Handle With Care Read online

  I smacked my hand on the steering wheel, inadvertently honking the horn. The noise brought Charlotte to the window. Her face was tiny and white, an oval whose features were blurred at this distance.

  I had asked Charlotte to marry me with petit fours. I went to a bakery and had them write a letter in icing on top of each one: MARRY ME, and then I mixed them up and served them on a plate. It's a puzzle, I told her. You have to put them in order.

  ARMY REM, she wrote.

  Charlotte was still at the window, watching me with her arms crossed. I could barely see in her the girl I'd told to try again. I could no longer picture the look on her face when, the second time, she got it right.

  Amelia

  W

  hen Mom called me down to dinner that night, I moved with all the wild and crazy enthusiasm of a death row prisoner heading to an execution. I mean, it didn't take a rocket scientist to know that nobody in this household was happy, and that it had something to do with the lawyer's office we'd gone to. My parents had not done much to mask their voices when they were yelling at each other. In the three hours since Dad had left and returned again, since Mom had cried into the mixing bowl while whipping up her meat loaf, you'd been whimpering. So I did what I always did when you were in pain: I stuck my iPod headphones in my ears and cranked the volume.

  I didn't do it for the reason you'd think - to drown out the noise you were making. I knew that's what my parents thought: that I was totally unsympathetic. I wasn't about to try to explain it to them, either, but the truth was, I needed that music. I needed to distract myself from the fact that, when you were crying, there was nothing I could do to stop it, because that just made me hate myself even more.

  Everyone - even you, in the bottom half of your spica cast, with your arm strapped up against your chest - was already sitting at the dinner table when I got there. Mom had cut your meat loaf into tiny squares, like postage stamps. It made me think of when you were little, sitting in your high chair. I used to try to play with you - rolling a ball or pulling you in a wagon - and every time I was told the same thing: Be careful.

  Once, you were sitting on the bed and I was bouncing on it, and you fell off. One minute we were astronauts exploring the planet Zurgon, and the next, your left shin was bent at a ninety-degree angle and you were doing that freaky zoning-out thing you did when you had a bad break. Mom and Dad went out of their way to say this wasn't my fault, but who did they think they were kidding? I was the one who'd been jumping, even if it had been your idea in the first place. If I'd never been there, you wouldn't have gotten hurt.

  I slid into my chair. We didn't have assigned seats, like some families did, but we all took the same ones for every meal. I was still wearing my headphones, with my music turned up loud - emo stuff, songs that made me feel like there were people with even crappier lives than mine. 'Amelia,' my father said. 'Not at the table.'

  Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite. And just at this moment, it chose to rear its ugly head. I blinked at my father, cranked the volume, and said - too loudly, 'Pass the potatoes.'

  I sounded like the biggest brat on earth, and maybe I wanted to be: like Pinocchio, if I acted like a self-centered teenager, eventually I'd become one, and everyone would notice me and cater to me instead of hand-feeding you your meat loaf and watching you to make sure you weren't slipping in your chair. Actually, I'd just settle for having someone notice I was even a member of this family.

  'Wills,' my mother said, 'you have to eat something.'

  'It tastes like feet,' you answered.

  'Amelia, I'm not going to ask you again,' Dad said.

  'Five more bites . . .'

  'Amelia!'

  They didn't look at each other; as far as I knew they hadn't spoken since this afternoon. I wondered if they realized that they could be on opposite sides of the globe right now, and still be having this dinner conversation, and it wouldn't make a difference.

  You squirmed away from the fork Mom was waving in front of your face. 'Stop treating me like a baby,' you said. 'Just because I broke my shoulder doesn't mean you have to treat me like I'm two years old!' To illustrate this, you reached for your glass with your free arm, but you knocked it over. Milk landed in part on the tablecloth and mostly smack in the middle of Dad's plate. 'Goddammit!' he yelled, and he reached toward me and ripped the headphones out of my ears. 'You're part of this family, and you'll act that way at the dinner table.'

  I stared at him. 'You first,' I said.

  His face turned a steamy red. 'Amelia, go to your room.'

  'Fine!' I shoved my chair back with a screech and ran upstairs. With tears leaking out of my eyes and my nose running, I locked myself in the bathroom. The girl in the mirror was someone I didn't know: her mouth twisted, her eyes dark and hollow.

  These days, it seemed as if everything pissed me off. I got pissed off when I woke up in the morning and you were staring at me like I was some zoo animal; I got pissed off when I went to school and my locker was near the French classroom when Madame Riordan had made it her personal mission to make my life horrible; I got pissed off when I saw a gaggle of cheerleaders, with their perfect legs and their perfect lives, who worried about things like who would ask them to the next dance and whether red nail polish looked trampy, instead of whether their moms would remember to pick them up from school or be otherwise occupied at the emergency room. The only times I wasn't pissed off, I was hungry - like right now. Or at least I thought it was hunger. Both felt like I was being consumed from the inside out; I couldn't tell the difference anymore.

  The last time my parents had been fighting - which was, like, yesterday - you and I were in our bedroom, and we could hear them loud and clear. Words slipped under the door, even though it was closed: wrongful birth . . . testimony . . . deposition. At one point I heard the mention of television: Don't you think reporters would get wind of this? Is that what you really want? Dad said, and for a moment I thought how cool it would be to be on the news, until I remembered that being a poster child for dysfunctional family life wasn't really how I wanted to spend my fifteen minutes of fame.

  They're mad at me, you said.

  No. They're mad at each other.

  Then we both heard Dad say, Do you really think Willow wouldn't figure this out?

  You looked at me. Figure what out?

  I hesitated, and instead of answering, I reached for the book you had in your lap and told you I'd read out loud.

  Normally you didn't like that - reading was just about the only thing you could do brilliantly, and you usually wanted to show it off, but you probably felt like I did at that moment: like there was a big Brillo pad in your stomach, and every time you moved, it grated your insides. I had friends whose parents had divorced. Wasn't this the way it all started?

  I opened to a random page of facts and began to read out loud to you about unlikely and gruesome deaths. There was a Brink's car guard who was killed when fifty thousand dollars' worth of quarters fell out of a truck and crushed him. A gust of wind pushed a man's car into a river near Naples, Italy, so he broke the window and climbed out and swam to shore, only to be killed by a tree that blew over and crushed him. A man who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel in 1911 and broke nearly every bone in his body later on slipped on a banana peel in New Zealand and died from the fall.

  You liked that last one best, and I'd gotten you to smile again, but inside, I was still miserable: how could anyone ever win when the world beat you down at every turn?

  That was when Mom came into the room and sat down on the edge of your bed. 'Do you and Daddy hate each other?' you asked.

  'No, Wills,' she said, smiling, but in a way that made her skin look like it was stretched too tightly over the edges of her face. 'Everything's absolutely fine.'

&n