Unspeakable Things(36)
“Does yours have a creepy dirt basement, too?”
I nodded vigorously. “It’s dirt, all right. Mom keeps most of her canning down there, and Dad stores stuff in it, I think. My dad doesn’t let us go down there.”
Frank shuddered. “Dirt basements are haunted. Always.”
CHAPTER 20
Here’s the thing. If you’d told me when I woke up that I’d have a best friend by the end of the day, and that he’d be a boy? I’d call you crazy cakes. But Frank and me found ourselves practically finishing each other’s sentences after that first hour together. We had mountains in common, once we got through the fact that he’d been mean to me at school because he didn’t know anyone and thought I was snotty. First, we both liked to watch The A-Team, and when I told him I had a copy of the latest Nellie Bly’s Trust It or Don’t, he made me promise to bring it over next time. I didn’t tell him that I only allowed myself to read one entry a night, because I knew it was weird. I told him all about Aunt Jin and how great she was, that she was an artist who said I could come live with her if I ever wanted to.
Frank had been duly impressed. When the girls started fussing, we uncovered the TV, plugged it in, and twisted the antennae until a grainy single channel came in. It featured a riveting (not really) show on the Alaus oculatus, commonly known as the eastern eyed click beetle. It made the same back-of-the-throat noise as Goblin had made when I literally ran into him at the liquor store, which I told Frank all about. Frank loved the world of bugs, it turned out.
The beetle show was interrupted by a commercial featuring a hardworking lady who couldn’t catch a break until she finished her workday, fed her family, and tucked in her kids. Then she got her big treat: alone time. Our view was whisked to a bottle of bubble bath poised on the edge of the tub. The bottle was blue, the label white. It read MY TIME.
A deep male voice rumbled the only words in the entire commercial: “Take charge. Make this your time.”
Frank punched my arm. “Hear that? You should make this your time.”
I bopped his arm back. “Shut up, young pup.”
He giggled and hooked my neck, pulling me down into a wrestling move. I laughed, pushing him away and then thinking better of it and twisting his arm behind his back, just enough to hold him in place. Or so I thought. He squirmed out and yanked me onto the floor, where we began wrestling for real. We were about evenly matched, but my long hair messed me up. We kept at it for nearly ten minutes, laughing and hurling insults—Bag your face! Eat my shorts!—neither of us able to keep the upper hand for long.
Finally, exhausted, we declared a truce. That’s when we noticed the girls had fallen asleep on a bare mattress in the corner.
“Hey, you wanna see something?” Frank asked, still trying to catch his breath.
“Sure. Hold on.” I stood, opened the bag marked “blankets,” and pulled out a musty orange afghan to cover Julia and Marie. “Where?”
“My parents’ bedroom.”
“Okay.” I wiped the back of my hand across my forehead. I was sweaty from wrestling.
We wove through the maze of boxes, by the steep staircase that I hadn’t yet used, past the bathroom that I had, and toward the rear of the house.
The Gomezes’ bedroom was the same size as my parents’ but seemed larger because it wasn’t dominated by the gurgly waterbed Mom and Dad had in theirs. Liquid moonlight poured in through a bare window, lighting up the double mattress and dousing everything else in shadowy relief.
“Where’s the light switch?”
“I dunno,” Frank said, heading straight toward the dresser. “Maybe we should call the A-Team?”
I lowered my voice and started to recite the TV show opening from memory. “‘In 1972, a crack—’”
“Yeah,” he said, distracted. He tugged open the top drawer, and then the second.
“Let me help.” I felt along the wall shadows until I bumped the light switch. I flicked it on. A bare bulb illuminated the room. “Your parents unpacked here already?”
“Mom told Dad that if he was going to make her move to Bumtruck, Egypt, that he better plan on having her bed ready and take her dancing the first week.”
“Smart.” I ran my hands along the buttery brown wood of their bed frame. “What are you looking for?”
He turned, a lopsided expression in his sea-colored eyes. He held up a round plastic disk that he’d fished out of the drawer. “This.”
I leaned in. “What is it?”
His voice was church-serious. “Drugs.”
I showed him the whites of my eyes. “What kind?”
“My mom calls them her Happy Pills. Dad says they’re the best thing since sliced bread.”
My cord scar tightened around my neck. I’d thought Hector and Sally were different from my parents. “Did a doctor prescribe them?”
“I don’t know.” He snapped open the disk and pointed at his mom’s name typed inside the clamshell lid. The bottom half was a miniature Stonehenge of white pills.
I started giggling. Once the laugh tickled my belly, it rolled to my mouth and squeezed water out my eyes. It was hard to wedge my words past all that laughter. “Do you think we should try those drugs?”
Frank pooched out his bottom lip. “What are you laughing at?”