“Walking was too slow,” I say. “I had places to be.” It’s an old joke, but this is what we do, so I do it. Her laptop is set to purr every time she gets an e-mail, and it’s purring now. She has her own website, Elainepenceporter.com, and her e-mail address is right there for anyone to find. Anyone can write to her. Anyone can send her anything. And I know they will. Why wouldn’t they?
I sit down at the table. Cat Stevens gently gnaws on my fingers; he loves fingers. I’m not sure if he thinks they’re food or what. My mom taps a few keys, scrolls down, taps another key or two.
I wait for the other shoe to drop. Or is it the axe? The knitting needles? The muffins? “Anything interesting?”
“Nah,” she says. “Not unless we need a new mortgage or some Viagra.”
I try to laugh and instead make a sort of strangled sound. “Is Dad still at the store?” My dad owns a formal-wear shop—wedding gowns, party dresses, that sort of thing.
“When isn’t he at the store?” my mom says. “He should be home about seven or seven thirty.” Angel is also her store—they opened it together fifteen years ago. She still works there on weekends, and so do I when I don’t have too much studying. Dad never leaves. And even when he’s not working, he’s working.
Her computer purrs again. More mail. Click, click, click. Frown. “What?” she says, more to herself than to me. But of course I know what.
“It’s a picture, right?”
She glances up from the computer and considers me in her careful way. She tips the screen so that I can see what’s on it. Two striped kittens, with the message “My new babies, Bastet and Vladimir!”
“Oh,” I say. “Cute.”
“You were expecting something else?”
I should tell her. I want to tell her. I don’t know how. What are the words? Mouth? Head? Me? I say, “No.”
“No?”
I shrug like I don’t know what she’s talking about. Silly Mom!
“Uh-huh. Well. I’m assuming you have a mountain of homework to do, yes?”
“Yeah. I’ve got to work on those transitions for Mr Lambright. Otherwise I won’t get an A.”
“Oh, my!” she says, with mock horror. I sigh, and her expression softens. “It’s your senior year. I think you can relax just a little.”
“Like you?” I say, pointing at her computer.
“Don’t you worry about me, I relax plenty,” she says. “It’s you I’m concerned about.”
“You should worry about Dad,” I say. “He’s the one with the high blood pressure.”
“Which you’ll have before you’re eighteen. You’re just like him.” She smiles at me. “Audrey, I think you can start having a little bit of fun. So you don’t get an A this once. So you get an A minus. Is that really the worst that could happen to you?”
I can’t look at her when I answer. “No. I guess not.”
I go up to my room and throw my knapsack on my bed. I feel sort of itchy all over, and I’m not sure what to do with myself. First I go over to the toothpick village. It is what it sounds like it is, a village built out of toothpicks and Popsicle sticks. I’ve got houses, a couple of churches, stores, roads, a windmill, whatever—all painted and mounted on a slab of wood. I started building it when I was nine, right around the time I got sick of Barbies. Every once in a while, I work on something new. It’s a totally twisted, pathetic hobby, I know, but I’ve always loved building things. It’s sort of like meditation, except for, you know, the toothpicks.
But today, the toothpick village isn’t cutting it—I can’t think of a single thing that I’d want to add, and it seems like nothing more than a kindergartner’s art project or a load of firewood. So I sit at my desk. I flick on the computer and the machine hums to life and starts pinging, meaning I’ve got about four thousand instant messages. I don’t even want to read them. I start deleting them, but I can’t help but see a few, mostly from IM names I don’t recognize:
Instant Message with “sweetyPI567” Last message received at: 3:42:10 PM sweetyPI567: U R such a ho! your dad should call his store Sluts R Us!
Instant Message with “69luvvver” Last message received at: 4:19:36 PM 69luvvver: will u marry me? will u at least suck me off????
Instant Message with “ritechuschik2424” Last message received at: 6:10:22 PM ritechuschik2424: u do what u want to do and don’t let any one stop u. its ur life. U R not a slut ur just trying to have fun. LDS is HOT!
I’ve got e-mail, too. A few people helpfully sent me a copy of the picture, just in case I haven’t been humiliated enough. Joelle sends a few ALL-CAPS messages telling me that Ash told her what happened and claiming that she will personally eviscerate Luke DeSalvio (unless, of course, I still like him). Then she says that what I need to do is deny absolutely everything and that she’ll tell everyone she saw Pam Markovitz or Cindy Terlizzi running around in a blonde wig. I erase all the messages, even the ones from Jo. I keep pressing the button till there are no more messages in my in-box, and then I press it a few more times, just to make sure.
My phone rings inside my backpack and I sit there, listening to it buzz. Later, as I’m reworking my paper for Mr Lambright, it buzzes again. And when I’m doing my calc homework. And again when I’m studying bio. Buzz, buzz, like wasps hitting a window. If they buzz long enough, if they hit hard enough, maybe they’ll all die.
“Audrey?” My mother’s voice warbles up the stairs. It must be time for dinner—not that I want to eat anything, now or ever. My stomach has shut down, packed up, and left for a vacation. Bye-bye, stomach. It occurs to me that I could actually lose a few kilos by the time I’m ready to eat again, and then I can’t believe I’m thinking what I’m thinking. I must be sick. There’s plenty of evidence. Once, when I was about eleven, my mom was asking me what kinds of words kids use in place of swearwords when teachers are around, because she had a kid in one of her books and wanted to have him swear without actually swearing. I told her we called people jerks, losers and dorks. And I told her that sometimes we went all British, calling people prats and gits and saying “bloody hell” with accents that made it sound like “bluddy hill”. And then I told her about our very favourite non-swear swearword, one that we recently discovered and said all the time. “What is it?” she said.
“Cocksucker,” I told her.
Her jaw dropped open almost to the table, and her eyes popped wide. “Audrey,” she said. “That is most definitely a swearword.”
“It is?”
“Absolutely, definitely a swearword. You guys have to try and stop saying it, OK?”
By then I was blushing so hard that my cheeks sizzled. How could I have been so dumb not to know a swearword when I heard one?
“Do you know what it means?”
And I’d told her I did—and I did sort of—but I thought it was more like a kiss, and how bad could a kiss be?
I go downstairs, where things are more than bad. They are worse. My mom is sitting at the table, which hasn’t been set for dinner. There’s no food on the cooker, no pizza box by the sink and nothing roasting in the oven. My dad stands at the kitchen counter, his jacket still on, as if he can’t decide if he’s coming or going. He pulls a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and smooths it out on the counter. I don’t need to see it, but I can’t help but see. The picture, again. This time with a message: “Look at Your Little Angel Now.”