The Black Sheep (5 page)

So much for all that freedom I keep hearing about. “I'll be with Carrie, and I can be home early.”

Mona looks at Max and he shakes his head. “We can't let you go alone.”

“But—”

She holds up a hand. “It's settled: Mitch will take you.”

“Mitch!” I'm horrified and I sound it. “There's no way he'll agree to go.”

“He'll go,” Max says, his tone indicating that it really is settled.

Why did they have to choose this moment to get all normal?

After dinner, Mona, Meadow, and I make chocolate-chip cookies. I've never baked before, but I find precision comes in handy, especially when you're quadrupling the recipe. My biggest challenge is keeping the twins' busy hands out of the chocolate chips. Finally I promise the biggest cookie to the twin who can track down my watch. It went missing again when I took it off to scoop the flour.

“More chocolate chips,” Meadow commands. “You need to gain a few pounds.”

“Then you wouldn't be able to steal my jeans,” I say. Not that I want them back, after the damage she's done to them. They're hers now, and her smile says she knows it.

Mona cranks up the stereo and hits repeat on Joni Mitchell's “Big Yellow Taxi.” She teaches Meadow and me the words and soon we are all bellowing, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

A shout drifts up the basement stairs. “Mom! Will you quit it? I'm trying to study!”

It's Mitch. I didn't even know he was home. He usually leaves before I'm up and returns when I'm in bed. “Studying?” I whisper. “School's over. He graduated.”

“Mitch is always studying,” Meadow says. “He's getting a head start on college.”

Who knew nerds came in such nice packaging?

“Did you know he's already been published?” Mona asks. “He wrote a first-hand account of his tracking experiences for a local travel magazine.”

Mitch sticks his head out of the stairway. “Don't talk about me.”

Too bad the packaging can't hide the personality.

“Lighten up, honey,” she says. “Can't a mother be proud?”

“Just cut out the yodeling,” he says, disappearing as fast as he came.

Mr. Likable is going to be thrilled to hear he's escorting me to a party.

“I'm not doing it,” I say.

Judy stacks warm cookies onto a plate. “What's the big deal? Just go downstairs, offer Mitch a cookie, and have a little chat.”

“Forget it. He tried to kill me with a basketball.”

She throws an arm around me. “That's how boys show girls they like them.”

“Not in a civilized society,” I say.

Mona laughs. “There's nothing civilized about teenage boys, Kendra.”

“I'm not chatting with him,” I say. “He's rude.”

“My point exactly,” Judy says. “Judy thinks you two got off on the wrong foot and you need to smooth things over.”

I step out from under her arm. “I thought Judy liked conflict. Ratings, remember?”

She shifts gears with her usual split-second timing. “Sure, but too much conflict about the same thing gets old fast. Viewers have short attention spans.”

“Mitch isn't so bad,” Mona assures me. “He's just cranky about the cameras. No offense, Judy.”

“None taken,” Judy says.

“I'm not a fan of television myself, to be honest,” Mona continues. “Ours broke a year ago and I had no intention of repairing it.” She turns to me and shrugs. “Judy arrived with a new one and I've hardly seen the kids since.”

Judy puts the plate of cookies in my hand and propels me toward the stairs. “Think about how much easier the party will be if you're getting along. Go patch things up.”

“Only if you and your cameras stay up here.” I brace myself in the doorway with one elbow and my free hand as she pushes.

“It's all fair game, KB, you know that.”

“I can't patch things up unless you back off.”

“Fine,” she says. “Have it your way.” She presses the button on her walkie-talkie. “Attention,
Black Sheep
crew.” Several crew members are in the kitchen with us, and their walkies squawk because of the close proximity. “We're standing down on the lamb. Repeat: stand down on the lamb.” Taking her thumb off the button, she says, “Consider this your one free pass, KB.”

Halfway down the stairs, I turn and run back up to make sure they're keeping their word. Mona has left the kitchen and Judy is kicking back at the table with the rest of the crew. The cameras and mikes are on the floor. “Go,” she says, around a mouthful of cookie.

I start down the stairs again, feeling a little nauseous, either from nerves or from eating too many cookies. Winning Mitch over is one of the tougher challenges I've faced in my life, but I'm sure he'll come to like me when he knows me better. It's not like he has a good reason to hate me.

When I reach the bottom of the stairs, Mitch is parked in front of a large plasma-screen TV watching a basketball game. I hold out the plate of cookies and offer a faint “Hi.” He doesn't respond. He doesn't even move his eyes from the screen.

This is going well. “I thought you were studying,” I say.

He turns to see if the crew is behind me. “And I thought you were upstairs milking your fifteen minutes of fame.”

I consider throwing the cookies at his head, but that would be a sad waste of my newfound talent for baking. “The same way your sister is milking it in New York.”

“Her choice, not mine,” he says. “I want no part of it.”

I point at the TV. “Except for that, you mean. I hear it's a gift from the show.”

He flushes, then looks away. “How about you stop barging into every room I'm in?”

“How about you stop throwing things at me?”

“What are you talking about?” A smirk plays on his lips.

“I'm talking about the basketball.”

“It was an accident.”

“Accidents don't happen twice.”

He stares at the screen in silence for a full minute before finally flicking his eyes at me. “Are you still here?”

Setting the plate of cookies on the coffee table, I sit down on the couch across from him. If it weren't for Aaron's party, I'd walk back up those stairs. But I have to win Mitch over. I can only stand having one enemy in the house, and that role belongs to the ferret. “Look,” I say, “I didn't get you into this, Maya did. And it's only a month out of your life.”

He ignores me.

“It was really nice of you to agree to participate for her sake,” I add.

He turns up the volume on the television.

“She's going to have a great time in Manhattan,” I shout above the TV. “For the first few days. Then my parents will get progressively obsessive and controlling until she's begging to come home early. You can expect that call by the end of week two.”

Although he doesn't turn his head, Mitch does lower the volume slightly. I take it as a good sign and continue. “My house is like a high-security prison,” I say. “There's a binder of rules
this thick
.”

Mitch rolls his eyes sideways to see how thick. “A binder?”

“Now you see why I like
your
parents.” Since he's starting to thaw a little, I say, “I applied to be on
The Black Sheep
because I was having trouble at home. I just wanted to try something different.”

“You could do that without dragging your whole family into it.”

“For your information, I had a really good reason for being upset with my parents.”

“Yeah, what did they do? Reduce your shoe allowance?” He raises a hand to his mouth in mock horror.

“It's personal,” I say. There's no way I'm admitting I lost it because they fired my nanny. “But I did have second thoughts. By then it was too late, I'd signed the contract.”

He turns up the volume again.

“Anyway, I don't have much of a family to inconvenience,” I yell. “I'm an only child.” I wait for him to say something, and when he doesn't, I continue. “My parents obviously didn't go to enough tent rallies.”

Mitch laughs his odd, barky laugh—and looks startled that it slipped out. “My parents are so embarrassing,” he mutters.

“They're funny,” I say, choosing the word carefully. “Funny” can go either way.

He grunts noncommittally.

“I was at the aquarium today,” I tell him. “Some woman there thinks you're God's gift to salt water.”

He looks at me again. “Yeah? Who?”

“Lisa. She wouldn't let me name the otter with the sore paw:
‘They're not pets, you know.'
” I use my uptight teacher voice and he laughs again.

“Lisa takes everything seriously. She's an academic.”

“An academic? Already?”

“She's doing her Master's thesis on how toxins are affecting the ocean's food chain.”

And Judy thinks
I'm
boring? “Well, I didn't mean any harm by naming Maurice.”

“Maurice? Please.”

He sounds somewhat entertained and, figuring he's in as good a mood as he's likely to get, I deliver the bad news. “Carrie's friend Aaron invited me to a party and your parents will only let me go if you'll come, too.”

“What about your entourage?” he asks, raising his eyebrows.

“I don't have any choice about that. I just used my one free pass to come down here without them.”

“Aaron's a loser,” he says. “But I'll think about it.”

Knowing I've pushed my luck far enough for one night, I stand to go. “Okay. Thanks.”

Mitch says, “His name is Fred.”

I'm confused. “Whose?”

“The otter's.”

“Shouldn't it start with an ‘M'?”

He smiles—not
at
me, but in my general direction. I smile too. He can't be all bad if he names the wildlife.

That's when I hear a creak on the stairs. We turn at the same moment to see the camera snout poking through a crack in the door.

“Shit,” I say.

There's shuffling, and then Judy's head appears in the crack. “Great job, KB,” she shouts. “Very natural. It's like you didn't even know we were rolling.”

Now
Mitch has a good reason to hate me.

T
he twins thunder down the old staircase and into the living room, where half the neighborhood has gathered. We're going to watch an advance copy of
The Black Sheep
premiere, which will air in a few days. I'm surprised at how quickly Judy has managed to edit the episode. I've only been here six days, although it feels like more—and not in a good way.

“Pilot to bombardier,” Matt shouts into a walkie-talkie. He zooms around the room with outstretched arms before raising the walkie to his lips again. “Prepare to lock in on target.”

“Bombs away,” Mason responds, hurling a hairbrush that resembles mine against the wall.

They are dressed as fighter pilots, in oversized leather jackets and swimming goggles. Matt is wearing white earmuffs strapped under this chin; Mason's are pink—and lacy.

“Boys!” Mona says sharply. “Are those Maya's bras?”

“Can't be,” Meadow answers. “Maya's aren't padded.”

All eyes—and cameras—turn to catch my reaction.

The flush rolls over me so fast it almost knocks me down, but still I manage a feeble defense. “How do you know they're not Mona's?”

The crowd cracks up.

“Mona hasn't worn a bra since her mother's funeral in 1988,” Max explains.

“And only then out of respect,” Mona confirms.

Judy's smile stretches so far it threatens to decapitate her. Why isn't she bugged that the boys have confiscated the crew's walkie-talkies?

I snatch futilely at Mason while Matt targets his big brother, Mitch, who has appeared in the doorway. Raising his arms, Matt shouts, “Target locked in! Prepare for missile departure!” He loads a tampon, adorned by a tiny American flag, into my purple thong and launches it.

Time slows as the white projectile sails through the air. Heads turn to follow its trajectory. Three seconds later the tampon lands in Mitch's soda.

The twins high-five each other. “Splash down!”

Mitch sets his glass on a table and then reaches for my thong, now dangling from the snout of a ceramic otter. He offers it to me with a flourish and says, “Nice color.”

Carrie's brother, Calvin, grabs the thong and twirls it over his head on one finger, whooping. In a frenzy, the twins leap for it until Max crosses the room and puts each boy in a headlock. Without waiting to retrieve my property, I bolt for the back door.

Bob and Chili are so intent on following me that they collide in the doorway and curse at each other.

It's good to hear some profanity, even if it isn't my own.

The swing set in the backyard turns out to be a good refuge from the mayhem inside. Nothing in my past prepared me for this sort of behavior. In
my
home, people don't go out of their way to embarrass me. Yes, my parents are an embarrassment simply by virtue of being the dullest people on the planet. And yes, it kills me when they expose their weirdness to the public. Why two intelligent people can only make small talk about two subjects—the stock market and healthy living—is beyond me. But one thing I can say for them is that they don't
deliberately
embarrass me.

Another thing I can say for my parents is that they only slipped up on the birth control once. Obviously, I wasted too much of my youth wishing for brothers and sisters. Had our family been larger, my parents would have had breakdowns trying to draft enough
BLAH
legislation, yet it wouldn't have prevented sibling abuse.

I've never had the opportunity to develop a thick skin. Even at school I've mostly escaped ridicule by flying below the radar—far enough below that hardly anyone notices me, yet not so far that people single me out to bully me. It's a balancing act that's harder than it sounds.

With Bob's lens still trained on me from the deck, I push off on the swing. The movement seems to clear my mind, and it occurs to me that my mediocrity was genetically inevitable. When I was conceived, two sets of completely bland chromosomes combined not with a bang, but a whimper. It's not my fault that I am average. Ordinary. Unexceptional. Predictable. I find a synonym with every arc of the swing.

Then, as I soar up into the late afternoon sky, I realize that there is still hope. I took introductory biology, and I know that genes do not control everything. Environment plays a huge role in what we become. I didn't stand much of a chance of escaping the Banker Duplication Program in Manhattan, but now that I'm in Monterey, I might be able to work against my genes to become someone completely different from my parents. Someone with a personality. Someone outgoing. Someone interesting.

The Black Sheep
could be my lucky break after all. Not because I want to be on television and expose my fight against mediocrity to a national audience, but because it gives me the chance to prove to myself that I am not a chip off the old block.

It won't be easy. I've got a long way to go and only a few weeks to get there.

Today I'm the type of person who retires to the swing set at the first sign of trouble. By the time I leave Monterey, I want to be a true Black Sheep. A Black Sheep doesn't crumble. A Black Sheep claims the padded bras as her own and laughs as the tampons fly. A Black Sheep tosses out her parents' rule book and invents her own.

The first rule of my new Black Sheep code arrives in my head fully formed:
A Black Sheep stands her ground
.

I leap off the swing at its highest point, psyched to face the enemy.

When my feet hit the ground, however, it is friend, not foe, that I face. “Judy sent me to get you,” Carrie says. “She's cued up the show.”

“Let's go to the mall instead,” I suggest. It's not running away: a Black Sheep can stand her ground wherever she likes.

Carrie shakes her head. “Don't worry, Mona read everyone the riot act. Nobody is allowed to mention the tampon.”

“Barbarians,” I grumble, following her to the house. “They have no respect for privacy.”

“That's what it's like in a big family,” Carrie agrees.

“At least
your
brothers acknowledge you exist. Mitch has barely spoken to me since Judy secretly taped our conversation.”

“She's hard not to hate, isn't she?”

I nod, pondering for a moment. “Do you think Judy put the twins up to that stunt? She wasn't even mad at them for taking her walkie-talkie.”

The back door swings open and a Donkey smile appears. “Two minutes to curtain, girls. ”

The beauty of rules, which I never recognized until today, is that they give you something to cling to in the midst of chaos. If I hadn't launched the Black Sheep code, I might be hysterical right now. Instead, I stand my ground as the show rolls even though Calvin is sitting behind me with the tampon tucked behind one ear. I stand my ground even though Mitch is snickering at the sight of my on-screen alter ego prancing around my parents' marble halls in pajamas. I stand my ground when the high-definition TV offers a shocking close-up of a blemish I didn't know I had. And I stand my ground when Judy asks on air if I have the runs, even though the rest of the audience convulses with laughter.

This is not my finest hour. I am coming across as totally obnoxious. Judy has edited out the scenes where I looked normal and kept only the ones where I'm picking up after the crew, wiping their fingerprints off shiny surfaces, rolling my eyes when they misidentify Mozart, and explaining the difference between a Monet and Matisse. The way she's cut this, I look like a snob. And a boring snob, at that.

“I can't go to California,”
I tell the camera.
“I'm taking music theory class this summer. And economics. Plus I've got math camp.”

Mitch snickers again. “Wow, life in the Big Apple is as exciting as everyone says.”

“Hush,” Mona says.

The show cuts to a close-up of Judy standing outside our brownstone. It must have been taped after she left, because she's holding a framed photo of me that she swiped from our mantel.
“This poor child hasn't been hugged in four years!”
she says.

“It's not like that,” I say, but no one hears me because Calvin is pretending to sob gustily behind me.

Max reaches over to pat my back, but withdraws his hand abruptly when my father intones,
“Our daughter is not spending a month with beatniks.”

“We're not beatniks,” Max protests.

“Sure we are, sweetie,” Mona says. “And proud of it, too.”

Back on screen, Judy asks me if I have any interests. I stare blankly at the camera for several long moments, twisting my ponytail before finally replying,
“I, uh, like to shop.”

“Grab your scuba gear,” Mitch says. “That's pretty deep.”

“Mitch,” Mona says. “That's quite…”

Her voice trails off as her daughter's pretty face appears on-screen. The show's focus has finally shifted to Maya's last day in Monterey. But instead of skewering Maya's family as she did mine, Judy has featured a montage of scenes where the Mulligans are singing folk songs beside a campfire, frolicking in the backyard with the pets, and cooking a huge meal together. It's all glorious family harmony.

The show cuts to New York, where Maya's dark hair glistens under my parents' chandelier as they eat together at the dining room table we never use when I'm around.

“That's take-out food,” I point out. “They dumped it into my mother's Limoges china to make it look homemade.”

“Maya looks wonderful,” Max says, to no one in particular. “She looks happy.”

Maya
does
look happy as she rearranges the furniture in my room and takes down my posters and spreads her cosmetics all over my bathroom counter. She looks even happier as she walks up Madison Avenue arm in arm with my best friend, Lucy, laughing at some private joke. And she looks happier still while contemplating Jan Gossaert's
Portrait of a Banker
, Mom's favorite painting, which is currently on loan to the Met.

My mother is obviously thrilled to be sharing this moment with Maya. At least it's obvious to me that she's thrilled. Mom doesn't have the full range of facial expressions normal people have, but her eyebrows are riding a little higher than usual.

“You call this
reality
TV?” I ask, looking over my shoulder at Judy. “There's nothing real about it. You made it look like
my
life sucks.”

“I'm showing the truth as I see it,” she says, shrugging. “Pictures don't lie.”

I try to protest further, but a dozen people shush me because the show has cut back to Monterey, and the neighbors are excited to see themselves at the barbecue.

Carrie's image appears on screen, nodding her agreement with Meadow that Maya is a bitch. Carrie gasps in horror, but Meadow simply states, “Sometimes she is.”

“That was a private conversation,” Carrie says.

“Welcome to
The Black Sheep
, where nothing is sacred, thanks to your attention-craving friend,” Mitch says, pointing to me.

He doesn't have time to say more before his own face appears on the screen. Make that his full physique, although the shots of our encounter in the bathroom have been blurred for prime-time viewing. The camera captures me sneaking covert looks below the waist.

Now it's my turn to gasp in horror. “I was just checking his—”

“Package?” Calvin interrupts, elbowing Mitch. “You called it, man. The shopaholic's a perv.”

Carrie is halfway back to her house before the credits have finished rolling.

“Carrie, wait,” I call after her. “Where are you going?”

“Home.” She doesn't turn around.

“Mrs. Kowalchuk is hitting on Mitch. Don't you want to hang out and watch?”

She stops when she reaches her front stairs. “I just made a fool of myself on national TV. I practically said Maya's a bitch, and I
did
say that Mitch is hot.”

“I know, but that's nothing compared to what I said,” I offer consolingly. When she doesn't come back, I walk over to her porch.

“Yeah, but you made a
choice
to be on television,” she says, starting up the stairs. “I'm an innocent bystander!”

I follow her to the door. “You didn't mind the cameras at the mall the other day. And remember, I asked Judy not to use what you said.”

“Yeah, I know. I guess I'm not cut out for this kind of attention. Sorry, Kendra.”

She steps inside and shuts the door in my face.

Bob and Chili are standing behind me when I turn around.

“Don't worry, kid,” Bob says, reassuringly. “She'll come around.”

I notice for the first time that Bob's
Black Sheep
T-shirt has been personalized with Magic Marker. Stretched across his paunch it says,
YES
,
JUDY
,
I
'
M ZOOMING IN
.

Chili isn't as confident. “I don't know. She totally slammed the door in Kendra's face. It was cold.”