I pretend to sucker punch him and in the process kick over my messenger bag. The junk inside spills on the asphalt, along with my notebook and the gifted sketch. He deserves to understand. I kneel down and lift the sketch. The girl’s strange broad forehead catches the light, and Kellan’s eye.
I hand it to him, and he tilts it, trying to see, head cocked. I expect him to make a guy face, a pure, unfiltered reaction to a picture of a girl who isn’t the prettiest. But his eyes flutter all over it. Deep in my chest something plinks—jealousy?
“Cool,” he says, crouching next to me and handing it back. “Who’s the artist?”
“Donald Jessup.”
His head jerks back, like I’ve slapped him. “How—”
“Yvonne Jessup. She gave it to me,” I say. “Aren’t you going to ask who the girl is?” Because that’s the important part.
“Who’s the girl?” he says slowly.
“You know her,” I say. A dusting of snow smudges the charcoal. I blow the sketch with a soft puff, adding, “Just not as well as I do.”
FOURTEEN
367 Days After the Woods
“Mother prefers the green foil paper with the Spirograph snowflakes.”
Liv only calls Deborah “Mother” around Deborah. We are wrapping gifts under Deborah’s surveillance, gifts for Leland’s family, which will be mailed well ahead of Christmas to France; a gift for Father Carl, who is expected any minute; and Liv’s gift for Shane, which she is in charge of because it’s heavy and the corners may tear. Tonight has been declared Early Christmas by Deborah, who has the power to schedule holidays prematurely in her own house, since the Lapin girls will be in Bolivia for actual Christmas. Besides the calendar-warping, the evening is made weirder by the fact that I have been dropped into a scene straight out of Barbie and Skipper’s Holiday, with Deborah in full makeup and a red rabbit-collared suit, and Liv in a matching red dress. I am apparently styled after little green plastic army men, in jeans, a camo Henley, a puffy vest, and the black military boots I’ve taken to wearing every day.
Deborah’s surveillance extends to our conversation, so I cannot ask Liv about the charcoal sketches, or how she feels about my publicly outed visit with Yvonne Jessup, or how she will manage missing a month of school. We speak nothing of my interview on Dateline; I can only assume that its national nature has piqued Deborah’s annoyance. As much as she supposedly hates the media attention, she hates me getting media attention even more. So the subject is closed, which suits me fine.
Even my pointed looks at Deborah’s outfit get censored. “Pretty makes her happy, and her happy makes everything easier,” Liv explains quietly.
Christmas music sung by an aging pop star screeches out of the Bose radio. Rolls of paper are spread across the dining room table—too many, since the gift count is low. I finish wrapping Father Carl’s gift and set it aside. Father Carl is coming to talk to Liv and me, a “check-in” following our recent exploitation by the media. But giving him a present deflects the attention back to Deborah, and he deserves a present, she insists. What you buy a priest I cannot imagine, and I don’t ask what’s in the generic box, although she wants me to.
Deborah scrapes the length of a red ribbon with the edge of her scissors until it snaps into a tight curl. She steals a look at Shane’s gift box in Liv’s hands. “Should I guess what you’ve got in that box?”
“Oh, I don’t think you can guess,” Liv says, folding the corners into careful triangles. “It’s a toughie.”
“There’s nothing you can give me that would equal the love and care I give you,” Deborah says, arranging a pile of curlicue ribbons on top of her wrapped box for one of Leland’s other children. “Besides, what can you afford?”
“It’s not for you, Mother. It’s for Shane.” She tapes an oversized gold bow to the middle of the tie box, a tie being an excellent guess if it was for anyone but Shane Cuthbert. “What did you get Father Carl? I thought priests weren’t supposed to want anything.”
“This isn’t for Father Carl, it’s for Crystal,” she says.
“Who’s Crystal?” I say, stupidly. The only place I ever sound stupid is in this house, mainly because I have such a hard time following their insides and references. Though Liv is forever in opposition to Deborah, they are always on the same plane, like two comets racing to earth on the same path, scorching each other on the way down. I’m so caught up in this image that I don’t realize they are both laughing at me.
“Crystal is my new little sister,” Liv says with a wicked smile.
I nearly choke. “One of Leland’s children?” I look at Deborah in horror. Or is she pregnant?
“Little sister, like Big Brothers Big Sisters. My community service hours for confirmation. She’s darling,” Liv says.
“We got a good one. She’s a stunning girl,” Deborah says.