The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (21 page)

“Do you have any thoughts?” my mother asked.

“About what?” I said.

“About what I just said.” My mother leaned against the counter. “Adrienne, I know I’ve asked you this already, but I’m asking again: You don’t know where these pills are? The ones that went missing from the D’Amatos’ house?”

I said I did not.

“And you aren’t taking drugs of any kind? You aren’t taking pills?”

“I am not ingesting pills or other substances,” I said. “I completed the drug awareness program in seventh grade.”

This was probably one of the times when my mother found herself wishing for a second parent:
She already lied to me about the drinking. You handle her this time, Frank
. I imagined a big-bellied, gruff, unshaven man, his arm looped like a hairy rope around my mother’s shoulders. “Are you all right?” my mother asked.

I stared into the filthy basin of water. “Why do you hate going to the beach?”

“The beach?” My mother wiped her hands on a towel.

“It’s not because you get sunburned, is it?”

“What’s with the beach all of a sudden?” my mother asked.

“I’m just asking a question,” I said. A greasy tsunami of tepid water splattered my shirt.

“Adrienne, are you crying?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But why?” she asked.

“I asked you a question first,” I said. “And you have to answer.” I plunged a second pot into the sink. “I can ask you any question I want, because those are our rules.”

“Okay.” My mother stood close beside me. “I do get sunburned at the beach,” she said. “And I do get a rash. But I also don’t like going to the beach because I have … difficult memories of being there.”

This was the word she had used in her email to my Aunt Beatrice:
difficult
. I was difficult—a difficult person. “You made mistakes there,” I said.

“Mistakes?”

A tear rolled down my cheek and dropped into the sink. “You did stupid things.”

My mother took a step back. “I suppose I did some stupid things when I was younger,” she said. “But I still don’t understand why you’re crying.”

Because you called me a mistake
, I thought.
Because you think I’m a criminal. Because I am wrong about everything and you wish I was like Wallis, with her Rule of Three Thousand. Because I want to be a person the Quaker Oats man would know how to describe
.

“It’s too hard to summarize,” I said. I tried to wipe my nose on my sleeve.

My mother said she was sorry I was upset, and we could talk about a trip to Atlanta later.

“Forget it. You can tell Aunt Beatrice I’ll go,” I said. I
told myself it would be better if I left. If remnants of the blog were still floating around, I would be out of reach when all the homeless people and pedophiles lined up at the door to ask if they were my dad.

My mother took out the trash. When she came back I was in my room. She knocked on the door. “You’re okay?” she asked.

I said I was.

“Call if you need me tomorrow.” She paused in the hall, then turned out the light. “You’ll be good while I’m gone?”

16. STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS:
Stream
is a metaphor, I guess. Because nobody’s mind is really a stream. It just feels that way sometimes when you’re sitting around doing nothing and all kinds of weird thoughts are floating through your head on their way to wherever. And some writers write this way, to show you what it’s like when the stream of consciousness is flowing along in one of their characters’ heads
.

W
hat did I want from the final meeting of the Excruciating Reader’s Group for Abominable Girls? I wanted an ending. I wanted Wallis to talk to us and tell us the truth. I wanted Jill to admit she knew that CeeCee hadn’t taken the pills. I wanted CeeCee to promise to stop hanging around with Jeff, and I wanted her to read
The Awakening
all the way through.

I thought of the speech I was going to give when they showed up. It was going to be something inspirational, something about trust and pulling through hardship as a
group. I imagined my voice almost echoing as I spoke. I would talk about letting this last book unite us, one book to finally … I realized I was thinking about
The Fellowship of the Ring
.

I read a few more chapters of
The Awakening
before I noticed it was getting dark. It was only three-forty-five, but the sky, when I went out to the porch, was thick and gray, and it was closing down over West New Hope like the lid of a pot. I heard a tapping on the roof of the house—the sound of a giant drumming his fingers—then a pause while the wind turned a corner and the temperature, which had hovered in the nineties for almost a month, dropped by twenty degrees.

Lightning.

The thunder that followed seemed to grab hold of the sky above the house and shake it out like a rug; from inside the porch, I watched silver streams of water falling to the ground, water clotting against the screens, water rinsing the heat from the air and sliding serpentlike over the grass on its way to the street, which sent tendrils of steam up to meet it, water churning, turning the outside world into a blur, a wet green painting.

I stood and watched, getting wet through the screens. The porch felt like a ship. Thunder trembled the floor under my feet; the sky darkened and swelled. The trees, rattling their greenery and tossing their heads, were bent low to the ground.

My mother sent me a text:
Is our house still standing?

Parts of it are
, I said.

The rain fell for hours. When it finally stopped, almost
as quickly as it started, I opened the windows and doors to let the new air in. Then I went outside to look at the branches and the shingles from our neighbor’s roof, littered over our lawn. I collected a stack of the shingles, along with a drainpipe and a deflated soccer ball. A few minutes later I saw Jill on her bike, riding into the driveway with a bottle of ketchup under her arm.

“You travel with condiments?” I asked.

She got off the bike and leaned it against the railing by the front steps. “Only when I’m thinking about hot dogs,” she said. “Last time I was here I think I spotted a pack in your freezer. Is your power out?” She kicked at a branch that had fallen across the sidewalk.

“I don’t know.” I flipped the light switch by the front door: nothing.

“Yup. Powerless,” Jill said. “All of West New Hope’s going dark. There are a lot of trees down.” We went inside.

“This is the first time all summer that I haven’t been sweaty,” Jill said. “I smell really good. Do you want to smell me?”

“No,” I said. “Thanks.”

We went into the kitchen, where Jill immediately started rummaging through the freezer. “Are these kosher?” She held up a package of frozen hot dogs.

“Don’t leave the freezer open; you’ll melt the ice cream,” I said. “Anyway, what do you care about kosher? You aren’t Jewish.”

“Kosher dogs taste better,” Jill said. She put a pot on the stove, then reached for the knob and realized the stove
was electric. “Dang. A serious setback.” She bit her lip, then stared at the frosted package in her hand. “Where are your candles? Maybe I can cook these over a flame.”

“Do you think Wallis and CeeCee will show up tonight?” I asked.

“I don’t know. You’re the one who invited them.” Jill found our junk drawer and started raking through our collection of chopsticks, tea strainers, pickle pickers, tape dispensers, batteries, pencil stubs, coasters, and glue. “Which means that, even though you keep denying it, you’re still president of the book club. Chief organizer. Ooh. A flashlight. You’re going to need that.”

“Wallis should have told us she was leaving town,” I said. I opened the cabinet above the junk drawer and handed Jill a green pine-scented candle from the previous Christmas. “Do you know where they’re moving?”

“Connecticut. Her mom got a job there.” Jill plopped the candle onto a plate. “Are you going to miss her?”

“Do you mean Wallis? Am I going to miss Wallis?”

“That was my question.” Jill found a pack of matches and lit the candle.

I wasn’t sure how to answer. Maybe that’s why I had wanted to meet. Would I miss Wallis’s bear-cub voice and her rashy legs and the sight of her wearing my castoff clothes?

Jill opened the hot dogs and forked them apart under running water while giving me a tally of what she had sold that week at the pool. She managed to spear one of the franks with a knife. “Somebody’s knocking at your door,”
she said. She looked out the window over the sink. “Actually, at both doors. We’re in here!” she yelled. CeeCee and Wallis had showed up at the front and back of the house, and arrived in the kitchen at the same time.

My
Fellowship of the Ring
speech, as if attached to a fistful of helium balloons, floated gently away.

“Are you cooking a hot dog over a candle?” CeeCee asked. Jill was holding a kosher frank over the pine-scented flame.

“Why not?” Jill asked. “The package says they’re precooked. Hey, Wallis.”

“Hi,” Wallis said.

We stood around in the kitchen talking about nothing, our conversation a wandering river of aimless ideas. Jill said her parents had driven to Maryland for their anniversary. “Every year they eat at the restaurant where they had their first date, and after they eat they drive to a park where they used to make out.”

CeeCee said that people over twenty-five should never make out, and then Jill told a story about a girl who’d had the hiccups for eleven years, and Wallis made some observations about meteors, which were often called shooting stars, she said, even though they weren’t stars, and CeeCee wanted to know if any of us worried about getting brain cancer from our cell phones, because she had heard on the radio that they emitted the same whatever-y things as microwaves, which meant they were literally frying our brains, but Wallis said the research wasn’t reliable and she hoped we understood that meteors streaked across the sky
by the millions each day, in fact it would probably be easy to see them on a night like this, with the power out, particularly if we were up on a hill or a roof.

Jill had sliced up two hot dogs but they were still partly frozen, and the little pink pork cylinders, because of the candle she had used to roast them, tasted somewhat like pine. “We can get to your roof from your attic,” she said. “Right?”

I said that my mother didn’t want us up there.

CeeCee had found a package of marshmallows in the cabinet. She pointed to my copy of
The Awakening
on the kitchen table. “Should we bring this with us?”

We blew out the candle and left the hot dogs on the counter. I grabbed the flashlight and a beach towel that we could sit on. Then I led the way up the attic stairs and stepped through the window above my mother’s bedroom and climbed onto the roof.

“This town looks better in the dark,” Jill said. “It’s almost pretty.”

“I’ve heard people say that about you,” CeeCee said.

Standing side by side, we could see exactly where the blackout had hit, because the lights south of West New Hope were just being turned on. Though our whole town was dark, we could pick out the landmarks: the rectangular roofs of the other houses, the meandering shape of the creek, the elementary school, the Towne Centre, and the beginning of the road that led to the park, and beyond it, to Wallis’s. I felt as if I were looking at an architect’s model:
I almost expected to see a tiny version of myself, living within the grid we were looking down on.

CeeCee tore the bag of marshmallows open. “I don’t see any meteors, Wallis.”

Wallis said we had to wait until it got darker.

I spread out the towel so we could sit down.

“Hey, Adrienne: this is a good place for your epiphany,” Jill said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. But I couldn’t remember what my epiphany was. It had probably trickled out the bottom of my brain like a hair down a sink. Still, I thought I remembered that it had involved wanting the book club and the books we had read to have some kind of meaning. “School starts three weeks from now,” I said.

“That’s a lousy epiphany.” CeeCee clicked the flashlight on and then off. “Do people still use Morse code?” she asked. “Did we learn it in Girl Scouts?”

Jill reminded her that she’d been thrown out of Brownies and never made it to Girl Scouts.

“I guess I remember that,” she said. “What did they throw me out for?”

“Swearing at Angela Carriman’s mother.” Jill grabbed the marshmallows. “We were in first grade.”

Two houses away, someone dragged a plastic trash bin to the curb. Otherwise it was quiet. The stars began glittering overhead.

“We’re going to be juniors this year,” Jill said. “I used to think I’d feel old when I was a junior.” She tossed a marshmallow into her mouth. “But I feel the same.”

I felt the same, too. Maybe I would never feel older or more mature. When I tried to picture myself at forty or fifty or even eighty, all I could imagine was a gray-haired, confused-looking person sitting on a roof with her mouth full of food.

“I should go home now,” Wallis said.