“Yes. As in with you and me. Do you intend to be the couple who holds hands in the hallway or the couple who sneaks around in the bushes?”
Gordie kissed my blueberry-stained lips. “Whichever gives me more access to you and your purple underwear.”
“Okay, good. Because Hannah S. already seems to know about us.”
“I don’t care who knows about us, Sadie.” He slid his hand up my shirt and gently held the back of my head as he moved toward me and kissed me long and hard until he finally stopped and said, “Sexy Sadie.”
“Okay, that’s weird,” I said.
He laughed. “That’s a Beatles song.”
We lay in the dark with a new bout of rain hitting the car roof. Gordie held me in his arms and the world felt good and safe and hopeful again.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE PRESS COVERAGE of the Unlikelies had shifted to everybody trying to guess who we were. One news network decided the Unlikelies had originated in Manhattan and was probably somebody with connections to the East End of Long Island. Thank you, Meghan Rose Sharp.
Our offshoot, Ebenezer, was all over the news.
“Since when have you been interested in news?” Mom called from the kitchen, where she sipped tea and read a fall flower magazine.
“Shh.” I turned up the volume. The news guy with the hair plugs and overly white teeth was interviewing two women in their early twenties wearing Alice-style print skirts and tank tops.
“Are you the Unlikelies?” I held my breath, afraid they would claim our baby.
“No. Not at all,” the glossy-haired girl with glasses said, looking directly at the camera. “The Unlikelies inspired us to create Ebenezer, you know, as in Scrooge, because Scrooge was misguided and then rehabilitated after he had an epiphany.”
“So what exactly is Ebenezer’s mission?”
“We are encouraging young people who might be drawn to fundamentalist and fringe groups to join us.” Glossy-Haired Girl stared into the camera again. “There are better ways to make your mark. As the Unlikelies say, ‘You’re one of us now.’”
The news guy stuck the mic in the other girl’s face. “Do you know who the Unlikelies are?”
“No. But we’re all Unlikelies now, right?”
The guy continued interviewing them until a commercial break.
Damn, they were good, Jean texted.
Who’s our spokesperson? Gordie texted.
You, Jean texted.
Nah. I nominate Sadie.
You’re biased cause you’re banging her.
I’m right here, I wrote.
Val wrote, Is this really happening?
All because of a couple of candy necklaces for assholes.
Alice? Is that you? Val wrote.
Gordie wrote, She’s back!!!!!!
I went to Alice’s that afternoon. I had something to show her. I hoped it would make her feel better. When I got there, Alice was lying on her front lawn with a blue-gray puppy curled up on her stomach.
“Who’s this little guy?” I whispered. The puppy stirred when Alice got up, but she stayed asleep.
“This, Sadie, is the best consolation prize my parents could ever give me.”
“She’s yours?”
“She’s mine.” Alice held the puppy up to her cheek. “It took my best friend being shipped off for heroin addiction to finally get a puppy, but she’s all mine.”
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t have one yet. That’s a very important decision.” Alice took a picture of me holding the puppy and texted it to everyone.
We went up to Alice’s room. “I have something to show you.” I took a folded copy of a newspaper article out of my back pocket and handed it to Alice. I sat next to her on the bed, and we read Hector’s obituary together silently.
Charles Adam Sands, 19, died of a heroin overdose Saturday in a Queens bathroom. He was the son of Mary (Lewis) and Arthur Sands and brother to Lily, Maeve, and Sydney, his three “baby bunnies,” as Charles called them. Charles loved baseball, chocolate-chip pancakes, Christmas, and visiting his grandparents in Arizona. He also loved to sit with his cat, Paisley, on his chest while he watched fairy movies with his sisters. Charles got sick the first time he tried heroin at a party, when he was fifteen. His family adored him and spent every moment of every day trying to help him get away from heroin. But heroin won.
Alice threw the obituary on the floor. “Why are you showing me this? Are you trying to make me feel worse?”
“No. Alice, look at the date. Hector died on July seventh,” I said gently. “All that time you were looking for him, he was already gone. He died before you even started poking the poppet.”
Alice sat back on the bed and held the puppy. She didn’t say anything, but I could tell by the way her forehead relaxed a little that she felt better. We put the puppy in her crate and listened to her cry for Alice the whole way up to the attic. The altar was pretty much the same as it had been the last time I was there, but the room was slightly cooler.
“How do you want to do it?” I said, gathering scraps of fabric from the floor.
“Let’s do it the way we did the lizard’s suitcase.”
“That sounds good.”
We pushed all the dolls and candles and books and scraps into a big black garbage bag, and Alice went back to her puppy while I went straight to the supermarket, chucked the whole voodoo collection into the dumpster, and drove away.
By the time I got home, half the damn world had changed their Facebook profile photos to our masked Union soldiers or one of the spin-offs, including Gordie’s mom, baby Ella’s mom, and the insufferable Meghan Rose Sharp.
Jean: We should be getting royalties for this.
Gordie: It was only a matter of time before this entire thing became convoluted. It’s like Einstein and the nuclear bomb.
Nobody knew what he was talking about.
TWENTY-NINE
WHAT WAS SUPPOSED to be movie night with Dad turned out to be movie night with Dad, Mom, both grandmas, Mr. Ng, and Willie Ng. They purposely chose a movie that didn’t have sex scenes, because of Willie’s “issues.” They neglected to consider my issues and chose a movie with multiple brutal, bloody assault scenes.
A few times, I caught myself finger snapping. That was when I decided to focus on the popcorn and chocolate-covered raisins. Grandma Sullivan seemed a little too into the movie. She swatted my hand every time I tried to check my phone. By movie’s end, the good guys finally took down the dirty cop, although I felt like the Unlikelies could have taken him down in thirty minutes.
After the movie, we walked to the pizza place, except for Willie, who claimed he had someplace to be.
Mr. Ng wanted to treat.
“Put your money away,” Dad said.
“Put your money away, Woody. I’ve joined the Unlikelies,” Mr. Ng announced.
“Isn’t that something?” Dad said. “That an underground movement of Good Samaritans is going viral because of the Internet? Although my buddy in Syosset was complaining the precinct phones are ringing off the hook. Renegade tipsters turning in drug dealers, sex traffickers, secret polluters, dog-fighting rings.”
“It’s probably a scam,” Grandma Sullivan mumbled.
“What’d she say?” Grandma Hosseini asked Mom.