Kids of Appetite (15 page)

“Me too.”

“Dad could make Mom laugh like nobody. And now she laughs like everybody. Frank isn't hers. They weren't made for each other. Mom says you can't base a relationship on literary preferences, but she and Dad totally liked the same books, so you tell me. Frank wouldn't know old-new if it hit him in his stupid face. He loves canned green beans. Can you believe that? What kind of grown-ass man loves canned green beans? Would it kill him to eat a fresh green bean once in a while? And God, his kids are the worst. They have this band called the Orchestra of Lost Soulz—
Soulz
-with-a-
Z
, mind you. And they're sneaky mean.”

“In what way?” she asked.

“In every way. In all the ways. They're sneaky in too many ways to explain, okay?”

“Okay.”

. . .

We stared at the moon, and at the dormant truck across the street, and at the garden gnome.

. . .

Mad stomped out the rest of the cigarette. “What do you think it means?”

“What do I think what means?”

“Being old-new. Clearly it's a sweet thing to say, some sort of subtle, indefinable quality.”

“Clearly.”

“So let's define it.”

I loved that after I had spilled my guts, this was what Mad wanted to discuss. She offered no solutions, no apologies, no pity. It wasn't because she wasn't listening, rather—because she was.

“You first.”

Mad cleared her throat. “Okay, well. Maybe it means feeling old, but remembering what it feels like to be young.”

“Or being young, but understanding what it feels like to be old. Like an old soul.”

“Or some utopian mindset that long after you've seen everything and heard everything and done everything, there's still some newness out there somewhere.”

“Or maybe it's just a name,” I said. “Sylvia and Mortimer Altneu.”

“Sylvia and Mortimer. Old-new.”

“Simultaneous extreme opposites.”

Mad raised her eyebrows. “Simultaneous whats?”

This time, I thought about what to say before saying it. I wanted to get it right. “Lots of things are two things at once.” I pointed to one side of her head, where her waves fell down past her knees. “Mad has long hair.” Then, I pointed to the other side of her head, the shaved punk cut. “Mad has short hair. See? Equally true. Extremely opposite. Happening simultaneously.”

“Simultaneous extreme opposites,” she said, then sort of
laughed, which made me feel like this: my work on Earth was done. “Quite the enigma.”

“A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

“The most magnificent enigma,” she said.

Mad leaned sideways, closer, until her face was inches from my own. She stared right into my eyes, and my insides turned to molten lava. She made me forget the unforgettable things.

I don't know.

I wanted her. But not like that. Or not
just
like that.

I wanted Mad in
every
like that.

And I tried to imagine what she saw when she looked at me this up close.

“
While the moon does its division
,” she sang, “
you're buried below. And you're coming up roses everywhere you go
.”

The song did it—what all good songs try to do. It made me feel like it was about
me.
And suddenly Mad grabbed my right wrist. Tight. But careful, too. And I let her.

She turned it over in her hands so the inside was faceup.

And I let her.

She raised my sleeve so my skin was bare and cold.

And I let her.

She looked from my face to my wrist, and she studied my scabs, and in the light of the sickle moon they looked more sad than usual. Ragged and haphazard were my tiny paths going nowhere. My pain threshold had been pushed many times. Fingernails, mostly. Construction paper, credit cards, cardboard—never a blade.

I'd thought about it though. What it would look like, what it would feel like.

But I always stopped at thinking.

“Does your mom know?” asked Mad.

What a thing to ask. Just get right in there, right up in my head, right in all the important places.

“Yes,” I said. “We used to talk about things. She asked if I hurt myself on purpose. I told her yes, but never too bad.”

Mad, still holding my right wrist, pulled the sleeve of her own jacket up.

She did not have tiny paths. But she did have bruises. Dark ones. Going nowhere.

“These are recent,” I whispered. I don't know why I whispered it. It just needed whispering. And while mine clearly were self-inflicted, hers clearly were not. “Who did this to you?”

She didn't answer, just shrugged. And as much as I wanted to hug her, to pull her to me, I didn't. We just held each other's wrists, inches apart, under a lit sky, letting the moon do its division, all our shit getting buried below, submerged in the bricks of my parents' first kiss, on the roof of my once-handsy, now-deceased grandparents' house, having completed the third task on my dad's wish list, soaking in the scary-realness of the moment.

“You may,” whispered Mad.

“I may what?”

“You may have a picture of me with no one else in it.”

I am a Super Racehorse.

Interrogation Room #2

Madeline Falco & Detective H. Bundle

December 19 // 6:01 p.m.

“Madeline Falco,” I say out loud. “Madeline. Madeline. Madeline. It's weird, saying your name out loud. I mean, you hear it so often in other people's voices, but how often do you hear your own name in your own voice?”

Bundle scrunches his face up like a pug. “Madeline—”

“See?” I interrupt, pointing at him. “Right there. I hear that shit
all
the time. But your name sounds different in your own voice, I'm telling you. Madeline . . . Madeline . . . God, that's weird.”

“It's weird, all right.”

“What's your first name, Bundle?”

He sighs, and I can almost hear the
whatever
behind it. “Herman,” he says. “Herman Bundle.”

I smile a little, nod slowly. “See? How'd that feel?”

“How did
what
feel?”

“Saying your name out loud. Felt good, right?”

“This is ridiculous.”

“Herman Bundle,” I say dreamily. “Any idea what it means?”

He shakes his head. “You know what yours means?”

“I don't know what Madeline means, but Falco is the root
of
falcon
, Italian for ‘hawk.' Which makes me a mad hawk. I'm basically a superhero.”

A man in a wrinkled suit and a shock of red hair walks in holding a cup of coffee and a newspaper.

“Hey, Ron,” says Bundle, pushing pause on the recorder.

The fact that this man's name is Ron, that he has bright-red hair, and that his suit looks like it hasn't been washed in weeks, is simply too much for my Hogwarts-loving brain to handle.

“Let me guess,” I say to Ron. “Your father is obsessed with plugs.” He stares at me with a tired perplexity, then scratches his head so his hair kind of frizzes all over the place. God, this man is more Weasley than Bill. Or was it Charlie? Whichever one went to Romania to study dragons.

Ron calmly turns to Bundle. “
Any-who
. Thought maybe I'd see if you wanted a coffee or something.”

Detective Bundle rolls his eyes back in his head and grunts.

Ron chuckles. “Yeah, I thought so. I'll be back.” Just before stepping into the hallway, he turns and looks at me. “You stink, you know that? You and your boyfriend over there. Like someone shat sour eggs.”

After Ron leaves, Bundle smirks at me.

“What?”

“Told you.”

“And here I thought we were getting to be friends.”

“Friends tell each other when they smell like shit. Also,
why
they smell like shit.”

“Now, now.” I take a sip of water. “Let's not spoil the ending.”

I set the glass down and press record.

(FOUR days ago)

“You're lying,” said Coco, staring at the ice cream. She turned to Baz, her bottom lip quivering. “He's lying, right? Tell the truth.”

Baz couldn't stop laughing long enough to talk, truth or otherwise.

“I'm not lying,” said Vic. “I saw it on
60 Minutes
. Or . . .
20/20
or CNN or something. In a list of ingredients, ‘natural flavors' isn't necessarily a good thing. Take castoreum, for example, the anal secretion of beavers. They use it in the wild to mark territory, but apparently it smells like vanilla and raspberry, so we use it—”

“Don't say it,” I said.

“—as a food additive.”

Zuz snapped twice.

Very slowly, as if the freezer handle were wired with explosives, Coco pulled open the door, flooding us in a cloud of cold fog. She pulled out a pint of mint chocolate chip, scanned through the ingredients on the back. “. . . 
natural flavors
.” She grabbed another one, then another and another, each time reading the ingredients, and each time letting out a sort of low-pitched whine.

“Um, Vic?” I said. “I think you broke Coco.”

“It just can't be,” muttered Coco, staring blankly at the back of a tub of cherry cordial.

“Sorry,” said Vic, staring at his boots.

Coco slammed the freezer door and looked on the verge of tears. “That is all frakked up.” She crossed her arms. “Well, I don't even care. I love ice cream more than I hate a beaver's anal secrets.”

“Secretion,” said Vic.

We all pretty much lost it. I mostly gagged; Baz only stopped laughing long enough to declare that this scene was
definitely
going in his book.

I raised my hand. “Okay, okay. Everyone, quiet down. I have declarations.”

The Madifesto dictates:
the longer you hold on to an apology, the harder it is to give it away.

Coco, who'd been giving me the cold shoulder all morning, glared at me.

“I declare that I was, in fact, a Grade A assclown the other night,” I said. “I declare that, heretofore, we shall be known as the Kids of Appetite, as it is officially, irrevocably, and otherwise authoritatively one kick-ass gang name, and that I was supremely jealous of the fact that Coco thought it up first.”

“The kids of what?” asked Baz.

“Oh right,” I said. “You weren't there. Coco named us the Kids of Appetite.”

“You can't just—Mad, you skipped the declaration.” Coco cleared her throat. “And they called themselves the Kids of Appetite, and they lived and they laughed and they saw that it was good.”

Baz looked like he was holding back a smile. “You stole that from the Bible.”

“Did not.”

“Sure you did.
And God saw that it was good
. It's all over the creation story.”

“Oh, so okay, no one but God can see that things are good? I see that things are good all the frakking time, for your information. Sometimes I see that things are
very
good, in fact.”

“
Anyway
,” I said, “it would seem we've derailed.” From my jacket pocket, I pulled out the finishing touches of my declaration, the pièce de résistance of my apology. “I declare that we, the Kids of Appetite, wear these wristbands proudly, loudly, and in perpetuity, as they are an outward sign of our inward transformation.”

I handed a wristband to Baz, then Zuz, then Coco, saving Vic for last.

Two nights ago I'd stayed up all night making these, sewing the cotton together, then stitching on the three white letters, bold and simple:
KOA
. They were wider than most wristbands, five inches at least, long enough to cover the entire wrist and then some. This was a crucial detail. The idea came to me when I thought back to that day I'd first seen Vic's scabs on Channel à la Goldfish.

I handed the wristband to Vic, tried to speak with my eyes.
Here, this should cover those up.
If I couldn't heal his wounds, I could at least hide them. He stared back at me, and I felt waves of the same flutterings I'd felt last night on the roof. I smiled at him, pulled my hair to one side, then looked around at everyone.

“I declare that we, the Kids of Appetite, are a family.”

Coco's arms came flying. I felt a whiff of air and hair, and before I could stop her, she'd wrapped herself around me in a forceful hug. It was hard to tell over the sobbing, but I'm fairly certain she was thanking me.

We all slipped them on, and Baz held up his wrist. “It is so declared.”

Coco clapped her hands, chanted low and rhythmically, “
Kids . . . of . . . App-e-tite. Kids . . . of . . . App-e-tite
.”

Vic and I caught everyone up on last night's occurrences: the completion of the third place on the list and the true
meaning of
smoking bricks
. We discussed number four on the list—
drown me in our wishing well
—and they told me about their fruitless excursion to the mall, and Barbara Tetterton's diarrhea unicorn statue.

“The Parlour was where they made a permanent commitment to one another,” said Baz. “The rooftop was where they first kissed. The common thread is that they are personal places.”

“What was so personal about the Palisades?” asked Coco.

“Sylvia and Mortimer Altneu,” whispered Vic. He then explained the plaque on the bench at the Palisades, how it was dedicated to the Altneus, and how Altneu translates to
old-new
. “My parents used to say they'd love each other until they were ‘old-new.' And look”—he pulled his father's Terminal Note out of his backpack and pointed to the bottom—“the signature.”

There was a certain palpable energy in the air—we all felt it. As if the Terminal Note were a treasure map and we'd just pinpointed
X
.

I said, “Okay, let's come at this the other way.”

“What do you mean?” asked Baz.

“Well, instead of trying to figure out the wishing well, Vic, can you think of any other locations that meant something special to your parents? Their first date, maybe, or high school, or—”

“How about where they got married?” said Coco.