The Household Spirit (7 page)

And so it began.

Because then came Lori Freeman in seventh grade. Similar thing. Out of nowhere Lori going, “You're my second-best friend, Emily!” You have got to be kidding me. Emily first thought it was a joke, as if Lori was in collusion with Jess Yarsevich. Then, in eighth grade, the cabal of Stephanie Bouchard and Amber Haviland
and
Jennifer Savona. They all said it. Three second-best friendships. In ninth grade it was Rebecca Hipsh and Desi Acevado and, urgh, Lori bitchface Freeman again. Lori, who, gallingly, actually claimed to have
two
first-best friends at the time, Rebecca Hipsh and Alexi Jones in a mutually beneficial BFF power share, meaning: here was someone who had enough best friendliness to spread over
two
girls in ninth grade but back in seventh grade, back when she'd originally said that Emily was her second-best friend, she didn't. Couldn't. Wouldn't. For reasons Emily would brood herself to death on, Lori Freeman needed to keep her in second place no matter what, a second place that felt, to Emily, exactly like a no place.

—

Emily attended exactly one sleepover. She was thirteen years old. She'd been invited numerous times before but Peppy had forbidden it. The idea had terrified Emily too. But this time, for whatever reason, she pushed things too far.

“Why can't I go?” Emily knew why. “Everyone's going. Peppy, I want to go.”

“You've made that clear enough.” He flipped through the TV channels.

“That's all you're going to say?”

“Let's talk about this another time.”

“The sleepover's tomorrow.”

“Then I propose we talk about it the day after tomorrow.”

“That's not funny!” Emily needed to fight this out. For herself, mostly, but also so that she could semi-truthfully tell Alexi Jones that God, it wasn't
her
fault. She was normal. Her grandfather could be such a dick.

“I'm sorry, you're right,” he said. “I'm concerned is all. I think that you're not ready.” Then, because she made exasperated noises, he said, “Your dreams, Em.”

“I am too ready,” she said. Then, “Anyway, they're not dreams.”

Exactly
. Peppy stopped on a sitcom that neither of them enjoyed. “May I talk with this girl's mother?”

“Why do you have to talk to anyone's
mother
? Jesus. You don't trust me? What am I going to do? Drugs? You think I'm going to get pregnant?”

“Hold it, buster.”

“You think I'm going to get HIV?”

Peppy turned the TV off. He sighed. No TV plus Peppy's
bemusing
thinky face meant that Emily was actually winning. Emily was not supposed to be winning. “I think that you know why I need to talk to Becky's mother,” he said.

“Alexi.”

“Excuse me?”

“
Alexi's
mother.”

“Alexi,” he repeated. Twinkled. “Now, she the one with the ears?”

“That is so mean. Please, I'm being serious!”

They stopped, watched the empty TV. “Anyways.” Emily exhaled. “Melissa is the one with ears.” You win, you're right. No sleepover. Now let's move on please.

“I suppose they all have ears,” Peppy said. “So, then. Which one is Alexi?”

“Alexi's
Alexi
,” Emily snapped. She hated Peppy's inability to take
her social life seriously, the way he pretended never to remember the names of the unimportant people that Emily pretended were important. Oh she hated that he
knew
.

“Well, I guess it's OK then,” he said.

Seriously?

In a reckless, irrational surge, Emily said, “Call her mom then! Fine. What are you going to say? Watch out, my granddaughter's a little bit crazy?” If there was one thing Peppy liked less than talking to other parents, it was talking to anyone, Emily included, about what happened to her at night.

“You're right,” he said. “Maybe that won't be necessary.” He turned, looked directly at her. “You really want to go to this sleeping over evening?”

No
. How dense are you? But she couldn't locate her emotional brakes. “What do you think's going to happen to me? Why not just have me committed,” and Emily began to cry. Would you look at how obviously nuts I am? You're going to send this kind of crazy to a sleepover party? With children?

“Sweetheart.”

“I'm not crazy!”

Peppy turned the TV back on. He was not good with tears. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I know you're not crazy. Like I already said, I won't forbid it. I'm sure it will be OK, and you're old enough to make your own decisions. Maybe it will be good for you. Perhaps I'll throw a little sleepover party of my own here, you never know. House to myself and all. Invite Mr. Jeffries over for some beer pong.”

Emily laughed, couldn't help it. “Gross. Jesus, Peppy, what are you talking about?”

Peppy smiled. “Oh, just the latest thing.” He loved incorporating and misusing contemporary terminology that he'd heard on TV. It was a routine that always made Emily laugh. He continued, “We'll mosh dance and take some e-mail photographs and we'll AOL them to Becky's party.”

“Alexi.”

“With the ears.”

Emily tried to stop smiling. She needed to put a stop to this and so she made up a brother, an older brother of Alexi's, Keith, and Keith was probably going to be there at the sleepover
the whole time
. Take that, old man. Take
Keith
.

“Suppose Kevin has to be somewhere,” Peppy said. “Can't tie him up out back, can they?”

“He'll have his friends over, too. I just remembered. It's like a double sleepover thing?”

“Well,” Peppy said, chewing the word. “Well, I trust that none of them will have AIDS.”

“But they might,” Emily said. There was no hope now. They'd fallen deep into their routine.

“Statistically improbable, but OK.”

Not OK.

—

They were six girls, including Alexi's bossy spit of a sister, Fiona. Fiona spent the first hour or two standing on her head, playing this electronic annoy-o-phone, challenging the big girls to games of Connect Four. She cried when they wouldn't play and she cried when they would and she lost. Sick to her stomach with worry, Emily hadn't slept much the night before. It wasn't only that she was too proud to call it off. She wanted to prove something to Peppy, and herself. She would make her grandfather proud. She was a normal girl. It was the first time she'd ever sleep in a house not on Route 29. Maybe she wouldn't have problems here—maybe, like a ghost, her problems were site specific. She couldn't eat. She was exhausted and she drank as much Pepsi as she could, all day long, can after can, buzzing like a fluorescent light, her head full of flies. The plan was to stay up all night.

Because it was October, Alexi decided that they'd watch R-rated horror movies. She'd borrowed some DVDs from a guy at school. “Let's scare the shit out of each other,” she said boldly, presenting the contraband DVDs. Emily had never heard “Future Leaders of
America” Alexi swear before and couldn't help being impressed—and reminded of her truncated second-best friendship with Jess Yarsevich. Is this what sleepovers were like? Shit and horror? Emily had imagined more pink. They were supposed to be gossiping about boys, right? Why weren't they sitting in a soft pink circle gossiping about boys?

They went underground.

The basement was only half done. The half they were in was carpeted, lit, and had a sofa, a TV, and Alexi's father's PlayStation 2. It was his cave, Alexi told them, knowingly. “Man cave,” she said, and they all kind of marveled at that, secretly, curiously electrified. Safe inside the cave of a man. This was a place where men went. There were sports posters on the wall, weights, a dusty running machine, and a few golden plastic trophies from the '80s. There was a collection of beer mugs from all over the world, but mostly Milwaukee. These they filled with Diet Sprite. The other half of the basement, behind them, smelled like a concrete dog. It breathed wetly, coldly on their backs and the girls would periodically turn to face it, pretend to see something, scream, and then all of them would flip out and dive laughing, scrabbling under the protective blankets they'd amassed in case the R-rated movies got out of hand.

There were really big cardboard boxes. Anything could be hiding back there in the dark in a cardboard box. Dead babies, partial nudity, spiders, decapitated heads. Emily acted as if she were having an amazing time. She joked throughout the movies, which didn't scare her, only grossed her out. The other girls were happy to have her there, deferring to her expertise. “You're really not scared?” one of them asked. “I can't hardly look.”

“It's a movie.”

“I know, but I keep thinking something's going to jump out.”

“Something will,” Emily said. “That's what the movie is about, things jumping out at you. But it's only a movie, and—”

“Fuck!” someone shouted.

Shattering glass, running, butchery. The girls laughed, half hugging
one another. Because they were fucking teenagers now, weren't they? More or less officially? They'd bravely repeat the F-word, puffing themselves up, a spell against childhood and fear. “That is so fucked up!” The more they said it, the less frightened they were of the boxes or the bloodbath, the more they giggled like happy little children. Some kind of lesson here? The more you fucked, the less scared you were of fucking, the more childish you invariably became. Emily would recall this later.

Because, otherwise, she was terrified. The fucking spell didn't work on her. One by one, the girls dropped off, leaving only Alexi and Emily. This was nice, and more of what Emily had expected. They whispered in a heavy-lidded, disjointed, overly serious manner. They gossiped, and they talked about the future. Alexi was frightened of high school, the prom, of who would eventually ask her to the prom in three or four years, of not getting into all the Advanced Placement classes, and, she said, eventually not getting into her first choice college because she was white. “They're taking away a lot of our rights, Emily.” Emily admitted that she rarely thought about school, or being white. “But you're not one hundred percent white, are you?” Alexi asked. Emily said that she thought that she was. “You could say you weren't though, you know. If you wanted. You're lucky. I would, if I were you.” They spoke about which teachers sucked and which of the girls would marry ugly men and which of them would not marry men at all because
lesbians
. “But so who do you think will be the richest? I think I'll be the richest,” Alexi yawned. “But maybe we'll both be the richest. You're not tired, Em?”

I am a teenager talking at night with another teenager, Emily thought. “I'm not super tired,” Emily said, intent on keeping the increasingly unspooled Alexi awake for protection. “Do you want to watch another movie?”

“Do you? My dad's got some crazy ones upstairs.”

“Really?”

“Like unrated crazy.”

They slinked upstairs and, in the dark, snatched the first DVDs they found, something called
Band of Brothers
. Alexi was out within minutes. Emily woke her up once, just to see if she could, World War Boring flashing itself over the sleeping girls; Alexi only made a chewy face and turned over, whined. Emily turned the incomprehensible carnage up. Men, she thought, in a voice she'd heard women use on TV. She stood, looked at the trophies. She examined a single blue dumbbell. She turned the trophies around so that the plastic gold jocks faced the wall. Tomorrow, she thought, that would be some chilling and hilarious shit; she'd spook the girls by noticing and not knowing who—or what—did that. How creepy. Tiny plastic gold jocks moving on their own, turning to face the breeze block wall. She got back into her sleeping bag and watched the war. It was 4:00 a.m.

The next thing she was in Peppy's car, dark rushing at her. She was still in her pajamas. Peppy's left hand was on the steering wheel, his right on her shoulder, holding on tight.

“Peppy?”

“Shhh, it's OK, sweetknees. Go back to sleep. Everything is OK now.”

“I wasn't asleep.”

But then where had she been?

There was a slow road under them. Lights popped here and there, little gasps out in the blackness, the forest, the hills. Shit. Horror. The car's clock said 6:23 a.m. They were on Route 29, Emily knew that much, every turn and buckle and hill ingrained in her body. And then she registered the speed. Not slow. They were fleeing.

“Where are we going?”

“Home.” Shoulder squeeze. “We're going home.”

“No,” Emily pried Peppy's hand off her shoulder. “No no no no.” She pushed her head into the window. “I don't want to,” she said.
“I don't want to.”

For a month or so, Emily became the girl who'd pretended not to be scared of horror movies and man caves but was, in fact, scared
shitless of both and who knew what else. She'd gotten them all in trouble, especially Alexi.

“Well, you sure freaked my mom out,” Alexi said. “I dunno, she was actually afraid your granddad was going to sue or something. Like, you were going to have to go to the hospital? I heard her talking to my dad. They were convinced that someone had brought drugs to the party, that we had all done some kind of drugs. They said you had taken acid. They'd seen that kind of thing before. Did you take acid?”

“No.”

“Well, my sister can't sleep without the light on now. Least that's what she says. You got her pretty bad, running into her room, screaming and jumping around like that.”

“I must have had a nightmare,” Emily said. Quietly, “I was jumping?”

“I don't know,” Alexi said. “I guess. You were really scared.”

Only one other girl had woken up and seen it. Melissa with the ears, of course, and Melissa told people that Emily had
problems
, swear to God, that Emily needed to see an exorcist is what she freaking needed. Samuel Wiener, an inveterate passer of notes and a kind of obvious homosexual who'd pretended to have had a crush on Emily since elementary school, told Emily that Melissa was going around calling Emily a
psycho
. “Oh, and worse. Telling everyone that she never wants to be alone in a room with you again, just in case you snap. Stuff like that. Don't worry, though, she's just jealous because you have normal ears. I think on some level everything she says is about her ears.” Emily apologized to everyone. They didn't exactly stop hanging out with her at school, but Emily kept her distance from that clique of girls and they seemed happy to let her. She made jokes when it came up, which wasn't so much after a month or two, and Peppy, of course, never mentioned it again, only once, a week later, saying that Alexi's mother had called and spoken with him. She'd called, initially, to say how sorry she was that Alexi had, unbeknownst to her or her husband, snuck
such inappropriately contented DVDs into their house, and that she knew the young man who'd supplied the filth and already had a word with his parents, quite a few words in fact, frankly speaking, and, finally, it was really none of her business but she wanted to say that she knew the name of an excellent child psychologist. If they didn't have one already.