The Chance You Won't Return (16 page)

On Monday, it was my job to get Katy and Teddy ready for school. Katy was all right on her own; I had to practically drag Teddy out of bed and toss him into the bathroom. He kept collapsing against me like he’d lost all muscle control. “I don’t feel well,” he said. “I’m too tired.” I told him that I didn’t care, and he could go puke in the nurse’s office at school if it came to that. After I took off Friday night, Dad wouldn’t let me out for the rest of the weekend, which meant I hadn’t seen Jim since the football game. It was the first time in a while that I was actually looking forward to school.

“Teddy!” I shouted from the kitchen as Katy and I made lunches. “Get your butt down here or I’ll kick it down.”

He clomped down the stairs and slumped against the kitchen table. “Hey there, sunshine,” I said.

“Hi,” he mumbled, starting to pick at the bagel Katy had set out for him. “What’re you making?” When I told him ham and cheese, he groaned and held his head in his hands as if it weighed a thousand pounds. “I don’t
want
that.”

“Fine,” I said. “Make it yourself. I’m just doing this to be nice.”

“I don’t want to make it
myself.
Just make me something
else.
”

I shoved the sandwich in a paper bag, along with a mini box of raisins and some baby carrots. “Oh, my God, Teddy, whine me a river.”

He began to swing his legs, kicking the underside of the table. “
Mom
would make something else for me. Make me something
else.
Make Mom make lunch.” When I turned, Teddy’s face was red and scrunched, like he was about to cry.

“She’s . . . sleeping,” Katy said.

I knew Dad had talked to him about Mom, even though I wasn’t exactly sure what Dad had told him. How was he supposed to explain a mental breakdown to a seven-year-old? At least when Mom was curled up, we could say she felt sick and achy, and he seemed to buy it. But now Mom was there but she wasn’t Mom, not even in some quiet, distant way. She would pretend that Teddy was someone else — a nephew, the son of her sister, from what I could tell. So Dad was just trying to keep Teddy away from Mom as much as possible, and he asked us to do the same.

“We have peanut butter,” I said. “And I think chicken. Do you want that?”

Teddy slid from his seat to the floor, disappearing under the table. “I’m not going to school today,” he said. “You didn’t have to go Friday, and I don’t have to go today.”

I rolled my eyes. “Teddy, get up. We were helping Mom. It wasn’t a real day off.”

His sneakers slapped the tile floor. Nearby, Jackson squeaked and moved into the living room. “Mom’s pretending to be someone else and doesn’t have to go to work. I can pretend to be someone else, too, and I won’t have to go to school.”

Katy and I looked at each other. “Teddy,” I said. “Teddy, stop being stupid. You’re fine.”

“I’m not Teddy.”

I didn’t even want to ask who he’d be — some superhero, probably. For a second, I thought about saying I didn’t care if he went to school or not, but then I imagined him standing at his window, thinking he was Spider-Man and could web himself to the next house. I knelt on the floor and grabbed his arm. “Yeah, you are. Now, get up.” I pulled, and he screamed.

By the time I heard the knocking, it was more like banging. “Door,” Katy said.

I’d wrestled Teddy from under the table and handed him to Katy. “Calm him down or something,” I said, and rushed to the door.

It was Mrs. Ellis, here for her first shift. “Is everything all right?” she asked, trying to glimpse behind me.

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s just my stupid brother. Come on in.”

She followed me into the kitchen. When Teddy saw her, he stopped struggling in Katy’s arms, embarrassed. He started to wipe his nose on Katy’s sleeve, and she yanked her arm away. “Ew, Teddy!”

Mrs. Ellis smiled with her lips pressed together. “Well,” she said, “it looks like you’ve been having quite a morning.”

Suddenly I felt like we were such a mess. The counter was covered in stuff for lunch, and boxes of cereal had been left out. In the corner, the trash can was overflowing. No one had bothered to vacuum in a while, so stray bits of leaves and dog hair gathered in the corners. Since I’d been doing a lot of the laundry, all of our clothes were wrinkled. I wasn’t sure if Teddy had had a bath that weekend. We’d never been an obsessively neat family — even when Mom had all her mental capacities, she hated cleaning — but now everything felt out of order and dirty. I tugged at the ends of my hair. Even though I’d showered that morning, it felt gross and uncombed. In crisp khakis and a fisherman’s sweater, Mrs. Ellis looked fresh, but then, she always did. She was around Mom’s age, and probably Mom’s closest friend in the neighborhood. She was nice enough, and she would do stuff like lead her daughter’s Girl Scout troop and organize an egg hunt every year for Easter. Her kids — a boy and a girl, older than us — were off at college, or maybe they had even graduated by now. I wondered if they knew that their mom would be sitting with our crazy mom during the day.

“Mom’s still asleep,” I told her. “She stays up late.”

“That’s all right. It’s better for her to get some rest. You kids better hurry or you’ll be late for school.” She kept smiling without her teeth. It was like Mr. Kane and how he got nice. Not that Mrs. Ellis ever hated me, but I didn’t want her smiling like that, all patient and unblinking. I didn’t want her waving good-bye like she was our mom.

I grabbed a bagel and pressed it into Teddy’s hand. “You can eat this on the bus,” I said. He didn’t argue and kept holding my hand as we marched to the bus stop.

When I got off the bus, my insides were wringing themselves in anxiety. I wanted to see Jim — and I didn’t want to see him. What if he thought us making out was a total joke? What if I saw him pressed up against a locker with some short-skirted freshman? What if he thought I was a loser, just like everybody else? But he was also the only person I felt calm around these days. In phys ed, Mrs. Harriott matched everyone up with a partner to practice backhands, and, of course, I got paired with Amanda Baxter, tennis champion, so I never got the chance to really talk to him.

A couple of hours later, when I was in line to get an iced tea at the cafeteria, Theresa and Maddie were talking about how their moms sucked, and I didn’t even want to hear it. Jim was just paying for his lunch when I caught his eye.

“Hey,” he said. “I was gonna eat outside. You want to come?”

I said yes without even looking at my friends or explaining to them what had happened.

We found an empty spot outside the gymnasium. It was sunny, and probably one of the last nice days we’d get to have lunch outside before the cold weather set in. Nearby, kids with sixth-period phys ed jogged around the edge of the soccer field. At the tennis courts, Mrs. Harriott blew her whistle, and the kids ran over to her, cutting down the white center line. Jim told me about Will’s party — “A lot of random sophomores showed up; you didn’t miss much”— and I told him about crashing senior parties when I was a freshman and on JV soccer.

“It was like we were these stupid little magpies, going after whatever was shiniest,” I said. “We just stayed in a huge clump and giggled a lot.”

“But you don’t play anymore, right? Soccer, I mean.”

I shook my head. “I decided not to this year.”

“Why not?”

I rubbed my thumb against the label on my bottle of iced tea until the edge came unglued. “I was just sick of it. I mean, I really liked playing, but it was, like, a lot of pressure.” I could almost hear my mom, telling me that I could do better.

“Like how?”

“It just was.” My tone was harsher than I intended, and Jim blinked in surprise.

“Sorry,” he said stiffly. “I just think if you like something, you shouldn’t let stuff like that stop you.”

I peeled the label off my bottle and took a breath. “So if you could be anyone, who would you be?”

Jim bit into an apple. “That sounds like the essay question on a college application.” He grinned. “Are you trying to steal my answer? Because I’m definitely getting into Harvard with that one.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I’ll have a better chance if I apply as you. Seriously, it’s just a fun question.”

“Anyone?” he asked.

I sipped my iced tea. “Anyone. Living, dead, imaginary, whoever. If you could just become them.”

He leaned back against the brick wall of the gym. “I don’t know. Let me think for a second — I have to remember everyone who’s ever existed in the universe.”

“Not everyone,” I said. “Just the good ones. That cuts out, what, like fifty gazillion people? That’s so easy.”

He laughed; I loved that I could make Jim Wiley laugh.

“Time’s up,” I said. “Who would you pick?”

“Oh, thanks. Only the huge question of my future identity and you give me about a minute and a half.” He exhaled sharply. “I don’t know. Maybe Banksy.”

“Banksy?”

“He’s this street artist from England,” Jim explained. “Graffiti artist, you know. But it’s not just tags or whatever. He does these really cool stencil paintings and prints, with all these subversive messages. And of course his work is on regular building walls. You could walk down the street and see his work. In fact . . .” He pulled his phone out of his pocket, scanned through it for a second, and then handed it to me. I flipped through the images — a bird with a gasoline nozzle for a head, two kissing policemen, a wall labeled
DESIGNATED PICNIC AREA
.

I handed Jim back his phone. “That last one is stenciled writing. Does that count as art?”

“Why not? That’s what I like about it. Plus, not many people know who Banksy actually is. You don’t have to be some famous guy hanging art in famous galleries to be an artist. I think that’s pretty cool.”

I just stared at Jim for a second. Even though I’d seen him try to do graffiti art on the boulder, I didn’t peg him as someone who would have thought much about what it meant to be an artist. “Is that like what you were doing at the rock?”

He laughed. “Trying to do. The rock’s a good place to practice because people don’t notice if it sucks.”

“I think you’d make a good Banksy.”

Jim’s face reddened a little, and he nudged me with his knee. “Maybe he’ll go crazy and cut his ear off, Van Gogh — style, and I’ll have to pick someone else to be.”

I stiffened at the word “crazy” but tried to smile. “You have nice ears. Don’t get rid of them.”

“Thanks. I kind of like them myself. Anyway, he’s the first one I thought of,” Jim said. “There’s probably somebody better, but for now I’ll say Banksy.” He tapped my knee with his apple. “What about you?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Come on, it’s your question,” he said. “You have to know.”

It seemed dangerous to even think about. “What about Amelia Earhart?”

Jim nodded. “She was pretty cool. Except for that whole thing where she died young. You lose points for that.”

“Disappeared,” I said. “No one actually knows what happened to her.”

“I dunno, some people have some convincing theories. Like, I’m pretty sure aliens got her.” He laughed and nudged my leg with his.

I wished aliens had abducted Amelia Earhart. Then Mom probably wouldn’t have wanted to be her. “Yeah, she was just the first person who popped into my head anyway. I’d probably choose someone else.” I tugged a blade of grass from the ground and began tearing it into tiny pieces. “Maybe Jane Eyre.”

“Jane Eyre?” he said. “From the book?”

“Yeah. I had to read it for Heickman’s class last year. Jane’s smart and she holds her own even though everyone’s a dick to her. And she and Mr. Rochester — that’s her boss — are the only ones who get each other. Although Jane’s life kind of sucks for a while. Well, the ending was happy. It was just getting there that was bad.” In the distance, I could hear the electronic ring of the bell. “That’s lunch,” I said, starting to collect my things.

“How about driving tonight?” Jim said.

Dad wasn’t exactly happy with me, and I was supposed to watch Mom until he got home. And now that Mom was back in the house, I wasn’t sure what that meant for Jim coming over — especially after I basically told him about the Amelia Earhart thing. “I don’t think I can tonight,” I said. “I’m supposed to watch my little brother. Maybe later this week?”

“Sounds good. We can practice parallel parking.” I froze, looking at Jim like he’d suggested we give Russian roulette a try, and Jim laughed. “Come on, I bet Jane Eyre would’ve loved it.”

“Sure,” I said. “Eighteenth-century governesses love parallel parking.”

Theresa attacked me in the hall before driver’s ed. “See, I’m a little confused,” she said, linking my arm with hers so it looked like we were being best-friendy, but really she just didn’t want me to escape. “If I were going to hook up with Jim Wiley during lunch, I’d give my friends a heads-up about it. Then we could all exchange high fives afterward.”