Spectacle (A Young Adult Novel)

Spectacle
by Angie McCullagh

Copyright © 2012 by Angie McCullagh

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Dedicated to my parents,
who raised a six-foot-two-inch girl
with grace and humor.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67

Postscript
Acknowledgments
About the Author

1. Tall Pride

I
T WASN’T THAT
Emily Lucas didn’t like her jeans; it was that they had shrunk. Or something. This particular pair had been her favorite: a dark blue wash with worn spots on one hip and the opposite knee.

But lately they hadn’t been skimming the tops of her feet so much as swinging around her ankles. It was embarrassing, actually, the way they’d gone from Cool to Floods in a matter of a few weeks.

Emily tried not to catch a glimpse of her pant leg as she swung one foot over and off her bike, a heavy ‘90s Schwinn, brush painted sky blue. She leaned the Schwinn against the porch, trudged inside and dropped her backpack at the base of the stairway.

In the kitchen, she scrounged for a snack that wasn’t kale or garbanzo beans, and found a can of diet soda, a jar of creamy Jif (her stepmom’s one vice), and a box of crackers.

Plopping down at the kitchen table, she dug in.

“Hey Emily! You’re early,” Melissa said, coming in and beginning her detailed ritual of brewing green tea. She filled a red kettle with water, measured exactly one teaspoon of dried leaves into a diffuser, and snapped it closed. She tapped it against the counter, then added exactly one more teaspoon of leaves, and snapped it closed again. She retrieved a cup and saucer from the cupboard’s top shelf.

Emily, a cracker jammed into the side of her mouth, said, “It was an early release day.”

“What for?”

“Teacher meetings or something. I don’t know.”

October sun streamed through the bank of windows above Melissa’s beloved rectangular farmer’s sink.

Emily took a swig of soda and said, "I need new jeans."

"Oh? What's wrong with those? And your Luckys?"

"They're shrinking."

"No," Melissa said, sounding mildly devastated. "We're so careful."

Which was true. Emily did her own laundry, but Melissa helped stretch her jeans after every wash, pulling the hems while Emily yanked the waistband, like denim tug-of-war. But it worked. It usually worked, anyway.

"You're growing again," Melissa said.

Emily shook her head, refusing to accept that possibility. "I can't be."

"Let's measure you."

Emily thought Melissa took a weird overinterest in the actual numbers of her height. When someone asked Emily how tall she was, which was often, Melissa would crow, "Five eleven and three-fourths!"

Who cared about the stupid three-fourths?

"C'mon! It'll be … exciting!"

Emily swallowed a large gob of cracker and peanut butter and said, "Unlike you, I don't need specifics, okay? I don't wanna know."

Melissa crossed her arms and leaned against the counter. She nodded. "Denial."

"Fine, whatever," Emily scooped up her snack, went to the family room, and folded herself into the couch.

She clicked on the TV and stared hard at some reality show she didn't care about.

Soon, Melissa joined her and settled herself on the leather chair across from Emily. She flipped her hair, shiny and black. "It's okay to be tall," she said. "You should hold your head up high."

"Tall pride. Got it."

"When I was a kid, I would've killed to be taller."

Right, Emily thought. Tall
er
. Not three-story-house tall. Not oak-tree tall. Not Emily Lucas tall.

She looked at Melissa, whose dainty foot was slung over her knee. She wished Melissa wouldn’t try so hard to be her friend. To be all Girl Power. She was ten years younger than Emily’s dad and had good music on her iPod, so she thought she and Emily should be besties.

“Can I just eat my snack?” Emily pleaded. “And watch some trashy TV? It’s been a crappy day.”

Melissa pretended to stare at the show with her for a few minutes, then stood, stretched noisily, and left. She bopped around the house with her earbuds in, straightening, cooking, getting on the computer, and generally being overly cheery.

Just before dinner, Kristen came crashing in, dropping her duffel with a thud on the floor by the front door and disappearing into the bathroom for a shower. She came home just before dinner most days, finally done with whatever practice she was involved in at the time. Volleyball, softball, soccer. It could be any sport. She was good at them all.

Athletic, normal-heighted Kristen.

Emily always wondered how they could be sisters. Really, how?

She had to hate her a little bit.

She went up to her room, kicked the door closed, lay across her bed, and tried to concentrate on algebra. She could smell rice cooking and the fruity scent of Kristen’s shampoo.

She heard Kristen’s door open and close.

The phone rang, and Emily assumed it was her dad calling to tell Melissa he was going to be late again.

She chewed her pencil, loathing the x’s and y’s. The numbers that, to her, looked like a jumble of noodles in a bowl. She doodled across the margins of her paper. She thought about calling Trix but decided against it. Trix was probably working at Frederick Hui’s, the fabric dyeing plant where she put in 20 hours a week, or wandering Seattle’s twilit streets.

Frustrated with math, Emily stood in front of the full-length mirror hanging on the back of her door. There was her long, long body and thin face and big hands.

There was the very-much-not-ideal teenage form. The girl without a petite or sprightly bone anywhere within her skeleton.

Her eyes, thankfully, were bright. Alert. Her henna-brown hair hung in a thick wave past her shoulders. Her lips were a nice shape—kind of full and wide, though she didn’t like how they spread like melted butter when she smiled.

Emily could go days sometimes without noticing herself, without catching her reflection in the chrome toaster or a dark store window, without glancing down at her stretched out legs and thinking she was anything other than normal. But then there would come a surprising objective moment, and she could see what others saw: the lanky limbs and how, when she sat with crossed legs, she looked angled and severe. It was a wonder, in a way, that people didn’t exclaim more when they saw her, didn’t gawk for longer than they did.

She checked out her jeans, at how they stopped too soon now above her feet. She examined her sleeves, which, sure enough, had hiked up an inch or so, showing her bony wrists.

Frustrated, she spun away. How could she be growing again? And how tall was she actually going to get?

2. Trailer

T
RIX OPENED HER
window as far as it would go. Sounds from Aurora Avenue filtered in: five lanes of traffic rumbling, the occasional shout, barking dogs. She removed the screen, lit a cigarette and leaned out into the night, a breeze blowing her curly hair off her face.

Trix’s mom would flay her if she found her smoking.

Her mother, Fiona Jones, used to smoke herself, but quit when she was diagnosed with early emphysema. Now she filled the nicotine void with food and TV.

Still, Trix was sixteen. She was supposed to try all sorts of things, figure out what and who she wanted to be. Smoking, she had to admit, made her feel kind of badass. It gave her something to do and look forward to.

She thought about the guy her mom was on a date with. Rodney. He had an octopus tattoo on his left bicep. “Look!” her mom had squealed when he come to pick her up, “He can make it swim!”

Sure enough, with a little flexing, the tentacled legs rippled. Trix had smirked and looked away. She couldn’t bear the thought of her mom with that guy, laughing at his jokes and swooning over his stupid octopus. But her mom had made it clear a couple years back that Trix had no say in the matter. Fiona’d go out with whomever she wanted, and no amount of protesting or sulking on Trix’s part was going to change that.

Fine
, Trix thought now,
you go out with who you want to, and I’ll go out with who I want to.