Chapter FOUR
April pressed the lock button on her bedroom door as gently as she could, hoping the telltale click wouldn’t echo in the hallway like a cannon and alert her mother to come running up the stairs and start pounding on the door, asking why this door was locked and saying, We don’t lock doors in this house and People who don’t have anything to hide don’t lock their doors and What are you doing in there, young lady? and on and on. And on. Living in this house meant having your every move monitored, like on reality TV—only instead of a bunch of cute guys, there was only her mother.
She opened her laptop and keyed in her password to access her list files, which she kept in her algebra folder in case unwelcome visitors—such as her math- averse mother—nosed around. April used to think there was such a thing as privacy, certain rules you just didn’t violate. But then one day she came home from school and found her mother waiting for her in the family room, holding a joint in one hand and, in the other, the sock she’d found the joint in. How lame was that? Not just snooping in a sock drawer, but actually examining each pair. Lame and creepy.
April began reviewing her lists. TITS (Things I Think Suck) included such things as cramps, zits, and boys who lie their asses off and still have girls chasing after them. All the items here had first put in time on PU (Patently Unfair), which at the moment included the fact that boys could pee whenever they had to no matter where they were, the age requirement for driving, paying premium dollar for crappy weed, and ridiculously early curfews. She also maintained a SOO (So Obviously Orgasmic) list of her favorite musicians, songs, and television shows, as well as SOIL (Signs Of Intelligent Life), currently empty.
The file she worked on the most, the one she clicked now, was PITS (People I Think Suck). Time for some hard-core prioritizing: Heather Rosen needed to be added.
Heather had been texting her all afternoon, begging her to call. It was so obvious that the only reason Heather wanted to talk was to tell lies about the party last night and the probably no more than seven seconds she spent within a hundred feet of Keith Spinelli. The messages had started coming in when April was tying up the newspapers at her grandfather’s. Call me. KS is 2 hot. Wher r u? U won’t bleve. Heather’s texting was so pathetically full of it since Keith Spinelli, April was sure, wouldn’t have anything to do with Heather Rosen, much less actually do anything with her. No way.
So April had some choices to make. First, how high on the PITS list should she put Heather? Definitely in the top five, given that Heather knew, she had to know—despite the fact that April never actually said anything—that April kind of liked Keith Spinelli. That alone should justify the highest ranking. But putting Heather in the top spot was not a decision to be taken lightly, especially since the current titleholder—April’s mother—had been number one for sixteen straight weeks.
April double-clicked on the Word icon and created a two-column table. At the top of the left column, she typed in her mom’s name; in the right, Heather’s. Her father had once told her, when she was trying to make up her mind about something—it was so long ago she had forgotten exactly what—to do a pros and cons list. The column with the most entries would win, although April soon discovered that sometimes one item in a column could easily outweigh all the entries in the other. Still, she felt duty-bound to justify any action she might take on this high a PITS ranking. She started on the left column. Beneath her mother’s name she wrote:
? Nags the crap out of me. Constantly.
? Calls my clothes slutty. Sometimes.
? Won’t let me practice driving. Ever.
? Checks with other moms for sleepovers. Always. And always embarrassing.
? Wears clothes that emphasize her lard-butt. Often.
? Suddenly starts crying but won’t talk about it. Ever.
? Acts like talking to a guy will impregnate me. First time.
? Doesn’t think I do enough homework even though I get straight A’s. Always.
? Trashes Dad constantly but denies doing so. Always.
April stopped typing. There was no point in continuing, as there was no way that Heather—no matter how many obnoxious lies she told—could unseat her mother.
An instant-message bubble popped up on her screen. Heather, of course: R U there?!?!?!
April checked to see if anyone else, like Keith, was online. Of course he wasn’t—anyone with half a life was out doing something interesting. Heather, case in point, obviously had nothing better to do than lie about her pitiful sex life. And thanks to her mom’s insistence on visiting her grandfather for the first time in several centuries, April didn’t have anything interesting going on, either.
April flopped on her bed and lay there, hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling and at her Don’t Care poster—another sore subject with her mom, who wanted it taken down. She was constantly threatening to take it down herself, saying it was “inappropriate” to be lying in bed and staring up at a guy—“especially that creepy-looking guy.” But as usual, her mother was totally clueless. April wasn’t interested in Ian Max, the skinny cokehead with the trying-too-hard body art and piercings and the totally obvious and gross way he played the guitar between his legs. She concentrated on Roxie Reece, DC’s lead singer and current holder of the number one position on her SOO list.
Her mom said that Roxie’s name made her sound like a pole dancer. April didn’t care. She loved the way Roxie sang without looking at Ian. Some groups make a big deal out of looking at each other and screaming in each others’ faces while they play and sing. Look, everybody! We rock gods are having all kinds of fun up here while you peons down there worship us. That wasn’t Roxie’s style. From the expression on her face, it’s obvious she is just into the music, into her song, and she doesn’t give a crap about the audience or how she looks or even about the no-talent guitar player standing next to her.
April learned from an MTV special that Roxie came from a broken home in California, hung around some part of San Francisco called North Beach, and basically pestered the local bands to let her sing. Somehow, she hooked up with Ian Max and they got the group going. There was talk about Roxie and Ian, but April knew that Roxie couldn’t care less about that dickhead. Roxie, not Ian, had written their best song. Roxie was the one, according to Rolling Stone, who handled the money and bailed Ian out of jail whenever he trashed a hotel room or got caught with some sixteen-year-old. What did Roxie need Ian for? She didn’t. It was the one thing April didn’t understand about her. Why didn’t Roxie dump the loser?
April jumped at the sudden turn of the doorknob, which was followed by an impatient knock and her mother’s fingers-on-chalkboard voice.
“April, why is this door locked?”
“Because I’m dropping acid.”
“That’s not funny. Open up.”
“I’m changing!” April yelled from the bed, not moving. “God!”
“What are you changing for?” Her mother’s voice was only slightly muffled by the door. April thought of a new song title: “Door Voices.” No, people would think it was some sort of Jim Morrison cover. “Doors and Voices.” Better. “Voices through Doors.” Yeah.
“Where are you going? You didn’t tell me you were going out. And who said you could go out?”
“I’m not going out, so don’t worry about me having any fun,” April said. She bit her lip. Her answer had been totally reflexive—a habit of saying the first thing that contradicted whatever her mother had just said. Even though this time it was the truth—she wasn’t going out—she didn’t want her mom to know that. She had been thinking about calling Megan or Erica, but they’d probably all immediately ask where Heather was, and she didn’t feel like making something up. So what she had just told her mom was, sadly, true. The best April could hope for was that her mother would go shopping or to the grocery store alone so that she, April, could have some time to herself, maybe crank up DC full blast, fill the house with sound.
“Then why are you changing?”
April had forgotten her mother was there.
“Because the clothes I wore to Grandpa’s are gross,” she yelled. Fast thinking, eh, Rox? “I can still smell the smoke from his pipe.”
“Ugh, I know what you mean,” her mother said. “I have no idea why he’s taken that up. It makes absolutely no sense.”
April went on high alert at the sudden, friendly change of tone.
“You want to go to the diner for dinner?”
There it was: the ultimate trap—stuck in a diner with your mother on a Saturday night. It would be like putting a sign over the booth: “Loser with No Friends Having Dinner with Mommy. Feel Free to Ridicule.”
“No, thanks,” she called out. “I want to get a head start on my English paper.”
April held her breath. What would come next? The disbelieving On a Saturday night? The commanding You’ll have plenty of time afterward ? Or the pouty and sarcastic and guilt-trippy I’ve had a really rough day and wanted to go out but I guess I’ll cook dinner so that you aren’t in any way inconvenienced?
“Okay. Then I guess I’ll start dinner.” April heard her mother start to walk away. “And unlock this door.”
April looked in her closet for other clothes to change into. She congratulated herself again on her quick thinking about her grandfather’s pipe. Then she started thinking about her grandmother’s picture. Her mother didn’t talk much about her, but when she did, she usually said something like, “Things just weren’t the same after she died. Your grandmother was the glue. She knew how to handle your grandfather . . . and your uncles.”
Her uncles as kids was a hard concept for April to get her brain around. She had trouble thinking of them as anything but too old and too boring to get into any sort of trouble. Not that she knew them all that well. She saw Uncle Nick occasionally; Uncle Mike and his family, never. She had met her cousins only once, when she was around six, and she often wondered if, meeting Clare somewhere and not knowing it was her cousin, they’d each think the other was cool. April hoped so, but with the cast of characters in her family—highly doubtful.
Her grandfather, though, had potential. April liked the way he traded insults with her mother, something not too many people even attempted. She especially liked the way he was all set to toss her the keys to his car, until her mother lived up to her billing as Primo Party Pooper.
Old guy . . . living like a pig . . . three kids but none of them see him that much. April closed the closet door, rushed to her desk, and pulled her notepad out of her pocket. She was glad she always kept it on her, especially when sweet moments like these popped up, when words seemed to barge their way into her brain, impatient as hell, begging to be written down.
What you thinkin’ ’bout, Mr. Ear Hair
Sittin’ alone in your newspaper chair?
Watchin’ tube, collectin’ dust
While your joints and memories
Turn to rust.
Something about TV-dinner trays would have to be worked into the lyrics. That could be a song, couldn’t it? The kind Roxie might sing? The kind she, April Shea herself, could sing . . . after she changed her name and got into a band of her own?
April stared at the words for a while before closing the notepad and putting it back in her pocket. She began rummaging through her drawer for a top.
The only way she was going to escape this ridiculous life of hers was to get as far away from it as possible. But she’d need a car to do that, and she’d have to wait more than a year—two, if they passed that stupid law raising the driving age—before she could even get her learner’s permit.
Unless her mother had a sudden and completely out-of-character change of mind and agreed to teach her.
Or unless someone else was willing to teach her.
What you thinkin’ ’bout, Mr. Ear Hair?
April opened her bedroom door.
“Mom, we can still go to the diner, if you want,” she called out. “I kind of have an idea for my paper I want to ask you about.”