The Queen of Everything (5 page)

"Oh, God, a spider." Melissa shook the sleeve
of her shirt.

"Careful, Melissa." Diane Beene scurried for
the television listings, bent down to let it crawl onto the paper. "Quick, open
the door."

"I can whack it with my shoe," I said. You
should have seen the looks I got.

While they made sure the living being who
shared our earth got safely outside, I went to the small guest bathroom to wash
my hands. Here

42

the walls were ringed with stenciled seashells.
Also, there were little seashell soaps and folded seashell towels that you
weren't supposed to really use, and small seashell books you weren't supposed to
really read.

"You didn't cut that off a live tree, did you,
Diane?" I yelled to her over the running water. I pulled my shirt out of my
jeans, dried my hands on the tail, and rejoined her, Melissa, and the
branch.

"Oh, my God," she said. "Oh, my God." She
sounded just like Melissa. She put her hand to her head like she couldn't
believe what her brain had done without her permission. "Do you think people
will think that? I found it on the ground. I swear."

"It was
my
first thought," I
said.

Diane sat down. "I'm going to have to
reconsider this," she said.

"It's fine, Mom," Melissa said. "No one's gonna
think that. Jordan hardly represents the entire population." She scowled at
me.

"I don't know," Mrs. Beene said.

"Trust me," Melissa said. When she pulled me
upstairs to her room, she said, "Real nice, Jordan."

"What?" I said.

"She was excited about that stupid branch.
Sometimes you just don't think enough about other people."

43

Another day, when Kale Kramer hadn't just given
me his hat, she would have laughed. It wasn't true, anyway. According to my
mother, I thought about other people too much. "Someday you've got to figure out
how to belong to yourself," she always said, which sounded like more of that
seventies "Find Yourself" nonsense she was so fond of. The idea of having to
find yourself always cracked me up. How exactly would this work? You wander away
from yourself one day, end up roaming around some small town, until you finally
pull up alongside yourself and say,
Hey Jordan, glad I found you. What the
heck are you doing here?

"I'll go down and tell her I love her branch,"
I said.

"Seriously," Melissa said.

A loud, angry voice doing a bad Texas accent,
muffled only slightly by the bedroom wall, stopped all conversation about my
behavior. "God, I hate him. Just ignore him," Melissa said.

"What's he doing?"

"He's been calling radio shows. That dumb-ass
Peppy Johnson your father likes."

I put my ear to the wall. "All you are is a
yellow-bellied snake if you think that cow dung ain't a vi-able natural
re-source." Pause. "Why, you can make clo-thing outta cow patties. You should
see the shirt I got on."

"You don't want to listen," she
said.

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But I did. I kept my ear to the wall. I liked
Jackson's sense of humor. Melissa let out an exasperated yell, stomped out of
her room, and began to pound on Jackson's door. "Would you shut the hell up in
there?"

I scooted off the bed and poked my head around
the corner. Veins were practically snapping from Melissa's neck. The voice
quieted, then stopped. I could hear the clunking of a phone being settled into
its receiver. The door opened a crack, and Jackson's head popped out.

"Evening," he drawled.

He smiled at me. I smiled back. There was
always something about the way Jackson looked at me that made me feel like he
really knew who I was. I didn't know the Beene family very well before Jackson's
accident, as I had just moved in with Dad about then, but according to Melissa,
Jackson used to be "normal looking." I was glad he wasn't normal looking
anymore. His hair was a straggle of colors, dark with dyed streaks of blond. He
was unshaven and rumpled; his eyes looked as if he hadn't slept in a while. At
least they had that red-rimmed intensity you get when you've stayed up late and
talked about things that matter.

"Goddamn it, you freak--" Melissa began, but
Jackson had already shut the door. I could hear him moving about in his room,
and I wondered what he was doing. I'd never been inside

45

his room before--the door was usually shut---
and right then I had the strange urge to see what it was like.

Melissa had given up. "My mother told him if he
wasn't going to go to college he had to get a job or move out, so at least he
won't be around much after next week. He's getting his own apartment at the end
of the summer. Got it picked out and everything, but hey, as long as it's far
away from me. Can you believe the Hotel Delgado hired him? As a
waiter,
as if you want him touching your food. How desperate can you get? I swear, I'd
like to get him back out on that mountain and give him a second chance at
getting lost."

I didn't say anything. I didn't want to get in
trouble with her again by pointing out what I've noticed--that the people who
use those expressions like
I Swear
and
Over My Dead Body
are
usually weenies who, past their moment of bravery, crumple at a barking dog.
Real tough guys don't swear, they just do.

Finally I said, "Let's get out Kale Kramer's
hat. We can try it on and make fun of ourselves."

"Are you
kidding?"
she said. You'd have
thought I suggested snatching that little shoulder pad the pope wears on his
head and dancing naked with it on. So instead we just talked about Kale Kramer
for a while, and then Diane called

46

up the stairs asking Melissa to help her drag
the branch back outside until she could discuss the matter with Larry. I sat in
Melissa's room, looked at last year's yearbook, and read the message she didn't
want me to read from Andrew Houseman, which was no big deal except for the fact
he said she was real sweet, which is the same thing he wrote in mine.

Bored, I peeked out into the hallway. Jackson's
door was half open, and he seemed to be gone. I pushed open the door with my
fingertips. I could hear Melissa and Diane and the bang of the screen door as
they struggled to get the branch outside. I went into Jackson's room.

It smelled like a guy's room, if such a thing
is possible. At least, it smelled different than my room or Melissa's--thick
somehow, steamy. The room had managed to escape Diane's decorating, and so it
looked like a real person actually lived there. On the floor, a pair of Jockeys
had found their soul mate, a white undershirt, and the two of them were rolled
together in an intimate ball. The desktop held a scattering of sheet music and
scrawled notes on paper scraps, a book tided
Poets Of The United Kingdom,
a tube of ChapStick, and a chain necklace with a slender silver vial that
Jackson usually wore around his neck. Three shelves above the desk held more
books, a jar of pennies, and high school soccer trophies. It seemed funny now to
think of Jackson playing an

47

organized sport on a high school team, and he
must have thought so too: the golden heads of several of the frozen players now
sported odd items like a wad of gum and a tiny knit cap that made the player
look ready for winter despite his stiff golden shorts. One player had a man's
ring dangling from its forever-kicking foot, like it was a halo that had fallen
and was about to be flicked back up into place.

I crouched down by the phone and lifted it from
its receiver. Where he had held it near his face it smelled like soap. I
listened to the dull tone for a minute, then hung up. A floppy phone book was on
the floor beside the phone, covered with ink doodlings of trees and plants that
looked like part of a child's book of fairy tales. Jackson was a good artist. I
stood again. A half-drunk cup of coffee on the floor by the rumpled bed made me
think for a moment of Ms. Cassaday and her desk full of cups.

I heard Melissa and Diane bang back inside,
their voices becoming loud and clear again. In a moment Melissa would come
thunking back up the stairs, and I sure as hell didn't want her to catch me in
there.

But in the corner of the room near the window,
I noticed the bagpipes. They were set down carefully on a chair; the case with
indented felt compartments that usually held its pieces lay open underneath.
With its leathery stomachlike

48

bag and jangle of tubes it looked like a
skeleton of some huge prehistoric spider. I wanted to hold it. I lifted the
contraption off the chair, and the pipes clicked together noisily. I was trying
to figure out how to manage its awkwardness, when my slow brain finally
registered what it had just seen outside of Jackson's window.

There were no trees to block my vision; there
was a clear view of Crow Valley, the several miles of flat, grassy acreage
behind our planned neighborhood. From where I stood, I saw Little Cranberry Farm
and Osprey Inn, a bed and breakfast that competed with Mom's. I could see part
of the Horseshoe Highway, the main inner island road that connected with
Deception Loop, the main outer road.

All of this I would have expected to see. What
I didn't expect to see, with such sharp clarity, was the faux Tudor D'Angelo
home. From Jackson's second-story window the adjacent airstrip was a long gash
in the land. The driveway was nearly as long and certainly roomy enough for the
blue Ford Taurus parked there.

I wondered what Dad's car was doing at the
D'Angelo house.

I stood at the window, my mind helpfully
supplying the vision of Mrs. D'Angelo the day she'd come into True You, a visit
I'd forgotten about since. I remembered her cool hand stretched out, her voice
like a melted caramel: "I

49

can't believe meeting you like this. I think
your father is wonderful."

But, God, it wasn't like he was the only one
around who drove that kind of car. It was stupid to think it was his, and why
would it be? My morning with him had gotten me off balance, was all.

Still, I had a feeling the car was my father's.
Even though I couldn't see the flat Christmas tree hanging from the rearview
mirror, the one that stank worse than any natural car-smell could. Even though I
couldn't see the metal box of Altoids Dad always kept in the half-open ashtray
or the dent in the right passenger door, from when I accidentally ran into a
shopping cart in the Johnny's Market parking lot the day after I got my license.
It was one of those knowings you have with people who you're close to-- the way
you can tell their car is about to come down the street, or that they are on the
other end of the phone you haven't yet picked up. The way you might know their
blue knit hat among a hundred others just the same. I'm sure if you asked that
prune Cora Lee at the Theosophical Society, she'd have something to say about
it, this knowing. Something laughable, no doubt, about energy and crap that
would make you forget what you knew was true.

"Jordan!"

Melissa stood in the doorway of Jackson's room,
holding Boog in her arms. Poor old Boog.

50

If the Beenes didn't think to carry him around,
he'd probably never move from the rectangle of linoleum in front of his food
dish. He was round and fat as a bratwurst and about as smart as one,
too.

"What are you doing in here?" Melissa shrieked.
Boog looked alarmed too.

"I was just going to the bathroom, and then I
saw ... I thought I saw my father's car," I said. I hooked my thumb at the
window.

"Oh,
right.
And that's why you're
holding my psycho brother's bagpipes. Right. I get it. Why you are here in his
room." Room,
said like it was something worse. Bed, maybe.

I set the bagpipes down. "Oh, I'm sure," I said
to what she was implying. Guilt was doing that creeping trick, starting at the
toes.

"I don't understand you, Jordan," she said. I
followed her back to her room, where she plopped Boog down on the bed. He would
stay there, no doubt, until someone remembered to move him again. That dog was
doomed to be forever stuck where other people put him. "I mean, since, you know,
Kale,
you've been acting really weird. Is this going to change you? If it
is, I swear, you'd better tell me right now."

"Nothing's going to change," I said. Which are
about the stupidest four words in the English language.

"Fine," she said. She seemed reluctant
to

51

take her argument further. What did she think,
that I was about to dump her? Leave her behind with Chantay West as I went off
into the wide world of men?

"I think your brother's totally strange," I
said.

She looked relieved. "Kale probably likes you
because you're hard to get. And because you're in that
gifted
class
together."

This was something that bugged her to no end,
my being in that class. "People don't realize," she always said, "that there are
school smarts and life smarts."