The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (18 page)

Slowly, as if moving her hands took a lot of effort, Jill unlatched the screen. “I’m letting you in because I feel sorry for you.”

“How very generous,” I said.

I followed Jill to the kitchen, where she filled two smiley-face glasses with water; then we went to her room. “I’m not technically grounded,” she said. “I grounded myself. It kills my mother to have to punish me, so I make things easier for her by taking matters into my own hands.”

This made an odd kind of sense, because it was Jill.
I gulped down my water and looked around at her room, which was totally pink. There was a pink rug, a pink quilt on the bed, a pink beanbag chair, and a row of teddy bears on a shelf. The bears were arranged in size order, and they were wearing an assortment of pink raincoats, tutus, aprons, shorts, and shoes. “Nice bears,” I said.

Jill scooped up the largest in the row of animals, took off its pink plastic rain boots, and then put them back on.

“So: are you going to tell me why you grounded yourself?” I asked.

Jill licked her finger and cleaned the bear’s black plastic eyes. “You don’t actually know? Can you guess?”

“Why should I guess?” I asked. “Is your bedroom always this neat?”

Jill put the bear down. “Actually, I don’t think I should talk about it. I don’t want to be accused of spreading gossip.”

“I rode all the way over here,” I said. “If you don’t want to say why you’re grounded, can you write it down? Send smoke signals? Or maybe you want to act it out.”

Jill picked up a Magic 8 Ball from her shelf. “It has to do with something that’s missing.” She shook the 8 Ball, a little violently I thought, then turned it over and peered into the tiny inky window. “The 8 Ball says, ‘Maybe Adrienne has heard something about the thing that’s missing but doesn’t want to admit it.’ ”

“That must be in very small print,” I said. “I didn’t know 8 Balls were that specific.”

“Oh, sure. They can tell you lots of things,” Jill said. She shook the 8 Ball again, accidentally smacking it against
her dresser. “Now it says, ‘Adrienne has been acting like a suck-up all summer.’ And it says that CeeCee is a snake—‘a venomous, two-faced, treacherous beast.’ ”

“That’s kind of over-the-top,” I said. “Are you exaggerating?”

Jill said she wasn’t.

“Then maybe you’re reading the messages wrong. Or misinterpreting.” I grabbed the 8 Ball. I shook it, then pounded it several times on the floor. “Huh,” I said. “Look at this. Now the little window says that Jill D’Amato should unpack that truckload of shit from her ears and listen to me for half a second, because I have no idea what she’s talking about.”

“I think you cracked it,” Jill said.

“Good. You’re too old for an 8 Ball.”

“I still have a Ouija board,” Jill said. She ran her finger along a seam in the 8 Ball, which did appear to be leaking. She tossed it into the trash. “Have you ever stolen anything?” she asked.

“Like what?” I touched the earring at the top of my ear.

“Not counting accidental thievery,” Jill said. “That was CeeCee, not you.”

I quickly shuffled through my mental “Crimes of Adrienne” file, the list of boneheaded moments, idiotic remarks, and regrets. “I stole a bag of cashews once,” I said. “I was in first grade.” I remembered lifting the blue plastic package from its metal arm on the revolving display and quietly tucking it under my shirt. When my mother and I left the store, I assumed she would find the cashews and be shocked, and she would lead me back to the store to
confess. But she never found them. They were delicious. “And I took a chocolate milk from the school cafeteria. I think that lunch lady, Denise, is blind in one eye.”

“She’s blind in both eyes,” Jill said. “But I’m not talking about milk and cashews. I’m talking about expensive things. Things that are stolen from people you know. You wouldn’t, for example, walk into my house and steal something valuable from my parents. You wouldn’t steal my dad’s medication.”

“What kind of medication?” I asked, as if I might have happily stolen one type but not another.

Jill raked her fingers through her hair. “My dad needs those pills, Adrienne. It’s not a joke. When he doesn’t have them he feels like his nerve endings have been set on fire. And they’re really expensive. You should have seen my mom’s face when she found out they were gone. And nobody has been to our house since we hosted book club.”

“Book club?” I asked. “But no one in the Unbearable Literary Society would steal your father’s pills. No one would comb through someone else’s—” I heard my voice slowing down. I remembered CeeCee checking the medicine chests.

Jill plucked a piece of fuzz off the carpet. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “And neither one of us has even mentioned her name.”

“But—” I was confused. I felt like my brain had been cut loose from its usual mooring and was sloshing back and forth in my skull, like a fish in a tub.

“I’ve taken the shit out of my ears now,” Jill said. “But I don’t hear you saying anything.”

“I don’t have anything to say,” I said. “CeeCee wouldn’t have taken them.”

“Why not? Do you think being a member of a book club makes her a good person?”

“I don’t know,” I said. It wasn’t doing much for
my
moral character. “Did you at least
ask
her if she stole the pills?”

“You are a class-A idiot,” Jill said. “She’s not going to admit it. I asked her to come over here and talk. I said it was important, but she went to the beach.”

“But … why are you mad at
me
?” I asked. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Yes, you did. You started this book club.”

“I didn’t start it,” I said. “And I didn’t steal your father’s pills.”

Downstairs, we heard a door close.

“That’s my mom,” Jill said. She tilted the pink plastic wastebasket so we could see inside it. The 8 Ball continued to leak.

“None of this makes sense to me,” I said. “And I still don’t understand why you’re grounded. Does your mother think
you
took the pills?”

“No. Hold this. I’ll get some tissues.” Jill handed me the wastebasket. “The thing is, I told my mother I could guess where the pills might have gone, because I’d seen someone poking through the medicine chest. And my mom started crying. She’s very sensitive. So I told her I would talk to a couple of ‘suspects,’ and I might be able to get the pills back. Now she probably thinks I loaned them out, or … I don’t know what she thinks.”

“Jilly, honey? Are you upstairs?”

“In my room,” Jill called.

“So, basically,” I said as we listened to her mother’s approaching footsteps, “you told your mom that Wallis or CeeCee or I—one of the three of us—stole your dad’s medication.”

Jill shrugged.

“That doesn’t strike you as unfair?” I asked. I thought about hiding under the bed or in the closet. But the door opened and there I was, red-handed, holding a dripping wastebasket over the rug.

Jill’s mother held out her arms. Not sure what the proper response should be, I set the wastebasket down and let her press me to her chest.

“It’s so good to see you, Adrienne!” she said. “That’s very sweet of you to visit. We don’t see enough of you, outside of book club. How’s your mother? And how’s little Wallis?”

“Everyone’s fine. It’s good to see you, too,” I said.

Her eyes thickened with tears. “Well. Can I make you two something to eat? Adrienne, honey, can you stay for dinner?”

“No, I should get going,” I said.

Jill’s mother squeezed me again. “Oh! You girls. I know we’ll survive all these challenges, won’t we? You’re still so young!”

“Mom? You should let go of Adrienne,” Jill said.

Her mother nodded and dabbed at her eyes. “I’m fairly emotional these days. Jilly can tell you. Maybe it’s all this literature we’re reading. Some of it is so powerful!” She
picked up
The House on Mango Street
. “Where do you think these writers get their ideas?”

I said I didn’t know.

“Well, I certainly hope they aren’t all true,” Jill’s mother said. “Some of the characters go through such terrible things. It’s just … upsetting. What do you think, Jilly?”

Jill patted her mother’s arm. She suggested that writers might be an unusual group, and that more well-adjusted people—people like us—probably kept busy with work and hobbies and didn’t feel a need to write anything down.

14. ANTAGONIST: the character who is against the main character. The monster is Frankenstein’s antagonist. The husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the antagonist of his wife. I don’t know if most people in real life have antagonists, but everyone in a novel seems to have at least one
.

I
n books, it’s never the obvious person who’s guilty. The person who’s found standing over the corpse with a bloodstained weapon in her hand almost never turns out to be the killer. The killer is the person you would never think of, the one who wandered through the second chapter in a friendly way, or the person who—up until the minute she confesses—wouldn’t seem to be capable of the simplest crime.

I didn’t think CeeCee stole the pills.

Did she? Maybe anything was possible. Maybe my mother was lying to me, and maybe Wallis’s mother was a figment of my imagination, and maybe CeeCee had ransacked Jill’s bathroom cabinet so she could steal the pills
for someone who would know how to sell them—let’s say an unemployed guy who liked to run errands at three a.m.

CeeCee wasn’t answering my texts. Was that incriminating? Or did it just mean she was tired of me? I checked her blog. It didn’t seem to have changed, but I saw a number 44 in the
Post a comment
section. Forty-four comments? Who would bother to comment on a book club blog?

Oh.

Hey CeeCee, great blog
, most of them said.
I like the bikini
. One person asked about my hair (
Does that chick have a mullett?
) and several people sent links—these were probably obscene—that CeeCee might want to use for her project. One person offered to be
the daddy I had always wanted
.

Nice. A pedophile
.

The last few comments were from Jeff Pardullo.
Hot
, he said, commenting on the picture of CeeCee’s toes. In another post he wrote,
Call me. I wanna hang out with your high school friends
.

I wondered if Jill or Wallis had seen the comments. Then it occurred to me that Wallis, who didn’t even want her picture taken, probably didn’t know about the blog at all.

CeeCee finally reappeared a couple of days later, on the morning of Unbearable Book Club meeting number four. I woke up to find her sitting at the foot of my bed with a clock in her hand.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She held the face of the clock in my direction.
“Nine-forty-five,” she said. “Is this when you non–summer school students usually get up?”

“How did you get in here?” I rubbed my eyes. “And why aren’t you at French?”

“Your front door was unlocked.” CeeCee put the clock down. “Very low security. And I’m here because my mother made me get up hideously early this morning and drive back from the beach so I could get to class, but Monsieur Crowne didn’t show—
il est malade
. So I had my mom drop me off at your house on her way to tennis. Can you make cappuccino?”

“I don’t even know what it is,” I said. The sun was pouring through my bedroom window. I peeled the sheet from my legs. “Do you know I called you about twenty times?”

“No. My phone died,” CeeCee said. “It was some kind of Stone Age model. I’m finally getting a new one. My little vacation was pretty entertaining, by the way. Remind me to tell you about it when you’re older. What beach do you usually go to?”

“I don’t. My mother hates the beach,” I said, sitting up. “It’s a scarring memory for her, because I was born somewhere nearby.”

“Parents.” CeeCee shrugged. “So I noticed Wallis is gone,” she said. “I’m going to award you the National Tolerance of Wacky Intruders Prize for putting up with her. How long was she here?”

“Three years,” I said. “CeeCee, I need to—”

“Hang on.” She cut me off. “We have book club tonight, right? Are we meeting at Wallis’s?”

“No. At the pool. The picnic grounds. I need to tell you—”

“You need to brush your teeth,” she said. “You’re not telling me anything until you smell better.”

I stared at her. “I just woke up. You
woke
me up.”

“Yeah, I remember that,” she said. “Hey, nice boxer shorts. But are you going to get dressed? You should try to look presentable when you have company.”

I went off to brush my teeth and to pee. I asked the mirror over the bathroom sink if CeeCee would bother to show up for book club if she’d stolen the pills. The mirror told me I looked like an idiot when I talked to myself. “Thanks,” I said.

Back in my room, CeeCee handed me a pair of jean shorts that looked vaguely familiar.

“Where did those come from?” I asked.

“I found them in your drawer and cut them off with your scissors. They’ll look much better at this length.”

“I’ve hardly worn those yet,” I said. But I assumed she was right; there was probably a reason I hadn’t worn them. I stepped into the closet to get dressed. My knee was looking better again; it was almost back to its normal size. “I wasn’t the only one trying to get hold of you,” I said. “Did you hear Jill was grounded?”