After the giant had been killed and collapsed onto the stage—although, really, there was no giant but actually Rita Lopez backstage standing in front of a microphone reading her revengeful lines from her script while Leo Gibson in the orchestra pit slammed his drumsticks against the surface of the drum to create the sound of the giant falling to her death—and the rest of the cast members adorned in costumes the drama department had sewn from various articles of clothing from Goodwill gathered in the lobby of the school for fruit punch and themed cookies from the local bakery, Kupcake Kingdom, I spotted my family near the entrance, holding the makeshift Playbills that Ron Weller had printed out on his computer, and scanning the lobby for me in my brown and white dress that was purposely torn at the hem, with multicolored patches over the skirt and black combat boots over tan, thick socks made to look like stockings. Shelia Roan had heavily dusted dark brown eye-shadow over my face to look like dirt from the woods.
I had lifted my hand to wave at them as I maneuvered past Arnold Crown, who had played my prince and had swept my bare feet off from the wooden stage and carried me in his arms for five seconds and onto a fake carriage that we actually had to walk to move, and past Emory May, who had played the Baker’s Wife and had effectively ruined my marriage with Arnold, when I suddenly felt two strong arms wrap around my waist and lift me off of the ground, my feet once again leaving the floor. I glanced down and saw that the two arms were sun-kissed and bulging with muscle, and I heard the sound of laughing in my ear, warm and inviting against my skin, and I felt his ear against my own. It wasn’t until I noticed Kolby Rutledge, a few yards away from me, pouring himself a glass of red fruit punch, alone, that I realized that the one lifting me off of my feet and pressed my back into his toned stomach was Griffin Tomlin, and I nearly choked as I squealed. And I realized that my hands were covering his around my waist, and I suddenly felt self-conscious that I might have been too heavy for him or that the excessive amounts of black eyeliner applied to make my eyes more noticeable on stage might now make me look like a raccoon close up.
“Clara!” he was saying, almost laughing my name from his lips, so happily and proudly that I smiled in his arms, even though my back was against him and he couldn’t see that my ruby red lips had been curved into a grin. I was in Griffin Tomlin’s arms, I thought, and I hoped that he would never, ever put me down. “Who would have thought that our very own Clara Porterfield could sing and dance, huh? Did you think so, Kolby?”
Kolby just smiled over the rim of his plastic Styrofoam cup. “You were really good, Clara,” he replied instead of answering Griffin’s question, and then he stepped out of the way of Maria Gregory, who had portrayed the Witch and was adorned in a black discount prom dress she had found at So Fetch a few weeks before, and grabbed a cookie shaped like a crown with gold frosting from one of the glass platters on the white fold-out tables pressed against the walls of the school lobby.
“Good?” Griffin repeated, a note of exaggerated incredulousness in my voice, which vibrated close to my ear as he spoke, his breath warm on my lobe and the side of my neck as he held me, and I felt him tilt his head to the side, as if he were trying to get a look of my face, and then I felt his arms loosen around my waist as he let me drop onto the floor, the soles of my shoes making a flat smacking against the off-white tiled flooring. My waist suddenly felt cold and empty without his arms, muscled from so many years of playing baseball, wrapped around me. “Don’t worry, Clara. Kolby’s always had a bit of a hearing problem. That’s why he didn’t use the words ‘great’ or ‘amazing’, right, Kol?” He cupped his hand around his lips and shouted the words at him as Kolby chewed on his cookie, having bitten off two of the three points of the crown, and Kolby smiled, his lips pressed tightly together as he chewed, and nodded, his brown eyes rolling slightly.
I smiled, using my bare fingernails to scratch on the fabric of the sleeve of my dilapidated dress as I thought about just how close Griffin Tomlin was standing next to me and how every time he exhaled I felt his chest against the back of my arm and that he smelled like soap and musk. “It’s alright,” I said, even though I wasn’t quite sure what I was dubbing alright, and I glanced up at Griffin, feeling a jolt in my chest when he looked back down at me and smiled. “I’m really glad you came. You didn’t have to, though. I mean, I’m really glad you did but it wasn’t . . . you didn’t . . . it was just really nice of you,” I said, and then I wondered if Emily or Nora or basically any other girl stumbled over her words as much as I did around Griffin Tomlin. I wondered what it must have been like to just act normal around your crush, like every single magazine article and quiz said to, but how was that supposed to be possible when I was worried he would notice the pit stains collecting under my arms or that I seriously considered getting a spray tan just so it would be less obvious that I blushed ridiculously whenever he looked in my direction.
Griffin smiled at me and then bent down, and I felt his moist lips pressing against my cheek. “Anything for you, Cinderella,” he whispered against my ear as he pulled away, and I had to bite down on my lip to stop myself from reacting as he nonchalantly reached down and grabbed a sugar cookie in the shape of a glass slipper and winked at me as he bit off the heel.
.
I was sitting in the living room, curled against the arm of the faux leather couch with my knees brought close to my chest and my grandmother’s knitted red, white, and blue afghan draped over my lower body with my toes poking out from under the hem, a flash of the purple material of my sock in the bottoms of my eyes, when I heard the sound of my mother’s car pulling into the driveway as she got home from work as a vegetarian. Occasionally, she would come home with her fingers crisscrossed with several little scratches from provoked cats or agitated dogs, and she had a horror story about a ferret that she examined once that she told at parties whenever she introduced herself as a vet, which would usually lead to the hosts or one of the guests mentioning an odd behavior that their pet was exhibiting, such peeing on their pillows or only eating after seven p.m. or something. Sometimes, to my embarrassment, she would leave her card in random places of their house if she noticed a plastic bowl of water on the ground in the kitchen or a particularly gnawed table leg in the dining room. One time, I noticed her card—complete with a cartoon drawn image of with a bird on her shoulder, an orange cat in her arms, and a Dalmatian puppy sitting at her feet—sticking out as a makeshift bookmark in one of the novels on an end table in the living room, her strawberry blond hair and the green head of a bird peeking out of the pages.
She stopped doing it, though, after Emily was arrested, but that might have been because people stopped inviting us to their evening cocktail parties in fears that their other two daughters would attempt to murder their sons in their backyards, so she stopped finding odd little places she sneak her card in. Maybe it just wasn’t as fun self-promoting herself and her veterinary skills with only one daughter to whine about how embarrassing it was that she left her card in the coat pocket of Mr. Ford. Maybe if Emily couldn’t groan about it too then it wouldn’t matter at all.
And besides, who was going to take their sick cockatoo to the mother of a murderer, anyway?
When she entered through the front door, there were green, environmentally-friendly bags made from fabric dangling from the crooks of her elbows with the edges of boxed pasta and the top of the wrapper to frozen garlic bread from Pepperidge Farm peeking out the top as she stopped the snow from her worn Nike shoes that she bought from a thrift store a few years ago, supergluing the soles down last summer just so she didn’t have to go shoe shopping again and buy new sneakers. Her bobbed strawberry blond hair was brushed behind the backs of her ears, gold hoop earrings hanging from her lobes, and her cheeks were pink as she exhaled past her lips as she pushed her elbow backward to close the front door.
“Goodness, its cold out there!” she exclaimed, her voice breathy and her eyes glassy from the wind. She set the green bags down on the ground, a few inches away from the wet doormat with a reindeer on it, a clump of dirty snow concealing his red nose—Dad had bought the festive doormat during an after Christmas sale last year and decided that doormats didn’t need to be seasonably correct. “Weatherman says that we might get a couple of inches tonight. Who knows? Maybe you’ll get a snow day!”
I smiled at her, her face flushed and grinning as she looked at me and unzipped her parka, the material swishing as she shrugged it off of her shoulders and grabbed it by the fur-lined hood and hung it up on the coat rack. I watched her, silently, as she peeled off her knit mittens that Grandma had given her as a present last Christmas and stuffed the violet mittens into the pocket of her parka before grabbing the groceries while simultaneously kicking off her boots and using her toes to neatly align them against the wall beside the door. She was humming a song she probably heard on the radio playing in the waiting room of her practice today as she ambled down the hallway with the bags, the smell of garlic already infiltrating the room, and I just sighed, quietly. My mother liked to pretend things—when we were kids and learned that Santa Claus wasn’t real, she told us that we could still pretend that he was real, or whenever we got catalogs in the mail, she told we could take a highlighter and mark everything that we pretended to buy—and, apparently, that remained the same despite Emily’s imprisonment. She pretended that, despite this, we were still a happy, normal family that ate meals together at the table and helped each other out with homework questions and had family game nights or whatever.
It wasn’t until she was the only one left in the room that she stopped pretending.
My father, however, hated to pretend. He was someone who preferred reality—telling us that, yes, Santa Claus was not real but then explained to us the story of Saint Nicholas and tried to convince that history was better than fantasy—and I noticed how clenched his jaw would become whenever he heard the sound of my mother’s cheerful voice in the room, raving about things that just seemed so pointless to him now—barbeques, weather, gardening—it was almost as if Emily’s arrest awakened him from the life he had been living, and now he couldn’t go back. Now what he wanted to talk about was lawyers, about Emily, about sentences, about statistics and probabilities, but every time my father would bring up Emily and what she had done, my mother would interrupt with him a brief but curt look and a muttered, “Now’s not the time.” And then she would resume whatever she had been doing, most likely speaking about gardening tips or abnormally large dogs, and my father would clench his jaw and then promptly excuse himself.
“Your sister is coming over tonight,” my mother announced from the kitchen, her voice muffled through the walls as she spoke, and for a flicker of the moment, I thought she meant Emily, as if the prison had just released her so she could enjoy some homemade Italian food with her family, and then a beat later, I realized she meant Nora. Struggling hairstylist Nora who rented an apartment in Buffalo an hour away with a girl named Jana with three inch long fingernails and purple hair and green mascara was coming over tonight, not neighbor-murdering Emily who shared a cell with a woman named Melody who tried to strangle her husband with a coat hanger. “And I’m making your favorite! Pasta, with garlic bread!”
I tried to smile, even though she wasn’t even in the room. “Thanks, Mom,” I mumbled as I brought my knees closer to my chest and tucked my arms underneath the cozy comfort of the afghan, burying myself in the faint scent of my grandmother’s perfume and citrus based cleaning spray.
.
My older sister Nora arrived in a cloud of overbearing floral perfume, bleached blond hair styled into a shaved pixie cut, and a tank top that showed the bottom of her innie belly button whenever she moved her arms. She wore a pair of sandals that looked like the kind Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel wore on Friends with a faux gold ring around her second toe that was beginning to bronze, the faux gold wearing away, and there were leather bracelets fastened around both of her wrists, and she wore a pair of dark green cargo capris, her unshaven leg hair visible where the hem ended a few inches up from her ankle—she stopped shaving in high school after she read some article on the internet how women shaving their legs was anti-feministic or something, but secretly, I think she just wanted an actual reason to stop shaving. When my mother saw that she had cut her former shoulder length, ebony black hair into a bleached blond pixie cut, she nearly dropped her wooden spoon into the pot of boiling water and pasta, and then looked for every opportunity to compliment her on this decision.
“It just highlights your face so well, Nora!” she raved as she stirred the softening pasta while Nora picked at one of the frozen loaves of garlic bread, which sat on a cooking tray on the granite countertop of the island in the center of the kitchen while the oven preheated, as she scratched the back of her calf with her other bare foot, the toe ring glistening under the light. “And, you know, I never would’ve thought it, but blond looks pretty great on you, honey. It’s no wonder your business is such a success.”
Nora tore off a piece of the frozen bread while glancing up at my mother, her expression skeptical as she eyed her while our mother tried to scoop one of the pieces of rotini to try. She raised one slightly bleached eyebrow in her direction as she ate the small, green rotini. “You think?” she asked, a slight edge of doubt in her voice as she leaned over the countertop. Despite what my mother believed, my sister’s hairstyling business, Curl Up And Dye, was actually not that much of a success. She rented a building on the edge of Buffalo with one of her friends who turned his side of the building into a tattoo parlor with heavy metal music blaring while my sister attempted to perm old ladies’ hair, as she put it, anyway, but my sister was into hairstyles a little more radical. In fact, I was pretty sure that she spent most of her business hours trying to persuade seventy year old women into dying their hair pink or shaving half of their head or something.
My mother shrugged, feigning distraction, as she chewed. “Well, you’re still pretty young. You’ll get there, sweetheart!” She gave my sister a kiss on the cheek, complete with a peach lipstick mark over her cheekbone, as if this was sort of affirmation of her belief in my sister’s hairstyling capabilities. Sometimes, I wondered if Mom kept trying so hard now was because she thought that she hadn’t tried hard enough when Emily was here. That maybe one extra pep talk or kiss on the cheek could’ve prevented everything that had happened.
She had just grabbed the dial for the left burner, the one that was boiling the tricolored rotini, and spun it to off with a faint click that was just barely drowned out by the bubbling water, and had moved the pot from the stove when I heard the sound of my father’s fires crunching against the snow colliding on the driveway that I knew he would later shovel at an unreasonable hour—after the late night dog walkers and other neighbors shoveling their own driveways had retired to indoors, locking their deadbolts and closing their blinds so no one would amble down the sidewalk, perch themselves on the handle of their shovel, and puff out a greeting to him—and I noticed the muscles in my mother’s back stiffening slightly underneath the fabric of her shirt as she heard the noise as well as she set down the pot. “Sounds like your father’s home,” she noted after a minute, the strained cheerfulness evident as she spoke.
I glanced out of the window as I heard the sound of his engine being turned off, the low rumble emanating from the driveway abruptly silencing after a moment, and I watched, quietly, as my father just sat there in the car, his seatbelt still strapped from his shoulder to his chest, and his gaze was directed for the closed garage door. His suit jacket was thrown on the passenger seat, along with his briefcase, and I noticed a cup of Tim Horton’s coffee in one of the cup-holders, one of their Roll Up The Rim To Win! cups and I noticed that he hadn’t taken off the brown lid or rolled up the rim like he always used to. He sat there for a moment, just staring ahead of him, and then, after a moment, as if he just realized where he was, he ran a hand over his face, dragging his fingers across the beard that he had started to grow after Emily was arrested, and grabbed his briefcase and jacket and got out of the car, slamming the car door shut as he did.