Thirteen Plus One (6 page)

Honestly? It was creating tension between me and Lars, because it made him not want to be around me when I was with her. And with Bryce out of the picture, she was with me A LOT.

That’s what I wanted to vent about to Dinah, only I couldn’t, as Dinah was off being WEIRD with weird Mary.

Grrrrrrr.

So basically, both of my BFFs were being B-Ps-in-the-B (big pains in the bottom), and, as Sandra so eloquently pointed out at Smoothie King, I couldn’t “fix” either one of them.

And
my love life was tanking,
and
today was fish sticks day,
and
I hadn’t finished my French homework, and I just knew Ms. Beauchard was going to call me on it.

And my love life was tanking. Did I mention that? I hadn’t spent real time—yes-we-really-do-like-each-other time—with Lars in ages, it seemed. And as easy as it was to blame it on Cinnamon, I secretly knew I was looking for excuses. I also secretly knew—so secretly that I tried not to let my mind go there—that my foul mood might
possibly
have had more to do with Lars than with Dinah or Cinnamon.

Stomping around in a sulk wasn’t going to solve anything, however, and I had an icky suspicion that if I wanted things to get better with Lars, I was going to have to take a good, hard look at myself. Unfortunately.

 

On Thursday night, I decided it was time to take action regarding the sorry state of my love life. It might be scary, but so what?
Do something scary,
that was one of the things on my list, right?

To give myself a jump start, I marched downstairs and asked Dad what he thought about wimpy girls who sat in their rooms all weekend and just, like, read books.

“Good books or bad books?” he said, twisting to see me from his lazy-bum sprawl on the couch.

I perched on the back of the couch. Mom hated when I did this; she thought it smushed the pillows into deformed lumps that could never be replumped. But Dad didn’t care.

“Good books,” I said. “But still. Is that any life for a fourteen-year-old girl?”

“If the girl’s as gorgeous as you are? Definitely.”

I rolled my eyes. “Then let’s say bad books. Bad books
with bad grammar
. You don’t want me reading books like that all weekend, do you?”

Dad lifted the remote and muted
Phineas and Ferb
, which he claimed only to watch for Ty’s sake. He claimed it was for daddy-son bonding time. But this wasn’t the first time I’d caught him watching it on his own.

He put the remote on his chest. “Hmmm. So you’re saying you could lock yourself in your room and read grammatically incorrect books”—he squinted one eye—“or you could go out into the big bad world like Little Red Riding Hood, who got eaten by a wolf?”

“She did not!”

“I like the locking-yourself-in-your-room option. Till you’re twenty-one.” He reached up and shook my knee. “I’m proud of you, Winnie. I think you’re making an excellent choice.”

“Ha ha.”

He pointed the remote at the TV. “Want to watch
Phineas and Ferb
with me?”

“No. And
Dad.
” I slid down the back of the sofa, squishing the cushion to get to him. I pushed the remote back down so that he had to look at me. “Do you really want me being a dried-up spinster who has zero fun and lives a life of misery?”

He made his funny-Dad hopeful expression, much like the one he used when Mom said, “Joel, you’re not planning on eating that
entire
can of Pringles, are you?”

“Da-a-ad,”
I said.

“Princess, what I want is for you to be happy,” he said. He hardly ever called me “princess,” thank goodness, as it was horribly embarrassing. But secretly, I liked it when he did.

“Okay, good,” I told him. “But you should know: It’s going to mean leaving my room.”

His sigh was loud and long.

“But c‘mon. You don’t
really
want a wimpy daughter.”

“I
do
, however, want a safe daughter,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He put his arm around me, and I soaked in the comfort of his hug for a few seconds. Then I pushed myself up and kissed his forehead. “Thanks for the chat, Dad. You’re the best.”

Upstairs, before I lost my I-am-confident-and-strong feeling, I called Lars.

Ring, ring,
went my phone.
Ring ring ring.

“Hey, Win,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Not much. What’s up with you?”

“Ah, you know. Thinking about homework. Not doing homework. Considering chucking homework out of window.”

“Blech,” I said, giggling. “Hate homework.” I tried to stay easygoing. “So are we going to do something this weekend? I feel like we haven’t done anything in forever.”

“Um, sure,” Lars said.

Okay, good start
, I thought. “So, what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. What do
you
want to do?”

I felt my easygoing-ness start to slip away. I’d been proactive, and now it was his turn. Only he didn’t say anything. Just sat there like a lump, waiting for me to do all the work.

I sighed. “Well, tomorrow night I’m hanging with the girls, so we can’t do anything then.”

“More movies about how guys suck?” he said. He’d heard all about
Black Widow
from Cinnamon. First he thought it was funny. Later, not so much.

“Possibly,” I said, then immediately regretted it. I sat on my bed and drew my knees to my chest. I did not want this conversation to go bad.

“How about Saturday?” I suggested.

“Sorry, told Bryce I’d watch the Hawks game with him. They’ve got a shot at first in the division. Hey—wanna join?”

Um ... sure, only Cinnamon would kill me.
“Nah. But thanks.”

From downstairs, Mom called up a request. “Winnie? Would you
margle-gargle
Ty?”

I pressed my phone to my chest. “
What
? I can’t hear you!”

“Mlarfle mflarfle
bath!” she called. “Please?”

I groaned. “Mom needs me to go make Ty take his bath.”

“Okay,” Lars said. “I should go anyway. I should finish my lab report.”

Depression kicked in, intensified by how little he seemed to care. “But ... are we ... ?”

“I
want
to,” Lars said. He exhaled, and I realized he was frustrated, too. Which made me feel slightly better, but at the same time more stuck in the mire. How pathetic was it that neither one of us could solve such a seemingly simple problem of wanting to spend time together? “You come up with something, and we’ll do it. All right?”

Why me? I thought. Why do I have to come up with something?

“Winnie!” Mom called. “Are you
flarfle glargle
?!
”

“I hear your mom,” Lars said. “I’ll let you go.”

But I don’t want to be “let go,”
I thought. What I said, flatly, was “Okay, bye.” I tapped the END CALL bubble and watched his profile picture be sucked—
whoosh
—back into the phone.

Ty had a phobia about taking a bath alone. Why? Because of the Bathroom Lady. And who was the Bathroom Lady? No one. The Bathroom Lady didn’t exist.

So why was Ty afraid of her? Because I was good at inventing stories, and long long
long
ago I’d told Ty that a witch named the Bathroom Lady lived in the sewer system and slurped up tasty children through the pipes. I made the story good, too, giving the Bathroom Lady rubbery lips and grasping claws as blue and cold as ice.

Whoops.

I rapped on the door of the bathroom, then twisted the knob and barged in. Ty was squatting fully dressed by the tub. Not
in
the tub, but
by
the tub, just staring at the drain. He whipped his head around at the sound of my arrival.

“Ty,” I scolded. “You’re seven years old. You’re too old to be afraid of taking a bath.”

Ty’s eyes widened, and he propped his elbows on the edge of the tub and tried to form a wall with his scrawny upper body. “I’m sorry, Ty is unavailable,” he said. “
Beep
. Please leave a message.”

What was he hiding? I attempted to peek past him. He moved his body in tandem with mine.

“Ty, what’s going on?”

“Nothing!
Beep!
Leave a message!”

I spotted his backpack on the bathroom floor. His open,
empty
backpack. He scrambled to his feet and drove his hands into my hip bones, attempting to push me backward.

“Not gonna work, bud,” I said, lifting him from under his armpits and moving him out of the way. “Whatever you’ve got in there, I’m sure it’s not—”

My throat closed,
because there was a penguin in the bathtub
. A
penguin
, and it was
alive,
and its chest puffed in and out as it breathed. It pitter-pattered from side to side when it saw me, and its penguin feet made slippery sounds on the porcelain.

“Heheheh,”
Ty said. It was his robot laugh, which he pushed from his lungs in an anxious monotone.

“Ty?” I finally managed. “There is a
penguin
in our bathtub! ”

He made his “adorable me” smile, but like his
heheheh,
it was stretched too tight.

A vague memory floated into my mind. Ty went on a field trip today—the details were coming back to me. To the Georgia Aquarium. And apparently he’d acquired a penguin while he was there, a penguin which was now in our bathtub.

“His name is Pingy,” Ty whispered. “He’s a baby.”

Omigod.
I knelt by the tub and gulped. I gingerly touched the penguin’s feathers. I thought a penguin’s skin would be more slippery, like a seal’s, but maybe that happened when they got older?

“Holy pickles,” I muttered.

Ty dropped to his knees and scooched in beside me. “Isn’t he cute?”

“What did you
do,
Ty? Did you steal him and stuff him in your backpack?”

“No
^!
”

“Then what? Buy him at the gift shop? I’m pretty sure—make that
entirely
sure—that baby penguins aren’t for sale at the aquarium gift shop.”

“Heheheh,”
Ty said. “Did I tell you his name is Pingy?”

I looked at Ty, then back at the penguin, whose eyes were dark and as bright as buttons. It—
he?
—did his funny side step pitter-patter and flapped his wings.

Mom clearly didn’t know about Pingy, or there would have been yelling going on. Lots. And rightfully so, because Pingy was probably hungry and scared, and anyway, Ty couldn’t go around stealing penguins from the Georgia Aquarium. It just wasn’t done!

“Holy pickle crap, Ty,” I said. I went into lecture mode, informing him he wasn’t allowed to steal penguins from the Georgia Aquarium. That he wasn’t allowed to steal, period.

He told me he knew, he knew, he knew. He told me other stuff, too, like how he’d seen Pingy at the aquarium and worried he was lonely, and, oh, that Pingy loved peanut butter, and wasn’t that funny? But the stealing part
wasn’t
funny, and now he felt really scared.

He shifted from foot to foot and said, “What are we going to do?”

“We?”
I said incredulously.

His face fell, and I felt terrible. Because who was going to help him if I didn’t?

I sighed. “Oh, Ty,” I said. “We’ll figure something out. I promise.”

I thought hard. At last I told Ty to get Pingy out of the tub, and to get
himself
into the tub, because if Mom didn’t hear bath-taking sounds soon, the game would be up. Then I went and found Sandra in her room.

“I’m busy,” she said. “Go away.”

“I need you to come with me to the bathroom,” I said. “Oh, and bring your secret stash of peanut butter.”

“I don’t have a secret stash of peanut butter,” she lied. She glanced at me from under a swoop of blond hair, which she was braiding as she watched an episode of
Chuck
on her laptop. “And Winnie, you are
way
too old to need company while you do your private lady business.”

“For real, Sandra. Your presence—and your peanut butter—are needed in the bathroom, pronto. Get in there and I’ll tell you my plan.”

 

“Hey, Mom, Sandra’s taking me to Barnes and Noble,” I said ten minutes later as Sandra and I made a beeline through the kitchen. “‘Kay? ’Kay.”

“Is Ty in the tub?” Mom said. She had Maggie strapped to her chest, and she was swaying and stirring spaghetti sauce. She didn’t notice that I was holding Ty’s backpack in front of me like a sack of groceries, or that every so often, it wiggled.

“Yep. Shampoo in his hair and everything.”

“Really?”

“What can I say?” I tossed off. “I’m just that good.”
And
I had excellent blackmail material. It wasn’t often a girl could hold penguin-napping over her little brother’s dirty head.

Sandra opened the back door. “Bye!” she called. “We’ll be back in an hour!”

But at the Georgia Aquarium, things got complicated. The heavy doors of the main entrance were locked, and there was a freaky red light blinking from a nearby keypad. It was a keypad like the keypad on Cinnamon’s home alarm system, only more heavy-duty looking.

“Do you think they have spy cameras?” I whispered, holding Ty’s backpack in front of me. “Do you think we’re getting our pictures taken?”

“Oh, great, that’s
just
what I need,” Sandra whispered back, jerking me into the shadows.
“‘Westminster Senior Expelled for Busting into Aquarium. Hopes for Future Thoroughly Dashed.”’

“Well, we’ve got to get in somehow,” I said. “We can’t leave Pingy out here—he’d waddle into the street and get hit by a car.”

“This is
insane,”
Sandra said.

I cradled Ty’s backpack with one arm. With my other hand, I unzipped the top and felt inside for Pingy. “Don’t worry, little fella,” I said, patting him. “I’m not going to let you get run over.”