– with that guy? ‘I love pie’? What is he, five?”
“Alice never said a thing to me, Tim.” Jase picks up a forkful of chicken, puts it back down.
George says philosophically, “Pie is good. Except the kind with four and twenty blackbirds baked in it, prolly. You know, like, sing a songofsixpence, pockafullarye?” he warbles in this high voice that sort of slays me. “That sounds yuck.”
“No way would they sing when they opened it,” Harry says, with his mouth full of crust. “Because they’d all be cooked and dead.”
George’s eyes get big. “Would they?” he asks, looking back and forth between me and Jase. “Cooked?”
“No way,” Jase says firmly, “because . . .” He hesitates a second, and George’s eyes start filling.
“Because, dude, it wouldn’t be an eating pie,” I say. “It would be a performance pie. Like something to make the king laugh because he was all stressed from –”
“Counting out his money,” Jase finishes, nodding, all confident. “Right, G-man? Isn’t that what he was doing – ‘in the countinghouse, counting out his money’?”
George nods, soberly. “He’d be all upset like Daddy at work, so they’d make him a performance pie? Like, like a play?”
“Exactly,” I say. “They’d make this, uh, fake pie –”
“To make him laugh. Like Mommy does.” George is nodding, like the whole thing makes total sense now.
“But where would they get the blackbirds ?” Harry asks. “Who has blackbirds lying around?”
“They’d probably have them in the barn or something,” Duff says, all fake-casual. “Like, kind of tame ones. Maybe the king was, uh, into birds.”
This story is getting away from us. But George is down with it. “We could look them up in my Big Birds of the World book. See if you can tame blackbirds.” He slides off the kitchen chair and trots off, Harry at his heels.
“Nice job, Duffy,” Jase says. “Thanks for chiming in.”
“I was sort of lame,” Duff admits, scraping up the last of his pie. “‘The king was into birds’? But I tried. It’s just hard sometimes to see what’s gonna scare George.”
“Dead, baked birds? It’d give me nightmares.” I shudder.
That or that asskite Brad, and what Alice might be getting up to with him right this very minute.
“Do we have to?”
Brad may be upward of 225 pounds and over six feet tall, but he sounds like my little brothers when I drag them shoe shopping. “Yup,” I say.
He weaves hesitantly through traffic – he drives like he’s in one of his video games on slo-mo, sudden spurts of speed and then well below the limit. Staring out the car window, I don’t see the blur of the maple trees that line the turnpike but the garage apartment reinvented, the way I was going to do it.
All of Joel’s heinous furniture piled into the attic. My great-aunt Alice’s brass bed down from there. Along with her big wardrobe that Jase and I were always trying to find Narnia in. The walls painted a deep burnt-orange color, October Sky, a paint we got in at Garrett’s Hardware last week – so not the dingy white that’s in there now – far from the “bridal pink” in the room Andy and I share. I saw something in a magazine last month – this tulle canopy that goes over your bed, making it into your own cocoon. Splurge on those billion-thread-count sheets that are so soft you barely notice them at all. Stereo speakers for my iPod and a reading corner full of books that aren’t textbooks, with big puffy floor pillows and –
“C’mon, Ally-pally. Let’s hit Pizza Palace and you can bash my butt at Slimin’ Sumos.” Brad elbows me, giving me his best smile.
“I don’t feel like eating bad pizza while we play videogames, Brad.”
Now I sound whiny too. I dig my fingernails into my palm and kick my feet up onto the dashboard. Let it go. It’s just an apartment. Just a space of my own, for the first time ever, and for the last time for a while too, assuming I can still accept the transfer to Nightingale Nursing in the spring, assuming things at home are running smoothly, assuming I can get student housing and –
Sharp inhale. Another.
Brad squeezes the back of my neck. “Yowch, you’re tense, Allo. Don’t do that funky breathing thing. It freaks me out. How ’bout we go back to my place? I’ll send Wally out for decent pizza. Like all the way to Ilario’s or something. That would give us at least half an hour. I could . . . relax you.” Now he’s rubbing my shoulder, giving me a sunny, hopeful grin. No stormy weather with Brad. All one mood, like the easy listening music they play at the dentist.
“I see a smile, Als. You want to, don’t you? C’mon. Let’s book it home. I’ll boot the Walster for the whole night if you want. Bummer for sure about the apartment – that would have been sweet – but it’s not like I don’t have my own place.”
Brad’s “place” is a three-story house in White Bay. His parents live on the first two floors, Brad and Wally in the basement, his grandmother, who I’m pretty sure refers to me as That Whore, on the top.
He reaches over and gives my knee a squeeze, while passing a camper on the right and leaning on the horn.
I sigh.
“Is that a yes? C’mon, Aliwishous. We could take a shower or something. My dad fixed the hot water tank.”
“Let’s go to the batting cages. I need to hit something.”
“Works for me. Whatever floats your boat.”
He’s nothing if not steady. Which is good when you’re a little bit shipwrecked. He’s now singing along to the radio – a commercial for river cruises. Steady is solid ground under your feet. Even if the planks are a little thick.
But the garage apartment? I’m not letting that go down without a fight.
“You’re actually knocking, sis?” I open the door to find Nan, one arm balancing sheets and towels, the other extended to knock again.
“I always knock,” she says, swatting my nose instead. “I respect your privacy, unlike you, reading my diary.”
I kick the door open wider. “C’mon, get my towels out of the rain, assuming those are for me and you’re not dropping off laundry. And really? The diary again? Jesus. It was once, it was four years ago, and I had insomnia. Your diary was like a sleeping pill. ‘Dear Diary, I –’” I start, all sugary. But I cut myself off. I’m being a jackass.
You want the truth, that diary about broke my damn heart. It was full of these letters from Nan to God. I knew she’d gotten the idea from this Judy Blume book she loved crazy much, because I’d read part of it when I was ten and someone told me it was all about tits. It was,
