The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (19 page)

“For what?” CeeCee asked. “Memorizing too many vocabulary words?”

I put on a pair of flip-flops and a shirt and stepped out of the closet. “Somebody stole her dad’s medication.”

With her back to me, CeeCee was unscrewing a lip-gloss container she had found on my dresser.

“It was a bunch of pills,” I said. “Did you know they were missing?”

She stuck her pinky into the lip gloss. “Why are you asking me that?”

I looked in the mirror. “These do look good as shorts,” I said.

Without turning around, CeeCee asked, “Is Jill saying I stole her father’s pills?”

“Yeah, kind of,” I said. “She’s been consulting an 8 Ball and a Ouija board.”

CeeCee opened the top drawer of my dresser and riffled through it. “I guess it would make things easier for her if I stole them,” she said. “It’s always nice to have a bad person to point to. Someone who’s guilty. What’s the word for that? Like a kind of enemy.”

“Scapegoat?” I asked.

She opened a little wooden box and examined my shark tooth collection and my stack of silver dollars. “You think I stole them, too,” she said.

I paused for a second before I answered. “You didn’t pick up when Jill tried to ask you about it,” I said. “And we saw you going through the medicine cabinets. I wondered if Jeff …” My thoughts were tangled. “Why is he on your blog? And you have to take those captions down; I’ve got some kind of pedophile asking if he can be my dad.”

“You said ‘we.’ ” CeeCee closed the lid of the wooden box. “
We
saw you. Do you know what’s interesting?”

“What?”

She turned around. “I saved your butt that night you got drunk,” she said. “I cleaned your vomit out of Jeff’s car.”

“You did? Sorry, I wasn’t—”

“And you never said anything about it. You got wasted and passed out and had to be rescued but you’re still the good girl,” she said. “I’m the one who’s a thief.”

“I told Jill you didn’t steal the pills,” I said. “Go ahead and ask her. But the evidence makes you look guilty.” We stared at each other. “And Jill’s mother probably thinks you did it. So you might not want to come to book club.”

“Thanks for the tip,” CeeCee said. “But my attendance record is perfect. I’d hate to miss a meeting.” She noticed my copy of
The House on Mango Street
on my desk. “That’s the new one?” she asked.

I said it was.

She picked up the book and read the back cover.

“Listen,” I said. “I’ll talk to Jill before the meeting. I’ll tell her—”

“Don’t worry about it,” CeeCee said. “What are … 
vine
—hang on
—vignettes
?”

I looked over her shoulder at the book. “Little pieces,” I said. “It’s French.”

“And what’s
so-delate
?” She put her finger under the word.

“Desolate,”
I said. “You read it wrong.”

She held out the book. “Are you going to read it to me?”

I looked at the thick blue type on the back cover. “You’re dyslexic,” I said.

“Yeah, whatever. Reading gives me a headache.”

“That’s why you always want me to read to you. Maybe you should get glasses.”

“I don’t want glasses.”

“But how will you—”

“You don’t have to read if you don’t want to,” CeeCee said. “It’s not a big deal.”

I opened the book. She sat on the bed, near the window, looking out through the screen. I read to her about Esperanza and the things that she wanted; then I read about a character named Marin, who dances to a radio under a streetlight,
waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life
.

“Pitiful,” CeeCee said. But I knew she was waiting for me to keep going.

I read a little bit more and then skipped a few chapters. I read about Esperanza getting a job and about her grandfather dying. Later, at an amusement park with a friend, Esperanza meets a guy who presses himself against her. She describes
his dirty fingernails against my skin
. I felt a tingling at the back of my neck.

“You should take the comments section out of the blog,” I said.

“Don’t worry about Jeff,” CeeCee said. “Have you kissed him yet?”

“No. But I don’t think other people should read about us,” I said. “At least you should take down our pictures. I hate the one you took of me. And Wallis didn’t want her picture taken.” I remembered the scar on Wallis’s forehead. She had changed her last name.
His dirty fingernails against my skin
.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

CeeCee was brushing her hair. “What?”

Jill had told me that
someone in the book was being abused
.
My mother thought I was
impressionable
, but what if Wallis—

“You have to take down the blog,” I said. “It isn’t safe.”

“Nobody cares about blogs,” CeeCee said.

“I’ll read you all five of the books. And I’ll help you come up with a different project.”

She put her hairbrush back in her purse. “I’ll get rid of the comments section,” she said.

“Can you make the blog private?” I asked. “So only the four of us can see it?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” she said. “Read me some more of the book, and I’ll work on the blog this afternoon.”

I was anxious and jittery that night when my mother and I left for book club. “Why are you tapping your fingers like that?” my mother asked. “Are you worried about something?”

“Me?” I asked, as if—though we were alone in the car—my mother might be talking to somebody else. I had checked the blog and was relieved to see that the comments section was gone; still, I had a few lingering concerns about the evening ahead of us. For example, would Jill’s mother have CeeCee hauled away in handcuffs? Would Wallis’s mother suddenly show up and take one look at me and say, “That’s the inebriated girl I almost accidentally killed”?

When we got to the picnic grounds, Wallis was spreading a plastic cloth on one of the tables. My mother had brought paper plates and cups; Wallis had brought a bottle of soda, a pair of salt and pepper shakers, and two cookie tins.

Sitting down at one end of the splintery bench, I noticed the row of metal rings on the tablecloth. “Is this an old shower curtain?” I asked.

My mother raised her eyebrows in my direction. I could smell the chlorine and hear shrieks and splashing from the pool.

“I made hard-boiled eggs,” Wallis announced in her growly voice. “And I brought carrot sticks and I filled pieces of celery with peanut butter. And added raisins.” She took the lid off a cookie tin. “Here are the eggs.”

I noticed the stale crumbs of ginger snaps or graham crackers around the lid of the tin.

Jill and her mother parked near the swings and walked slowly toward us. When they reached the table, Jill’s mother fussed over Wallis’s culinary skills.

I had texted Jill an hour earlier to give her a heads-up that CeeCee was coming.
Brace yourself
, she texted back. Now she avoided looking in my direction. She was eating an orange Popsicle; a bee circled her wrist.

In various cities and towns across the country, I thought, people were gathering on porches and around tables and on comfortable sofas to exchange ideas about books. They would probably discuss the lives of the characters, who were always more interesting than real-life people, and point to the parts of the stories they liked best. I had a feeling our discussion would be somewhat different.

CeeCee and her mother got out of their car, both of them wearing dark glasses; they crossed the parking lot together on two sets of matching, elegant legs and sat
next to each other at the end of the bench. Jill’s orange Popsicle crumbled into several pieces and was lost in the grass.

Not realizing what she was up against, my mother tried to kick-start a discussion. She got CeeCee’s mother to agree that
The House on Mango Street
was short. And that it was hard to tell who some of the characters were at first, because there were so many of them.

I scraped some orange soap scum from the tablecloth and looked at Jill.

Silence.

My mother observed that this was the first contemporary, realistic title that our group had read, the first book to deal with the concrete dangers, for people our age, of sex and drugs. She wondered what CeeCee and Jill and Wallis and I thought of it.

“Egg?” CeeCee asked. She passed me the tin, the boiled eggs sliding around inside it. Some of them had pieces of grass stuck to them.

“Thanks.” I took an egg.

Jill’s mother cleared her throat and said she thought the portrayal of the social problems in the book was very important, because drugs and violence and dishonesty happened everywhere, even among people we knew. She glanced at CeeCee. “Even here in West New Hope,” she said.

The egg tasted odd. Biting into its rubbery surface, I detected a subtle whiff of chlorine, as if Wallis had peeled and rinsed it in the pool.

CeeCee’s mother said she hadn’t finished the book yet
but that kids like Esperanza grew up too fast, and kids in the inner cities in particular—

“Celerypeanutbutterandraisin?” CeeCee asked.

I took a piece of celery but disposed of the raisins, which are basically spoiled fruit. The carrots, rolling around in the same tin, were knobby and misshapen and hadn’t been peeled.

Jill’s mother said she’d be interested to know what CeeCee’s mother meant by “kids like Esperanza.” Was she referring to people who weren’t wealthy? People who weren’t white?

CeeCee’s mother took her sunglasses off. “That’s a very odd question.”

Blushing, Jill’s mother said she was only asking because in her experience, and maybe others would not agree with her, regular middle-class and city kids weren’t any worse or any different than kids in the suburbs who had grown up in supposedly “good” families, families that could easily afford—

“Oops.” CeeCee squeezed one of the hard-boiled eggs, and it shot out of her fist and across the table, hitting me in the chest.

“Egg war,” I said.

CeeCee’s mother looked fixedly at Jill’s across the table. “It sounds like you’re making a point,” she said. “Or an accusation.”

“I might be.” Jill’s mother turned abruptly to CeeCee. “Did you take something that belongs to us?” she asked.

CeeCee selected a carrot from the cookie tin. “What did you have in mind?”

“Excuse me.” CeeCee’s mother put her hand between them. “Are you suggesting my daughter stole something?”

“Mom,” Jill said. “We can—”

“Jilly, I’m just asking a question. I’d like to know,” her mother said.

“And I asked
you
a question.” CeeCee’s mother leaned across the shower curtain. “You have an awful lot of nerve.”

My mother tried to intercede. “This is silly,” she said. “We should talk this out, and not make accusations.”

CeeCee’s mother stood up. “I don’t think it’s
silly
. And if anyone’s accusing people of stealing, I’d like to point out that Adrienne is wearing my diamond earring, which has been missing for almost a month.”

“Adrienne is
what
?” My mother turned to stare at me. “Is that a real diamond?”

“I didn’t know it was real,” I said. “It’s pretty big.”

“You didn’t know it was real but you stole it?” my mother asked.

I looked down at the damp spot on my shirt where the egg had hit me. “That’s right,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I broke into CeeCee’s house one night. I put on my black ski mask and my burglar shoes, and I climbed the stairs and opened the door to her parents’ bedroom and found her mother’s jewelry box. And when I looked through her jewelry I decided to steal this single earring.” I saw Jill shake her head. “I’m not sure why I did it,” I went on. “It must have been the influence of this book club. Now that you’ve caught me, I’ll give it back.” I grabbed the
diamond in front, pinched the fastener at the back of my ear (some of my skin had grown over it), and wrenched out the stud. “Here.” I put the fastener and the diamond on a paper plate in front of CeeCee’s mother. There was a piece of skin stuck to it. “Thanks for the loan.”

Without even thinking about where I was headed, I found my flip-flops slapping against my feet. They carried me across the dusty grass of the picnic grounds and through the pool gate (the ticket taker was gone) and across the squelchy red rubber mat that led to the cave of the locker room.

Jill was behind me. “That was unusual,” she said. “For what it’s worth, I asked my mother not to make a scene.”

“I guess she decided not to listen to you,” I said.

“I guess not. Your ear is bleeding.” Jill knocked on a door to one of the toilets. “Anyone home?” All the stall doors were crooked: they hung like slips of misaligned paper on a bulletin board. Jill unfurled some toilet paper and told me to press it against my ear.

“The good news,” I said, “is that we only have one more meeting.”

Someone flushed a toilet. An older woman in a flowered bathing suit emerged from a stall and washed her hands at the sink. She glared at us—
Teenagers!
—and then lumbered off to the towel dispenser.

“CeeCee didn’t take the pills,” I said.

Jill took a deep breath through her nose, then let it out. “Nothing that’s happened in this book club makes any
sense,” she said. “I miss being in school. I wish we could have torn some pages out of the calendar and gone straight from June to September. Oh, God, here she comes.”

“Hello, literary friends.” CeeCee sauntered around the corner near the shower room. She stopped by the sinks. Though the mirrors above them were bolted to the wall, CeeCee pretended to open one. “Let’s see,” she said. “Oh, a tweezer for my collection. I obviously want that. And a used toothbrush and a dirty sponge,
check
. And a thermometer—I hope it’s not rectal. And here’s my favorite nail polish.” She pretended to unscrew a lid and paint her nails. A little girl in a two-piece bathing suit paused by the toilets, mesmerized.

“I didn’t tell my mother you stole them,” Jill said. “I let her come to her own conclusions.”

CeeCee was still painting her nails with the invisible brush.