Wicked Sweet (6 page)

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Authors: Mar'ce Merrell

BOOK: Wicked Sweet
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Competition
.
I
f there is one thing I am not, it’s a girl like Annelise. I’m not going to ditz around with the whole how-much-do-you-like-me cutesy talk. I’m not going to write his name on the inside of my notebooks. I’m not going to imagine getting married in the first month that we’re going out. I am definitely not, ever, going to give him my locker combination so that he can store his things in my locker. That is only one step below letting him keep his toothbrush in your bathroom! And, although I’ve never had a conversation with a guy about his intentions, I’m not above imagining it. After all, with a mother like mine plus the imminent departure of Dad 3, I am the only one who will be looking out for my virginity.
I get out of the car before he can slide over the stick shift and kiss away my resolve to figure him out. He follows my lead and we lean against the trunk drinking our bottles of water. I wonder if he’s calculating his next move. I wonder which one of us will speak next, what we’ll say, how I can determine if Parker is playing me. Normally I am stuck trying to negotiate around six brothers, or preparing to score points in a debate. Both skills, Chantal says, require serious strategic thinking. And thinking is one of the things I do best. That, and running.
“Let’s race.” I set my empty water bottle on the hood of the car.
“Race? As in run?”
“Yeah. To the first pine tree and back.” I point to where we left the road to drive onto the flats.
“You’re serious?” He tightens his shoelaces, untucks his shirt from his jeans. “What does the winner get?” He grins.
“The winner gets … to decide that when she wins.” I stretch into a lunge.
“Winner’s choice?” Parker jogs in place. “Okay. Hey. I’ll spot you three seconds. I’m on the track team, you know.”
“I don’t need a head start.”
We yell, “Ready. Set. Go!” and within a few seconds I’m behind by at least five strides. The distance increases by half before the turn at the pine tree. Parker slips going around the tree, though, and ends in a face plant. I jump over him and keep running.
“You okay?” I yell back. A second later I hear footsteps through the weeds and I know he’s out to win. Unfortunately, the race isn’t long enough for him to gain back the distance. I slap the car a second before he reaches it.
“If I hadn’t fallen, I’d have beat you,” he gasps.
“Oh, so that’s how you play.” I walk off the trembling in my legs. “A race isn’t only about who is fastest. There’s strategy, like knowing you have to slow down or risk falling at the turn.”
“Point taken. You beat me on strategy and I beat you on speed.”
I remind him that the race rules were straightforward: first one to the car wins.
“Okay. Okay.” He holds up his hands. “You won. So,
winner,
what do you want?”
“Hmm …” I close my eyes as if I’m trying to decide what to choose, but I already know. “You have to answer one question. Total truth.”
“Um …” Parker wipes the sweat off his upper lip with the edge of his T-shirt. Flashes me his abs. I think about changing what I want for my prize.
“It won’t be too personal. I promise.”
“All right. All right.”
“Are you and Annelise finished?” I see the look of confusion on Parker’s face and I almost regret asking. “I … um … I need to know.” A good debater knows when to stay silent. If I offered my points, I’d reveal the one that embarrasses me most. My mother always seems to “overlap” boyfriends. I don’t want to be the overlapped girl.
He takes a step closer and I lift my chin to look in his eyes. “I’ve changed my status—I am in no way dating Annelise. We don’t talk on the phone and we don’t text each other.” Oh how I’ve always wanted this moment. It would be perfect if he’d reach his hand up and cradle my face and lean down and …
“You look like you need more water.”
Was I that obviously hot?
Parker takes his time opening the trunk, pulling out two bottles of water, handing me one, going back to close the trunk.
“Okay,
winner.
Any more questions?” This feels so comfortable, so right. I think I could ask him anything.
“Well … no … okay … maybe one. What’s up with Will? Is he really interested in Chantal?”
“Uh …” He fumbles the cap of his water bottle. Between long drinks, he answers my question. “It’s … okay. We’re best friends. Will and me. We do things together. And I … I …
picked you
… as the girl I wanted to go out with. And of course, Chantal is your best friend. And Will is mine. So that made sense.” He nods that he’s finished, but I don’t say anything. “Does that answer your question?”
Let’s face it. I stopped listening to everything past the words, “I picked you.” The prince at the ball asked me to dance. I take a deep breath. If only he would kiss me. Right now. I wait. And wait.
“Hey, are you finished with that?” He points at my unopened water bottle. “It’s getting dark. I guess we’d better get back.”
And the spell breaks, a little. I become myself again, a girl on a first date with a guy who
picked
her. Total truth.
Parker drives with the sunroof open and the radio low enough that we talk over it. Suddenly we have everything to talk about, school and friends and I even tell him stories about my brothers. Over ice cream he tells me he knows all about brothers. His big brothers liked to play Mafia and since he was the youngest, they ordered him around and when they got bored, they iced him. This is, strangely, so romantic; me wanting my ice cream to stop melting while he tells me stories from when he was little. We don’t leave the ice cream place until the stars are out.
When we pull up in front of my driveway, I’m relieved the house is dark and no one will witness a kiss. And at the moment I think that is exactly what’s about to happen, Parker says, “You know what would have been the prize if I’d won the race?”
I swallow, and try to avoid showing fear.
“A second date with you.”
I bite my bottom lip.
“Can I call you?”
“Sure.” I manage to squeak out.
“Mia’s party. Okay? I really think we should try to get Chantal and Will together, don’t you? I mean it’s time for them to uh … bury the hatchet.”
“I’ll talk to her.” Before I die inside from all the building tension in every private part of my body, I reach for the door handle. There will be time for a kiss at Mia’s party. Now it seems like it’s destined.
Blackout
.
I
didn’t leave. I am not a mean babysitter and I’m not a negligent one, at least I didn’t intend to be negligent. I should have known to check on the boys. I know them. They don’t find trouble. They define trouble.
Once I discovered the waterfall, I took Ollie upstairs and put him in his crib. He cried. Of course. I turned the water off and pulled every towel from the linen closet, dropped them on the river. I couldn’t find clean pajamas for the Double Minor so I stuck them in matching T-shirts and diapers. They ripped them off. I forgot how they hate to match.
“Okay,” I said through my gritted teeth. “Then go to bed naked.”
Ollie screamed.
I became overwhelmed, frustrated. Actually, I was furious.
Before I could count to ten, my words morphed into weapons, and I became the person I am not. I screamed at the Hat Trick, told them I was going to tell Jillian, their mother, and Dad 3 how awful they’d been.
“It was an accident,” Trevor yelled through the door. “We’re sorry.”
When Stevie and Josh heard my footsteps stop at their doorway, their shadows shivered. I waited to make sure they wouldn’t be getting out of their beds, either. Ollie pulled himself up when he
saw me, gripped the crib bars. Snot ran from his nose. I gathered an armful of stuffed toys off the floor and dropped them in his crib. “I’ll be right back. Stop. Crying.”
My T-shirt got soaked from carrying the wet towels down to the basement. I’d never done laundry. I turned the dial a few times. Pushed it in. Pulled it out. Finally something happened. The machine started making noise.
In the kitchen I found dishcloths that sank to the bottom of the lake and I gave up. The water cleanup would have to wait for the towels to dry. My rage began to evaporate as I walked up the stairs to the boys’ bedrooms. Guilt flooded in when I checked on the sleeping Hat Trick and Double Minor. Just little kids. Acting like kids. At Ollie’s door, I decided I would forgive them all by morning. Then, the lights snapped off.
Ollie screamed, and I rushed to get him before he woke the other boys. I unpeeled his gripped fingers from the rail, and lifted him out. I tried to keep his snot out of my hair. Out the window, I realized the other houses had light. Jillian’s was the only one that had lost power. When I was sleeping over a month ago and the lights went out Dad 3 said it was a blown breaker. “Too many demands on the system.” He said it was simple to fix; throw the switch in the breaker box, in the basement. I didn’t know how to do it, but I had to do something. I told Jillian I could handle this.
“It’s okay, Ollie. It’s okay.” My legs shook as I leaned against the wall on my way down the stairs. Shock. I was in shock. I shoved action figures and plastic blocks off the couch, sat on the middle cushion. Ollie buried his face in the curve of my neck. I’d given up on the snot, smeared from my collar to my earlobe. His breath began to soothe my splintered nerves and I tried to match his breathing. In. Out. In. Out. Until I was calm enough to think. Evaluate.
Everything I know about real families, about yelling and screaming, and mistakes that are quickly forgotten—everything I know about
blending in with the rest of humanity—I’ve learned at Jillian’s house. I can’t handle it all the time or for very long, but I get the best of both worlds with Jillian.
My mother is a perfectionist and my house is a petri dish for my future success.
It’s no wonder that I got frazzled, that I yelled, that I fell apart. It’s what I do now that matters, I tell myself. But I can adapt. I can make things better.
First things first, though. I thought I saw a package of mini-cupcakes in Jillian’s fridge. A bit of chocolate cake would settle my nerves.
Home
.
I
tiptoe into a dark house on princess toes, knowing exactly how Cinderella felt. I slip off my muddy shoes, reach for the light switch, stop. I imagine what his kiss would have been like, the soft lips and the slightest scratch from his facial hair.
Oh.
A rush of
I want
warms me.
“Jillian?”
“Chantal?” I snap back to the real world. A light beam shines from the top of the basement stairs. “What’s going on?”
“Unnatural disaster.” The headlamp she’s wearing is mine, bought for our camping trip last summer. I thought it was buried in one of the hall closets.
“The breaker went?”
“After the flood.” She nods. “And every time the machine gets going too fast. I was about to go down and throw it again.”
“Huh?” I’m stunned. I follow Chantal down the basement stairs, over to the breaker box. She stands on a step stool and throws the switch.
“
Voilà! Lumiere!
”
Now that the light is on, I see Chantal’s splotchy red cheeks and wide pupils, the T-shirt that’s stretched and dirty, and the wild hair scrunched like a muffin top by the headlamp elastic. “What have you
been doing? Where are the boys?” I press my hand against her forehead. No fever. But she looks … I’m going to have to help her.
“You’re not going to believe it, Jillian. I am almost too good to be true.” She tells me the evening’s events starting with a frenzy of cookie eating, through to the flood, and her meltdown.
“Oh, Chantal. I’m so sorry.” And if Will doesn’t go for Chantal, where does that leave me? On the curb. Annelise will be drinking the other bottle of water.
“No. No. It’s okay. Because I was sitting there, doing my times tables in my head and then, it came to me. I could fix this.”
“You could fix what …” All of this seems so unimportant. My real life must be outside all of
this
; this house, my family, even school. My real life doesn’t belong here. At least I don’t think it does. If only I can convince Chantal we fit in somewhere else.
I follow her up the stairs and she begins the tour of how she’s washed the main floor (the result of sopping up a lake of water) and, what’s more, gone on to improve upon my system of shoving everything in closets by sorting the toys into piles of Trash Now, Trash Later, or Probably Trash Later. Plastic garbage bags wait by each pile.
“And Jillian …” she continues. “Before the power went out I was on the Internet and I downloaded the application for
Extreme Home Organizer.
You totally need to do this. I mean really, a set of triplets, a set of twins, and a baby, and they’re all boys! If they pick you they send you off to Disneyland while they clean and organize your house for you.”
“We can’t go on a reality TV show. If my mother saw how pitiful we were on TV, she’d move away and I’d have to raise the boys by myself. Seriously.” I sit at the kitchen counter, spotlessly clean, and wonder what I’m going to do now. My best friend has gone crazy.
“Okay, we can rule out the TV show. But, Jillian, this is totally something we can do ourselves. Organize your house.
This
can be our summer project. We can do the toys tonight and—”
I groan. “Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.” I pull the headlamp off her head. I may have to call her dad for an intervention.
She smiles. “Gotcha!”
I miss a complete heartbeat before I catch on. “Chantal. I was beginning to believe …”
“I know. Scary, huh? I thought you were going to figure it out. There’s no show called
Extreme Home Organizer.
”
“But the flood? And the power blackout?” She nods and tells me the order of tasks to come. We need to bag up the toys and label the bags and we’ve got a couple loads of towels to fold and put away. As she’s telling me all this I can’t help but wonder if she’s becoming her mother—a woman who seems to think purpose equals endless productivity. “But you didn’t have to do all this. You could have left it for me. It was enough that you babysat.”
“I had to fix it, Jillian. I imagined what it would be like for you to come home and find the disaster.”
I don’t know what to say because I feel strange. I’m not sure I want to team up to fix what really is my mother’s problem. Shouldn’t we be sitting at the kitchen counter polishing off the rest of the cupcakes? Yet, as Chantal starts bagging the toys into garbage bags I fold towels.
I’m definitely thankful that she cares, but she hasn’t even asked about Parker.

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