Ask the Passengers (2 page)

Kristina laughs again and even snorts a little. But then she gets that worried look on her face as we approach her house. “Do you think people know?” she asks. She’s so random.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” I say.

“I wish I could be as sure.”

“Don’t worry. No one knows.”

“You’re not bullshitting?” she asks.

“No bullshit. Promise. I am the ears of this town. No one knows.”

WHEN I GET HOME
and put my backpack on the desk in the quiet room, I hear Mom’s rolling office chair carving tracks into the wood floor upstairs. She rolls to the east side of the office and then rolls back. Each push makes a series of loud clopping sounds, as if there’s a dancing horse upstairs.

My mother wears expensive high heels all day while she works, even though she works at home. She wears full business attire, too, and makeup and earrings and has her hair perfectly styled, even though nobody ever sees her. When she breaks for lunch, she clip-clops downstairs to the kitchen and then clip-clops back upstairs—back straight, eyes focused just above the horizon, as if she’s still in New York City, walking
down Park Avenue, being a big, important art director. When I hear her clip-clopping, I am immediately annoyed. At everything. At Unity Valley. At her. At this house and how I can hear her upstairs because the house is a million years old and there’s no insulation between ceilings and floors, unless you count centuries-old mouse nests.

We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for my grandmother dying. Mom’s mom. She used to tell Ellis and me stories about growing up where there were cornfields and hills to roll down. On our last visit to her Upper West Side apartment, Gram mentioned to Mom and Dad that the house Gram grew up in—one of the oldest on Main Street in Unity Valley—was up for sale.

Even though Gram lived her whole adult life in New York City, she was buried back in Unity Valley, next to her mother, my great-grandmother. We drove by the house fifty times the week of her funeral, and one time we stopped the car and Mom got out and talked to a person walking down the sidewalk. The lady said, “They’ll never get what they’re asking. The place is too small, and the market is too slow.”

That’s all it took for Mom to call the real estate agent.

“It’s rightfully mine,” she’d said. “I remember visiting my grandmother in it when I was little, and always wishing I lived there,” she’d said. “We won’t move permanently, but we should buy it. It’s like an heirloom. I finally have a chance to buy it back into our family.”

So she did. A year later, when I was ten and Ellis was nine, we moved. Now we’re small-town girls. Except that we aren’t. And Mom is a hometown girl. Except that she isn’t.

Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop.
She descends the steps, and I start to unpack my books onto the quiet-room desk to get ready for the trig homework I’ve been avoiding all day.

“How was your day?” she asks Ellis, who’s been sitting in the kitchen this whole time but hasn’t said hello.

“I’m starting against Wilson tomorrow,” she says.

“I suppose that’s good, is it?” Mom never played sports. So, Ellis’s field hockey is her introduction to words like
starting
,
varsity
and
shin splints
.

“It’s great,” Ellis answers.

“How great? Will we see you on the front page of the sports section soon?”

Ellis rolls her eyes. “It’s great for me. And the team. And maybe it means Coach Jane will start me more often.”

“I can’t understand why she doesn’t make you the star of the team. This whole fairness-to-seniors idea is so silly. If they backed talent no matter what age, it would get them further.”

I’m still in the quiet room playing invisible, but I want to explain to Mom that you can’t make a player
star of the team
by better advertising or better shelf placement, the way she does with her clients’ products.

“I think it’s fair to let the seniors start,” Ellis says.

“Well, it won’t help you get your name in the paper, so you’ll have to forgive me if I disagree,” Mom says. “Help me make dinner?”

Ellis deflates and claims homework time in her bedroom. Mom goes into the kitchen to make dinner without asking me how my day was, even though she knows I’m here.

The quiet room is technically the foyer. In our house, you pronounce that correctly.Foy-
yay
, not foy-
er
. We call it the quiet room because as long as the horse isn’t dancing upstairs and the door is closed, it is the quietest room in the house. It’s where my mother hopes to read classic novels again one day when she isn’t working nine days a week, and it’s where I do my homework because Ellis plays loud music when she works in her bedroom and I can’t concentrate. And I need to concentrate because trig is killing me.

When I signed up for trig, I certainly thought it would be more exciting than the deep study of triangles. Seriously. Triangles. That’s all it’s about. When I realized this upon reading the basic definition in the front of the textbook on the first day of school, every cell in my body told me to go to Guidance and change my schedule. I don’t need trig to graduate. I’ve taken plenty of math, and I got good grades. I even got picked for AP humanities—the only class in Unity Valley High School that requires teacher references.

I’m not sure if learning about ancient Greece and classical philosophy is going to get me anywhere, but it’s not like trig is going to get me anywhere, either. At least philosophy isn’t making me want to jump off the nearest bridge. Okay, well at the moment it kinda is, but that’s Zeno of Elea’s fault. And anyway, if what he said is true, that motion is impossible, then I wouldn’t
really
be able to jump off a bridge, would I?

At five thirty, Dad parallel parks in the space in front of our house and goes into the backseat for his briefcase. When he gets to our front walk, he hits the lock button on the car, and it sounds a little honk. He stops to make sure our two front birdfeeders are filled. He checks the water level in the birdbath. Then he walks in the front door to find me pretending to poke my eye out with a protractor.

“Trig?” he asks.

I put my head down in response. I stick my tongue out and roll my eyes back like I’m dying.

“Good luck with that,” he says as he heads upstairs.

I can smell the pot on his breath.

Mom brings the steaming casserole dish to the table and places it on a hot pad. “Aubergine casserole!” she announces. Yes, aubergine. That’s eggplant to us nonspecial, undereducated, small-town people.

She serves it with a cold salad and sprinkles walnuts on top of everything.

Halfway through dinner, Ellis tells Dad about starting against Wilson tomorrow. As she tells him the details, he nods and chews. When he finally swallows, he says, “What time does it start?”

“Four.”

“I bet I can swing that,” he says. “Even if I’m a little late.”

“That would be awesome,” she says.

Mom says, “I can’t make it.” Even though she works upstairs. And she can. Totally. Make it. “But if you want, we can go shopping this weekend.”

We all go back to eating aubergine casserole. For the record: The last time Mom took me shopping on a whim was never. And it’s not like Ellis has grown out of her clothes. The saddest part is that Ellis still pretends they have the perfect relationship Mom wants them to have. Because Ellis is her last chance, and they both know it.

“It would be nice to see you in the paper,” Mom says. “They’re always concentrating on boys’ sports or the kids who get scholarships.”

“I’m a midfielder,” Ellis says, which she knows Mom won’t understand, so I don’t know why she says it.

“But you’re talented,” she says. “I’m going to get in touch with Mike at the paper and see what he can do. We do each other favors. He could get you in there,” she says, pointing with her fork.

“I don’t really want to be in the paper,” Ellis says.

“Everyone wants to be in the paper!” Mom says. “And it’s not like it’s the
Times
. No need to be modest.”

I can’t figure out if that’s an insult or a compliment.

When it’s my turn to talk about my day, I share lit mag news.

“We got a few poems today that were half decent,” I say. “And there’s a kid in freshman AP English who writes these great fantasy short stories, and he submitted a few of them. I picked one of those, too.”

“Fantasy?” Mom says. “Seriously, Astrid. You’re the editor. You should set the bar.”

Instead of replying with my usual open-your-mind speech, I send love to my mother.
Mom, I love you even though you are a critical, unforgiving horror show. This casserole sucks, but I like the way you roasted the walnuts.

“We’re starting the first unit of the Socrates Project in humanities next week, and I’m kinda excited,” I say. Mom nods, even though she has no idea what the Socrates Project is… because I haven’t told her. “I think I’ll just be happy to stop talking about Zeno and his dumb motion theories.” I haven’t told her about Zeno, either.

“And how’s Kristina?” she asks. She’s using the Kristina tone—a weird mix of jealousy and I-know-something-you-don’t-know because she and Kristina text each other a lot and she thinks I don’t know this.

“Fine.”

“Any word on Homecoming?”

“We vote Friday.”

“I know Kristina’s really excited about it.”

“Yeah.”

“I think she has a real chance to win. She has all the right qualities,” she says.

I am annoyed that she thinks she knows more than I do about Kristina. Believe me, if she knew half of what I know, she’d probably choke on this awful aubergine casserole and die right here in her four-hundred-dollar shoes.

“What qualities are those?” I ask.

She takes a sip of her wine. “You know. She’s just such a great representation of what this town is all about.”

“True,” I say. Because it’s true. Kristina is exactly the opposite of what she seems, and that’s a perfect representation of Unity Valley.

Then Dad tells us about how boring it is to work in his new office cubicle all day, talking to people on the phone about microprocessors and systems analytics while looking over his shoulder for the outsourcing memo. (His last job lasted eight months before the company moved to Asia. The job before that lasted eleven.)

“To top it all off, while I was at lunch, someone borrowed my stapler and broke it.”

“Aw, poor Gerry,” Mom says.

“Hey, that was my favorite stapler. It was ergonomic,” he says.

Without a moment’s sympathy, Mom launches into her day (hellish clients, dumb photographers, bitchy magazine editors) between gulps of wine and mouthfuls of eggplant. She could go for an hour, I bet.

We all eat as fast as we can to get out of here.

Then, after the dishes are done and the kitchen is cleaned, Ellis goes for her nightly jog on well-lit Main Street with two of her small-town teammates, Dad sits down in the quiet room to read a book, Mom goes back to her office, and I go out into the backyard to talk to the passengers.