Inevitable and Only(5)

That’s one of the great things about hippie parents and Quaker school. No one cares if you dye your hair crazy colors, or if you show up in red Converse sneakers and a mustard-yellow hoodie dress printed with the words Always be yourself. Unless you can be a unicorn. Then always be a unicorn. I was one of the tamer dressers at Fern Grove, actually. I inspected my outfit in the window. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about the fabric pulling tight over my chest and waist like that, but I didn’t have any choice. Mom was wide-hipped and curvy, too. I pulled the hood up over my head and scowled at my reflection.

“Acadia!”

Mom was waving to me from across the street, where Josh was loading his cello into the back seat of the Honda. There was barely room for all three of us plus the instrument. But I knew we couldn’t afford a bigger car.

Josh folded himself in under the cello in the back, and I climbed into the passenger seat, trying not to think about what this car had so recently rolled over. What I had so recently rolled over.

“How was your lesson?” I asked, twisting around to look at Josh.

“Fine.”

Josh had never been a kid of many words. In fact, up until someone put a cello in his hands, we were slightly worried about him. Once he started preschool, Mom and Dad noticed that he didn’t seem to take much interest in other kids, or in the things other kids liked—Play-Doh, make-believe, kicking a ball around. Or else he’d pick one activity and concentrate super hard on it, long past the time when other kids had gotten bored and drifted away.

But it turned out he was just storing up all those words so they could come out of his fingertips when he drew a bow across the strings of his cello. He started lessons at five, and he was winning competitions in the Prep by his sixth birthday. At seven, he began competing regionally. Now, at ten, he was studying with Olga Menshikov, the best teacher in the Prep, playing repertoire usually assigned to sixteen-year-olds, and it was clear he was on a conservatory track.

Mom’s full-time job was school, and her other full-time job was Josh.

Which was fine by me. I had Dad, and we were a perfect pair.





CHAPTER TWO


When we got home, I sliced vegetables for a stir-fry, then curled up on the couch with my pocket edition of Much Ado About Nothing (a gift from Dad) and started reading from the beginning. The very beginning—page i, not page 1—the part with the introduction and preface and cast of characters. It was slow going.

Dad came home a while later and dumped his satchel on the coffee table. I held up my book; he gave me a thumbs-up.

“Veg is prepped,” I said.

“Hallelujah!” He blew me a kiss, then breezed into the kitchen.

I realized I’d been reading the same paragraph over and over for the last fifteen minutes. I sighed. Maybe I should skip the introduction stuff and just read the play.

ACT I

SCENE I. Before LEONATO’S house.

Enter LEONATO, governor of Messina, HERO his daughter, and BEATRICE his niece, with a MESSENGER.

LEONATO

I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Aragon comes this night to Messina.

MESSENGER

He is very near by this: he was not three leagues off when I left him.

I jumped when Dad’s phone rang inside his satchel. His ringtone was the opening notes to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Dum-dum-dum-dummmmm. Dum-dum-dum-dummmmm.

“Dad!” I yelled without moving. “Your phone!”

Pans rattled in the kitchen. He came in, fished his phone out of the satchel, and looked at the number, then lifted an eyebrow and took it back to the kitchen before answering. I heard the buzz of his voice faintly, but couldn’t make out what he was saying. I was feeling too lazy to follow him and eavesdrop.

Twenty minutes later, my stomach rumbled. I yawned, stuck a bookmark in Much Ado, and wandered into the kitchen to see if dinner was ever going to happen.

The vegetables I’d sliced were sitting on the cutting board untouched. Dad was leaning against the counter, still talking quietly on the phone. He said, “If Elizabeth is ready, then we are.”

He noticed me and waved an arm, shooing me away.

Huh?

I wondered who Dad was talking to. He isn’t really a phone guy. No matter who’s on the other end, he finishes calls after just a few minutes. He’s good at making up excuses, like, “What’s that smell? Oh, dinner’s burning!” Or once, with Awful Aunt Marge, “What’s that smell? Oh, the outhouse is overflowing!” (Awful Aunt Marge, who thinks we’re “a bunch of dirty hippies,” did not call him again for a long time.) He says he misses the days of letter writing and express carrier pigeon, that the communication center of his brain doesn’t work as well in real time.

I, however, living in the twenty-first century, went upstairs to my room, dug into my backpack, and grabbed my own phone to call Raven. I was grumpy and hungry and Dad was being weird and secretive. Plus Raven and I hadn’t gotten a chance to talk after school, with me rushing off to art club, and I still hadn’t told her about my horrendous first driving lesson.

“Hey,” I said, when she answered. “You’re going to think I’m a terrible person and I hope you don’t hate me forever because I think I’m going to hate myself forever already.”

“Uhhh,” she said. “Okay?”

I told her what had happened, all the gory details. “They never found a microchip, it was a stray. Someone from Animal Control called and told us. Is that worse? It never even had a loving home!”