CHAPTER 14
Julie’s stomach churned while she watched her cousin Damian shovel marshmallow-topped yams into his mouth. She wanted to kill whoever had come up with the sickening idea of combining marshmallows with a perfectly likeable vegetable. As gross as that was, it didn’t compare to her aunt’s “salad”: Red Hots candies suspended in a green Jell-O mold, with carrot bits and canned mandarin orange slices. At least her mother’s turkey was devoid of anything offensive. That was something to be thankful for.
“Julie, why aren’t you wearing your pilgrim hat? You love the pilgrim hat!” Julie’s uncle Pete raised his voice to be heard over the table noise and pointed to his own. “It doesn’t feel like Thanksgiving if you don’t wear the hat.”
Julie scanned the fourteen family members who sat at the table in her mother’s house in Ohio. Everyone there wore either a pilgrim hat or an Indian hat that had been purchased years ago at the costume shop on Delacorte Avenue. In other years, Julie had found this tradition amusing, but today the absurdity and idiocy had become undeniable. It was undignified. Not to mention the cultural offensiveness factor.
“Consider me the rebellious relative who refuses to conform. I can’t say I’m a fan of supporting stereotypes.” Julie jabbed her fork into the heaping mound of green bean casserole. God, the canned fried onion smell alone was enough to give her indigestion for days.
“Pete, she doesn’t have to wear the hat if she doesn’t want to,” her mother said. Kate stood up and reached into the middle of the table for the cranberry sauce. The hideous white dish was painted with country houses. “My daughter is making a statement, I believe.” As she moved to sit back down, she tipped the paper turkey centerpiece to the side and into the candle flame, immediately turning the gaudy decoration into a fiery display. “Oh, hell!” Kate shrieked.
Everyone simultaneously backed their chairs up about three feet and—amid hollers to call 911 and prayers to higher powers—Uncle Pete upended his water glass on the flames. “No harm, no foul,” he chortled. “Get it? Fowl? Turkey joke.”
Julie patted her napkin on the table with one hand and fanned the smoke away with the other. She sighed and sat back down, pinning herself once again between her cousin Damian and her mother’s sister, Erika.
“So, Julie,” Erika started, “how is school going? Do you love Boston?”
“I do love Boston. It snowed for the first time a few weeks ago, and the city looks even more beautiful at night.”
“Eh, Boston,” Uncle Pete growled. “I went there once. Dirty city with a bunch of bums hanging all around the Common. It’s not that hard not to be homeless.”
Julie gripped her fork and considered the pros and cons of stabbing her uncle’s hand. Had he always been such a dumb jerk? “I’m sure my Economics of Poverty professor would disagree with you.”
“Economics of Poverty? What the hell is that? What’s to teach? If you don’t have any money, there’s no economics to talk about.” Her uncle dropped his fork and looked at Julie’s mother. “Are you actually paying money for your daughter to take a class on being poor?”
Her mother squirmed uncomfortably. “I doubt the class is just about—”
“The class is about exploring and analyzing poverty and understanding the effects of poverty and discrimination on different populations,” Julie explained through clenched teeth. “Currently we’re looking critically at different public policies that attempt to combat the cycle of poverty.”
“You want to end poverty? Get a job like the rest of us. There. Class dismissed.”
“What about the working poor? It’s a little more complicated than that.” Julie practically snorted.
“No, missy, it’s not. Now, we’re not rich or anything, but we work hard and pay our bills. You don’t need some college class to know that poor people bring it on themselves.” Pete’s face had started to turn red with anger. “And these government handouts you’re talking about? Another excuse for these lazy people to sit on their asses and collect cash.”
“So when you lost your job two years ago and tracked down my father for fifteen hundred dollars, he should have told you to suck it up and get a job, the wretched economy be damned?” Julie shook her head and stood up. “Have you even paid him back now that you’re employed again?”
“Julie, sit down!” Kate ordered.
Pete’s face was now scarlet, and the vein next to his eye throbbed disgustingly. “Your father doesn’t give a rat’s ass about that money, and you know it! He also doesn’t give a rat’s ass about—”
“Shut your mouth!” Julie hissed. “Don’t you dare.” She stepped away from the table. “While you’re busy ignoring the systemic, social, cultural, educational, and political contributions to poverty, I have a paper on ignorant, bigoted creeps to finish writing.” Julie walked angrily out of the room, up the stairs, and into her old bedroom.
She shut the door and blocked out most of the dinner-table chaos. She didn’t care in the least that the cousins and uncles and aunts were probably tearing her apart right now. They revolted her even more than the slew of tacky Thanksgiving decorations that her mother had strewn throughout the house.
She sat at her old desk and logged on to the article database that Erin had given her access to. Julie was about to write the best damn term paper on “the collapse of the housing market as it relates to an increase in suburban poverty.”
So there.