Sister Mischief (24 page)

You.

There is a buzzing in my ears, a dim din of anger and a deeper disappointment than I’ve felt since I was five, a hum like the phantom ring you hear the moment after a phone stops ringing. I can’t believe she’s chickening out, and at the same time, I can.

“Fuck you, Rowie,” I manage without dignity. It’s a frayed blur as I split, struggling with my jacket, both of us crying, my hair sticking to her face, swallowing. She lets out a strange yelp as I retreat. Her arm is outstretched as though I were a boat pulling away in the night, like longing from a dark dock. I close the floor door to her. I climb dumbly down the tree trunk, stopping my ears to the celebratory racket from the Baumgarten house leaking into the night, and barely prevent myself from screaming as I hurdle toward home.

 

Marcy and I are testing the ice sheet on the creek with our feet. It’s Wednesday afternoon; I hear church bells tossing hollow echoes across the plains.

“Who goes to church on Wednesday?” I ask.

“Catholics, duh,” she says.

“Huh,” I say.

“Wanna go steal some signs?”

“Eh.” I shrug listlessly. “Maybe later.”

The wind bites and the winter light clouds over the patchwork of white frost and dead brown earth. Brittle Creek runs through her backyard; it was a source of endless fascination when we were younger, swimming in the summer and boot hockey in the winter. As we probe the half-frozen sheet, daring it to crack under our leaning, I feel an awareness of seasons, of the ache that comes when seasons change.

“Hey, dirtbag. What’s with you? Where were you today?” she asks.

“Just wasn’t really feeling school. I had some things to do.”

“Like building a secret annex and hiding in it? You showed up to like one class all day.”

I squirm. “Okay. I have to tell you something and I don’t know how to put it.”

“Put what? Just put it.”

“It’s about Rowie.”

“What about Rowie? She’s been totally AWOL, too.”

“Yeah. Um.”

Marcy throws a stray rock into the river in frustration. “Spit it the fuck out, Ez.”

“We could ice-fish through that hole,” I say, misdirecting, pointing at where the rock went through.

“Esme.”

Marcy very rarely uses my whole name. We’re always just Ez and Marce.

“Mary Marcella, I really don’t know what to say. Remember the night we ripped off that joint of Rooster’s and smoked it in the treehouse, and you left early?”

“Yeah.”

“Well. After you left, Rowie and I were talking and realized that neither of us had ever kissed a girl.”

“Why would Rowie have kissed a girl?”

“Um,” I say.

Marcy searches my face. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“Um, I guess — fuck. I don’t know how to — I mean, I haven’t ever really told — oh, fuck all. Rowie and I made out that night in the treehouse, and we’ve been hooking up on the DL ever since, until last night Tess caught us and Rowie freaked out and I realized that she would never be able to handle being my girlfriend.” I start getting choked up and try to wipe the tears off before she notices.

“Holy shit, Ez,” she says, looking at me incredulously for a full ten seconds. “Are you serious?”

I nod.

“Is that why you’ve looked like a zombie for, like, two months?”

I nod.

“Shit,” she breathes, understanding dawning across her face. She shifts from standing on the bank with one leg arched onto a rock like a pirate to a flabbergasted sprawl in the snow, her heels resting on the ice.

“Say something,” I insist with what little insistence I have left in me.

She drags her heels over the ice, tracing a snow-angel arc on the creek.

“Something, Ezbo,” she says.

“Don’t call me that.” I kick the ice and it cracks like crème brûlée under a spoon. My toe breaks through, dipping into the searing freezing water, and I stumble back onto the frozen bank. “I think I hear my dad calling.”

“Bitch, please.” Marcy grabs my sleeve, pulling her feet under her. “You can’t pull this shit on me. I’m a shitbag with emotions too, but quit with the cactus act and fucking come in for some hot chocolate.”

“Okay,” I sniff.

Marcy drags me across her backyard and into the kitchen, where we stomp off our shoes and leave our wet jackets in a pile on the floor.

“Is Bob here?” I ask.

She shakes her head as she takes a swig from the milk carton. “Practice.” She exhales, wiping a renegade drip from her chin. She dumps the milk into a saucepan to heat up. My phone beeps.
⁵⁷

57. Text from Tess:
How are you doing, babe?


“I’m, um — I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” I say. “Rowie, like, couldn’t really deal with people knowing about us.” I take a breath, still unsure how to talk about Rowie and me to anyone other than Rowie or me.

“Don’t trip,” she says. “I mean, I understand, or whatever. At least now I know why you never sleep over anymore.”

It dawns on me how displaced Marcy must have felt while Rowie and me were — whatever we were. I’ve spent so much cumulative time at the Crowthers’ over the years that I actually have my own set of dishes here. Me and Marcy were really picky about what we ate and what we ate it on when we were little, so Bob and Luke had to team up and provide full sets of diningware for both girls at both houses to appease us. She hands me my #1 Grandpa mug and I pinch a marshmallow out of the cocoa. Marcy’s drinking out of her 1991 Twins World Series Champions mug.

“Are you, like, okay?” she asks abruptly.

“I don’t really know,” I say. “I guess I just needed to say it out loud more than anything. It was really hard not to tell you while it was happening.”

“Yeah,” she says. “It was hard not to know why you looked so sad.”

“Marce?” I ask.

“Yeah?”

“I know we don’t usually talk about stuff like this, but — do you believe in God?”

She takes a long pause. “I do my best to remember that I am loved. The source is less important.” For a long moment, I am washed over by a wave of intense love for Marcy, the longest-running female lead in the sitcom of my life. I take her for granted the way I take my ability to read for granted. Not for nothing, we’re the only sisters we’ve got.

“I love you, Marce,” I blurt out. “I know we don’t really say that, but I don’t know. I guess I need us to say it sometimes.”

She returns my long look. “I love you too, Ez,” she says. “I can deal with us saying that sometimes.”

“I won’t tell anyone if you won’t,” I say, grinning.

“Deal.” She grins back.

“I gotta jet,” I say, rising.

“To do what?” Marcy scoffs. “I know you’re not going to do homework.”

I crack a grin. “If I did my homework now, what would I do during the first five minutes of every class?”

“Dude — I don’t want to push you or whatever, but when there’s no talking happening, there’s no sweet beats and fat rhymes happening either. . . .” She trails off meaningfully.

Nope. Not yet.

“Nope. Not yet.”

“I’m just
saying,
we got some good momentum going after the LocoMotive, and your on-camera interview about Hip-Hop for Heteros and Homos, and you had that new song you showed us on your birthday, and we were talking about having a concert. . . . Come
on,
Ez. Don’t let all this drama get in the way of our dream.”

“Give me a little time.” I tip my hat on my way out. “Later, homes.”

“Minnesota-do-or-die, soldier.”

Marcy lives on the eastern border of Holyhill’s west side, near the highway and the big Lutheran church and the old Soo Line train tracks, a ways away from the big houses in the old-money part of town. I plug myself into my iPod and start walking, Black Star trickling into my ears. It’s barely four o’clock, but the sun is indistinct, as if afraid of wearing out his welcome. I begin to climb the spiral-ramped bike path up to the bridge over the highway, and a twinge of hunger reminds me I haven’t eaten in a while. I look down at the highway: the traffic is thickening as the giant arched streetlights begin their neon flicker into the evening. This was Marcy’s and my favorite place to hide growing up, a perch in plain sight that no one can really get a good look at.

Twilight has settled around the cold midday and that frozen-eardrum feeling starts to set in; I don’t want to go home, but it’s getting time to stop in somewhere and thaw out. My favorite diner, Home on the Range, is a few more blocks north, and my pace quickens as visions of bottomless chicken noodle soup dance in my head. Minnesota: the only place on earth that’ll give you free refills on pop
and
soup. The green-and-pink Art Deco sign beckons and I have a rush of hoping I don’t run into anyone I know. The bell jangles as I duck in out of the cold.

“Just me,” I tell the fifty-something waitress in the white button-down dress, holding up one finger. “I can sit at the counter.”

“Any place you want, honey,” she says through her gum, ripping off a ticket and slapping it next to my knife. I plop down, seizing in a thaw-shiver as I unwind my scarf and coat. The diner’s been alive in Holyhill three times as long as I have and has a pleasant old-timey tone: cue the red-and-white plastic checkered tablecloths, cue the Everly Brothers on the jukebox. The weekday crowd is brimming with young families toting boxy bags of hockey gear and early-bird seniors stirring steaming mugs of decaf. I see a pair of old ladies sharing a spotted cow milkshake and laughing in a booth by the window, and it shoots me through with missing Rowie. Mom took me here for my birthday breakfast right before she left. All I remember is that she had oatmeal with Craisins.

“Somethin’ to drink, doll?” Her name tag says
Marjean
and she has what you’d call kind eyes behind her bent wire glasses.

“Can I have a Coke, please?” I reply as she tries to hand me a menu. “No, thanks, I don’t need it. Could I just also please have a bowl of chicken noodle soup?”

“You bet. Want some crackers with that?”

“Yes, ma’am. And could you put an orange slice in the Coke?”

She looks up from her pad and smiles. “Sure thing, honey. Back in a jiff.”

I rummage around in my backpack for a book. I can’t remember what I’ve got in here today. Catching the edge of something, I grab it and pull out. It’s Mom’s grimy old copy of
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
Eureka! I thought I’d lost it, but it turns out it was just buried in this old bag, which I haven’t used in a while. Salt-and-peppery Marjean returns with my Coke and orange, but I barely look up, immersed in my favorite passage of
ATGIB: