"We had band practice," I started saying. By the time I got to the dining room table—which has this buzzer built into the floor beneath the chair at the head of the table, so the hostess can step on it and signal to the servants in the kitchen that it's time to bring out dessert, which, since we have no servants, is just this huge annoyance, especially when we were growing up, since it's impossible for little kids to keep from buzzing something like that all the time, which drove my mom, who was usually in the kitchen, postal—I was rolling with it.
"Yeah, band practice went long, Mom. On account of the hail. We all had to run and stand under the bleachers, and there was all this lightning, and—"
"Look at this."
My mom held a letter up to my nose. My brother Mike was sitting, kind of slumped, at the kitchen counter. He looked unhappy, but then, he had never looked happy a day in his life, as far as I can remember, except when my parents got him a Mac for Christmas. Then he looked happy.
I looked at the letter my mom was holding. I couldn't read it, since it was too close to my nose. But that was okay. My mom was going, "Do you know what this is, Jessica? Do you know what this is? It's a letter from Harvard. And what do you think it says?"
I said, "Oh, hey, Mikey. Congratulations."
Mike said, "Thanks," but he didn't sound very excited.
"My little boy." My mom took the letter and started waving it around. "My little Mikey! Going to Harvard! Oh, my God, I can hardly believe it!" She did a weird little dance.
My mom isn't normally so weird. Most of the time she's pretty much like other moms. She helps my dad out sometimes with the restaurants, like with the billing and payroll, but mostly she stays home and does stuff like regrout the tile in the bathrooms. My mom, like most moms, is totally into her kids, so Mike getting into Harvard—even though it's really no big surprise, seeing as how he got a perfect score on his SATs—was this really big deal to her.
"I already called your father," she said. "We're going to Mastriani's for lobster."
"Cool," I said. "Can I invite Ruth?"
My mom made a little waving gesture. "Sure, why not? When have we ever gone out for a family dinner and not brought along Ruth?" She was being sarcastic, but she didn't mean it. My mom likes Ruth. I think. "Michael, perhaps there is someone you'd like to invite?"
The way she said "someone," you could tell my mom, of course, meant a girl. But Mike has only ever liked one girl his entire life, and that's Claire Lippman, who lives two houses over, and Claire Lippman, who is a year younger than Mike and a year older than me, barely even knows Mike is alive, since she is too busy starring in all of our high school's plays and musicals to pay any attention to the geeky senior down the street who spies on her every time she lies out on her carport roof in her bikini, which she does every single day without fail starting as soon as school lets out for the summer. She doesn't go back inside, either, until Labor Day, or unless a cute guy in a car drives up and asks her if she wants to go swimming at one of the quarries.
Claire is either a slave to ultraviolet rays or a total exhibitionist. I haven't figured out which yet.
Anyway, there was no chance my brother was going to ask "someone" to go with us for dinner, since Claire Lippman would be like, "Now, who are you?" if he ever even got up the nerve to talk to her.
"No," Mike said, all embarrassed. He was turning bright red, and it was only me and Mom standing there. Could you imagine if Claire Lippman had actually been present? "There's nobody I want to ask."
"Faint heart never won fair lady," my mom said. My mom, besides frequently talking in a fake French accent, also goes around quoting from Shakespearean plays and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.
On second thought, maybe she's not so much like other people's moms after all.
"I got it, Mom," Mike said through gritted teeth. "Not tonight, okay?"
My mom shrugged. "Fine. Jessica, if you're going, allow me to assure you you're not going in that." That was what I normally wear—T-shirt, jeans, and my Pumas. "Go put on the blue calico I made for Easter."
Okay. My mom has this thing about making us matching outfits. I am not even kidding. It was cute when I was six, but at sixteen, let me tell you, there is nothing cute about wearing a homemade dress that matches the one your mother has on. Especially since all the dresses my mom makes are of the Laura Ingalls variety.
You would think, considering the fact that I don't have any problem walking up to football tackles and punching them in the neck, that I wouldn't have any problem telling my mother to quit making me wear outfits that match hers. You would think that.
However, if your father promised you that if you wore them without complaining, he would buy you a Harley when you turned eighteen, you would wear them, too.
I said, "Okay," and started up the back staircase, what used to be the servants' staircase, back at the turn of the century—the nineteenth into the twentieth, I mean—when our house was built. "I'll tell Douglas."
"Oh," I heard my mom say. "Jess?"
But I kept on going. I knew what she was going to say. She was going to say not to bother Douglas. That's what she always says.
Personally, I enjoy bothering Douglas. Also, I asked Mr. Goodhart about it, and he said it's probably good to bother Douglas. So I bother him a lot. What I do is, I go up to the door to his room, which has a big Keep Out sign on it, and I bang on it really hard. Then I yell, "Doug! It's me, Jess!"
Then I just walk in. Douglas isn't allowed to have a lock on his door anymore. Not since my dad and I had to knock it down last Christmas.
Douglas was lying on his bed reading a comic book. It had this Viking on the cover, with a girl with big boobs. All Douglas ever does, since he came home from college, is read comic books. And in all the comic books, the girls have big boobs.
"Guess what," I said, sitting down on Douglas's bed.
"Mikey got into Harvard," Douglas said. "I already heard. I expect the whole neighborhood heard."
"Nope," I said. "That's not it."
He looked at me over the top of the comic book. "I know Mom thinks she's taking us all to Mastriani's to celebrate, but I'm not going. She's going to have to learn to live with disappointment. And you better keep your hands off me. I'm not going, no matter how hard you hit me. And this time, I might just hit you back."
"That's not it, either," I said. "And I wasn't planning on hitting you. Much."
"What, then?"
I shrugged. "I got hit by lightning."
Douglas turned back to his comic book. "Right. Shut the door on your way out."
"I'm serious," I said. "Ruth and I were waiting out the storm, underneath the bleachers at school—"
"Those bleachers," Douglas said, looking at me again, "are made of metal."
"Right. And I was leaning on one of the supports, and lightning struck the bleachers, and next thing I knew, I was standing like five feet from where I'd been, and I was tingly all over, and—"
"Bullshit," Douglas said. But he sat up. "That is bullshit, Jess."
"I swear it's true. You can ask Ruth."
"You did not get hit by lightning," Douglas said. "You would not be sitting here, talking to me, if you'd been hit by lightning."
"Douglas, I'm telling you, I was."
"Where's the entrance wound, then?" Douglas reached out and grabbed my right hand and flipped it over. "The exit wound? The bolt would have entered you one place, and left you in another. And there would be a star-shaped scar in both places."
As he'd been talking, he'd let go of my right hand and grabbed my left, and flipped it over, too. But there wasn't a star-shaped scar on either of my palms.
"See." He flung my hand away in disgust. Douglas knows about stuff like this because all he ever does is read, and sometimes he reads actual books, as opposed to comics. "You weren't struck by lightning. Don't go around saying stuff like that, Jess. You know, lightning kills hundreds of people a year. If you had been struck, you'd definitely be in a coma, at the very least."