a young adult novel by Annabel Lyon
EXCERPT
“ROMANCE IS MUSH,” Dad sings along to the CD. He sings to Mom into the microphone of his thumb with an intense look that makes her laugh. While the CD moans on, I catch Dexter’s eye and pretend to stick my finger down my throat.
“What’s wrong, Edie?” Dexter says sweetly, and I can’t get the finger out before our parents see. I’m thirteen (today!), Dexter is fifteen, and sometimes we’re allies but more often we’re enemies, like those knights in Elizabethan times, the ones with the white roses and the ones with the red, like on the front of my Collected Shakespeare Volume III: The Histories and Non-Dramatic Poetry. Volume I: The Comedies has a guy with a donkey’s head, some fairies, and a bearded guy in a big starry cloak glowering at an enormous book. Volume II: The Tragedies is my favourite. It has the dressed-in-black guy, and the hunch-backed guy, and the crazy-looking red-haired woman, and the old guy sadly patting the head of a boy with bells on his hat. Hamlet, Iago, Lady Macbeth, King Lear.
“Cake in my molars,” I say quickly.
“Cake in my mo-o-lars,” Dad sings along to the CD. “For those who are lonely too. Ooh, ooh.”
“Like, please stop,” Dexter says.
“I love this one,” I say. “Like, shut up.”
On the table in front of me are the remains of my birthday: cards, wrapping paper, half a cheesecake, books, a stuffed giraffe, a T-shirt, a mug with ‘Edith’ on it, and the case for the CD we’re listening to. My family recently returned from our annual holiday at the cabin on the lake, and while we were driving there, Dad tuned in a jazz station while Mom slept and Dexter i-Podded, and after a while I said, “I like this,” and Dad said, “I do, too,” and he remembered and went out and bought me a CD of someone named Sarah Vaughan singing songs from eighty years ago, and that was his present to me. Usually he just signs his name under Mom’s name on the cards. I get the feeling he approves very much of me liking jazz, and is Encouraging Me, which I usually resist, but I like the CD. I’m looking forward to listening to it again, alone in my room, in bed with the headphones, where I can concentrate.
The books are from Mom. The mug is from Grandma. The giraffe is from my cousin and arrived in the mail in an envelope warped by too much taping. It has enormous eyelashes and giggles from a recording inside its body if you tickle its horns. It’s for a three-year-old.
“Ellie told me Merry chose it specially for you,” Mom says. Ellie is Mom’s younger sister. Merry has something called Down syndrome, which makes her short and pudgy, with tiny ears and stubby fingers and eyes like pods, and worst of all it makes her slow. She goes to a special school and makes lopsided crafts and can barely read and doesn’t understand jokes and loves me and Dexter more than anyone in the world. That’s what Merry told her mom, who told our mom, who told us. “Aw,” Dexter said. “Huh,” I said.