Ink Is Thicker Than Water (2 page)

Chapter Two

My plans the next morning are the usual: brunch with Mom, my stepdad Russell, Sara, and Finn. Since the shop’s closed on Sundays, it’s Family Day, and I’m completely fine with that. I guess now plans also include replaying in my head every time Oliver grinned or raised his eyebrows at me last night (seven total, by my count).

Still, I’m looking forward to brunch. Seeing Oliver last night made me so jumpy I was afraid to eat and just stole some fries from someone else’s plate. But when I walk downstairs expecting pancakes and eggs or at least bagels, what I see instead is
Dad
.

“There she is!” he says. It’s the only way he ever greets me, like I’m a contestant on the game show in his mind. “Hey there, kiddo.”

I figure if he’s doling out normal salutation-type stuff, probably no one is dead or maimed or whatever tragic event would bring him here. “Hey, Dad.”

“Hi, baby.” Mom pops into the front room, right next to Dad, and I try for the ten billionth time to comprehend that they’d ever been married. Photos
and my own memories
tell me they were, but it still feels like fabricated history, a novel based on actual events and not the nonfiction it is.

It’s a casual day for Dad, which means he’s in shiny black dress shoes and perfectly pressed black slacks, with a gray shirt and a patterned blue tie that pops exactly how all the fashion magazines say a tie is supposed to. It’s a casual day for Mom, too; she’s wearing ragged jeans with a black sweater of Russell’s that features a little skull and crossbones on each shoulder. Since she’s inside, her feet are bare, chipped red manicure showing as well as the black line drawings of flowers tattooed across the tops of both her feet.

“How was your Saturday night?” Mom asks.

“It was fine. Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine.” Dad kisses my cheek, smelling—like always—of coffee and the spearmint gum he chews obsessively since he quit smoking when I was nine. “In fact, I’m on my way out. See you this weekend.”

When I was little, I’d cling to him whenever we said good-bye, but now it’s just life. “Bye, Dad.”

He leaves, which is for the best because I always worry the universe will explode if he spends much time in this house. Well, the universe or Mom’s brain, and I don’t see myself surviving either one of those catastrophes.

“Why was Dad here?”

“It’s nothing,” she says as Finn barrels into the room wearing Mom’s black leather jacket, which hangs past his knees, and a black ski mask covering his face.

“I’m a pirate!” he shouts.

“No, you’re a ninja,” I tell him. Finn always gets those confused. “Also ninjas don’t shout. You have to be super sneaky.”

He nods solemnly before racing up the stairs and letting out some kind of war cry. Well, I tried.

Even Mom says I’m biased, but I’m positive Finn is the cutest kid in the world. I’ve seen hundreds of photos of myself, and I definitely didn’t hold a candle. His hair is sandy brown like Russell’s, he got Mom’s perfect little upturned nose (which genetics conveniently didn’t give to me), and big blue eyes (I’d at least gotten those), and when he smiles he somehow looks just like Mom and Russell at once. Total cute overload.

“What happened to brunch?” I ask Mom as she sorts through the mail on the front table even though nothing new could have come today. Mom might be sort of old—she just turned forty-three—but she’s the kind of lady you totally believe when you hear she’d once been a cheerleader. Still blond, still smiles all the time, still pulls off a high ponytail, still, you know…cheers for things. With Mom, no achievement is too small for hugs and congrats. (And she can still turn a pretty mean cartwheel, if you beg.)

“What? Oh, right, sure. Russell’s out picking something up.” She turns back to the mail like it’s urgent when in reality it piles up there constantly.

I run upstairs and down the hall to Sara’s room, where Finn is jumping on the bed while she’s curled up on one corner of it doing homework. From here it looks like physics, but considering I’m three levels of science behind her, I’m probably not the best judge. Still. Physics on a Sunday morning.

Sara is really good with numbers. Honestly, she’s good at everything, but numbers especially. Normally when people say things like that they just mean someone’s good at math, but the point is that she’s good at something useful. When we moved into the big house down the street from the old house, Sara knew how many boxes each room would take. It probably doesn’t sound that exciting, nothing like knowing how many jelly beans are in a giant jar and then winning a prize, but way more useful.

I’m not good at many things that are useful, a fact Mom
delights
in telling me. It’s not that she’s disappointed—no, her parents had always told her the same thing, which she bought into for a long time. She says, “Kellie, baby, I bought into that, can you believe it?” and I actually can’t. No matter how many times she tells the story, I can’t believe Mom trained to be a paralegal and went to work every day in a jacket and skirt and the scary flesh-tone pantyhose with tasteful pumps, until the day she realized she was miserable. “I ripped myself free of a nylon hose existence,” she likes to say, which I thought was a figurative saying until the day we were packing to move into the new house and Mom actually found the torn pair of hose. Mom hangs on to the weirdest stuff.

So, anyway, I’ve been carrying on family tradition. Well,
Mom
traditions, at least. Dad gets this concerned look on his face whenever he sees one of my report cards. He’s a lawyer—that’s how he and Mom met, one billion years ago—and he thinks grades are a window into our futures. “Kellie, you want to get into a good college, don’t you?”

Good colleges all want Sara already, two months into her senior year. I remind Dad of this, that I’m only a junior and therefore who would be courting me yet? Unfortunately, he has a better memory than I do and points out that a year ago Sara was already being wooed by universities from east to west.

Obviously, Sara is Dad’s favorite. And while I really should have had a shot at being Mom’s favorite, she spends loads of time detailing how she loves all of us exactly the same amount. My only hope is that maybe she’s lying to spare Sara’s and Finn’s feelings.

Oh, right, Finn. Since he’s only four, we don’t know if he’s going to make Mom proud by being as unskilled at useful things as me. So far his big interests are zebras, kaleidoscopes, and this stupid singing fish Mom let him pick out at a garage sale, so all signs point to yes.

I haven’t admitted to anyone that the more often I think about Sara away at college with her clear path in front of her, the less delight I take in feeling
useless
. When I think about how long it took Mom to shift her life into the place she actually wanted—or to even
know
what she wanted—well, I love Mom, of course, but I don’t want that for me. And that’s some of what I would have said if I’d answered the “Why do you want to join the
Ticknor Voice
?” essay question a little more honestly.

I sit down next to Sara. “What’s up with Mom?”

She waves an arm at me like I’m a bug to shoo. Not so easy, sister. “Today or in general?”

“Today,” I say. “What’s up with brunch? And why was Dad here?”

“Who knows?” she says. “Do you mind taking Finn? I need some time alone.”

“Come on, ninja.” I catch Finn mid-jump and cart him into the hallway instead of interrogating Sara. Anyway, it would have concerned me more if she wasn’t always needing time alone. (Though, maybe Dad would be less freaked out about my grades if I occasionally did my homework without simultaneously pointing out differences between ninjas and pirates.)

I head back downstairs because if brunch is on the way, I might as well be nearby. Our house isn’t that big compared to the others on our block of Summit Avenue, but the kitchen and dining room probably outsize everyone else’s. When Mom and Russell bought the house, I remember Mom marching Sara and me in here with her hands on our shoulders and declaring this kitchen was going to see the best of us. Mom had been crazy-dreamy-eyed back then, between her engagement and the house purchase, but I think that actually turned out to be true. Even on cloudy days, the golden walls, packed with picture frames painted in every color imaginable holding images of our family, make everything seem sunny.

“Look, look!” Finn runs into the dining room while I’m lining up knives with spoons on the red-topped retro aluminum table. “Kellie, look!”

I finish positioning the knife and turn my head to see that Finn has placed his ski mask over the head of his favorite stuffed zebra. “Oh, awesome, Marvin’s a ninja, too.”

“Yeah, awesome. Can me and Marvin help?”

Helping means that most of the silverware ends up on the floor. “I’m okay, Finn, you and Marvin can just hang out with me.”

Russell walks into the house with a huge bag I’m pretty sure is from his favorite vegan café in Maplewood. I honestly love eating with my family and I rarely mind getting up early, but there are days when I wish my stepdad would eat just one animal. I understand ethics and all, but animals can be so tasty.

“I got some of those scones you like,” Russell tells me.

I know it’s a bribe so I won’t mind eating vegan, but the scones
are
delicious, so it works. And I swipe a piece of fake bacon (facon?) as Russell’s putting everything onto the table—okay, also delicious—which prompts a glare from Mom. “What? It’s a tiny piece.”

“We eat as a family, you know that. Finn, sweetie, go get Sara.”

Finn pulls his ski mask back on before bolting upstairs.

Mom walks to the refrigerator to get orange juice and milk, of the real and of the soy varieties. “How was your Saturday night?”

“You asked me that already.”

“Did I?”

Finn leaps back into the room, sliding a few inches across the coppery orange tile in his monkey-print-stocking feet. “Sara’s not hungry.”

Whoa, that never flies. Mom and Russell totally believe that the 1950s-everyone-sitting-down-together family dinner is a cornerstone of a civilized society.

“More for us, then. Kellie, help me carry in the rest of this.”

As if Dad’s presence in the house wasn’t weird enough. Now Sara is allowed to skip brunch like we’re one of those uncaring families Mom likes to lecture us we’ll turn into if we don’t spend enough quality time together? “Mom? Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine, Kell-belle. You know what we should do soon?” Mom asks as the four of us sit down at the table. “Your hair. Yeah?”

“You have some big plan?”

“When don’t I have a big plan?” Mom never has a plan. Mom just has a lot of impulse buys from the beauty supply shop down the street, where they never check to see if she actually has whatever license you’re supposed to be in possession of.

“Hmm, maybe.”

She ruffles my hair and grabs my face in her hands. Her rings are cold on my cheeks. “I love you, Kellie baby.”

We’re a pretty mushy family, but this is a lot even for us. I don’t have that much more time to wonder if something is up, though, because soon Finn is yelling that he loves us, too, and I am really hungry, animal products or not.

I text Kaitlyn after we eat to see if she’s surviving, post-Garrett-making-out-with-Brandy. I’m honestly not really expecting a response, since Kaitlyn likes to sleep in, but my phone beeps almost right away.

Except it’s not Kaitlyn.

It’s a text from
him
. I don’t know how he got my number (though, I’d bet big money on Dexter, if the source of text messages was the kind of thing people gambled on), but it’s the most obvious thing in the world that it’s from him.

Good seeing you last night. Is the fish still singing?

It sounds dirty, but the day Oliver and I met, he’d brought up those nightmare-inducing dancing and singing Santas, which had directly led into a conversation about Finn’s stupid singing fish and my burning desire to follow its orders and take it to the river. And frigging drown it.

So I know what it means, but I also don’t know what it means.