Whatever Doesn't Kill You (3 page)

“Ah.
TV
for smart people.”

Katie shrugs. “A lot of it's just pop-culture stuff. Some of it's common sense.”

We watch the rest of the show with Katie shouting out every answer before the contestants do. One guy can't figure out how his buzzer works, and another one has minus two thousand dollars by the time Final Jeopardy rolls around; he has to leave the game before supplying the final question.

“That'd be me on that show. A big fat zero.”

“Quit putting yourself down,” Katie says. “You're plenty smart.”

“Yep. Straight Cs. I'm some kinda genius.”

“You just don't apply yourself, that's all. If you studied instead of coming over here to watch
TV
all the time, you'd be a straight-A student.”

“Yeah, that's what it is. My bleak future is all your fault.”

Katie hauls herself up out of the beanbag chair and pulls out a couple of
DVD
boxed sets from the bookshelf.

“So, what will it be tonight?
Cosby Show
? Or
Family
Ties
?”

Ah, that's more like it. Katie knows what I like. I'm sure she'd rather be watching some chick flick on W or a documentary on the Discovery Channel, but she always indulges me with these cheesy old sitcoms. I mull it over. Which happy eighties family do I want to watch bicker over some inconsequential little problem, only to work everything out in twenty-two minutes flat? That's how long it takes to watch a half-hour
TV
show, once you take out all the commercials. I point to Bill Cosby in an awful sweater on the box in Katie's left hand.

“That one.”

And so it goes. I lounge on Katie's bed while she flops back into the beanbag and we watch an entire disc of episodes. We don't say much, just laugh at the tacky clothes, the lame jokes, the silly dialogue. At the end of every episode, there are hugs and smiles and laughs, and everyone's happy again. Nobody has any real worries— not like Katie does, and not like I do. Theo Huxtable doesn't have to worry about getting his head shoved in the toilet, or anyone yelling “Boom, boom, fatty!” when he walks down the hall. Clair never has to warn her kids to stay away from Main Street and Kenilworth Avenue after dark, where the drunks and meth heads are roaming, and Rudy doesn't have to worry about what she's going to say to the man who killed her dad.

Katie and I don't talk about that though. It's right there, hanging over our heads the whole time, and I'm pretty sure that both of us want to talk about it, figure out what I should say when I meet him. My heart beats a little faster just thinking about it. But neither of us says anything. We just laugh along with the live studio audience, episode after episode, until we get to the end of the disc.

I take a bus home from Katie's, still thinking about Travis Bingham. What if he'd never come along? My dad wasn't rich like the fathers in all those old sitcoms, but it would be pretty cool to come home to a normal family instead of a weird brother and a messed-up sister with an odd little boy.

I unlock the apartment door, daydreaming about walking into an immaculately decorated house with lush curtains and an overstuffed couch instead of an old futon and sheets tacked up over the windows, to a mom and dad asking how my day went instead of the random collection of freaks that passes for my family.

Everyone's asleep, but Simon has left the living room light on for me so I don't trip over anything. I stop to turn it off, and the photo over the
TV
catches my eye. It's a picture of everyone in my family but me—I hadn't come along yet. They're all dressed in their Sunday best and smiling at the camera. There's Simon, who was fifteen or so at the time, and Emily, smiling with two front teeth missing, which would make her seven or eight, I guess, and my mom, skinny and pretty, and my dad, handsome and dignified and friendly-looking. But no me. I didn't come along until two years later, the afterthought baby. I never got to be in a family photo.

I stand with my hand on the lamp switch for a long time before I turn it off, staring at the picture and wondering about all the what-ifs: if Dad was alive; if Mom wasn't sick; if Simon hadn't had to spend his whole adult life taking care of everybody else; if Emily wasn't…well, Emily. If I had a normal life; that would really be something. Maybe Marie-Claire is right. Maybe I do need to track down Travis Bingham. He should know what he's cost me.

FRIDAY

“Hey, Jenna, didn't anybody tell you? They already gave peace a chance, freak.”

Ned Street is a real witty guy. He's almost as hilarious as he thinks he is. Last week he stuck a picture of a hippo on Katie's locker. I took it off and threw it away before she saw it, but he's always got something else in store. Wedgies, name-calling,
kick me
signs—he does love the classics. Making fun of my sweater with the peace sign on it is nothing new. He makes stupid hippie cracks every time I wear it. He's pretty much got a nasty comment for every item of clothing I own, but the hippie jokes seem to be his favorite. His little posse is right there too; Ashley Walsh and Sam Fletcher, grinning away at Ned like he's some kind of celebrity.

“Thanks for letting me know, Ned. I'll be sure to bring that up at the next meeting.” I slide my books into my locker and close the door before he can make fun of the pictures I've got posted inside: photos from old magazines I found in an antique store on Ottawa Street. Smiling hippies at Woodstock, the cast of
Growing Pains
grinning at the camera, happy flappers doing the Charleston.

Ned looks a little perplexed.

“What meeting?”

“The International Society of Creeps, Freaks and Weirdos. We meet on alternate Tuesdays. You're a little late to get on the agenda for this week's meeting, but I'll be sure to let them know at the next one.”

This leaves him speechless for about ten seconds. Then he pulls a penny out of the pocket of his jeans, which are the kind where the rear end hangs down to the knees. He flips it at me.

“Here you go, Jenna. Why don't you go buy yourself a new pair of pants? Looks like those ones are all worn out.”

Ashley makes a face as she turns away from me. “You can
totally
see her underwear through those pants,” I hear her say.

In the cafeteria, Katie nibbles on salad and sips Diet Coke while Griffin and I have the Friday fish-and-chips special. Katie can put away enough food for four people most of the time, but she doesn't like to overindulge at school. She attracts enough attention from the resident jerks as it is.

“It dates back to ancient times,” she tells us. “Fish on Fridays, that is. They would slaughter the meat on the first day of the week, which was Sunday, and by Friday it would be rancid, so they'd eat fish instead, because it was caught fresh every day.”

Griffin scrunches up his nose and pushes a strand of long, stringy hair out of his eyes. “I don't think this was caught fresh any time in recent history. I think it actually might have been grown in a laboratory, as a matter of fact.”

Marie-Claire picks apart a Rice Krispies square with her long black fingernails and shoves it, almost grain by grain, into her mouth.

“So, Jenna, what time are we going tomorrow?” she asks between bites.

“Oh. That. I hadn't really thought about it. I don't even really know where this place is.” Nonsense, of course. I've only checked it out on Google Street View about sixty times since I found the article yesterday. It's a big white house that looks like it's made of Lego blocks, tucked away on a downtown street amid sprawling hundred-year-old brick houses that have all been subdivided into three or four apartments each, the lawns paved into driveways and a cluster of mailboxes on each porch.

“I think we should go first thing in the morning,” Katie says. “Like, seven thirty. Surprise him on his way out for the day, if he's allowed out on work release or something.”

“What are we doing to do, knock on the door?” Griffin says around a mouthful of fish and chips.

Marie-Claire shakes her head. “No, no. We just wait across the street. Hang out on the corner and smoke and try to blend in.”

“You're the only one who smokes—which is disgusting, by the way, and is going to kill you,” I say. “And what if he doesn't come out all morning? Simon had the news on this morning, and it's supposed to be minus twenty with the windchill factor all weekend. I'm not standing around on a street corner for four hours in freezing weather.” Plus, I fail to add out loud, every time I so much as think about talking to Travis Bingham, my stomach does somersaults.

“So what do you want to say?” Griffin asks.

I shrug. “I don't really know. I haven't really thought about it.”

“I think you should just walk right up and kick him, right in the nuts,” Marie-Claire says.

“Yeah, and get charged with assault,” Katie chimes in with a disapproving scowl at Marie-Claire. “I think you should just start by telling him who you are and see what he says.”

“And I think we should play cards,” says Griffin. He pulls a deck of cards out of his book bag and starts to deal out a game of Asshole, our standard lunchtime diversion, and the conversation instantly switches gears, much to my relief.

“Who was the president last time?”

“Not me. I've been the asshole for about ten games now.”

“Griffin's been an asshole for going on sixteen years.”

“You're hilarious.”

Asshole has to be the lamest card game going, but once you get into it, it's a lot of fun. The first person to lay down all their cards gets to be the president for the next round; the last person is the asshole and has to give their best cards to the president next hand. As we start laying down our cards, I relax a little. Tomorrow will bring whatever it brings. For now, I'm winning this game, and that's enough to take my mind off everything else.

SATURDAY

“Jenna! Your boyfriend is here!”

Wex is watching
Veggie Tales
on
TV
, sitting cross-legged on the couch. He's eating a bowl of store-brand Fruity-O cereal in his too-small Spider-Man pajamas with the cuffs coming off.

I let Griffin into the apartment. He's hopping back and forth from foot to foot to warm up, waving his glasses in the air to defog them, and his cheeks are bright red from the cold.

I give Wex a cuff across the ear on my way past. “He's not my boyfriend.”

He throws a cushion at me. “He's a boy and he's your friend, so he's your boyfriend.”

“How did you even get in the building?” I ask Griffin. “I didn't hear you buzz.”

“Somebody's moving in. They've got the door propped open.”

“Right. I forgot that was today. They're moving into 403.”

“Was that where the potheads with all the cats lived?”

“No, that was 421; 403 was the old guy who almost burned down the building last year. He put a pot of water on to boil and fell asleep on the couch. Simon had to get all the ceilings redone, and the floors in 503 too.”

Wex throws another cushion, knocking Griffin's glasses out of his hand. “You're drowning out the
TV
. Go someplace else and talk.”

“That's fine. We're leaving anyway.” Griffin puts his glasses back on and uses the offending cushion to smack Wex in the head, but not hard enough to hurt. Wex giggles and smacks him back, spilling the milk from his cereal on the couch in the process, but nobody says anything about it. Wex doesn't get in trouble much, and when he does something wrong it's usually so minor it's hardly worth calling attention to it. Besides, it was mostly Griffin's fault.

I've been on the fence all night about whether to even go out today. I got maybe an hour of sleep between tossing and turning, worrying about what I might say if I see Travis Bingham, and listening to Emily pounding away at the keyboard on the practically antique computer in our bedroom, chatting with some guy online until she finally went out to meet him at some after-hours club at three in the morning. I know all this because she left the chat window open and I skimmed through the highlights of the conversation before I switched over to chat with Katie, who was also wide awake at that time. I made a mental note of the guy's profile name—Skinny D—just in case Emily doesn't come back in a day or two. At least that way we'll have something to give the police when they go looking for her.