The Key to the Golden Firebird (24 page)

“Yeah…”

Zap. Another bolt of purple light from the bug whacker shot through the room. Another bug moved on to bug heaven. May stared at the microwave clock for a moment until her focus gave and the numbers went fuzzy.

“Who took them to the field?” her mom asked.

“All of us.”

“Didn't someone try to stop you?”

“They tried,” May said. “We ran. We got away.”

She couldn't really blame her mother for looking so surprised. It was still a little hard for May to believe that she'd successfully run away from a group of grown men. Her mom tucked her head between her knees and scrunched her lips together. She looked a little like Palmer when she did this.

“Sometimes I don't know what to do,” she finally said. “I'm not like your dad. He always knew.”

“Knew?”

“He knew how to talk to Brooks and Palmer. I don't. I always felt like I had more in common with you. I was just like you when I was sixteen.”

“Right.” May snorted. “Because I always wear fishnets.”

“I was quiet,” her mom said. “Shy. The hair, the makeup—that was me just pretending I wasn't. It was easy to fake it that way.”

“You were faking it?”

“Sort of,” her mom said, smiling slowly. “I liked some of it. But a lot of it was just trying to fit in. Your dad didn't have to try that hard. He never seemed to be afraid of anything. He was totally comfortable with himself and with everyone else. I liked that. I wished I could be like that. And he knew who I really was, even under all that makeup and stuff. He liked me.”

There was something in her voice that May had never heard before. Her mom wasn't talking like a mom—she was talking like someone with a huge crush. It was the same kind of voice that May heard in her own head when she thought about Pete.

“What you said yesterday,” her mom went on. “You were wrong. Your dad didn't like Brooks or Palmer best. They're a lot like him, so he understood them. But he could never believe that he helped make you. He thought you were amazing. When you got into Girls', he couldn't stop talking about it. He'd tell anybody he met about his May. You were always his May.”

“Why didn't he tell me that?” May said quickly. “He always told Palm and Brooks how great they were.”

Her mother leaned back and thought about this.

“I think,” she said, “that he didn't know how. He tried. He was almost in awe of you, May. You're smart. You're mature. It was almost as if he thought he couldn't keep up with you.”

Having just heard something similar from Pete, May couldn't help but feel ashamed. She couldn't even remember why she'd thought her father hadn't liked her. Now she remembered it all clearly—the way he'd managed to find the money for her school, the fact that she alone had been allowed to have the kitchen table for homework, and even how he'd called her “the professor.” It all made sense now.

There was a noise by the door. May didn't have to turn around to know that Palmer was lurking somewhere in the darkness of the hall. She must have heard them talking. Evidently, her mom knew she was there as well.

“You can come in,” she said.

To May's surprise, Palmer wasn't alone. She had brought Brooks with her. Brooks shot her a look as if to ask,
What's the damage?
May could only shrug.

“There's something I want to know,” her mom said to the three of them. “Why didn't you ask me to come with you?”

The bug zapper claimed another victim in the ensuing silence.

“Wouldn't you have stopped us?” May asked.

“Of course I would have stopped you.”

“That's why,” May replied, puzzled.

Her mom nodded, as if this confirmed something she had been thinking.

“I never knew what to do with the ashes,” she said. “I never believed they were really him. So I just put them away. You did a dumb thing. Something could have happened to you.”

All the control she'd been keeping herself under dissolved all at once as she said that, as if the thought of anything happening to them was more than she could even bear to contemplate.

“You're good girls,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “You know that? You're in a lot of trouble, but God—you're really amazing girls.”

 

The four Gold women slept in the living room together that night, with the air conditioner blasting. May's mother took the sofa, with Palmer splayed out all over the floor by her side. They were the first to fall asleep.

Brooks took the recliner. May claimed a patch of floor by the television and made herself a little nest of blankets and pillows to defend herself against the icy gale that was coming straight at her. She wriggled down into the plaid flannel depths of an old waterproof sleeping bag that she had opened up and wound around herself. The recliner groaned softly as Brooks shifted.

“It's either kill-you hot or kill-you cold,” May whispered. “It's never just right.”

“It's better than sleeping upstairs,” Brooks whispered back.

May heard a tiny chip of ice rattle around before flying loose from one of the AC vents.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” Brooks asked.

“I don't know,” May said, staring up at a moving shadow on the ceiling that was a car passing by. “My schedule's pretty wide open.”

“Mine too.”

Lots more shifting around coming from Brooks's direction. The footrest banged back into starting position.

“You want the chair?” Brooks asked.

“I'm good.”

“I can't sleep here. Can I share those blankets?”

“Sure.”

She made some room in her warm pocket to accommodate Brooks, who managed to completely destroy the careful arrangement May had set up. But Brooks also acted as a human shield against the blast, so temperature-wise things were more or less the same.

“Hey Brooks?” she whispered.

“What?”

“Do I seem different to you?”

“What?”

“More unpredictable? Not as boring?”

“What?” Brooks said again. But this time it was a softer “what?” A “what?” that meant yes to anyone who spoke Brooks.

“Thanks,” May said.

“Go to sleep.” Brooks gave a tug on the blanket.

May took the suggestion and closed her eyes. She knew she would wake up on the living room floor, still grounded and unemployed, with Brooks's hair in her face and no covers at all. But these things didn't seem as bad as they would have even a few hours before.

Within a few minutes, Brooks was snoring in her ear loudly enough to cover the thick, icy coughs of the air conditioner. This didn't bother her either. In fact, it was lulling, reassuring. Her eyes grew heavy. She was right at the point where the real world gets taken over by dreamy haze when she felt a bump as Palmer rolled over and joined them.

Many thanks are due to Leslie Morgenstein, Ben Schrank, Josh Bank, and Claudia Gabel at 17th Street Productions, and Abigail McAden at HarperCollins. They are the reason this book made it to the shelf.

 

Jason Keeley, Karen Quarles, John Vorwald, Joey Sorge, Matt Zimmerman, “the real” Linda Fan, and Chris Blandino provided inspiration and information. The Fasslers provided the starting point. Joseph Rhodes committed an act of kindness simply out of the desire to help a writer.

 

I would be lost without the assistance of my friend and longtime partner in crime, Kate Schafer. And it was Jack Phillips who—among millions of other things—explained to me how to remove corrosive buildup from the nodes of a car battery.

Cover photograph © 2008 by Chad Johnston / Getty Images

Cover design by Amy Ryan