and snatched it away—with, of course, disastrous results.
As for the actual letter, Christal delivered it to me later on that same day, sneering as she did so.
“I guess this is yours,” she snickered, tossing the envelope (smeared with sauce, tea, and coffee) onto my bed. “And you know, rejection isn’t so bad…”
I sent her out with a sneaker to the head and a swipe of the concoction that had gathered on the nonexistent return address of my letter. And although I knew in the back of my mind that I was not being sent a note of disposal, I was still not prepared for what really lay in store for me.
On the college-ruled notebook paper that I still have today, I was being offered a proposal to meet—behind the hill with the poppies, on ‘rolling green fields’, the letter seemed to croon to me, ‘that we could make real, if we wished’.
And it was from Purchase.

X
The Week of Electrical Fires

In my entire life, there have only been three incidents in which I truly believed my heart had stopped beating. Going backwards in chronological order: when I received my first paycheck at twenty-three, when Samson kissed me under the lemon tree and—by this, you can conclude I am not easily surprised—the time Purchase asked me on a date.
I am not one to exaggerate, lie or stretch the truth (when circumstances find it extremely necessary, though, I have been known to fib like a pro. But it is not one of those times). When I say that Purchase asked me out on a date, I mean that within the contents of that very first note she had written—and these are her exact words—‘I’d love to get to know you, babe, so I think a date is in order’. I memorized the line then and I still know it now. It was recited to myself in the bathroom mirror when I was seventeen and now is recalled to girlfriends and boyfriends alike. But even so, from what I knew of her, willow trees and ripped jeans and fake red hair and addiction to street drugs and all, I could safely conclude that she was high and what this really was was not a date, but more of an excursion. A mere outing, was what I saw it as.
Nevertheless, I failed to act casual while thinking of the subject. I remembered once during dinner that I had been bringing a potato to my mouth. It was generously topped with cheese and sour cream and chili, because I was the most earnest eater of the family. Really, it was just a normal thing. But when my mind brought up, for no reason at all, the date—no, the playdate—my hand jerked and the legume promptly plopped into my lap. While my mother threw a fit and my sister spasmed with giggles, my father took one look at me and asked if I was troubled by anything.
“No,” I lied, my face flaring up like an electrical fire. “I’m fine.”
He chewed slowly on his own au gratin and then nodded, very decidedly and deliberately, before returning to his own food.
To my extreme embarrassment, I suffered the same fate many times at school. Even though I had lost the best friend, I still had a solid camaraderie with some select few, and every single one of them asked me if I was feeling well the next school day after I had received Purchase’s request. After insisting (with the straightest face I could muster at the time) that I had never felt better, I would rush to the bathroom and realize my face had involuntarily broken out in red splotches, and that I was clammy and flushed. I died a little inside, cursing that bloody beautiful redhead to damnation, and then tried to make myself look as normal as possible. And even when I did manage to pull the Hey Guys, I’m Not Flustered At All look off, all it took was one little burst of memory and I’d once again resemble a moldy tomato.
The date that Purchase had named for our simple picnic was a week away, and it was because of this that I hated her even more. The fact that she had chosen a long, slow, and toiling seven days made me wonder if she was playing hard-to-get, or being the bitch I had thought she was outside the door of her art room. And while I tried not to ponder this; not to think it over during the agonizing torment of analyzing poems about weeping willows in my high school textbooks, and through the portrait of Venus on my mother’s wall, Purchase clawed her way into my closed-off cranium with surprising, unexpected skill.
 I decided that she was a disease. No matter where I went, there she was. Whatever I did, she was with me. It didn’t matter what I ate because it all ended up tasting like olives in the end, and because of my extreme abhorrence to the vegetable; I ended up losing a pound that week. As for the thing that started it all, the now-infamous letter had lain on my bed for five days. I had opened it once and then tried to forget about it, but after I had ‘accidentally’ moved it under my bed I had a completely awful day and therefore came to the conclusion that Purchase (or her handwriting, at least) was my good luck charm. And so I began to carry it around with me, which was rather disgusting, because it was sticky and smelled like old hollaindaise sauce and eggs.
“What in the world?” asked one of my friends as she opened my bag for a pencil and, instead, came in heavy contact with the stench. “Are you hiding a dead cat in there or something?”
Yeah, the skeletons in my closet, was what I thought of telling her, just to scare her. But then I realized it was true: Purchase really was my skeleton, still living, hidden away in cherrywood cabinets. I shrugged awkwardly. “Oh, it’s nothing. Our new maid likes to pack me weird lunches.”
“Oh my God, you are so not alone…” And we launched ourselves into a tirade of foreign housekeepers who insisted on feeding us the food of their indigenous country. I actually liked bratwurst, but I was thankful for the distraction.
Seconds turned into minutes turned into hours turned into days. I was weak and fatigued, like a solider through war, and I knew it was all so pathetic because I was not a soldier in a war but a teenager falling in love but I couldn’t help it one bit. The swinging, topsy-turvy moods of a pregnant woman became me: I was snappish one minute and utterly complacent the next. The calender on my wall was full of red xs counting down the days and I had managed to become so out of it that I woke up one morning clutching not my pillow but the cat. Not only that, there was a generous wad of fur in my nose and mouth.
“Oh, Lord,” I muttered (as best as I could through a mouthful of fur).
The kitty bit my chin.
But I was not doomed to this forever (unlike the many other things that Purchase damned me to). On the seventh day—let there be light, etc.—I jolted awake, as if the electrical current running through my veins had just slapped me in the face. I am normally not a morning person, and so when Sylvia, our new housekeeper, came tiptoeing into my room and saw me sitting straight up, eyes wild, she gave a little start.
“My goodness,” she breathed in her dainty English accent. “I was frightened out of my wits. I’ve just come to wake you up, for your mother says it’s not a good idea to sleep in this late.”
As if acting on its own volition, my hand grabbed the clock on my bedside table with amazing force. “It’s eleven,” I said, my voice hoarse.
Sylvia laughed. “Yes, I know this. Quite early for you I’d say, but your mother is insisting you get out of bed. Don’t you have something exciting on your schedule today?” And, apparently not expecting an answer, she gave me a little smile, took my laundry basket and tiptoed out of the room once more.
Blinking rapidly, I took another look at the clock still held tightly in my fist. Sure enough, it was eleven o’clock in the morning and the sun was streaming through my blinds and throwing itself all over my bed, particularly near my face, as if to offer me a good morning that was definitely not needed or wanted. I’d been hoping to wake up around ten at the very least, for the time Olive had requested was noon, and rich or not I was still of the gender that required pampering in the morning, whether it was seven or eleven.
And I only had an hour.
Heart beating wildly, I rolled out of bed and did a couple of Olympic-worthy jumps, the kind only extreme amounts of adrenaline can produce, to the bathroom. While there, I almost confused my toothpaste for shampoo and the conditioner for face moisturizer. I also swallowed a more than healthy amount of mouthwash and gagged for most of my shower, so that by the time I had finished, it looked more like I had just babysat several two-year-olds rather than looking like I had just gone through my freshening-up routine (which I hate to call it, but I am trying to make a point).
After flying down the stairs (the result of more of that very handy adrenaline), I was welcomed with lunch on the kitchen table and Christal in her ballet costume, lounging on the loveseat in front of the sixty-inch television and eating a bagel, crumbs spread in every direction.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked her, taking a fork and spearing a noodle. “And why aren’t you eating lunch?”
“How should I know and it’s none of your business,” she replied cooly, swinging her leg over the arm of the seat. “What is for lunch, anyway, Sylvia?”
“Noodles,” I said, and offered her a fork. I was feeling exceptionally kind that day. “Wanna try?”
Turning slowly, she took one long, puzzled look at me and then accepted the fork. “You’re not Sylvia. Why are you here anyway? I thought you’d be long gone.”
The fact that my own little sister had not recognized my voice told me that I was obviously not wanted that day, and that just made it better than it already was. I stuffed a couple of noodles into my mouth, and without even bothering to eat more or say good-by to anyone, I skipped out the back door, ready to greet whatever came out to get me. And even though I didn’t know her well, I had a distinct feeling that with Purchase, there was no telling how I could end up.

XI
Samson

Because I was not able to find my mother (actually, I didn’t even try to look for her, I was so jumpy that I couldn’t bring myself to do something that required patience), I had to take the bus to St. Abernathy’s. I do not take the bus often, and so I was instantly plagued with the fear that I would forget where the bus stop was, or I would miss the bus, or—and this, I thought, was the worst of them all—I would take the wrong bus, end up on the other side of town completely and miss the date that would become the very first emotional milestone of my life.
You must remember, for everyone else surely does, that before I met and became obsessed with Purchase I had not been a very open or feeling-oriented person. Sure, I knew what feelings were. A person can’t pass kindergarten without pointing out what is mad, sad, or glad. But besides the intense gut reaction I felt from my word magnets and paint globs and torn pages, people to me were just that: human beings that were born on earth and eventually died. I loved my parents and my sister because I was taught to do so, but I had never loved anyone else because I just didn’t want to. Out of all the movies I had watched with the best friends, or all the books I had read, or the songs Christal blasted at midnight, I thought non-platonic love was a big burden that would ruin us all if we weren’t careful. And since I didn’t like being careful, I thought I wouldn’t like falling in love.
But here I was, heart thrumming wildly, hands sweating profusely and train of thought falling off its tracks, because my hormones had decided to wake up and smell the redhead (albeit fake). I didn’t like to think that the reason I was so obsessed with Purchase was because I was helplessly falling for her, just like the song goes, but I was.
Just as I was about to start my usual rant of Why Love is Useless, which I had concocted long ago and perfected within the past seven days yearning, hands seemed to appear out of nowhere and I was held in mid-air for a few seconds before falling backwards.    
“Um?” I mumbled. I had been so lost in thought that I didn’t even know where I was. Looking up, all I saw was sun, and I began to notice the dull ache in my bottom and the contents of my bag slipping out dangerously onto grass.
“Oh God,” somebody said a tad hysterically. I wondered vaguely what all the fuss was about. “Shit, I’m so sorry—are you okay? Can you hear me?”
I could hear, but I wasn’t registering what I was listening to. I had always been prone to extremely bad falls, and after contact it usually took me awhile to understand what had happened and where I was. “Um,” I tried again, putting a hand to my head. “Yes?”
“Okay, good,” said the voice, and put a hand on my shoulder. On instinct, I flinched away, and the owner of the hand jerked backwards apologetically. “Sorry. Can you stand?”
A blurry image came into view—a hand, clearly being offered to me. I blinked a couple of times until my vision came into focus and then, seeing I had no other choice besides being rude, I took the hand and was pulled up.
“Thanks,” I muttered, able to see now. “Where am I?”
“You’re at White Oaks Elementary,” came the reply. Then a pause. “Did you hit your head? You seemed to be in a hurry…”
And then I remembered.
“Yes! I am in a hurry! Oh my God,” I gasped, shifting my bag onto my shoulder so that nothing would fall out. “I have to run. Gotta go. Bus stop. I’m late, ‘scuse me,” I babbled, walking past my helper and mingling with the bunch of waist-high (only because I was short) kidlets that had just come out of school. “Um, thanks,” I called behind me, waving frantically. In reply, there was a faint message, but I was on the other side of the street already and hardly caring.
I ran past children grasping Elmo dolls to their chests, and teacher’s aides looking as if they needed a good, strong cup of coffee to survive the rest of the day. I weaved in and out of striking yellow buses, and Mini Coopers, and more kids on bikes. And then there it was—my bus, just pulling up to the stop, with a couple of elderly pensioners lining up slowly in front of the door.
So out of shape was I that I had to catch my breath, even in so short of a run. I staggered over to join the line, accidentally running into a middle schooler who called me a rude name. But I was finally here, and didn’t care.
“Fare,” grunted the man at the wheel as I hoisted my short self onto the bus.
I realized that I didn’t know how much the fare was.
“To Vermont,” I said, sheepish but pretending not to be. “How much is that?”
The bus driver gave me an exasperated look and then pointed to the sign above him. Vermont Bus Station, it read, in big, bold letters, is being renovated until the 29th.
My heart did a spectacular flip and then broke off to fall, heavy, into the pit of my stomach. “What?” I said blankly, the word echoing in my car canals: what what what what what…
“You can read,” said the middle schooler behind me, bitterly. “Bus doesn’t go there. Get the hell off so we can get on.”
The world seemed to tip out of focus, like when you’re editing a picture and you drag it too far to the side so all you see is black. Perhaps I am overdramaticizing—no, I take that back, I am overdramaticizing—but that is how it felt and all I wanted to do was go on a complete rampage. Seven days of wholesome redheaded agony for this? Sure, I could walk, but that wasn’t the point. But really, who needs a point when everything you wanted has just gone down the drain?
I stomped off that bus like I had never stomped before. I think I even spat on the middle schooler, just to make him pissed off. I even glared at the kind old people, whom I had always liked because they were so nice to me, but at the moment I wanted to be a complete bitch. And I think I succeeded. Mothers near the elementary school, feeling my presence a mile away, hid their children behind their legs and leaned in closer with their other pearl-clad friends to talk about me. Look at that angry teenager, they said as I hurtled past them at the speed of light, we’d best keep our kids away from her. She might eat them. And I might as well have.
Instead of rose-coloured glasses, I was seeing things through the fire of hell. I could have sworn that if I stared at the grass long enough on that day, all the lawns on the sidewalk I was standing on would have spontaneously combusted. If I had grabbed a child, he or she would have begun to scream in agony. And as I came to the crosswalk, the guy directing traffic, upon seeing me, jumped a little and dropped his sign.
“You look like shit,” he said, after he had picked up his sign. “And you were okay just a few minutes ago.”
 I froze in my tracks, then, and looked at him. He was the same young fellow that I’d seen in the car last week, helping the little girl when she had fallen and waving at us when we passed. And, I suppose, it was also he who had helped me when I had fallen after our collision. If he, who I assumed was the type of guy to look for the best in everyone, thought I looked like shit then, then I probably did. I was instantly humbled, and even blushed a little.
“Oh. Yeah. Got into a fix back there.” I waved my hand floppily in an obscure direction.
“That sucks,” he said, and paused to blow a whistle (that came out of nowhere) to stop incoming traffic. While waving in the other side, he continued talking. “Saw you going to the bus stop. Did you miss your bus or something?”
Whatever this guy was doing to me, it was really calming me down. My heartbeat took itself off illicit drugs and began to wheeze itself back to normal, the organ itself pulleyed its way out of my stomach, and my fuzzy brain began to clear. I sighed deeply, and then I tried to laugh it off.
“Ohm,” I said, and then cursed inwardly. I’d wanted to say Oh, um, but it came out ohm. Another fine example of my faulty people skills.
He laughed, too. “Ohm, huh? Were you meditating?”
Right then, I was pretty sure that no one else in the world could compare to how many times I had wanted to die in the past month. Here was another one of those times. “No! I just…well, no. I wasn’t meditating, ha, ha. I didn’t miss my bus, either; they’re just doing all this renovation shit downtown or something, and I needed to get to Vermont like, really soon. I’m probably late now.”
As if staged, we both glanced up at the big clock resting on top of the elementary building. It was five past noon. He looked at me, and I looked back and shrugged.
“Did you say Vermont?” he said questioningly. Holding a hand out to stop outgoing traffic, he turned to me then and looked me right in the eye, not even bothering about incoming traffic. They were just piling in, not even paying attention.
“Yes I did. Um—,” and I gestured to the cars speeding by us, “don’t you think you should…”
Another grin spread across his face, somehow accentuating the brightness of his hair. I could not help but relax a little more. “It’s okay. They all know me here.” With ease, he blew into his whistle again with amazing breath and then took off his yellow vest. “Thank God, my shift is done.”
 I nodded.
“Would you like a ride?”
I stared.
He burst into laughter, a familiar scene, and then began to walk across his (I had noticed he practically owned the white strips of safety) crosswalk. “Don’t look so scared. I’m not going to rape you or anything.” He turned around and winked, and then went on before I even had time to light up. “I live pretty near Vermont, that’s all, like right by it, and I usually do take the bus but since they aren’t going to run by there for a few weeks, I have to drive here every day now. It’s really…” he smiled. “…I mean, I love my job, but driving for me is a pain in the ass. If I could take you where you need to go, at least that would make my ride home a little less tedious.”
He looked at me, not at the road, and in between mixed feelings of confusion and approval I felt concerned. “Don’t trip over anything,” I cautioned, pointing behind him. “There are trees and stuff.”
Shrugging off the warning, he slowed to my pace and fell into step with me. “I know this place well. And besides, I think it’s you that we both need to watch out for,” he snickered, referring back to my bad (and the thing is, it wasn’t even bad, I had just made it so) fall at the crosswalk. Embarrassed, I turned away.
When we reached his car—an elegant little black number, with two doors and bug-eyed, round lights—he pulled his keys out of his pocket and then, as if in afterthought, turned to me slowly.
“Since you’re still here, it means you’re coming, right,” he asked me, a trace of doubt sliding behind his words. “Because if you’re going to get into my car and scream ‘Help me, I’m being kidnapped!’ on the freeway…”
I shook my head, but I probably would have done it, just because it sounded fun. “Nah. I’m safe, I promise.” To show my honesty, I held up both of my empty hands and wiggled my fingers. “And I’m not armed, either.”
We both laughed, me out of slight uncertainty and he of genuine cheerfulness. As we piled into the car—me having no difficulty at all, since I had noticed the vehicle had been manufactured for people my height, and my chauffer scrambling in with a bit of difficulty—I realized that I did not even know this young man’s name. I had seen him many times, knew how seriously he took his job and how nice he was (on the surface, at least), but I was getting into a car with him and I didn’t even know what his name was.
He seemed to sense this, because he suddenly mumbled something to himself, took a deep breath, and turned to me.
“I’ve been an ass,” he grinned, and offered his hand to me once again. It was a gesture I would come to love. “Let me introduce myself. My name is Samson, and I will be your driver today.”