The Chicken Sisters(38)
Mae didn’t get what it was like to be her. She never had, and she never would. Amanda’s kitchen was fine. She was fine. Amanda dropped her tote bag on the floor, and Mae’s talking points slid out. We’re close but we have our own lives! Amanda snatched the paper off the floor and crumpled it up, quickly, then pushed it deep into the trash.
There. She’d cleaned.
She cleared a space on the table, dumping the breakfast dishes in the sink with the plates from last night’s pizza, and turned her back on the kitchen, on the boxes and the curled, ripped tabs from past frozen dinners, on the bottles waiting to be rinsed and recycled, on Pickle’s bowls, still under the counter, on everything that wasn’t right with her world. She sat down with her latest sketchbook, mashing it open angrily on the table. She felt better the minute she had the pencil in her hand, and a chicken chased by a tornado began to take shape on the page, rough and running for a coop that was obviously in the path of the wind.
You don’t grow up in a small town as “the kid who can draw” without ending up with requests, and as a result, one variety of Amanda’s chickens—she thought of them as the friendly biddies—was scattered all over town. She drew these plump chickens with simple, clear lines, drinking coffee, grocery shopping, and knitting, and traded them for local services, happy to see her biddies take up residence on her families’ menus and on various store posters.
The rest lived only in her notebook, and those chickens came in every color, shape, and size, including, even especially, the nasty nellies. The ugly chickens, the scrawny, the wild top-knotted, the molting: their stories all lived in here. To begin with, they’d been just single drawings; then they’d grown into panels, still on a single page. Now, just this year, they’d grown again, into a story that transcended a single page, that required her to go back, again and again, trying to map a journey that she hadn’t planned on, creating and re-creating panels and characters and dialogue until she was almost, but not quite, frustrated enough with herself to quit.
She knew enough to understand that the process of telling a visual story could be easier with a little training. All the college mailings arriving for Gus reminded her that there were places where people learned to do this stuff. It probably was easier for someone with real talent, like Bill Henderson, legendary as Merinac High’s most successful graduate, twenty years before her time. He’d taken his comics of a boy and a penguin and turned them into beloved icons—and then retired and become a total recluse after his success. But he’d gone to art school. She’d checked, damn it. And every time she saw classes in things like illustration and narrative design she had to face it: if she’d finished school she probably wouldn’t be flailing around quite this much.
She shaded in more of the tornado, a little fiercely, then turned back a few pages and let herself be pulled into the world of Carleen, the least popular chicken in her high school, pecked down by plumper hens and scorned by cocky roosters.
Carleen’s story wasn’t hers. Amanda had been quite well liked in high school—mostly because she stayed resolutely in the middle of the road, dressing like everyone else, doing the things everyone else did. Amanda had made those choices thanks to Mae, who had already made all the mistakes. Unlike Mae, Amanda did exactly what was expected of her and not anything more. She was a good girl.
Carleen was not a good girl. She was the dark chicken of her small town, pulling the other chicks in with her schemes and plans when they were young, then finding herself alone as a teenage chicken with a lot to prove and only her mysterious telekinetic powers, powers the others in the flock didn’t share, to do it with. Carleen had been thoroughly rejected and cruelly humiliated by her peers, and would continue to be until she allowed the forces within her to burst free—at prom, of course, in homage to Carrie, one of Amanda’s favorite books—and annihilate the chickens around her in a rampage of oil and flames.
Carleen, Amanda thought, would end her prom night with a fried chicken dinner.
Amanda stayed deep in her notebook for as long as she could, until she looked up at the clock and had to rush wildly to pick up Frankie and Gus for the night’s filming as promised, leaving her work spread out across the table to clean up later. She arrived at Frannie’s with a funny sense of carrying along a mood that wasn’t entirely hers: Carleen, crushed to the point of drastic action and ready to rumble.
She, Amanda, was feeling better. Her greeting from Sabrina reassured her that Mae was entirely off base in her assessment of Food Wars and its plans. If Sabrina had secret designs she would never be so warm and welcoming. Amanda might have spouted off at the mouth a little in her first interview, but she herself had no secrets, and she hadn’t said anything that wasn’t true, anyway. The relief made her bouncy, and Carleen’s determination was giving her confidence. With an unusual, pleasant sense of being fully in control of the situation, she hung up her bag, then joined Nancy and Sabrina at the bar to go over table assignments.
“These tables are the ones where we’ve got the spacing just right for the camera,” Sabrina said. “Can you split that section up, just for tonight, so we can see two of your team in action? And I’ll help Amanda seat it, so we get a variety of customers. No sending in ringers to talk the place up on my watch!” She laughed, but Nancy looked horrified, whether at the idea of splitting the front section or cheating, Amanda didn’t know.