Separate Sisters Page 4

  My big sister, Trisha, lonely? Talking to a computer? But—but no, that couldn’t be. She was a liar. She was perfect. Everybody liked her better than me. She—missed me? I felt like I wanted to cry, I felt so bad, but at the same time the mix-it machine was cranking up inside my head, roaring in my ears, and the eggbeaters were going and my heart felt hot and the feeling that I wanted to go to her got spun away in the garbage, got all flipped around. Trisha had pain, Trisha had problems? But she was supposed to be the mature one.

  NOBODY WAS ALLOWED TO HAVE WORSE PROBLEMS THAN I DID!

  My sister, talking to a computer named Amelia. What a twit. I grabbed at the mouse, shaking, I was so angry. I stabbed at the button. Select Journal. Delete. Bye-bye Emmy.

  I left my paper half finished and stomped downstairs. Mom and Trisha were sitting one at each end of the sofa in sweaters that practically matched, like bookends.

  “I read your stupid journal,” I said to Trisha real hard. “I read the junk you wrote about me.”

  Her mouth came open. Her eyes opened wide, frightened and hurt, like I’d shot her or something.

  “I erased it,” I said. “Don’t write stuff about me.” I walked out without my jacket and headed home on foot.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mom came after me, of course. I was moving fast, but she caught up to me in the car. She pulled alongside me when I was a hundred yards down the road, rolled down the passenger window, and ordered, “Get in.”

  There was a crisp edge to her voice. I got in.

  “Trisha’s crying,” Mom said. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Take me home.”

  “I will do nothing of the sort.” She U-turned in a dramatic gravel-spraying way, and Mom is not the gravel-spraying sort. “You two work this out.”

  When we got back into the house Trisha was up in her room. We could hear her sobbing and moving around up there. “Go on,” Mom told me.

  I didn’t want to. But even though I hadn’t had time to think it over, I already knew I had done wrong. My head was trying to say hey, so I lost it for a minute, so what, it was just a stupid journal—but my gut knew I had done something bad, I had to try to fix it. So I went up.

  Her room door wasn’t locked and I didn’t knock, just walked in. Trisha’s room is usually perfect like her, but now it was a mess, bits of mad litter all over the place. She had ripped up the handwritten draft of my English paper into pieces as small as confetti, and I just knew (and I was right) that she had zapped the file on the computer and she was ripping up my picture of her and the attack heart.

  Right, she’d mentioned it to her precious Emmy. I had meant to find it and take it back or trash it. But it was one thing to rip it up myself and another thing to see her do it. She ripped the heart in half and it was like she was ripping me down the middle. I stood there like she’d hit me.

  There were tears all over her face and dripping off her chin. Snot, too. Her eyes were red and glaring, her mouth twisted with crying. “Get out of here!” she screamed at me.

  I stood stunned.

  “Go away! I hate you!” She jumped me, and I was the one who got A’s in phys ed, but boy was she strong. She shoved me out of the room, slammed the door, and locked it.

  I went downstairs. “She tore up my paper,” I said to Mom.

  “She what?”

  “She tore up the paper I was doing on the computer.”

  Mom started upstairs.

  “Mom, don’t.” It was kind of nice to see Trisha the Perfect in trouble for once, but I hated myself for feeling that way.

  “But she can’t do that. You need to get that paper in.”

  To me the paper was the least important thing, but to Mom it was the most important thing. And I couldn’t explain why Mom was wrong. I felt tired, tired, tired. I said, “Please just take me home.”

  She got a funny look on her face—like I wasn’t home?—but she did it.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept thinking about Trisha. About three in the morning I turned over and sighed and all of a sudden I understood why I should never have messed with her journal. I mean, I knew it was not nice and it was against the rules, like I ever worry about rules, but all of a sudden I really understood. In my heart. The thing was, I’d never thought about it much, but to Trisha writing was like art was to me. That journal meant so much to her she would never have shown it to anyone. Just like I’d never shown my best paintings to anyone up till I’d lost my mind and given one to Mr. Billet.

  Besides, Emmy was her friend, and I’d killed her. I’d killed Trisha’s only friend.

  I wanted to hit me, but I was too tired. I just lay there.

  The next morning I went to school with my head feeling like it was stuffed with Rice Krispies and the rest of me feeling like total slime. I walked around the school looking for Trisha and I found her in the lobby, but then I couldn’t think what to say to her.

  It didn’t matter. I never got close to her. When she saw me standing there she glared, turned her back on me, and walked away.

  My chest hurt, and my gut. I went to science, but I couldn’t stand the way I felt. Trying to do something, anything, to lighten me up, I took the pickled earthworm I was supposed to be dissecting and stuffed it up my nose so most of it hung out. I took somebody else’s earthworm for the other nostril. They stunk pretty bad, but it was worth it because kids were laughing and yelling, “Ewwww, gross!” Then I made smacking noises and pulled one of the earthworms out of my nose and held it dangling while I tipped my head up and opened my mouth to eat it.

  The teacher yelled, “Miss Celadon Ross!” and that was all it took.

  I went psycho. I threw the worms at her. I screamed, I swore. It felt like my chest was going to blow up. I couldn’t breathe. I ran out of the room and out of the school.

  I don’t even want to talk about it, I was so sick of me. I hated me.

  So there I was, suspended again, walking home from school and it wasn’t even noontime yet, gee, what else was new? But I didn’t make it all the way home. A car honked, and I looked, and it was the school psychiatrist, and she still hadn’t gotten her roots bleached. Maybe she was letting her natural color grow out. Anyway, she pulled the car over to the curb and turned it off. Her mouth was set like a mousetrap and she beckoned me.

  I got in the car with her. “What happened?” she asked. Teachers and administrators and people like that always ask what happened, and I don’t see why they bother because usually they already know in one way and in another way they don’t want to know.

  I told her, “Nothing. I flipped out.”

  I’d been to her office for counseling four times and so far I’d done a really good job of not telling her anything. I mean, not anything true. I wanted to keep her happy, of course, so I told her interesting things, such as my mild-mannered father was really a mole for the CIA and he had met my mother through the Witness Protection Program and my mother’s real identity was known only to the Mafia, she was a professional pyromaniac who could be hired to set people’s hair on fire and see how they looked as human candles. Stuff like that. The last couple of visits I’d gotten the feeling the shrink was pissed at me and today I was sure of it.

  She said, “Donni, this won’t do.”

  “Do what?”

  “Listen to me, youngster, would you please help me to help you? You don’t seem to understand the consequences of your actions. One more escapade and you’ll be expelled. You’re only twelve—”

  “Thirteen.”

  “You’re only thirteen years old. The state can’t allow you to go without an education. They’ll take you and put you in a reform school.”

  Reform school?

  “I am serious.”

  I could tell she was serious. My blood was freezing. And I felt the pressure building inside my head and neck and chest; I knew that feeling. If I stayed in that car with her one more second something awful was going to happen. The weird, wild stuff inside me would come flying out
and I might strangle on it and die, I might say things, I might hurt her. I had already hurt Trisha.

  I opened the door and ran like a rabbit.

  Tires screeched and a car horn blared; I was so crazy I had run into the street. But I was on the other side now. Running home. Run. Run. Get help.

  I ran panting and crying down the alley. Across two more streets, just barely dodging the cars. Through the weedy backyard, up the fire escape, into the apartment, and I phoned my dad at work.

  “Dad? Dad! They—they say they’re going to send me to a reform school.”

  “Donni?” His voice sounded laid back and mellow as always.

  “Dad, help me. They’re going to take me away.”

  “Donni, calm down. Where are you?”

  “Home. I ran out again. They say if I do it one more time they’re going to take me away!”

  “So don’t run out anymore.”

  “But—” But I didn’t want to flip out and run, I hated it, but something made me keep doing it anyway.

  “Just make up your mind,” Daddy said like we were talking about groceries.

  “But I—I need—”

  “It’s not a problem. I’ve got a meeting, Donni. See you tonight.”

  I was shaking so hard it took me three tries to get the phone hung up. I needed help. Run. Run. I couldn’t stand still to think who else to phone. I ran out the door.

  My legs and my pumping arms and my thumping heart knew where to go and had me halfway there, halfway to the other end of town, before my mind caught up with them. Trisha said I’m stubborn, okay, I am stubborn, but that’s my head. My heart knew enough to point me toward the person who would help me.

  Mom was in the hallway of the doctor’s office where she works when I burst in like a wet cyclone. I was panting and gasping and crying so hard I couldn’t talk even to call her name. Her eyes widened and she opened her arms to me and I lurched into her hug and bawled.

  I’d been doing an awful lot of crying, but I guess I really needed Mom’s shoulder to cry right. She held me and patted me and cuddled me and kissed my head and smoothed my hair and I cried and cried. When I finally came up for air and a Kleenex, I found that sometime when I wasn’t noticing I’d moved from the hallway into the doctor’s office. Mom was sitting in his big leather chair and I was sitting in her lap; she was holding me like a baby.

  “Jeez,” I muttered, getting up. I blew my nose and sat on the floor beside her and laid my head against her leg because my face felt hot. She stroked my hair.

  “Okay? You going to tell me what’s the matter?” Aside from the divorce, she meant. She already knew a lot of what was the matter. “Take your time.” She was so sweet, so gentle, like Trisha—I had that backward; Trisha was like her.

  My head felt like it was going to split wide open. “They say they’re going to send me to reform school.”

  “What? Who says?”

  “The shrink. She says if I run out one more time they’ll take me away.”

  “Is that true? Can they really do that?” I realized she was talking to somebody else. I swiveled to look and there was the doctor standing in the doorway, checking on us. He could have been ticked off with me bawling in his office and taking Mom away from her work, but he didn’t seem to mind. He had kind eyes.

  “In this state, yes,” he said. “They can.”

  “We won’t let it happen, Donni,” Mom told me. “I’ll get you into a private school if I have to. Or I’ll home school you.”

  I knew she absolutely meant it. But what if something went wrong, what if the law wouldn’t agree to Mom’s plans, what if—

  She said, “Explain to me why you run out of school.”

  I couldn’t. How could I tell anybody I had horrible stuff inside me? They’d know I was crazy. Forget reform school; they’d lock me up in a nuthouse.

  Mom said, gentle as a feather, “C’mon, Donni. Give me a clue. What’s making you act the way you do?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. Truth, sweetie. What’s going on?”

  I shook my head.

  “Honey, you can tell me.”

  Couldn’t.

  But—but this was Mom.…

  I laid my head on her knee and told her. I told her about all the weird stuff, the noises in my head, the cold hands and hot face and feeling like I couldn’t breathe, the shaking, the pain in my chest and stomach, the way filthy words spilled out of me and I couldn’t hold them back and I felt totally nutsoid out of control, and I felt like I was going to hurt someone.

  “There’s something wrong with me.” I was crying again, but I was too tired to cry hard.

  “It’s probably just stress.” Mom was stroking my head, and I could tell by her voice that she was worried, but she was trying not to worry me. “Some kind of panic disorder, maybe. Anyway, it’s something physical, maybe biochemical, so it can probably be treated, Donni. Doctor—” She was talking past me again, to her boss in the doorway. “Can we get her a referral? And a medical leave from school?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Donni, now just relax. We can handle this.” Mom reached for the phone and called the school—she knew the number by heart. She asked for Mr. Billet. “Donni’s very upset,” she told him, and she explained why. Her voice was calm and precise. She wasn’t yelling at him, but he could tell she meant business. They talked awhile. He told her his side. All the while she was smoothing my hair, stroking my neck, rubbing my back and shoulders with her free hand. In her calm, even voice she said to Mr. Billet, “You’re treating it as a discipline problem, but it’s not just a discipline problem. It’s a health problem, a physical problem, and an emotional problem. I would appreciate it if you would add those dimensions to your thinking.”

  She told him she would bring a medical excuse to the office, and she wished him a very good day and said good-bye.

  There was a sofa in the doctor’s office. Mom asked me, “You want to lie down and rest while I take care of the paperwork?”

  I nodded. “Mom,” I said, shaky but talking fast because I wanted to get this over with, “I called Dad, but he didn’t want to do anything.”

  She sighed. “That’s the way your father is,” she said. “He doesn’t deal with things. He’s not a problem solver. But he loves you very much.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  So there I was home alone again. This was not making me happy anymore. I was getting really sick of being a sicko, and I wanted to be in school. I mean, I didn’t like schoolwork, but I liked school. I wanted to be with the other kids.

  This wasn’t the same as being suspended. The doctors weren’t sure yet whether I had depression with paranoia or panic attacks or post-traumatic stress or what, or whether they should give me medicine, and until somebody got a clue I was on what they called “homebound.” Tutors would come see me. I would do my work and get my grades. All the work of school and none of the fun. I couldn’t even call Trisha. She was in school.

  She was mad at me.

  She had a right to be mad at me.

  She was so mad she might never forgive me.

  I felt really bad.

  I slept late, got up, yawned around, watched a little TV, lost track of time. When the doorbell rang I opened the door without looking out the peephole because I assumed it was Mom. She had said she was going to come see me over her lunch hour.

  The person standing at the door was Mr. Billet.

  At the sight of him my heart started to pound and my head started roaring and I started shaking. I took a step back, but I had to hang onto the doorknob because I felt like I was going to fall.

  “My word,” he said, looking anxious. “I can see what the medicos mean. Heavens, Donni.” He lifted his hands like to show me he was not carrying a weapon. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

  “It’s okay,” I managed to say. I was taking long, deep breaths the way the stress doctor’s therapist had told me, and that was helping some. “I’m
just surprised.” Seeing him there when I wasn’t expecting him had spooked me so much it had shown. Usually I would have been able to hide it.

  “This is not an official call,” he said.

  “Oh. Uh, come in?”

  “No, I’ll just tell you what I want. I was wondering if I could commission some artwork from you. For my office. You’re right, it needs something on the walls.” He must have seen a funny look on my face because he started talking faster. “The piece you did for me, I’m going to get it matted and framed, but I’m going to hang it at home, not in the office. It seems too, how shall I say, egotistical for the office. I’m not the principal, so having me riding the school … well, I don’t feel right. But you’re extremely, extremely talented. Perhaps you could come up with another theme? Without me in it? George Washington is coming down. He gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

  Standing on my doorstep and talking fast like that he just seemed like the spot-remover salesman. All of a sudden I wasn’t scared of him at all.

  “Mr. Billet,” I said, “would you like to see the picture I did of me barfing on your shoes?”

  “What?”

  “C’mon in.” I beckoned him into the living room and went and got the picture and showed it to him. His jaw dropped. He gawked for a moment then burst out laughing. He threw his head back and laughed so hard I had to smile.

  “That’s amazing!” he said, chuckling. “Donni, you have an astounding knack for catching a likeness. That’s me, and that’s Officer Hillman, and that’s you, no question. May I have this? I don’t want it to fall into enemy hands.”

  “Sure.” I handed it to him.

  “Donni, off the record. Just between you and me. Truth.” He looked quizzical. “Weren’t you having a little bit of fun with me when you created this?”

  “Yeah. I was.”

  “And the riding-the-school one?”

  “It was partly serious. But, yeah, I was mocking you a little.”

  He smiled and nodded. “I thought so.” He held up his new picture and looked at it again. “I am going to have this framed and I will hang it in my home if I can get my wife to agree. It’ll remind me.”