When I was done, I tried to put everything back in the order Terrence left them. Though he hadn’t explicitly come out and said it, I didn’t think he wanted me touching his things.
I’d never had a brother and he’d never had a sister—we were only children in our broken homes—so boundaries had been set, though never really explained.
Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” ended, and he sorted through his collection of mass chaos on the floor in between picking up and putting down cassette tape after cassette tape.
He stopped, took the cassette out of the case, slid it into the boom box slot, and pressed play.
The sound of a bass filled the room.
Terrence didn’t say anything as “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang filled the room.
My left foot tapped against the floor, keeping the beat, and my head nodded, and I started talking real fast and in rhymes. I liked hip-hop. No one knew that. I tried to keep up with the song, but mouthing the lyrics was hard. Especially when they rhymed.
I could feel Terrence’s eyes on me. I stopped mouthing the words and froze.
He knocked his shoulder into me, smiled, and we both as a duet finished the rap. “Say what?”
The song ended and Terrence went searching for a new one. He had dozens of tapes with only a couple of songs recorded on them. The outside was written with the title of whatever he’d crudely recorded off the radio.
While he was distracted, I tried to think how to approach the subject. Maybe Mom and Dennis were right. Maybe I did need to give Terrence a chance. He was not going anywhere unless the bomb dropped.
“So,” I started.
“So what?” he asked, knocking over a stack of tapes.
“I was thinking about the movie—”
“How awesome it’s going to be? Yeah, you’re going to be hanging out with Astrid Ogilvie, Freddy White, Peony Roth, and Owen Douglas. Pretty damn cool.”
“Pretty damn cool,” I repeated.
“I just hope Dana won’t ruin it for you.”
“I’m not going to take Dana,” I said.
“Really? Well, that’s good.”
“Yeah?”
“But you know she won’t be happy,” he said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Just so you know.”
I nodded. “But I don’t think I can take it. I have a line, and she’ll probably weasel her way into saying it.”
“You know that’s right.”
“So I was thinking,” I said, twisting my scrunchie around my wrist. “Do you want to be my guest?”
“What? Are you serious?” he asked, nearly dropping his bowl to the floor.
“Yeah, I’m serious,” I said.
“Really? Do you know what you’re asking?”
“I do.”
He got this big smile on his face and said, “Yes,” with so many exclamation points.
I’d made his day, year, life.
He put in a new tape, turned the volume to the max, and rapped (badly) to “Friends”[27] as we finished our hot fudge ice cream.
Chapter Six
I was one hundred percent sure that Terrence was going to tell everyone at school how he was going to be my guest for the contest, and I would have to deal with the fallout from that concerning Dana. The Doomsday Clock[28] was ticking. Mom was right—I probably shouldn’t have smiled at her when it was my turn to pass out the milk cartons in kindergarten.
Dennis had already left to open the hardware store when I made my first walk through the house. Terrence was trying to finish his homework while downing a bowl of cereal, and Mom was putting on her makeup over the toaster, waiting for what I assumed was a strawberry Pop-Tart.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Mom said. “I’m glad you’re up. I didn’t want you to sleep all day.”
“I would,” Terrence said.
“This is supposed to be punishment, not a vacation.”
“Mom, don’t worry. I have tons to do,” I said.
“Tons?”
“I do have a plan.”
“A plan to stay in your pj’s all day?”
“How’d you know?” I asked, reaching inside the freezer for the box of frozen waffles.
“Laura—”
“Mom—”
“Maybe you should go to the hotel with me.”
“Um. No. Those people make me want to bang my head into a wall.”
“Those people?”
“The guests.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, but you don’t. You have to have self-control.”
“Self-control?”
She nodded. “That’s why you don’t reach across the desk and slap them silly.”
Shortly after Mom and Terrence left, I had a second breakfast in front of the TV with Hope and Bo.
“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives”:[29] Mom had started to record the show. It was legal now. The Supreme Court ruled that we were not going to jail if we recorded a TV show with our VCR.
My day of fun started off right. I had a list of things I wanted to do, and I crossed each thing off once I’d accomplished said item.
Read the paper—check
Take quiz about nuclear war from the paper—check
I was planning to drop the quiz off at one of the many locations it suggested once I went out for the day. My day. Laura’s Day Off.
But then an advertisement for an antinuclear meeting at Arkansas Tech that morning caught my eye. The advertisement was halfway down the page—a good three-by-five box.
My idea of a fun, relaxing morning changed. The phone rang. It was Mom making sure that I hadn’t gone back to bed. I promised her I was indeed up. I was stuffing my backpack with some essentials, two comics, and a spiral notebook. I promised Max I would make some progress. We were writing our own comic book. I did the writing and he did the drawing.
“So what’s your plan?” Mom asked.
“I think I’m going to go see Granny.” I left out the part about going to Tech.
Mom sighed heavily over the phone. Granny and my mom didn’t get along at all. Granny sided with Dad when the marriage went down the drain. And Granny’s my mom’s mom. That was what made it so surprising. Granny didn’t go to the wedding. Didn’t offer congratulations. Even though my mom was her daughter, she was no longer welcome in Granny’s home. I was. But we didn’t talk about Mom. I obeyed her wishes. I went to her house every Sunday to watch Murder, She Wrote,[30] where we assumed Jessica Fletcher, aka J.B. Fletcher, was a serial killer who lived in Cabot Cove, Maine—population dwindling by the episode.
Granny didn’t have much. In fact, she moved into our old home (the home where Mom, Dad, and I spent many happy years) when she gave her life savings to Reverend Floyd Lowry at The Gospel Hour. Thousands of dollars went into the pocket of the televangelist. A year ago, he went on his TV show and asked the congregation sitting at home to bless him. He asked the people for $4.5 million. He pleaded for them to send anything and everything they had. Reverend Lowry believed that God wanted him to raise the money to “erect a church that would bring the nonbelievers to the feet of Jesus.” It was controversial. It was a scam disguised as a fund-raising drive. Reverend Lowry was adamant that if the church did not reach its goal, then God “would call him home.” As in, if he didn’t raise the money by a certain time, Reverend Lowry would die. Who knew God had the same tactics as the mob? His tears were used to swindle people out of money. He hid behind his faith and took everything that my Granny had. I begged her to not give him a single dime, to see if he would die. But she felt she had to. He was testing her faith just like God was testing Reverend Lowry. Reverend Lowry met his deadline and ended up raising $6.2 million.
28
The metaphorical clock is maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It all started back in 1947 as a way to predict how close the world is to global destruction. The original setting was seven minutes to midnight. Today it’s three minutes to midnight.