Small Persons With Wings (4 page)

“Grow up, you barbarians,” he said. But he was trying not to laugh too.

By that time I'd figured out what the stupid thing was and was trying to pretend it was funny, but also I was Titian red. (Titian, who actually was named Tiziano Vecellio, lived in Italy in the 1500s and painted a lot of naked round ladies with red hair and got a color named after him.)

“You can sit down if you want, Mellie,” Mr. Higgins said. But I was a Stoic. I turned my back on them all and worked on the math problem until I was winter-pale again. Got it right too.

At lunchtime an hour later, I was at the little kids' end of the school, sitting on a bench against a wall steaming with March sunshine. I was leafing through my Degas book, my refuge in times of stress and tampons. It had snowed overnight, and I could hear the other kids in my class having a slush-ball fight around the corner.

“Hey, Effy,” Janine said, sitting down on my left. Inez sat down on my right. They had on too much competing perfume. I sneezed, managing to close my Degas book first so I didn't get any snot on
Musicians in the Orchestra
.

“Nice math problem,” Janine said.

Inez snickered. “Yeah. Guess you never saw a Tampax before, huh?”

I didn't open my Degas book again because I didn't want to draw their attention to it. I had a bad feeling.

“So what's in that book, anyways?” Janine asked. “That's the de Gas man, right?”

I made sure my rubber boots were flat on the pavement, ready to run. “Don't even ask. You'd never understand, any of you.”

Janine reached for the Degas book. Her mittens were soaked, filthy with slush-ball grunge. I jerked the book away from her and ran. But I was soft and clumsy, and they were basketball stars with eye shadow. They caught me at the jungle gym, shoved me into the monkey bars. The Degas book flew out of my hands and splashed into a puddle.

“Wooo,” Benny yelled. “Lookit Fairy Fat.” I clung to the monkey bars, watched the pages of my Degas book darken with the wet, the book jacket half off, floating.

“She said we were stupid,” Janine crowed. “All of us.”

A slush ball hit me in the back of the head, ran down my neck. I wasn't crying, was not going to cry. More slush hit the side of my head, but I would not wipe it off my face. I watched my Degas book, willing the moisture not to reach
Prima Ballerina
.

A slush ball hit the floating book jacket, submerged it. Slush balls exploded on the ground all around me and my book.

“Aw,” Inez said. “Poor Fairy Fat.” Another slush ball hit the dirt.

“Recess is almost over, leave her alone,” somebody said, maybe Mina Cardoza.

“Hey!” somebody else yelled. Mr. Higgins. “Get off her, you little . . .” He used a word I'm not allowed to use until I'm eighteen because it's biological and not usually the best word for the occasion. It was the perfect word for this occasion.

The playground went quiet. I picked up my Degas book, tried to wipe it on my coat. The book jacket fell apart in my hands. Water ran out from between the pages.

“Maybe we can dry it off.” That was Marshy, who still thought she could eat ice cream.

I couldn't look up because I might, after all, be crying a little. I stared at the toe of Janine's yellow boot.

Before my eyes, it turned into a cloven hoof, attached to a pink, hairy leg. This surprised me so much that I did look up.

Everyone, including Mr. Higgins, was a bright pink pig on its hind legs, all dressed except for having no shoes. The image lasted a second and then they were themselves again.

Inez looked sick. “Hey . . .” she said to Janine, “did you see something weird?”

“No,” Janine said. “No, I did not. I didn't. No.”

“I didn't either,” Benny said, pale as popcorn.

Mr. Higgins sat down in the snow on the end of the slide and got his pants all wet.

I COULDN'T FIGURE OUT THE PIG THING. Losing control of my brain like that freaked me out. What had Janine and Inez and Benny seen? And Mr. Higgins?

I would never know, since nobody was going to talk about it. I read up about how our body chemicals react to stress and decided the answer was in there somewhere. I stored the mystery away for when I was a famous scientist.

And anyway, a month later I had something new and big to think about. We heard Grand-père had died, which was a dream come true. That sounds callous, but wait and see.

The phone rang a couple of hours after dinner. I answered it, and some lady who sounded like she was in a tunnel asked for “Rho-longh Tooghh-peh,” which is the French version of Roland Turpin, which is my father.

It was bound to be a serious phone call at that hour, but Mom and I got no information from Dad's side of the conversation.

“Huh,” he said at first, followed by “When?” Then “What was the . . . ?” And more
huhs
.

When he got off the phone, he stared at the wall for three full minutes while Mom and I tried to be sensitive and unintrusive. Three minutes would be about our limit.

“So?” Mom said.

“He's dead,” Dad said.

“Who's dead?”

“I don't believe it. I didn't think he was the type.”

“What type? Who?”

“The heart attack type. He was so scrawny. And god knows he never held in his rage or anything. Plus, he drank red wine.”

“Roly, if you don't tell me
this instant
. . .”

“My father,” Dad said, annoyed as if she should have known. “He had a heart attack and died. That was his lawyer calling.”

“Oh, Roly,” Mom said. “I'm so sorry.”

Dad jutted out his chin that way he has. “Why?”

Mom eyed him as if he'd handed her a stapler for a screwdriver. “It's gotta feel weird, Roly. He's your dad. I know you didn't get along, but you must have at some point.”

“Nope. Not once.”

“Never once?” I couldn't imagine not getting along with my dad.

“Zero,” Dad said. “Zilch. Nada.”

“But Dad—”

Mom frowned me down. “Anyway. What happens next? Is there a funeral?”

“Nope. The lawyer says he wanted to be cremated and no funeral. He didn't leave any instructions for what to do with the ashes.”

“He sent your mother's back to France,” Mom said.

“So maybe I'll do the same with him. Plant him next to her and good riddance.”

“Roly.” Mom gave me a nervous look. I could tell we were inching toward things she wanted to protect me from. So of course you know what came next. “Mellie, it's past your bedtime. Good night, sweetie.”

“It's Sunday tomorrow.”

“Right, so you want to get up early to enjoy the day.” She has an answer for everything.

I went to my room and read about Leonardo da Vinci and how he gave some lady with an ermine a Mona Lisa smile before he even painted the
Mona Lisa
. So it wasn't until the next morning that I heard the really big news: Grand-père had left us the inn, and we were moving. We'd finish the school year, then my parents would quit their jobs and we would move lock, stock, and bad memories to scenic, seaside Baker's Village.

Good-bye, Fairy Fat. Sayonara, Janine. A whole new life, that's what this was. “Dad, are we going to run an inn?”

“No, no! We're going to fix it up! And then we'll sell it! And we'll invest the money wisely, and live on the proceeds while your mother and I become full-time artists! And we'll add a bunch to your college fund too!”

“We know what to do, Mellie,” my mom said. “Don't worry.”

They are brilliant about everything visual, so I wasn't worried about the fixing-up-the-inn-and-selling-it part. The investing wisely part was a laugh, but you can't have everything.

We moved in late June, and it was the first time we'd seen the inn since the bottle-throwing incident five years before. I was shocked when we pulled up to the same curb and saw what the inn had turned into. It probably hadn't been in great shape all along, but you didn't notice when it was painted and fixed up, with geraniums in the window boxes and everything. Now it was peeling all over the place, streaks of rust running down the stucco. A couple of window boxes were missing and a couple more were dangling by one nail apiece.

“He couldn't get up there anymore, I guess,” Dad said, eyeing one window box that might fall on us like a whiskey bottle.

“Or down here,” my mom said, looking at the rotting doorstep into the pub.

Getting up and down was an issue at the Agawam Inn. Still is. It's four stories, not counting the basement pub, which is five steps down from the sidewalk. The building is square, four windows on a side, wedged between two normal houses on Agawam Street near the Oak Street intersection.

When Mom opened the inn door—it's at the corner of the building next to the pub entrance, and opens onto a flight of stairs—she reeled and said, “Gah!” She has a fine nose for mold and mildew and rot, and Grand-père had left us plenty of each.

“Bring the bleach bottle in first,” she ordered my father. She pulled an herbal tea bag out of her shorts pocket, held it to her nose, gave me one, and grabbed my hand. We stepped over a pile of old mail and ran up the stairs before we could change our minds.

It was bad up there. When we got to the top of the stairs, a mouse abandoned a hollowed-out onion on the reception desk and booked it into the kitchen beyond. Nobody had cleaned out the refrigerator and Grand-père hadn't exactly spent his last days mopping and dusting. Every surface was sticky and brown and lumpy.

Mom ran around opening the windows that weren't stuck shut. She poked her head out a window in the breakfast lounge and yelled to my dad: “Bleach, dang it! And trash bags!”

It was hot up there, and my mom's hair was curling around her face in full cherub mode. Nevertheless, you do not ignore her when she says “dang it” or any swear of equal or greater value. My father was up the stairs in three minutes, his bald head shining with sweat, bleach bottle in one hand, trash bags in the other.

The next two or three hours went by in a stinky blur. We threw away terrible things, sniffed our tea bags, bleached important cooking surfaces and obvious patches of mold, stuck our heads out the windows to breathe. Mom and Dad carried a damp sofa down from the second-floor family quarters, plus a carpet and anything else that had cloth, and dumped it all in the backyard.

This was just the first two floors. We didn't venture upstairs to the guest rooms, even though a clock kept bonging up there with no regard for the actual time. “Don't drop or slam anything,” Mom said when it finally shut up. “We don't want to set it off again.”

My dad washed all the floors. My mom emptied the refrigerator except for some stuff in the freezer—cheese, fancy French coffee, even fancier Turkish coffee. She washed the shelves and bins. Then she went around the corner to the store to get something to cook for dinner.

Left temporarily to myself, I wandered down to look at the Bishop's Miter Pub, which I'd never been allowed to see. I stood out on the sidewalk for a minute, enjoying the fresh air. A freckled kid about my age came out of the regular two-story house next door and started walking over.
Oh great,
I thought
. Animal life.
He was pretty scrawny, but he looked to be my age. His light brown hair was longish and straightish and flipped out at the ends like a misshapen ski hat.

I was not prepared to meet a boy my age, especially not one from The Skinny Planet. I was tired and filthy and smelled like bleach and my nose was full of dust. This was no way to begin my new life.

Like I'd be so impressive if I was clean.

“The inn's closed,” the kid said.

“Obviously,” I said.
Ooo, clever comeback, Mellie.

The kid stopped walking and peered at our car, which had its trunk open and a toilet brush sticking out of a box of stuff on the roof. “Are you cleaners?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I live here.”

“You don't live here,” I said. “You live there.” I pointed at his house.

“Obviously.”

“I have things to do,” I said. “Good-bye.” I fumbled like a dork with the pub doorknob, because it was round and my hands were sweaty. I felt myself go red and hoped the kid wasn't still watching. Finally I got the knob to turn and scuttled inside.

“Nice to meet you,” he called. I slammed the door and stumbled down the steps to the pub floor, hoping he wouldn't knock or anything. He didn't.

The pub was gruesome, which was good because I was in no mood to cheer up. The wooden floor was stained with fifty years' worth of who knew what. Behind the greasy mahogany bar, the liquor bottles were all grimy and spiderwebby. The ceiling tiles sagged like they were holding in somebody's guts. But it didn't smell all that horrible by comparison—just mildewy, which I could handle.

I sat down on a filthy padded bench attached to one wall, behind a table. I stared at the cracked Formica on the tabletop, trying to imitate Degas'
Glass of Absinthe,
a painting of this sad woman sitting in a bar in 1876.

Pretending to be a painting is not imaginative. Not. At. All. You find out whether it actually is possible for a person to slump like that on a bar bench. That's science.

I had my hands just like the lady in the painting and was thinking how perfect I had her expression when I heard this funny noise. Several noises. A rustle. A tinkling, which made me look up to see this fancy but filthy chandelier shaking like my dad's belly at the beach.