“Looks like the boy did a good job blocking up your window.”
“Yeah. I guess…I could teach him some stuff. He’s got talent. Maybe want to learn more about woodworking…”
“McGrue—is that icy heart of yours melting? It’s going to run down onto your shoes.”
He laughed softly. “I don’t know.” He smoothed down his hair with a hand. “I must look like a bum. I should go in and clean up. Maybe you and the kid could come over for, I don’t know, hot chocolate.”
A teenage couple was walking down the sidewalk together, hand in hand, their other hands occupied by their cell phones. They gazed fixedly at the cell phone screens. They passed McGrue and Mary Sue, never looking up from their phones.
And as they passed, McGrue heard a sound from the phone speakers. The same from both phones…
“HUM. HURT YOU. HUM. HURT YOU.”
Cosmic Cola
Lucy A. Snyder
Millie leaned her forehead against the back window of her stepfather’s new Toyota van, morosely watching the weather-beaten, navy-on-white “Welcome to Marsh Landing!” sign approach and recede. Welcome to what? There was little but some bone-white dunes and shuttered, peeling bait shacks so far. Nothing she’d learned about the isolated coastal town in her school’s library made her feel any better about moving here. Population: twenty thousand. Primary export: fish and Cosmic Cola. Total Dullsville. It was probably one of those stuffy communities that forbade trick-or-treat at Halloween. Marsh Middle School was barely half the size of her old school and didn’t have any Girl Scouts troops she could join. It didn’t even have an orchestra. She’d only just started playing violin and already she was going to have to quit, probably.
Quitters never got anywhere in life. That’s what her grandfather Ernest always used to tell her anyhow, before he had a stroke and quit living. In the months before he died, he’d argue about physics when he was alone in his room, as if the empty walls were his audience. She could play her violin in her room and pretend she had an audience, she supposed, but her bedroom walls wouldn’t tell her if she dropped a note, or if her bowing was scratchy, or if her phrasing was awkward. So even if she kept going on her own, she wasn’t sure she’d get anywhere anyway.
If she was honest with herself, giving up violin didn’t bother her nearly as much as the notion of giving up Halloween. It was her favorite holiday, even better than Christmas, though she could never say that out loud. Her mom would say it wasn’t ladylike to prefer Halloween over Jesus’ birthday. And her love for it wasn’t just because of trick-or-treating. It was the one night when all the things she dreamed of seemed like they could actually become real. The one night when she didn’t have to always be nice and demure and could be something besides a girl from a little town in a flyover state. She could be a ghost. A witch. A werewolf. Something mythical, something to be feared and respected. Running down the street in her costume, she could close her eyes in the frosty fall air and just for a moment imagine that plastic teeth and waxy paints were enamel and skin, and she could go anywhere at all that she wanted on her own. What was Christmas compared to the chilly frisson of becoming?
“Gimme!” On the middle seat, her little half-brother Travis reached for his twin sister’s Cabbage Patch doll.
“Nooo!” Tiffany hugged the doll to her chest and turned away from her brother’s grabby hands. “Mooom!”
“Leave your sister’s toys alone.” Their mother’s tone was one of utter exhaustion. Was exhaustion an emotion, or the lack of it? Millie wasn’t sure. “Play with your Star Wars figures.”
“Fifty,” Millie announced.
“What?” Her mother turned in her seat and squinted at her tiredly.
“That’s the fiftieth time you’ve said those exact words on this trip.”
Her mother’s lips twitched into a half-smile. “You counted?”
“I did.” Millie couldn’t keep the satisfaction out of her voice. She was very good at counting. Last year she’d won a fifty-dollar gift certificate in a contest at Harmon’s Grocery to guess how many jellybeans were in a big jar, and was a little sad afterward when she found out that since she won once she couldn’t compete again. She’d missed the count by two hundred and forty eight, and was sure she could have done even better the next time.
Her stepfather cleared his throat, obviously annoyed. “Doesn’t Madame Curie have a book to read?”
Her mother shot him a dirty look but didn’t say anything. Millie felt her face grow hot. Her stepfather had started calling her “Madame Curie” after she won the school science fair with her homemade electrolysis set. And at first it had seemed like a nice thing, as if after five years of being her stepfather he was starting to like her a little bit and to be proud of her accomplishments, like he was proud of Tiffany and Travis. After all, Marie Curie was the only person in history to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences! So calling her Madame Curie couldn’t really be a bad thing, could it? But the way he started saying it after the first couple of times … it tasted like a razor blade inside a Tootsie Roll. But if she said anything, he’d just accuse her of not being able to take a compliment. Of not having a sense of humor. Of being a brat.
“I had a book to read,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady, “and I read it.”
“Then you should have brought more.” His tone was hard as the pavement beneath his van’s black tires.
“I brought four. And I read them all.” Her heart was beating so fast her vision was starting to twitch.
The twins had gone silent in the seat in front of her, like nest-bound fledglings beneath the shadow of a hawk.
“You did not read four books in the past six hours.” He stared at her in the rearview mirror, his gaze as steady as any raptor’s.
“Did, too.” She grabbed her library book sale copies of Bunnicula, Superfudge, Blubber, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and held them up so he could see them. “I read them cover to cover. Ask me about them. Ask me anything.”
She wasn’t lying, and she knew that he hadn’t enough of a clue about any of the books to even begin to question her about them. He’d made it clear he considered them to be kids’ books, girl books, and he was a man. A man with a brand-new van and a fancy important job. Nothing in the books could interest him, so why bother? The idea of seeking a subject to discuss with his stepdaughter was so far from his orbit it could take him millennia to discover it.
“If you were so busy reading back there, how could you possibly know what your mother said to the twins?” There was a talon of warning in his tone: she had better stop challenging him, or else.
Or else what? she wondered bitterly. Or else you’ll take me away from everything I care about and drop me in some dumpy awful town that probably stinks of fish? Just because you got a job at some stupid soft drink company?
Why couldn’t he have gone away to work and left them where they were? Other dads did that to keep from uprooting their families. But her half-siblings weren’t in school yet, so she was the only one being uprooted. Her real father had brought her mother to Greensburg so they could be closer to his father, and Mom hadn’t liked it there since Grandpa Ernest died. She said that seeing his old room every day made her feel sad. And Millie wanted her mom to be happy. She did. But … ugh.