6
GOING, GOING, GONE
Whatever pleasure Lily could have received from
Jordan’s getting kicked out of Granny Kate and Pop Pop’s house—what
on earth could she have done?—was
completely overshadowed by the fact that she was back now.
Apparently for good.
Lily was rinsing off the breakfast
dishes when she heard a rumbling upstairs from Nina and Jordan’s
bedroom. (She refused to call the room just
Jordan’s.) What was she doing up there? Jordan had been home for
two days . . . two days fraught with tension. She had been
relatively quiet until now, and careful to stay out of their dad’s
way, but it didn’t matter because bad feelings and conflict just
seemed to ooze out of Jordan anyway.
The only positive Lily could take from
Jordan’s being back for good was that for
good might not be all that long. In two years Jordan would
be eighteen, and there was no way she’d want to live at home after
high school. So two years was all they had to endure.
Two years of being known as the sister
of the freak with blue hair. The geeky little sister.
The ugly
duckling. She always tried to get that horrible expression
out of her head, but it stayed there anyway, dancing around in her
consciousness, mocking her.
In her opinion, Hans Christian Andersen
had a lot to answer for. People told that dumb story as if it was
supposed to be a source of hope to less attractive kids. As if
every ugly person ended up being a swan! A true fairy tale. As far
as Lily was concerned, the incredible aspect of the whole tale was
that it took so long for the swan—to say nothing of its mother—to
figure out that he was an entirely different species. The story
should have been called The Stupid Swan,
because that poor bird could have saved himself a lot of trouble
and heartache if he’d just looked at his reflection and realized
that he was in the wrong family to begin with.
Unfortunately, there was no doubting
Lily was in the right family. Everyone said she resembled Granny
Kate’s older sister, Jeannie, when Jeannie was a kid. Family photos
confirmed this, and it was not comforting.
Even as a teen, Aunt Jeannie looked like an undernourished refugee
from the land of bad fashion decisions. Her plain, ill-fitting
shirts always emphasized her pancake-flat chest, and the tweedy
skirts she wore bunched awkwardly around her thick waist. The girl
could have had a flashing neon sign over her head: FUTURE SCHOOL LIBRARIAN AND AFRICAN VIOLET
ENTHUSIAST.
Lily shuddered whenever she looked at
those photos, because apparently that’s how other people saw her.
But that’s not how she saw herself. It wasn’t how her mother or
Nina had seen her, either.
One of her best memories was of Nina,
eight going on nine, parading her through the halls of their
elementary school to Lily’s first grade classroom on her first day
of real school. Other kids had looked at her like she was special,
because her big sister—a third grader who already had the poise of
a sixth grader—had escorted her right up to the teacher’s desk and
announced, “Miss Collins, this is my little sister, Lily. She
should probably be in second grade, because she already knows how
to read and add and everything.”
(If only Miss Collins had listened—it
would have saved Lily two very boring years until her third grade
teacher had gotten a clue and bumped her up to
fourth.)
Nina had waited for her outside the
classroom after school at the end of the day, too, and had taken
her to the girls’ rest room to help her unstick the two braids that
Tommy Dewes had glued together during storytime. “The first day is
the hardest,” Nina told her. “Tomorrow afternoon will be
better.”
She’d looked blurry through Lily’s hot
tears. “How do you know?”
“Because tomorrow at lunch, Jordan will
punch Tommy Dewes in the nose.” And then, before they left the
bathroom, she’d given Lily a fierce, bracing hug. “You don’t even
belong in first grade anyway.”
Nina had always known what to say to
her. She’d been her cheerleader, and confidante, and practically
her best friend. Her only friend, sometimes. When they got older,
Jordan started treating Lily like a pest, but even when Nina was
with her school friends she sometimes invited Lily along to movies
or whatever. Nina would play tennis with her, too, though Lily
stank at tennis. Nina would laugh when Lily worried about not being
good enough. “Who cares? It’s just to have fun together,
right?”
Lily’s throat tightened. She really
shouldn’t think about Nina, not unless she was sure she was alone.
She didn’t want to get all upset and set Dominic off. It had been
horrible those first weeks to hear him crying in his room. Almost
four months later, they were all just now getting back to normal.
The new normal. That was what made Jordan’s return so especially
awful. She was one of those people who seemed to rampage through
life like a demented rhinoceros—as if she were the only person in
the world and the rest of them were just little rodents who had to
scatter or get squished.
Something crashed upstairs, shaking the
ceiling hard enough to set the light fixture over the dining room
table swinging. What the heck was Jordan doing?
Dominic ran into the kitchen, skidding
the last few feet across the linoleum in his socks. “Did you hear
that?!”
“What’s going on?”
Her brother’s entire torso lifted in a
shrug. “I’ve knocked at the door, but she won’t let me
in.”
Lily bit her lip. She wondered if
Jordan was doing drugs. That would explain why Granny Kate and Pop
Pop had been in such a hurry to get rid of her. She’d asked her dad
for details, but he wouldn’t explain anything.
She dumped baking soda down the drain
and flipped the garbage disposal switch. During the ten seconds the
disposal was making its god-awful noise, Lily reconsidered her
suspicions. Not that she knew anything about it, but she doubted
taking drugs involved anything that sounded like dropping a large
boulder on the hardwood floors. After she flipped the switch off
and quiet descended on the kitchen again, she announced, “I’m going
to find out.”
Her brother barred her path. “You know
how she is when she doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“So? Who does she think she is? The
queen?”
At that moment, Jordan herself slouched
into the room. “I prefer empress, if you don’t mind. Or tsarina.
Sounds more . . . well, like a bossy person.”
Lily smirked. “I think the word your
tiny brain is reaching for is dictatorial.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Jordan said. “Could
you guys get the door if the bell rings? Some people are coming
by.”
“What people?” Lily hadn’t seen any of
Jordan’s friends at the house in months and months. Did she still
have any? “Who?”
“Never mind,” Jordan said. “Just answer
the door and show them up to my room.”
Nina’s room.
Lily fumed.
“I’m not your maid,” Lily told
her.
“I’ll do it,” Dominic said quickly,
before a fight could erupt.
“Thanks, Dominickel.”
When she was gone, Dominic turned back
to Lily, who tried not to convey what a traitor she thought he
was.
Apparently her effort failed. “I’m just
trying to help,” he said defensively.
Lily was determined not to waste any
more of her time thinking about whatever it was that Jordan was up
to. She had more important things to do, like read Hamlet. Her original goal for the summer had been to
read the complete works of Jane Austen, but that had taken her less
than a month. After Pride and Prejudice she
hadn’t been able to stop herself. It was like eating M&Ms.
She’d just popped one down after another.
It would take her more than a month to
get through all of Shakespeare, she was pretty sure. Just this one
play was probably going to take her more than a month. Every other
line she had to stop and figure out what the heck was going on. She
hadn’t even reached the part with Hamlet in it. There were just a
lot of guys running around exclaiming, Tush! and Peace! and
Stand, ho!
Her task was made a little more
difficult because she couldn’t stop tensing up every time she heard
a noise outside. She kept thinking it would be those mysterious
people Jordan was expecting. But the first time she heard a car
door shut and stood up to peek through the curtains, it was just
that lady from next door, bringing Professor Oliver back. He had
cut off the leg of one of his pairs of khakis at midthigh, just
past where his cast began.
When the doorbell rang, Lily jumped up,
forgetting she wasn’t going to answer the door. She reached it the
same time as Dominic, who was running full tilt from the dining
room. The two came inches away from colliding like cops in an old
silent movie. As Lily opened the door, she expected to find a
teenager on the other side of the threshold, but instead there was
a scruffy guy who had to be at least sixty. He had on baggy jeans
and wore his scraggly gray hair in a ponytail. Behind him stood a
younger guy—younger, as in forty-five or so.
“I’m here about the dresser,” the
scraggly one announced.
“The what?”
Dominic exclaimed.
Maybe dresser
was code for “I’m here to sell drugs.” She debated calling her dad.
Or the police.
Then she heard Jordan call out from the
staircase, “Hey! The stuff’s up here.” She gestured with a roll of
her shoulder and headed back up, with the scruffy men
trailing.
As Lily and Dominic exchanged confused
glances, a paneled van pulled into their drive. Another middle-aged
guy popped out and came loping up the stairs. “This is the sale,
right?” he asked as he shouldered past them.
“Sale?” Lily repeated.
Dominic ran upstairs and came racing
down again a few minutes later as more people trickled in. This
time there were women too. An invasion had begun.
“She’s selling everything!” Dominic
announced excitedly.
“What do you mean,
everything?”
“I mean everything. All the furniture, and clothes, and books
and CDs. She told me she put an ad on Craigslist.”
“Is she selling Nina’s
stuff?”
Dominic nodded.
“She can’t do that!”
Lily ran to the staircase but couldn’t
get up it because the first two guys were now carrying down Nina
and Jordan’s old dresser. Quivering with impatience, she flattened
herself against the wall. When they were finally out of her way,
she took the stairs two at a time, nearly knocking over someone on
his way down with a boxful of loot.
She stopped short at Nina and Jordan’s
door. The room was filled with people dragging open drawers and
holding up articles for inspection. Stuff was strewn everywhere—all
of Nina’s clothes and books and purses. Everything. The vultures
were picking through it. They were looking at Jordan’s things too,
but Lily didn’t care about that.
“You’re selling everything!” she yelled
at Jordan.
Jordan tossed her an annoyed look.
“Brilliant detective work there, Lils.”
“But you can’t!”
“But I am.”
A lady picked up Nina’s tennis racket,
and Lily felt a pain shoot through her heart. She turned on her
heel and raced back downstairs to the phone. When her father
answered on the second ring, she didn’t waste time with
niceties.
“Dad, you have to come home.
Now.”
Tension crackled over the line—that
palpable fear disaster had struck again. “What’s
wrong?”
“Jordan’s selling everything in her and
Nina’s room!”
There was a slight pause before her dad
answered, but when he did, it was with exasperation. Aimed at
her. “For Pete’s sake, Lily. You scared me
half to death.”
“They’re taking away all the furniture,
and Nina’s tennis racket!” she said, trying to convey the extreme
urgency of the situation.
“Well, just see they don’t start
hauling away things from the rest of the house.”
“But—”
“I need you to keep your eyes open,
Lily. Make sure all the other doors are shut and watch to make sure
no one makes off with the family silver. Can you do
that?”
“But Dad—”
“I have to go now,” he said, cutting
her off. “I’m supposed to be in a meeting.”
She hung up, feeling more and more
panicky. And outraged. This was really going to happen! All that
was left of Nina was just going to be carted away like so much
garbage. Thank goodness she had already pilfered a few of her
sister’s books.
Dominic trooped through the hallway
with the neighbor lady. Grace. He was tugging her up the staircase
and telling her to “come see.” As if this were a carnival going on
instead of a tragedy.
The terrible thing was, Lily couldn’t
think of a way to stop it. She wanted to run up and screech at
everyone to get out, but what words would make a dent in the
determination of these estate sale buzzards? She wished she were a
soldier with a sword and could charge in yelling, Stand, ho! She wished there was another person left in
the world who would understand her anguish at seeing a stranger
carrying a stuffed toy rabbit and a tennis racket out the front
door.