Savvy (2 page)

I knew that after I blew out my own thirteen dripping candles, it’d be a-di-os and a-lo-ha to Hebron Middle School, as well as to Ashley Bing and Emma Flint, and everyone else like them. After my birthday, my poor moody Samson would be a lonesome shadow in the back of the big orange bus while I grew moss in pickle jars with Fish and Rocket back at home.

It was hard for us Beaumont kids to make friends and keep them. It wasn’t safe to invite anyone over with Fish and Rocket still learning to scumble their savvies; we couldn’t risk someone finding out, or getting hurt by sparks or storms if my brothers lost control. Like so many things, a savvy could take years to tame, and Momma and Poppa said the ups and downs of growing up only added to the challenge.

My last day at Hebron Middle School was a slow, creeping crawl of a day. It was hard, hard, hard to concentrate on
x+y=z
when my thoughts were all tied up at Salina Hope Hospital. It was harder still to spell
accommodate
and
adolescence
and
armadillo
when I thought of Poppa waiting for Momma to come and give him a fairy-tale kiss that would wake him up, and I couldn’t imagine how often in my life it might be so very important to spell
arma-double L-dillo
. But, of all things, it was hardest to listen to Ashley Bing and Emma Flint whisper and stare when the teacher said, “I’d like everyone to join me in wishing Mibs Beaumont a fond farewell. Today is her last day with us here at Hebron Middle School. Mibs will be homeschooled beginning next week.”

Everyone turned in their seats to look at me. Nobody smiled or wished me a fond sort of anything. Most of the kids just shrugged and turned right back around.

“Missy-pissy’s going to stay home with her mommy,” Ashley said, as though she were talking to a baby—just quiet enough that the teacher couldn’t hear.

“With her
mommy,
” Emma repeated.

“She’s going to stay home so that no one can see what a friendless freak she is,” Ashley sneered.

“What a
freak
she is,” mimicked Emma like a spiteful parrot.

It was a good thing for Ashley and Emma that Momma kept us kids home once we had our savvy. By the end of the day, I was hoping that mine might give me the muscle to turn nasty girls into slimy green frogs or to glue their mouths shut tight with a nod of my head.

When Samson and I got back home that afternoon, a shiny gold minivan was parked in front of our house and Fish was angrily blasting it clean with the garden hose. With its smiling angel air freshener dangling in the front window, I recognized the van immediately. It belonged to Miss Rosemary, the preacher’s wife.

Momma made the whole family go to church in Hebron every Sunday despite any fears of savvy catastrophes, and Miss Rosemary was well-known to us all. She smelled like Lysol and butterscotch and had her own matching set of rights and wrongs—like suitcases she made other people carry—and she took it upon herself to make everything and everyone as shipshape and apple-pie as she felt the Lord had intended them to be. Somehow, the news had already reached the preacher’s wife about Poppa’s accident and about the rest of us being on our own without a momma. Miss Rosemary had come to set things right.

Water spun from the hose in Fish’s hand, swirling around the van like a cyclone in the winds churned up by his bad mood. The trees next to the house, bright yellow-green with leafy spring, bent and swayed. Fish lowered the hose when he saw us coming, his face stormy black.

“If y’know what’s good for you, you’ll sneak in the back.” He nodded his head toward the house. We all stood and looked sadly at our own lovely house as though we’d just found out that a grizzly bear had moved in and pulled all the stuffing from the furniture and torn all the pictures from the walls and eaten all the special-occasion mini-marshmallows from the high top shelf above the refrigerator while we were gone. Then, like a break in bad weather, Fish smiled his cockeyed smile and sprayed the hose my way teasingly. “Last day away to school, eh, Mibs?”

“Last day,” I said, dodging the water from the hose. Leaving Fish to finish his chore, Samson and I quietly let ourselves in through the back door—hoping to make it up the stairs before Miss Rosemary knew we were there.

“Your grandfather looked tired, so I had him lie down in his room for a rest,” Miss Rosemary said the moment we entered the kitchen. She was perched up high, with a spray bottle cocked in one rubber-gloved hand and a rag held ready in the other. She was taking the jars from the tops of the cupboards and cleaning their dust with a wrinkle in her nose, squinting at the faded labels. I held my breath as I watched her, hoping that she hadn’t opened any of them. No one who wasn’t family should have been touching those jars—no one. “Gypsy is also down for a nap,” Miss Rosemary continued. “So I expect you two to be quiet and not wake her.”

“Yes, Miss Rosemary,” Samson and I both said, but Samson mostly moved his lips.

“Your mother should have called me the moment she found out about your poor father,” Miss Rosemary said, dusting the last jar with a flourish. Satisfied with her work, she clasped both the spray bottle and the rag to her chest and closed her eyes as though she was praying for the strength to clean up the whole wide world. When she reopened her eyes, she gave us a stern and solemn look.

“I ought to have been here sooner,” she sighed. “Children need a mother in the house.”

I
knew that miss rosemary was not a proper replacement for our perfect momma. I knew it down in the pit of my stomach and I knew it down to the tips of my toes. A sick feeling washed over me as Miss Rosemary pointed her spray bottle dismissively toward the hallway opposite the stairs and said, “I brought Roberta and Will Junior with me to keep you company this afternoon. Why don’t you two go find them? You can watch TV.
Quietly
.”

“Yes ma’am,” I mumbled, even though we didn’t have any TV—with Rocket in the house, Momma and Poppa wouldn’t buy any fancy gadgets until they knew, sure as sure, that my brother could keep from destroying them all accidentally.

Samson and I were eager to leave the kitchen, but not so eager to find Roberta and Will Junior, Miss Rosemary’s younger children. The pastor and his wife had three children, but their older son was already thirty and worked as a state trooper in Topeka. No one talked about him much.

Roberta—who everyone but her mother called Bobbi—was sixteen, and probably only came over that afternoon because she’d hoped to find Rocket at home. Rocket, I supposed, was the kind of seventeen-year-old boy that sixteen-year-old fizgiggly girls liked to act silly and stupid around, even if he did always look as though he’d stuck his finger in a light socket.

“This is so lame,” Bobbi was saying as we entered the room. “I can’t believe we had to come here.” Bobbi and Will Junior had never been over to our house before and were making themselves busy poking and peeking and prying. Bobbi was shuffling through a stack of Momma’s half-finished paintings and Will Junior, holding one of Gypsy’s wooden blocks, was prodding Samson’s dead pet turtle where it lay inside a glass aquarium, pulled tight and unmoving into its shell.

“Shut up, Bobbi,” said Will. “Their dad’s in the hospital. Show a little sympathy.”

“We don’t need your sorries,” I said flatly, startling Will and Bobbi, neither of whom had seen us come in. “We’re doing just fine,” I added.

Bobbi turned to look at me and Samson as though we were the trespassers in the room. With a heavy, well-practiced teenage sigh, Bobbi rolled her eyes, popped a big pink gum bubble, and threw herself down on the sofa with a disgusted grunt.

“Isn’t there
anything
to do in this house?” she grumped, reclining and closing her eyes, laying one hand across her forehead dramatically I noticed that Bobbi had glitter eye shadow and that her right eyebrow was pierced. A little gold hoop glinted, almost unseen, from underneath her long bangs, and I wondered how Miss Rosemary had ever allowed
that
to happen.

“Just ignore her,” said Will, glaring at Bobbi, then looking kindly toward Samson and me. Will Junior was fourteen like Fish, though Will was taller and, unlike my brother, kept his curly brown hair neat. I’d always been curious about Will. I’d heard him say once that he wanted to grow up to be just like his daddy. And despite the way others at church shied away from us Beaumonts, Will always seemed to be walking on our heels or watching us when he was supposed to be praying. One time he even gave me his own cup of juice when the crowd around the punch table was too tight for me to squeeze past. But even though Will Junior and Fish were the same age and Fish didn’t have a friend to his name, my brother never did like Will, thinking him to be nothing more than a holier-than-thou preacher boy. For my part, I thought he seemed nice, even if he was laced up a bit tight.

Will turned back to the aquarium. “So, is this turtle alive or—?” He caught himself before saying “dead,” grimacing apologetically.

Samson let go of my hand and coasted like a shadow across the room to pull his turtle out of its aquarium and away from Will Junior’s curious inspection. After a long, unblinking stare at the older boy Samson slipped from the room with his lifeless pet to go hide somewhere like a dusty gray moth. I knew my brother would turn up later behind a door or under his bed or beneath a pile of laundry.

Setting down the wooden block and wiping his hands on his trousers, Will Junior turned to look at me, doing a good job at mimicking a preacher’s most pastorly concern.

“I hope Mr. Beaumont gets better,” he said, as grave as a tombstone. “We’re all praying for your dad.”

“Okay.” I shrugged, uncomfortable. It’s not that I was against praying—I prayed every night for my savvy to come and be the best savvy ever. I prayed for the power to fly or to shoot lasers from my eyes. I also prayed for Grandpa Bomba and for Gypsy when she caught the croup. It’s just that it hadn’t yet crossed my mind to pray for Poppa, and again I felt selfish and shamed and bad enough to have a house come land
PLOP
down on me, leaving nothing but my feet sticking out; that’s just how wicked I felt.

Crossing the room, Will Junior placed one hand on my shoulder in a weird, grown-up kind of way, leaning forward with a tilt to his head like he was checking my eyes for tears.

“Mother brought you a meat loaf,” he said, as if that fixed everything. I took a step back, none too sure how I felt about having Will that close—even if he was just being nice. And while I was sure meat loaf could be a powerful thing, especially if it had a lot of ketchup and the onions were chopped up real fine, I knew that tonight, for the Beaumont family, meat loaf couldn’t do squat.

“A
little bird told me that tomorrow is
someone’s
birthday,” Miss Rosemary said with a quick, corner-of-the-eye glance from Gypsy to me as she cut a slab of meat loaf and placed it onto Grandpa Bomba’s plate. The preacher’s wife smiled down at the meat loaf, with its big, unfortunate, wormy onions and thin, dry layer of ketchup. I watched the knife as she cut another slice, and pretended that I hadn’t heard her say anything.

Sitting at that table just then was like sitting in a pressure cooker—thanks to Fish; the air in the room went hot and taut. Only Gypsy reacted to Miss Rosemary, because she was three years old and didn’t know yet what the rest of us Beaumonts knew about secrets—needing them, having them, or keeping them. Gypsy clapped her toddler hands together, eyes bright and eager in anticipation of balloons and sugar frosting.

“I thought,” Miss Rosemary continued, apparently unaware of the tension—and the breeze. “I
thought
that a birthday party might help cheer everyone up a bit.” She looked around the table from one face to the next. Fish stared at the salt and pepper shakers in front of him, the good crystal ones that Momma never used but kept up high in the don’t-touch-or-else cupboard. I could see him trying to get a good tight grip on his savvy. It was straining him, though, and he was starting to sweat, looking pained and gray and miserable.

“
I
don’t have to be there, do I, Mother?” Bobbi said, jamming a forkful of meat loaf into her mouth and rolling her eyes like she was possessed or was having some kind of fit. Part of me hoped her eyes would get stuck that way, just as people always say could happen.

“Yes, Roberta, we’ll
all
be there.”

“Yes, Roberta, we’ll all be there,”
Bobbi mimicked around her mouthful of meat loaf in a frighteningly perfect imitation of her mother’s voice.

“That’s enough, Roberta!” Miss Rosemary shot Bobbi a look of sheer ice that thawed into an apologetic smile as she looked back at me. Bobbi slouched down in her chair.

“We’ll have the party at the church, of course,” the preacher’s wife continued as though she’d not been interrupted. “It’s rather short notice, but we can still invite all your church friends, Mibs, as well as anyone from school you’d like to ask.”

“I don’t have any friends, Miss Rosemary,” I said, hoping that the truth might end the conversation.

“
I’m
your friend, Mibs,” Will Junior said with earnest. I looked across the table at him and his buttoned-up shirt. Will grinned at me then; smiling, he looked different somehow, more relaxed. None too sure about how I was feeling toward Will Junior just then, I didn’t smile back. But I didn’t scowl either.

“Nonsense,” Miss Rosemary continued as though Will had said nothing. “I’ll show you. I’ll get on the phone this evening and cook you up a fine party for tomorrow. Don’t you worry, Mibs, I have
connections
.” Miss Rosemary pointed one finger up to the ceiling, though I guessed she was really pointing up toward heaven. Apparently, she was going to get God to help her plan my party. I figured God had much, much better things to do, like keeping people from starving to death or from killing each other, or helping my poppa, and so I hoped He’d just stay out of it.