The List of Things That Will Not Change Read online

  I knew where to put it. I had known that all along.

  * * *

  —

  The Thursday before the wedding, when I couldn’t stand it one more minute, I asked Miriam if it was possible that Angelica’s face was temporarily paralyzed because she fell off the loft last summer.

  “I don’t know exactly which way she landed,” I told Miriam, “but her head missed the woodstove by four inches.”

  Miriam blinked.

  “Shouldn’t you be writing this down?” I jabbed a finger at her notebook.

  “Why, Bea? Is this important?”

  I just looked at her.

  She leaned forward. “We’ve talked about Angelica’s fall. And we’ve talked about the fact that it’s unlikely that her illness had anything to do with last summer. It was probably caused by a virus. And she’s better now, right?”

  “Yeah. So far.”

  “So far?” Miriam put her notebook down on the coffee table next to the gummy-bear jar. “Bea, do you think there’s something else about last summer that we should talk about?”

  “Yes,” I said. Now we were both leaning forward, I noticed. We stayed like that until she said, “Bea, it looks like you’re feeling sad.”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

  “Do you want to tell me what happened last summer?”

  “Yes,” I said. And then, for the first time ever, I cried in Miriam’s office.

  I pushed my cousin Angelica off the loft at our summer cabin. Uncle Frank says her head missed the woodstove by four inches.

  Every August, we opened up the lake cabin together—me, Dad, Uncle Frank and Aunt Ess, and my cousins: James, Angelica, and Jojo. There was a smell that always rushed at me when we shoved the door open: wet bathing suit plus bug spray. But it was a good smell.

  The sleeping loft was just a high-up platform, barely big enough for three sleeping bags. We slept with our feet pointing toward the edge so that no one rolled off: Jojo’s place was right at the top of the ladder, I was in the middle, and Angelica was against the far wall. If she came up last, she could either step over us to get to her sleeping bag or she could go along the little bit of space between our feet and the edge. That’s what she was doing when I pushed her.

  Everyone thinks it would be natural for me and Angelica to be close. But nothing between me and Angelica ever felt too natural.

  That summer, Mom and Dad had been divorced for two years already, but Dad never invited Jesse to Minnesota. And nobody ever talked about my mom.

  We were all sprawled on the tiny beach next to our dock one afternoon—me, Angelica, James, Jojo, a boy from cabin 5, and two sisters from cabin 11. We had spent the morning in the water, swamping the boats and then putting them right side up again, until we were tired. Now we were stretched out on our towels, sharing suntan lotion and gum.

  James stood up and threw one of our beach balls into the water, where we watched it float past the end of our dock and head toward the middle of the lake. Usually if you threw a ball into the lake, it would float straight back to the beach, but there must have been a wind blowing the other way, because it kept moving away from us.

  “You’re gonna have to go get that,” I told James.

  “I am not,” James said.

  “I’ll tell your dad,” I said.

  He ignored me. The sisters from cabin 11 had been teaching us a game where we had to clap out a rhythm and take turns singing rhymes. If someone missed a beat, they lost, and the round was over. So far, Jojo had lost twice.

  One cabin 11 girl clapped and sang, “Hey, hey, my name is Joe, and my butt is bigger than Mexico.”

  Picking it up, Angelica clapped and sang, “Hey, hey, my name is Bill, and my butt is bigger than Hamburger Hill.”

  Jojo’s turn. “Hey, hey, my name is Paul, and my butt is bigger than St. Paul.” She was a syllable short, but everyone let it go.

  Then it was my turn. “Hey, hey, my name is May—”

  Without missing a beat, James shouted over the rest of my line, “AND MY BUTT’S NOT BIG, BUT MY DADDY’S GAY!”

  The girls from cabin 11 laughed loud and quick, like they were getting it out of the way. I looked at them hard.

  No one started a new rhyme. James didn’t look at me—he got up and started chucking pebbles at the water. Angelica was watching herself wiggle her toes. She’d gotten Jojo to paint her toenails the night before. Pink.

  I stood up and walked away, up the long dirt path to our porch, where Aunt Ess poured me a lemonade. Aunt Ess almost never came down to the beach. She and Uncle Frank mostly liked to sit in the big chairs facing the water, and if you stood in the wrong place, Uncle Frank would say, “You’re in my sun,” and that meant move.

  I didn’t tell on James. The truth is that my cousins love my dad especially. Dad was the only grown-up who came back from the store with kites for everyone, or a stack of Hershey bars so we could make double-stuffed s’mores. I didn’t know what would happen if I told Dad what James had said, and even though I never sat down and explained it to myself, that was why I didn’t tell. I didn’t want anything to change.

  Instead, I drank my lemonade and I scratched. Dad wasn’t there to stop me. I had stupidly put on the smelly suntan lotion that the cabin 11 girls had shared at the beach. I’d wanted to slap it all over my arms and legs like Angelica and Jojo did, and say how good it smelled. Coconut.

  “Itchy?”

  I had forgotten that Uncle Frank was even there.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I used to wear gloves to bed,” he said. “Your dad ever tell you about that?”

  “Yeah.” Dad said that when Uncle Frank was a little kid, his eczema was so bad their mom made him wear cotton gloves at night so he wouldn’t scratch.

  “I hated those gloves,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you just take them off?” I said.

  “Oh, I did. Our secret. Shh.” He closed his eyes.

  I sat on the porch and scratched, and I watched James swim out to get that ball.

  The day after I decided not to tell Dad what James said, I woke up with itchy bumps from that stupid cabin 11 suntan lotion. I had bumps on my arms and my neck and my back, and Dad said I couldn’t swim or even wear my bathing suit for a whole day.

  I asked Angelica if she wanted to row over to the general store, and she said nah. I asked her if she wanted to take a bike ride, and she said the girls from cabin 11 had asked her to go swimming.

  They hardly swam at all, though. I could see them from our porch, where I was stuck making stretchy-band pot holders with Jojo. Angelica and the girls were lying on their towels practically all day, putting on more and more of that smelly lotion.

  Then Angelica invited the girls from cabin 11 to stay for dinner, and one of them sat in my regular chair. Dinner was bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches and corn on the cob, which made me think about Natalie the pig. The summer before, I had visited Natalie in her pen behind the general store, and now she was bacon.

  My stomach itched.

  Aunt Ess was sitting next to me. That was another thing; I had ended up on the grown-up end of the table. Aunt Ess kept saying, “Mmm, nothing like bits and coin!” Everyone in our family calls that dinner “bits and coin” because that’s what James called it when he was little. BLTs and corn is his official favorite dinner, and this was the second time in ten days that we were having it.

  Seven people eating bacon, two times, plus two guests, equals sixteen servings of bacon. James basically killed Natalie.

  I glared down the table at him, but he wasn’t looking.

  * * *

  —

  Miriam says that sometimes, when we don’t want to “look hard at our behavior,” we look hard at everything else instead, and that was probably why I was telling her all about bits and co
in and Natalie the pig. Because what happened at dinner was that Angelica had a long, long stutter.

  She got stuck on the first W:

  “W-w-w-”

  Her face was red from lying in the sun all day, but now she got really red, I think especially because those girls were there.

  “W-w-w-”

  Aunt Ess smiled at her and said, “Try another word, sweetie.”

  That’s when I said, “Wh-wh-wh-what if she doesn’t know any other words?”

  Everyone looked at me like I had just kicked a kitten. Dad reached across, took my plate, and said, “Bea, leave the table. Now.”

  Angelica burst into tears.

  “Burst into tears” is what people say. Usually they just mean that the person started crying. But “burst into tears” always makes me see a story in my head, like a really short cartoon: a person goes “poof” into a cloud of tears, and then the tears fall on the floor and make a puddle, and the person is gone. That’s almost what happened with Angelica. She started crying, knocked over her water, and ran out to the porch. Aunt Ess and Jojo both ran after her.

  I left the table and climbed up to my sleeping bag, feeling seasick and thinking about how I was the only kid at the table with no brother and no sister, the only one whose mother was nowhere near Minnesota. Did anyone ever think about that? And, I thought, that’s worse than a stutter, which everyone knows you can just outgrow.

  * * *

  —

  After it rains at the lake, it’s really quiet. And then the birds start calling out—first it’s just one bird talking, then two or three, and then suddenly they’re all calling back and forth and up and down, in their different voices.

  It was like that at the cabin after the horrible bits and coin dinner. First no one talked, and then Aunt Ess said something and someone answered, and then James got the Boggle game and shook it and yelled, “Who’s playing?” And after that it almost sounded like normal.

  I listened from the loft until Dad came up.

  What a feeling feels like: When my mom is mad at me, my stomach hurts like a mouse is hitting it from the inside with a mouse-sized hammer. When my dad is mad at me, it’s the same thing, except there are ten mice and ten little hammers.

  It took him a long time to come. He sat on the very edge of the loft next to my sleeping bag and said, “It’s dark up here. Don’t you want to turn on your light?” Each of us had one of those battery lanterns near our pillows. But I shook my head. I didn’t want to see his face, and I didn’t want him to see mine.

  He rubbed the tops of his legs and said, “Sorry I left you here so long. I was seeing red for a while.”

  “Seeing red” means your feelings are so worked up that you can’t think straight.

  “I don’t care,” I told Dad. “I like it up here. It’s better than being down there with a lot of jerks.” And then I burst into tears. Except when it was over, I was still there.

  Dad put his hand on my hair. “Bea. Did something happen?”

  I didn’t tell him. Not about Angelica hurting my feelings all day, and not about what James said, either.

  Angelica and I ignored each other in the loft that night.

  The next morning, I apologized to Angelica at the breakfast table with everyone there, which Dad said I had to do. A family apology, he said. At least the girls from cabin 11 weren’t there. Dad and I had figured out the words together:

  “Angelica, I’m very sorry for what I said at dinner last night. It was hurtful and wrong, and it won’t happen again.”

  Dad said I should look at her when I talked, but mostly I looked at the butter. I wanted full credit, though, so at the very last second, I glanced at her. She looked mad.

  “Whatever,” she said.

  Then Aunt Ess made her say that she accepted my apology, which I think was almost as bad for her as it was for me to say sorry in the first place, because after she accepted my apology, Angelica looked furious.

  Fine. I was furious, too. Was she even thinking about the fact that I hadn’t said anything about James? Or about how I felt when she didn’t invite me to lie on towels yesterday? I was holding it in, and it took everything I had. It took more than I had.

  After I apologized, I got busy buttering my bread, while Dad tried to convince Uncle Frank to try some bacon-and-onion omelet. Uncle Frank said he’d stick with his boiled egg. When I put the butter knife down, Aunt Ess silently pushed the sugar bowl toward me. We both like to sprinkle a little bit on top.

  Mom has a saying: “And then worse met worst.” That day at the lake was the worst. The girls from cabin 11 showed up right after I finished my sugar bread. We were getting our suits on. Angelica grabbed one girl with each hand, led them into her parents’ bedroom, and shut the door on me. Uncle Frank and Aunt Ess were already out on the porch, in their chairs.

  Friday morning was when Angelica and I always took the canoe to get Uncle Frank’s newspapers at the general store. Every Friday. I waited around by the top of the porch steps for Angelica to come out. I tried to stay out of Uncle Frank’s sun, and I waited, watching the door of Aunt Ess and Uncle Frank’s room. My back was to the lake, which was why I almost missed seeing Angelica and the girls from cabin 11 get into our canoe and push off without me. They must have taken the deck stairs on the other side of the house, which no one did, ever. They sneaked out without me, on purpose.

  I walked down to our beach and watched the canoe go around some trees and disappear. For a while, I could still hear them talking and whooping it up, and then I couldn’t. I took a pointy rock and scratched my itchy arms, and then I walked into the water, but only to my ankles because I didn’t have a swim buddy. I skipped about fifty rocks. On rock fifty-one-ish, James came up behind me and said, “You didn’t go? I thought you love the waterslide.”

  And that’s when I realized that Angelica and the girls from cabin 11 hadn’t gone to get Uncle Frank’s papers. They had gone to the waterslide.

  I sat on our beach all morning, getting hotter and itchier. I went up to the house for my lunch and didn’t say a word to anyone and no one even noticed. In the afternoon, I read on top of my sleeping bag in the hot loft, fell asleep by accident, and woke up feeling even worse than the worst. I climbed down and went out to the porch, where Dad and Uncle Frank were playing backgammon. I could see our canoe tied up at the dock, but Angelica had not come home.

  “Who brought the canoe back?” I asked Dad. He told me that after lunch, he and Aunt Ess had driven over the bridge together, and then Ess had paddled the canoe home. The mother of the girls from cabin 11 had picked them up at the waterslide and taken them and Angelica to the arcade.

  I pretended not to care.

  Dad asked me if I felt like swimming.

  I said, “Those girls aren’t coming for dinner again, are they?”

  Dad said he thought they were stopping for burgers on the way home.

  That meant they were going to Burger Base.

  Burger Base was on the other side of the lake, and it reminded me of Mom. (It still does.) Mom loves their onion rings. She used to say that a burger with onion rings and a Dr Pepper from Burger Base was “the perfect all-brown meal.”

  At bedtime, Angelica still wasn’t home. Next door to Burger Base, there are go-karts, and I lay on top of my sleeping bag just knowing that she was there, driving around in circles. I loved the go-karts way more than Angelica did. She always complained about the gas smell.

  By the time Angelica came back to the cabin, I was about as far from sleep as I have ever been. I felt cold. My whole body, even my skin, was listening for her. When the door finally opened, it was like a gun going off.

  I heard her drop her stuff on the floor, probably a bag full of Skee-Ball prizes and candy wrappers. And then she started up the ladder.

  I cried a lot, so it took a while to tell Miriam t
he whole story. But finally, I finished: “She was crawling across the edge, to her sleeping bag, and she put her knee down on top of my foot, and I kind of—kicked. And she went off the side.”

  Miriam’s expression didn’t change.

  “It’s horrible,” I told her. “I’m horrible. But I pretend I’m not!”

  “Bea, you did something hurtful. But you are not horrible.”

  “What’s the difference?” I cried.

  “Everything you just told me makes a difference. Everything we have talked about in all the hours we’ve spent together makes a difference. Bea, I know you. You are not a bad person. You are a wonderful person.”

  “But I feel so bad. It’s like I’m—infected.”

  She held up two fingers like a peace sign. “Two things. First thing: yes, you were angry and you hurt Angelica. Second thing: you are allowed to make mistakes. Are you hearing me? You are allowed to make mistakes. And to be forgiven.”

  Lizette had forgiven me for taking her root beer.

  Angus had forgiven me for pushing him off that chair at Carrie’s party.

  Sheila had forgiven me for sending Mission the wedding invitation.

  Even Carolyn Shattuck had forgiven me for hitting her on the nose.

  “Everyone forgives me,” I told Miriam.