This Is How It Always Is(63)
“I know,” Rosie panted. “But apparently it’s true. He did a presentation about sex, profanities, naked Barbies, and how gay and trans soldiers don’t belong in the military. So he failed history.”
“School has changed a lot since you were a girl,” said Carmelo.
“He failed the project, so he failed history, so he lied about failing history. So we grounded him.”
“You didn’t expect him to own up to something like that, did you?”
“I expected him not to do it in the first place.”
“Oh, well that’s different. Are you mad about the sin or about the lie about the sin?”
“Neither, I’m mad because when we confronted him about the sin and the lie about the sin, he said we were hypocrites because we lie all the time.”
“About Poppy?”
“About Poppy,” Rosie admitted. “He’s so mad about Poppy he’s become a bigot.”
His grandmother wasn’t buying it. “Poor Roo. I wish I were there.” Carmelo still came up every summer, but now it was nearly Thanksgiving, and it had been months since she’d seen her babies.
“He’s not mad we lied.” Rosie paused for breath and corrected the tense. “Lie.” She caught glimpses through dripping pine tree fingers of thinning fog wisping off the water, sound and scant sunlight backed by sea cliff and old-growth forest. It was a beautiful place to live, but maybe not if it only felt like home to everyone else in your family. “He’s mad we made him move to Seattle when he liked Wisconsin. He’s mad we made him live in the city when he liked his farm. We made him leave his football team and his orchestra and his friends and his presidencies.”
“He thinks you chose Poppy over him,” Carmelo said.
“We didn’t.”
“I know, dear.”
“We didn’t.”
“Does he?”
“It’s been more than two years. It’s time to get over it. We moved because it wasn’t safe enough there. Not for any of them. If we’d said, ‘Wisconsin’s too dangerous for Poppy, but you we’ll risk,’ then he’d have reason to feel slighted. We thought here was better for everyone. We thought he was funny and friendly and outgoing so he’d be fine.”
“What happened?”
“We were wrong.”
“Not wrong,” said Carmelo. “Just not right yet.”
“Maybe but—”
“Parents choose one kid over another all the time.”
“That’s not what we—”
“You missed most of seventh grade while your sister was sick.” Her mother talked right over her protestations. “You spent most of year twelve in a hospital room. At a time when I felt bad about everything, that was just one more layer of guilt. I had to let it go. Poppy needed extra care, and she needed her big sister with her. Daddy and I needed you there too, needed to not worry about school and homework and Girl Scouts and parent-teacher conferences. You didn’t need much of anything right then. When your needs arose, afterwards, then they got addressed. It’s a good thing people’s needs don’t all arise at the same time; otherwise we wouldn’t be able to meet them all. When you left Wisconsin, it was Poppy’s turn. Roo’s is coming.”
It was. It was closer than anyone thought.
Preventative Madness
Ben’s secret was this: he was in love with Cayenne. It was a secret for a number of reasons. One was he was embarrassed: it was such a cliché to fall in love with the girl next door. Another was he had been in love with her since the moment he met her at that barbecue in her backyard the weekend before they started eighth grade, and sometimes she loved him back and sometimes she did not. Best he could tell, her feelings toward him were unpredictable as weather and just as out of his control. He couldn’t tell people she was his girlfriend because unless she was standing next to him at the time, he couldn’t be sure whether it was true. Maybe that wasn’t secret keeping; maybe he just didn’t know. He had successfully passed off his relationship with Cayenne thus far as, variously, she was just his next door neighbor, he was just being friendly, she needed help with algebra, he had to go over there anyway to drag Poppy away from Aggie before they became conjoined twins, their parents were having dinner so they really had no choice. So another reason he didn’t tell was he didn’t want to tip his hand. But mostly it was this: Ben was supposed to be the smart one, and loving Cayenne was stupid. He was smart enough to see that; he just wasn’t smart enough to do anything about it.
There was also this: he was used to keeping secrets.
At the barbecue the weekend before ninth grade, the one year anniversary of the day they met, not that he was counting, she ignored him and stayed in her room by herself, even though it was one of those freak Seattle summer weekends where it’s ninety-five degrees and no one has air conditioning and spending a summer afternoon inside is like napping in your microwave. At the tenth-grade barbecue, she held his hand and fed him s’mores and kept pulling her sweater on and off revealing glimpses of her belly button while she let him lick melted marshmallow off her fingers. So you see how smart had really nothing to do with it.
“What do you see in her?” Roo asked that evening over six different kinds of potato salad.