Buff’s house was so different from Suzi’s house. In Buff’s house the furniture all looked and smelled new, and in the living room everything was blue and white, in the kitchen red and white, in little Angel’s room pink and white. Everything matched! Buff’s house had soft wall-to-wall carpet in all the rooms, even the bathroom; and the bathroom sinks didn’t have dried toothpaste globs and lone hairs in them and old eye shadow and blush containers spilling over on the counters. At Buff’s house there were dried flower arrangements in every room and a bowl of fresh fruit on the dining room table. There were family photos everywhere—of his family, not their dead relatives. Huge framed photos, taken outdoors, the kind where everyone in the family wears a white shirt. In all the pictures Buff looked so handsome, an older brother of Orlando Bloom. Paula’s blond hair hung down in perfectly straight curtains. Rusty’s wavy reddish brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Baby Angel had no hair. Except for Angel, they looked like an orthodontist’s advertisement.
The whole setup—the family and the house—made Suzi angry because she knew that the reason they looked so perfect and that their house looked so perfect was because they didn’t have two teenagers with Asperger’s throwing fits and hoarding things and a stinky old granddad (she loved him, though!) and a dad who never came home and a mom who slopped around looking hideous and making nasty remarks and claiming to be too tired to do anything but hide in her room and read. If she lived in a house that looked like Buff’s house, she’d bring friends home with her all the time. As it was now, she was always embarrassed when Mykaila and Sierra and Sienna came over, and she ended up apologizing over and over until they told her to shut the hell up.
Of course, Suzi knew that everything wasn’t as dandy at Buff’s house as it seemed. For one thing, Rusty had become a total reject misfit who wouldn’t even babysit her own little sister, or maybe couldn’t be trusted to babysit her. And there was something way wrong with a married man, a minister for God’s sake, who was obsessed with Ava.
Suzi might have found Buff’s obsession with Ava to be hilarious and only hilarious if not for two things: 1. Why Ava? What was so great about her? And 2. the fact that Ava wouldn’t have any part of Buff. Ava hadn’t been back to church since that one time, and after the Wakulla Springs trip she’d refused to go to youth group. She didn’t have an appreciative bone in her body. She was waiting for Elvis to rise up from his tomb and marry her. Did she not realize how cool Buff was? A hot minister! How cool was that? Maybe Buff would divorce his wife and marry Ava! Although nobody in their right mind, once they realized how annoying Ava was, would want anything to do with her. Of course, Ava was gorgeous to look at, prettier than Suzi, even, if you just looked at her.
Suzi could probably get Buff in big trouble if she told people about his obsession with Ava, and maybe she would, but she’d tell when she was good and ready. Her mother would spaz and she’d never let Suzi go back to that church again if she knew. Suzi couldn’t bear the thought of that. She liked going to Genesis, she’d accepted Christ as her personal savior and planned to start reading the Bible, very soon. Her knee was healing, mostly because of her physical therapy, but surely all the church members—and Buff!—praying for her had helped.
When she closed her eyes at night she imagined Buff, like in his sermon, standing in that big green field, holding out his arms, and her running toward him. He would envelop her in a hug, but it wasn’t the loving fatherly kind, it was the other kind; and when he kissed her it was like Orlando Bloom kissing Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, not like Davis slobbering on her at the skating rink. She’d broken up with Davis by texting him, which she knew was tacky, but she didn’t care. She’d moved on, in her mind anyway, to bigger and better things. Buff just needed more exposure to her and he’d catch on to what he was missing. Her. Not Ava.
But Paula had called their house last night and asked Ava to babysit. What a joke! Ava, babysit? She couldn’t even take care of herself. It was disappointing that Buff had told Paula to call the Witherspoon house and ask for Ava, not Suzi. Her mom had answered the phone and tried to get Ava to talk to Paula, but Ava said no, she wouldn’t, and left the room. So her mother, flustered yet again by Ava’s rude behavior, just stood there holding the phone like a mutant.
“Give me the phone,” Suzi told her mother. Then she got on the phone and told Paula that Ava couldn’t babysit but that she could, even though she’d never technically babysat before, and that’s how it happened that on Friday night, instead of hobbling through the mall with her buds, she was at Buff’s house, playing Nancy Drew. Buff wasn’t there, which was a bummer, but she could at least nose around and collect information about him. Just how far would he go in his ability to surprise her? He was a married minister obsessed with Ava. What other quirks lay below his shiny surface?
And she was entertaining Angel, whom it was so easy to love. As requested, Suzi fed Angel some gluten-free noodles and meatless, sugar-free tomato sauce. And steamed carrots and broccoli all cut up. Naturally, Angel turned up her nose at the entire dinner. Suzi tasted it and pretended to love it, just to get Angel to eat more of it, but it tasted like crap. Cardboard crap. Angel ate enough, with a lot of coaxing, to earn a yogurt pop for dessert. Since she wasn’t playing soccer right now, Suzi really had to watch what she ate. But tonight was special, so Suzi had one, too.
While they sat at the kitchen table and chewed and sucked on their yogurt pops, Suzi listened for sounds coming from Rusty’s room, but heard nothing.
Paula had rolled her eyes when she mentioned that Rusty was holed up in her room, grounded all weekend. Suzi wanted to ask what for, but you couldn’t ask that sort of thing. You need to ground her until she’s twenty-one, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t say that either.
Paula and Buff had gone for a Parents’ Date Night with some other church couples, all smiles and seeming eager to be off on their own. Buff was as friendly to Suzi as usual, giving her a hug, smelling like richling cologne. They’d be back by ten thirty, Paula promised. She wore a low-cut shirt, revealing the top of her round balloon breasts. Implants! A minister’s wife! Suzi was pleased to notice that Paula had a rather large behind, even though she exercised nonstop and seemed to eat only cardboard.
After dinner she and Angel played store (Angel’s idea) and then school (Suzi’s idea) and then Angel said she wanted to watch Veggie-Tales. Suzi got her into bed around seven thirty, read her a couple of wholesome children’s books, the best one called When Jesus Comes to My House about Jesus dropping in on a little boy for a play date and the two of them building with blocks and having a snack together. Finally Suzi turned out Angel’s light, feeling competent as all get-out.
All this time, Rusty had not made a peep in her room and hadn’t come out once to see what was going on. There was a light on in her room—Suzi could see it under the door—but no sound at all. Maybe she’d snuck out and was causing trouble with her friends. Or, scratch that, she didn’t have any friends. Suzi stood outside her door, listening as hard as she could, hearing nothing. If Rusty wasn’t in there, Suzi would go in and nose around, see what she could dig up. She knocked.
“Yeah.” She was in there.
“Hi, it’s me, Suzi, the babysitter.” She liked calling herself this.
“Otis’s sister?”
“Right.” Suzi had never been referred to as Otis’s sister before in her life. How would Rusty know Otis?
“Need something?”
“I’m just bored.”
“Sorry, the booze is locked up,” Rusty said. There was a rustling, then a creaking sound, and the door popped open a few inches. Rusty, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and no makeup on, looked almost normal, except for the nose ring. She wore pink pj’s with elephants on them. “Why, if it isn’t the preppy, popular Miss Witherspoon.”
Suzi made vague noises of protest, her face flushing. On the surface, being called popular was great. But the way Rusty said it, popular sounded like something worse than shallow and foolish, which it was, but how was it Suzi’s fault that other people liked her? “Just wanted to see if you were really in here,” Suzi said.
“Ta-da!” Rusty said.
Suzi looked over Rusty’s shoulder but didn’t see anything interesting in Rusty’s room—no cigarettes, booze, illegal drugs, nasty books. The room was neat and clean, without even any pictures on the walls. No computer, no electronics visible.
“Come in, I guess, if you want,” Rusty said. She stood back from the door.
Suzi hobbled into the room and Rusty quickly shut the door behind her.
“Sporting injury?” Rusty asked her.
Suzi told her how it happened, and surprisingly enough, Rusty actually listened as if she were interested.
She motioned for Suzi to sit down on one of the twin beds, which she did. Rusty plopped down on the other, lying on her side in her baggy pink pj’s, head propped up, staring at Suzi with her big blue eyes. It was a mysterious room, not what she’d been expecting. All white, no other color to balance it out. No personality. It was like an institutional room, like a room in a crazy ward. Girl Interrupted. The white bedspreads had nary a wrinkle in them.
Rusty must’ve noticed her looking around. “I used to have all kinds of shit in here, but I took it to the Goodwill.”
“Why?”
Rusty shrugged. “I want as little of my actual self in here as possible. It’s my way of protesting.”
“Dang,” Suzi said. “That’s harsh. On yourself, I mean.”
“They can make me live here, but they can’t make me enjoy it.”
Suzi admired Rusty’s zealous self-denial and wondered if she could strip her room bare this way. Nope. No way. She needed her comforting things. Her room was the polar opposite of Rusty’s room. She and Rusty were opposite in every way, when you thought about it, but here they were talking. It was like a social miracle. Never would’ve happened outside this room. Rusty was two grades ahead of her but seemed way older. And she was easier to talk to than a lot of people. She didn’t bother with meaningless chitchat, so Suzi decided to forgo it as well. “Why aren’t you watching Angel?” she asked Rusty.
“I’ve been deemed irresponsible.”
“How come you hate it here so much? Your dad’s so cool!”
“You go right on thinking that. I know him, and he ain’t cool.”
“You should see my dad.”
“I’ve seen him.”
They both shared a nasty little laugh.
Suzi asked what was wrong with Buff.
“Let’s just say, his fixation on your sister—it’s not the first, and it won’t be the last.”
“How did you know he liked Ava?” For some reason, hearing this, rather than making Suzi angry or repulsed or frightened, gave her hope. “Did he tell you?”
“Doesn’t your mom care? Does she know?”
Rusty sighed and rolled over onto her back. “She’s the Great Wall of China.”
“Huh?”
“She knows, but she pretends she doesn’t. She blocks it out. Even though he’s been in treatment.”
“Wow,” Suzi said, but she didn’t know exactly what this meant. In treatment for what? Did she want to find out? Not really.
“For sexual addiction,” Rusty added, staring at her ceiling. She sighed again.
“Wow,” Suzi said again, thinking how peculiar it was for a daughter to be talking about her father this way. A minister with sex-u-al addiction. What did this mean? That he couldn’t help himself? Again, in a way that Suzi knew was sick and twisted, this gave her hope. But she didn’t want to know more.
“What were you doing in here?” she asked Rusty.
Rusty rolled over and pulled a book from under the bed. “I bring in one book at a time, and when I’m done, take it out and bring in another. Usually I get them from the library. Otis gave me this one. It’s scintillating.” She held up an old white paperback book called Atoms to Electricity.
“How do you know Otis?” Suzi asked, but she was wondering, Would she be able to hear Angel if she woke up?
“Night, night, Suze,” Rusty said, flopping back on the bed. “Enough questions for now.”
* * *
The following Wednesday Suzi stayed late after youth group and watched as Buff cleaned up. All the other kids had left. Buff was supposed to give her and Ava a ride home, but Ava, of course, wouldn’t lower herself to attend youth group. Buff was rearranging beanbag chairs in the chat room, scooping them up and slinging them into a corner, while Suzi, because of her knee, sat on a folding chair and watched. The muscles in his back and arms rippled under his white T-shirt as he bent over and picked up the multicolored beanbags.
He was scowling. He’d been acting annoyed all evening. When one of the smaller boys, Nick, banged his elbow against a cabinet and doubled over in pain, Buff had told him to get over it. When one of the girls, Jackie, went on and on during check-in about a fight with her friend, he’d said, “That’s lame.”
“Where’s Ava tonight?” he finally asked Suzi, kicking the beanbags into a mound. “Did we do something to scare her away?”
“You did,” Suzi said boldly. “She doesn’t like you.”
Buff hesitated, glancing up at Suzi as if he were going to say something, then changed his mind. He snatched up the last beanbag chair, the one with a hole in it, and heaved it at the wall, and when it hit beans rattled out.
“But I do,” Suzi said, her heart popping away like a string of firecrackers. “I mean, I like you.” She hoped Buff understood what she was trying to tell him.
“I like you, too,” Buff said, not meeting her eyes. He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the room.
Suzi knew what kind of like he was referring to. Pals. Buddies. “No, not that kind of like,” she blurted out. “I like like you.”
He finally turned, looking her up and down. “What exactly are you saying, honey?”
Why was he making this so hard? “You know.”
He shook his head. “Okay, I know. But you don’t know. You’re younger than my daughter.”
“Your daughter hates you.” Because of all her sparring with Ava, Suzi had a knack for saying just the right thing at the right time, or maybe it was the wrong thing, depending on how you looked at it. But either way, her words usually had the effect she desired.
Buff walked over to the food table, where bowls of tortilla chip crumbs and plates of cookie crumbs waited to be taken to the kitchen. Buff slammed the table into the wall. “Wait for me in my office,” he told Suzi.
Suzi stepped out of the chat room and stood a moment in the great hall, and she felt like cartwheeling across the cavernous room, dancing and whirling. She would have done it except for her lame knee. Ha-ha-ha, she was thinking, for some reason. Na, na, na. So there. She had no idea to whom these thoughts were addressed.